TOTES FABULOUS
A great jacket can be thrown on to make the plainest outfit chic. Here are three
This is such a practical bag, especially for those of us who find it hard to edit what we carry around with us!
Cool bomber
Printed bomber,
top,
flattering options for now
£29, bag, £22, cotton traders. com. Shoes, model’s own
It’s 7pm in Tasmania, where chef Analiese Gregory is.there’s a huge bowl of in-season cherries beside her, a glass of wine in her hand, and a day behind her spent cooking, foraging and being awed by her new hive of bees.
“They like it when it’s sunny, and they’re not so into thunderstorms or rainy weather,” she explains.“i’ve discovered this, just so you’re aware, it makes them grumpy.”
Having worked in top restaurants in London, France, Spain, Australia,morocco and more,analiese landed in Tasmania four years ago – and her new book, How Wild Things Are, captures how she lives and eats.
It’s divided into two sections: recipes, the kind of food she’d throw together for a friend; and a sketch of her life on the Aussie island state, where she’s learned new skills, like cooking possum and wallaby.the latter, explains Analiese, is a sustainable meat in Tasmania and tastes a bit like veal crossed with venison.
Born in New Zealand, Analiese was raised on lots of Chinese food (her mother is Chinese-dutch) and “grew up in one of those houses where we didn’t really go to Mcdonald’s or buy cakes at the supermarket”.
“If you made something, then you could eat as much of it as you wanted,” she remembers fondly.
Analiese tends two acres in the Huon Valley in southern “Tassie”,“on a dead-end dirt road in the middle of nowhere”. She has chickens for eggs, pigs destined for salami and charcuterie, those sometimes grumpy bees (“They’re a bit scary but they’re also beautiful”), and she’s building a vegetable garden. Her miniature goats – absolutely not for eating – weed and keep unruly blackberries under control. “They’re part of the family,” she says, firmly.
When she’s not tending her menagerie,analiese can be found diving for sea food and harvesting seaweed. Prior to moving to Tasmania she’d only been diving a couple of times but the lure of ridiculously fresh, hand-plucked seafood, hauled in and cooked direct on the beach, coaxed her into the cold water.
“I just got really taken by it,” she says, holding her hands up with a grin. Now she stashes her dive gear in the car, so she
can “jump in the ocean and see what’s here” at a moment’s notice. She said:“i’ve never seen a single piece of rubbish in the ocean in Tassie.
“I’ve come to realise that that’s almost abnormal in the world these days. It’s very calming.when I was working heaps of hours and was really
stressed from the restaurants... it was the antithesis of that.”
Besides collecting abalone (scallops, she says, make for a reasonable ingredients swap), her dives are also spent on the lookout for seahorses and watching manta rays and gummy sharks scoot past while she attempts to
catch crayfish “which I’m still struggling to get because they’re a little bit fast for me”.
Even if we weren’t in lockdown and starved of travel, Analiese’s life would likely make you want to pack a bag, buy a beekeeping veil and rescue a couple of goats.“a friend was making fun of me,” she says wryly. “He was like,‘oh, you have to go forage wild fruit and make shrubs.your life is so hard!’ There are very good moments, where I go and dive and then cook abalone on the beach – life is great.
“Life is amazing but then I also live in a 1910 unrenovated house with no heating.and my goats escape and terrorise the neighbours.and one of my pigs keeps biting me and now I have to get a tetanus shot.”
She makes a good case for the downsides, but can’t mute the sense of adventure that emanates from her stories in her book.you can definitely see why Australian TV has been following her for a new series, A Girl’s Guide To Hunting, Fishing And Wild Cooking.
It’s like a more intrepid “Tasmania River Cottage” that sees her going floundering after dark and hunting for food.
“I would never just hunt for fun,” she says.“that’s not what it’s about for me.we’re not talking fox hunting.we’re talking: you hunt animals and then they get used.”
Waste is not an option. “A friend of mine just started tanning the pelts of the animals that we hunt,” she says with a certain amount of pride.“there was a deer we broke down and made salami and stuff with, and the next time I went over to his house, he had made a rug out of the skin. I was like,‘whoa, this is the next level’.
“I was sitting on the rug of the animal eating the salami made from it.”
Analiese needs to feel good about the meat she eats and where it comes from:“you can be an ethical meat eater. I had this crazy year, where the chickens had 40 babies and there were roosters everywhere.
“Now among my group of friends, there’s heaps of demand for it.”
Eating rooster may not be on the horizon for most of us, nor hand-dived abalone, but consider the book an opportunity for “armchair travel”, says Analiese, a chance to see “how ridiculously beautiful and varied Tasmania is”.that we will happily take right now.
I sat on a rug and ate salami made from the same animal