Travelling, foraging and local shopping

One thing I was looking forward to on our trip was trying some different local food sources, and maybe even do some foraging. There just seems to be so much more to forage once you get out of QLD, although I haven’t actually found or tried too much yet. I also haven’t found too much local food, but hopefully that will all change this weekend when we go to the Bungendore Farmers Markets. 

I’m a member of a facebook group “Edible weeds, wild food and foraging in Australia”. This group is amazing - both the knowledge and the willingness off the members to help out. I thought this one looked like it could be edible but after posting the photo was told what it was and that it was toxic. So always a good idea to check! 

Traveling through Rylsdale, we found some local free range eggs at the butchers. They were in a box labelled with caged eggs, but the lady assured me that they were definitely Chookie Charlies eggs and were free range - he just doesn’t bother with the extra expense of cartons! This was reinforced by the friendly tradie that stopped to chat while we drank our coffee on the footpath - I do think he just wanted to talk to Jack the Russell (our dog and the reason why we were outside the warm cafe in the cold of the footpath). It just shows that if you can trust the person you’re buying your food from, it doesn’t need to be certified free range, or organic. 

Same deal with roadside stalls - if the guy that grows the produce is there to tell you that of course it’s organic, you can tell when you taste it! And yes, you can tell when you taste it. We bought up fairly big at one stall between Kyogle and Scone (not sure exactly where it was). We bought some of the yummiest apples I’ve had for a while and picked the day before we bought them. Potatoes, kiwi fruit and tomatoes were added and then of course we had to buy some jam and chutney as well. 

The kilogram of tomatoes was half green and half red, so when I got to my sons house I decided to make a small batch of green tomato pickles. My mum has the best recipe for this, so after texting to ask for it, I got a text back with the recipe. I’ve tried many different recipes for green tomato pickles and none match my mothers. I cooked mine in the thermomix so it does look a little like a chutney. I had to reduce my recipe down a lot because I only had 320g green tomatoes and so had to do the math to reduce, and I’m not sure I did it correctly, but it does taste pretty good! I did put extra sugar in because I felt it needed it, so I’ll let you decide what to do if you have a go at the recipe.

This is the message I got from my sister: "Mums lost the scrap of paper that had the recipe on it, but these are the ingredients - 4lbs of tomatoes and 4 large onions, 1 litre of vinegar - 4 chilli's optional- 2 cups of brown/raw sugar(to taste), 2 tablespoons dry mustard, 2 tablespoons curry powder, salt. Mix all together, bring to boil, cook approx 30mins. May need some thickening with cornflour. Bottle as desired. Mum says add other stuff to taste."



This is what I did:

Green tomato pickles
320g green tomatoes
50g onion
65g vinegar
65g sugar
1 teaspoon mustard powder
1 teaspoon curry powder. I used half cumin half coriander and 1 turmeric
1 teaspoon salt
In the thermomix - 30 minutes 100 rev 4 - I did 30 minutes, but I would check after 20 if I did it again. Mine has a chutney texture rather than a pickle, but I quite like that.