Damper Den
Recipes, ideas and inspiration from lovers of good food as Central Australians make their contribution to the evolving Aussie cuisine – and place the traditional foods on the international menu.
Getting quandongs out of a jam
Olive Pink Botanic Gardens got some well deserved national publicity from the most recent episode of the ABC’s Gardening Australia last Saturday night. I was a little surprised, however, to hear show regular Jane Edmanson’s ‘s view of quandongs during her five minute tour of the gardens. Jane declared the quandong was a “wonderful tree”, redolent of her childhood in Mildura, when she and friends used to make necklaces from the seeds, and then added that the fruit wa...Read more
The burger from the bush
A bush burger from the slow-food lane won this year’s Alice Desert Festival Bush foods recipe competition for veteran entrance Michael LaFlamme and Pamela Keil. Preparing the burger and its accompaniments was an overnight job for the pair, requiring four separate recipes. It involved leaving the dough for the Kaiser wattleseed bread rolls to rise, and soaking strips of roo in a a Rosella marinade. Later the roo was smoked with red mallee gum nuts and given a native pepper glaze. The burger...Read more
A rush to speak
By Dave Richards Several hundred people attended meeting called by the Alice Springs Town Council to discuss crime and anti-social behaviour in Alice Springs; what will come out of it is anyone’s guess. For more than two hours there was an uninterrupted succession of people wanting to talk, finally cut off only because the meeting had gone on half an hour longer than planned. The Mayor Damien Ryan successfully kept the meeting to order, jumping on occasional outbreaks of rancour between speake...Read more
Wild fig summer treat
Personally I think Alice Springs might be a better place to be than the beach this Christmas. You might pick up from this that I’m not actually going to the beach, but this is not sour grapes on my part. More like sweet figs, in fact. I am bewitched by the sheer fecundity of what is all around us this summer in the Centre (except perhaps for mice and grasshoppers), and the native fig I mentioned in Sunday’s post is just another Christmas bonus. The tree grows on a particularly rocky ...Read more
Rayleen’s great bush Christmas cake (reprisal).
Dear readers: You have more than eleven days left to make an excellent bush Christmas cake. I got this recipe from Rayleen Brown of Kungkas Can Cook just a couple of days before Christmas 2009 and posted it, sadly a little late, because, after having finally made it ourselves last night, I can verify this is a truly worthwhile Christmas experience, perhaps one of the very few still available to contemporary human beings. I varied the original recipe slightly because I didn’t want to u...Read more
Ice cream time
A couple of months after Raelene Beale presented her quandong, mint and apple liqueur ice cream to the judges of the Alice Springs Desert Festival’s Wild Food Recipe competition, its time may have at last come. With temperatures finally strugggling up to the early thirties after one of the mildest Springs in memory, this recipe is worth a go. You might have to work with reconstituted quandongs, however. The recipe includes the sources of Raelene’s original ingredients! Ingredients: t...Read more
And now for brunch
After this year’s Bushfood competition at the Desert Festival, I’ve commenced a self-managed apprenticeship to the masterful cooks who plied delighted festival-goers with such a plethora of tastes, textures and new ways of thinking about food this year. I began on Sunday night with a slightly bodgied version of Hujjat Nadarajah’s victorious Bushtucka Bademjoon Persian roo and eggplant stew, foregoing the Quangdong Addas Poloh persian lentil quangdong rice Hujjat served it up ...Read more
Take this on your trail and eat it.
A “Larapinta Trail Mix” of dried native foods with a cordial made from quandongs and ruby saltbush berries , a bush passionfruit brulee and a classically presented high tea were the winners in a morning marked by “wonderful concepts” at the second round of the Alice Springs wildfood recipes competition. Rain drove the competition indoors to the Water Tank Cafe in Hele Crescent, and although it was made clear by entrants that the weather had had a longer-term effec...Read more
A fine stew.
The cool showery weather was perfectly timed for Hujjat Nadarajah’s winning entry in the wild food recipe competition of the Alice Springs Desert Festival on Sunday, but taste-wise it would have been just as impressive eaten in a sauna. Hujjat’s magnificent Bushtucka Bademjoon Persian roo & eggplant stew, served with Quangdong Addas Poloh persian lentil quangdong rice shared first prize with Miranda Sage’s Totally Wild Terrine. I didn’t get a chance to taste Miranda...Read more
Aussie food enters wild new terrain
Former Alice Springs chef Miranda Sage was well-known for her culinary achievements when she lived here in years gone by … but in recent years she has gone completely wild. The evidence is her Totally Wild Terrine, Salad and Pickles, which won Miranda equal first prize in the Alice Springs Desert Festival’s Wild Bushfoods Recipe Competition. That made it two years in a row for Miranda, who last year entered an equally beautifully presented Bushman’s Bag and Swag. It’s onl...Read more
There’s a river in the kitchen
People have been putting Central Australia’s rivers to good use for millenia. After all they are so much more versatile than rivers that are always full of water. Last night’s second annual damper cooking competition in the Todd River fits squarely within a very old tradition, from the days when Aboriginal people would grind seeds of various kinds, mix them into a dough and cook it up in hot coals. It’s just that these days things have become a little more complicated. In the f...Read more
From camel trains to cameltarians
Widespread publicity about the $19 million plan to cull camels in the outback has been good publicity for the camel industry. The camel has been enthusiastically adopted as a meat source by Central Australians who don’t feel comfortable eating meat from livestock bred specially for eating. At this weekend’s Wide Open Space musical festival east of Alice Springs, the Arid Lands Environment Centre was reporting doing a good trade in camel burgers, popular with growing numbers of meat...Read more
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