From tiny acorns mighty pigs grow.

From tiny acorns seasoned with kindred spirit mighty pigs grow, writes

Some birthdays are better than others. It may rain, dinner may be middling, or the weight of passing years can make you feel more like staying in bed than venturing out. But sometimes the stars align and the alchemy of friends, food and the optimum level of tipsiness lead you to feel that you’re ripening quite nicely, rather than withering on the vine.

I’ve had good nights belting out incredibly witty raps comparing my friends to vegetables. I’ve enjoyed beach holidays watching my kids catch their first fish, and I’ve contentedly stayed home and eaten Mum’s Indian leg of lamb – the birthday dinner of choice in my family. But the year of the acorn sticks fast in my memory

– an evening where spontaneity, family, food and escapades of questionable legality took place.

It began with a call from our friend Jake. The glorious Spiegeltent was erected for a festival on Hobart’s waterfront and he was slinging cocktails at a bar out the front. There’s not much I enjoy more than harvesting my favourite plants and following them to their destination in a glass. I’d picked lemon liquorice mint, anise hyssop, sweet cicely, wormwood and countless other whimsical and fragrant things.

I called my family and, lured by thoughts of dinner and booze, they came. We ate and drank, and, in a valiant effort to try all the herbs I’d sent down, we shared all the drinks on offer. You know the point, that space where your inhibitions are slightly lifted, you feel a little euphoric, but there’s not yet the tendency to break into song, or clumsily swing around lampposts? We found it that night.

When we finished our meal the night was still young, so we ventured to the gardens outside the Tasmanian Parliament to chat and let the kids run off a little steam before heading home.

As we sat, I mindlessly rolled an acorn beneath my foot against the grass and realised the lawn was covered with them. The century- old English oaks that shade the front of our parliament had shed their rich, starchy seeds all over the lawns. I’d booked a butcher to kill my pigs in a month’s time, and wasn’t acorn-finished pork a thing? It would be no jamón Ibérico, but surely it was better to harvest these nuggets of energy for my pigs than to have some groundsperson rake them up and send them to the tip.

We were magnificently outfitted for the task. My mum’s handbag is like a Tardis, filled with whatever it is you need – in this case, it was a mother lode of shopping bags. And all the nieces and nephews were there. Nothing gets a job done faster than kids who are convinced (or otherwise gently manipulated into thinking) something’s a game.

We scrambled in the gathering darkness over the lawns, thinking all the while that a security guard would soon arrive and end our harvest game with suspicions of some truly unusual terrorist plot. We filled all of Mum’s shopping bags, and quite a few acorns were tucked into kids’ pockets as well. We lugged our burdens back to the car and bid each other a contented goodnight.

The next day I tipped acorns into the trough and watched the pigs gorge. I cured the rest in the sun before packing them into bins to dole out daily as piggy afternoon tea. Every time I passed an oak that autumn I scooped up more bags of acorns, continuing the theme of threatening national security by finding a truly great crop on the lawns of the army barracks.

I love old traditions – of community land, or commons for feeding livestock, and of turning something seen as rubbish into food. Could we taste it in the pigs? It’s hard to say, but I suspect that the story, the efforts we put in on that night, enriched the flavour of the pork I shared with my family as much as the good diet those spoiled pigs enjoyed.

“I scooped up more bags of acorns, continuing the theme of threatening national security by finding a truly great crop on the lawn of the army barracks.”