Fruit and Veg

After being away for so long its time to restock the fridge but there's no fruit and vegetable stalls at each corner and my preferred farmers market is not for a few weeks! Everything was so fresh in India.

Being a cook I have always loved wandering in food markets and whilst it wasn't listed on any itinerary I managed to articulate my desire to stop whenever I spotted foods 'in the raw' for sale especially en mass. It was a delight to see not just the freshness of daily harvested fruit and vegetables but the care in presenting the produce and this all before one tastes. The flavours of ordinary carrots (not orange but RED and oh so sweet), tomatoes, cauliflower and potatoes in India transported me back to childhood when my grandparents produced most of our vegetables and many of the fruits we ate in their rather large and ever expanding garden. Grandpa's perpetual digging just kept creeping into whatever vacant adjacent land he found! And grandma cooked or preserved whatever was produced. So too in India, vegetables and fruits are preserved, there were plenty of fiery pickles to accompany my morning paratha. 

The choices were limited to winter commodities as Indian agricultural processes are predominantly regionally based and heavily influenced by the seasons, in Australia we have so much more variety but at what cost? Large scale commercial production and harvesting days, if not weeks, before we consume fruit and vegetables does not produce these wonderful flavours. Many of the meals we had did not include meat and I must say I did not yearn for it as the diversity and flavours of the plant based dishes served with plenty of pulses was so satisfying - not to mention making up for it with the abundance of seafood in Malaysia just a few weeks later!

What colour is a carrot?

Carrots are orange right? Typically the carrots we get in Australia are orange but much has been made of late of the more varied hues of the humble carrot - white, yellow, red, and now purple. The Age newspaper, August 8 2010 focused on a study suggesting "purple carrots ....being positioned as the next superfood .... high in anti-inflammatory properties and antioxidants." Just for the record eating a broad variety of different coloured vegetables and fruits and including plenty in the daily diet is a much sounder health choice than focusing on a few 'superfoods'. And of course there are many countries around the world where white, yellow, red and purple carrots are not exotic but rather the ‘norm’. I’m sure this must create bemusement for visitors who see us seeking out and paying premium prices for their ‘everyday’ vegetables.

It is wonderful to see some of Melbourne’s excellent restaurants including a balanced approach to menu composition with dishes that embrace vegetables and fruits as the feature rather than just the second rate accessory. Cutler & Co's winter menu featured a raw, cooked and pickled carrot salad with walnut cream and shanklish (shanklish is a herbed, dried and aged cheese made from cows or sheep’s milk used in Middle eastern cuisine). And Embrasses meli melo’ a ‘mishmash’ of cooked buttered vegetables accompanied by vegetable/herb emulsions and purees, flowers, stems and leaves may well have become a signature dish.

These dishes are generating lots of discussion in the blogger community with one blogger voting the carrot salad as “clearly my favourite of the night” and at the same time another listing it as the least favourite thus far at about course 6 into the 11 course degustation menu. With a dining community accustomed to animal protein based dishes such varied dialogue is not surprising.

P.S. Cutler & Co’s carrot salad has a wonderful  treat hidden amongst the carrots, little explosions with a mouth feel like rice bubbles; on asking these are overcooked fregula pasta which is then dried and deep fried! – Yum!

Cutler & Co, 55 – 57 Gertrude Street Fitzroy http://www.cutlerandco.com.au/