ANNABEL LANGBEIN
Winter vegetables are a celebration of Mother Nature’s offerings
Earth’s bounty
Two of the coldest winters of my life were spent in the Ureweras, where I made a living as a possum-trapper and occasionally as a jumper for the guys running helicopters on live deer recovery. Winters were the time when the fur prices were the highest, so we would head into the bush for two or three weeks at a time, coming out only to replenish supplies and get our skins tacked and dried.
I was 18 when I first signed up for this lifestyle. I had a 185cc Yamaha trailbike, which got me an hour up the track and from there it was another hour’s tramp on a less well-marked path to “home”, a euphemism if ever there was one, for the miserable, cold shack in the middle of the bush that I shared with my boyfriend and a red setter called Missy.
At the start of each season we would lug all our supplies and gear to this hovel, fording thigh-high rivers with camp ovens and toastie-pie makers, sacks of rice, pumpkins and onions, bread and spices, cheese and butter, toilet paper and toothpaste, packfuls of bedding and clothing. We never had to worry about anything going off — the whole place was one giant fridge.
My daily routine involved checking and laying lines over a radius of about 3km. I would get home tired, hungry and cold and then have to turn around and get a fire going in order to cook dinner. Everything went into the camp oven, emerging a hour or so later as some kind of stew or soup (curry powder, cumin and soup mix were pretty much the sum of flavour profiles in those days). We would eat, huddled over the fire, before retiring, usually fully clothed, to bed. In the mornings it would be so cold that the eggs would be frozen.
I have no doubt that this all sounds like some kind of nightmare but I remember how much fun I had and how happy I was. I loved the bush and the freedom and the sense of being so connected to nature. Even though it was bone-chillingly cold and we lived on the smell of an oily rag, I have never felt so alive.
Now, when it’s cold and stormy outside, I think back to this time of my life, living outdoors without any of the trappings of modern life. I know that these experiences gave me the appreciation that I have for nature and have sustained my ideas about living resourcefully.
What better way to eat close to the earth than with vegetables. Roasted, pureed or baked to creamy tenderness, they are nature’s salve for the soul.