Down the garden path
Maeve O’Meara has returned with her Food Safari Earth series. She tells DANIELLE McGRANE about her focus for this season and what inspires her food obsession.
It’s taken Maeve O’Meara nearly a year to film Food
Safari Earth, the latest in her journey through multicultural Australia via its cuisine.
And she’s found a new star in the humble vegetable as she explores the most delicious dishes coming from the bounty of the earth.
“Vegetables are incredibly healthy, really versatile, re- ally cheap. You’re never going to break the budget buying even the best vegies from a farmers’ market, but then we tap into what to do with them and how to get the best flavours,” she said.
The key to O’Meara’s food exploration, she says, has been finding the right chefs.
Throughout the making of this series she’s discovered the combination of hatted- restaurant head chefs, such as Peter Gilmore (Quay Restaurant) and Martin Benn (Sepia Restaurant), with authentic home cooks who have migrated from Ethiopia, or Turkey, can unearth the most delicious recipes. Some of those home cooks have been found in the unlikeliest of places.
“There’s a Zimbabwean woman who picked tender pumpkin leaves from her garden, a few flowers and a few tendrils, and then cooked it up in a classic dish with tomato, onion and peanut butter and it was one of the most delicious things I’d eaten on the show. She was actually found through my hairdresser,” she said.
O’Meara, by her own admission, lives and breathes food and can’t help talking to everyone about it. While she was getting her hair done, she fell into conversation with a girl working at her salon who then introduced the TV host to her aunt, who was the Zimbabwean woman in her show.
“She said, ‘ You need to talk to my aunty Dorothy’, and aunty Dorothy, my God, what a beautiful, sparkling, clever woman. She works as a mental health educator and her garden is her beautiful connection to home,” O’Meara said.
The flow of the show is dictated somewhat by the seasonal availability of the produce, but there are some stand-alone episodes that explore other aspects of food culture and ingredients.
“There’s something on flowers, there’s something on the tropics, there’s something on the cuisines of the world, on vegetables in parcels … and herbs used in many different ways through the cuisines of the world,” she said.
Many people brand themselves a “foodie” but with her knowledge and enthusiasm, O’Meara really earns the title. However, even she was surprised by the reach of one well-known ingredient through the making of this show.
“Onions are the indispensable vegetable in so many different cuisines and they are so versatile,” she said. The other thing that inspired her was the gardens where so many of the guests on her show spend their time nurturing their own ingredients.
“I absolutely loved spending time in the gardens of some of our top chefs. We were with Andrew McConnell (Cumulus) who’s one of the great chefs of Melbourne who’s got about five or six restaurants and he loves being in his home garden because he can taste things at different stages and come up with great dishes,” she said.
At home, O’Meara says she tries to recreate nearly every dish she discovers through the show, so she really walks the walk. But she also insists that the show isn’t just for wannabe chefs or cooks, essentially this is about the personalities behind the dishes.
“I think in this show you meet people who just sparkle off the television, so even if you’re never going to cook anything you just have an appreciation of Australia as a beautiful multicultural food-loving nation with people who want to show you some of their tips and secrets and gardens,” she said.