His petri-dish patty will be made from a mixture of fat and cow muscle grown from stem cells in a culture of foetal calf serum (that’s blood plasma without the clotting agents) – a technology trialled in February. It may sound less appetising than a Big Mac – but it could bring huge environmental benefits. Producing beef this way results in a 96% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions compared to rearing animals, and uses 45% of the energy, 1% of the land and 4% of the water associated with conventional beef production.

and

The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth

My most distinct memory of The Space Merchants (last read back in 1996) was the test-tube grown meat “Chicken Little”.

And what of the world traveller, the woman who’s now lived in 5 different countries?

I am so very glad to regularly lay myself down in this, our most beautiful bed. It’s comfortably soft and firm at the same time and layered with a bedspread I bought from a tiny old lady in Sapa, Vietnam several years ago.

The map reminds me of the places I’ll be and the places I’ll go – but most days I’m very happy to be at home. I really like the small city feel of Linz and I’m beginning to reach out tendrils of personal growth into the opportunity of this place.

I’m slowly documenting my making and doing a little more, primarily to make myself feel more productive but also to prepare a portfolio. It’s strange, but in these days of craft and cooking blogs it can often feel like you’ve done nothing until it’s been documented publicly.

For example:

Cloning a Kombucha Scoby

I’m not much of a soft drink consumer, though I do love carbonated spring water and “gespritzte” juices. I have enjoyed Kombucha, but spending 3€ per bottle on fermented tea seems like a waste when I can follow a tutorial and make it myself.

I’m hoping that the Scoby mother will grow – so far there’s a pleasant cider vinegarish smell which is meant to be a good sign.  Apparently it’s also good to anthropomorphise your scoby “mother” and give it a name. Since I used Yorkshire Tea and raw Demerara sugar in the mix it seems that Mrs Rochester will be appropriate.

There’s something about cloning a mass of microbes (yeast and bacteria) which is strangely compelling.  I’m hoping that we’ll have a batch of Kombucha ready for the public mushroom growing workshop of Time’s Up‘s Non-Green Gardening residency.

Picking Wild Foods

Living in Berlin put a bit of a dampener on picking wild foods, something which I’d done in Finland, Adelaide and during my short time in Sheffield. Despite collecting some blackberries in Gorlitzer Park, the ubiquity of dogs and their waste meant I was reluctant to pick nettles.

So the presence of wild and urban food sources around Linz is quite lovely. There are more backyards for fruit trees to escape from and there’s a healthy continuing tradition of collecting wild foods. Many of my urban finds are being tracked in Boskoi and I’ve got a lovely book that I’m slowly learning to understand.

Bärlauch / wild garlic (Allium ursinum) is in season now and Vicy, Theresa, Lisa and I went picking a couple of weeks ago after a quick tutorial on how to recognised the leaves.  If nothing else the smell of garlic helps you identify the bärlauch from its poisonous and perfumed doppelgänger Maiglöckchen / lily of the valley.

I’ve frozen some chopped leaves and have several jars of pesto (with almonds and sunflower seeds) that are awaiting consumption.  Unfortunately the stored pesto coincides with me trying to manage my carbohydrate intake, so I’ve not been eating nearly as much pasta as I’d like. Nor are bärlauchsemmelknödel (wild garlic bread dumplings) especially low on the GI scale… Oh but they’re delicious!

Travelling on Handbuilt Boats

Recognising bärlauch came in handy just before Easter when we started the second journey* of the Control of the Commons (CoC) project and began travelling down the Danube on a Frankenboat. In short we only managed to camp for one night before our trip was halted due to being an unidentifiable watercraft.

We made our camp near Wallsee on an old section of the Danube that was bypassed when a hydroelectric weir was installed.   The highlight was being camped next to a forest of bärlauch and young nettles, both of which made it into that evening’s risotto.

As much as I love the CoC project, camping in Austria in early April is not such a good idea for the ill-prepared. We almost reached hypothermia as a result of being too tired to layer up properly in our sleeping bags on a -2°C night, so our camping experience was not amazing.

Yet another reason to be grateful to return to our lovely bed.

*See, I really should be blogging more – not only have I not mentioned our wedding at all I also neglected to talk about travelling down the Murray River for 3 weeks on another weird boat.  Another time… I promise.

and beyond food it must be autumn. I didn’t arrive in Berlin until mid-November last year so I was shocked by how punctual and quick the change was from late summer to autumn.

sure, it might just be autumn, but for a girl originally from Adelaide it feels COLD.

even though i’m layering my clothes and wearing socks and uggboots while working at the computer i had to turn the heating on to low or else my fingers were freezing up.

over the next week i start a new job doing some teaching and geeking a couple of days a week. actual jobs aren’t that easy to come by in Berlin so i’m incredibly grateful and enthused about the opportunity. also i turn 30 which feels just right.

i still need to decide what cakes to bake. i wish that friends from the rest of the world could come celebrate with me. oh well, a small berlin posse (with a ring-in from upper austria) will have to suffice.

LIWOLI is an event exploring the crossovers between art and the FLOSS community.  I’ll be recording a series of interviews with participants about self-organised education and how DIY / autodidactism intersects with university education. As many people in both fields have self taught skills I’m looking forward to the responses.

I’ll be asking my interviewees to explore ideas like these:

• Does one have to attend a formal institution to become an Artist or Technologist?
• How important is a sense of community (mentors, teachers and peers) to a learning experience?
• How important is it for learners to hack and remix their knowledge?
• How can “free” learning work alongside formal institutions such as art schools and universities?
• What elements of the FLOSS movement are most relevant to the idea of DIY / self-organised / “free” learning communities?
• What are the most valuable experiences we take from formal learning?
• Can we create similar experiences outside of formal institutions?
• How can we enable more people to have valuable learning experiences using readily available resources?
• How can people share their experience of learning as well as the knowledge that they are acquiring?
• Autodidacts and self-learning have always existed, but how can society make this learning journey easier?

Get in touch if you’re heading along to LIWOLI or if you have any suggestions of what I should check out in Linz.

If I’d thought ahead, I’d have protected my clothing with the lovely apron that Sarah M gave me, but I forgot. Instead, here’s a photo from when I baked pavlova at D’s place for Weihnachten (Christmas).

There was one major problem – I couldn’t actually bake anything since the oven in my current flat has no temperature control. Actually, most things in the flat have some fault that one needs to overcome.

For example, the washing machine:

Everytime you put a load of laundry on, you have to wedge the door in place with a piece of wood and strap it all down.

It’s not really the weather to barbecue and while I’d love to whip up some proper meat pies^, or to bake Anzac biscuits or a pavlova, they all required baking.

So, in the end I chose to make lamingtons, as I could buy a premade vanilla cake and then do the messy bits of chocolate coating and coconut shaking.  Even though lamingtons are fairly traditional Australian fare, I can’t remember ever making them as a kid, so this entire process was new to me.

I bought two vanilla “jumbo” cakes so I’d have enough lamingtons for hungry housemates and classmates. Also cocoa, powdered sugar, butter and coconut.

I chopped the cake into slices and took the edges and top off the cake. After making a couple of bigger lamingtons I cut the slices in half to make more and for a greater surface area of chocolate.

The recipe that I based the chocolate sauce on was from the Joy of Baking.  As I have no cup measures, I estimated the proportions of cocoa, sugar and butter and used boiling water instead of milk.  I’ll probably ease back on the amount of cocoa I use next time as the sauce was a little on the bitter side.

Actually, I almost brought some plastic cup measures with me from Australia, but they ended up in the 20kg of stuff I’d have shipped over if I moved to Germany all over again box. I have no regrets but I am considering making a list for when I make my inevitable next international move.

The chocolate sauce needs to be on the runny side. You want it to soak into the cake and hold onto the coconut. The butter in the icing helps it to solidify after a while.

Use a couple of forks to roll the pieces of cake in the chocolate sauce. Let any excess sauce drip off.

Then cover the chocolate covered cake in dessicated coconut.

(I’m pretty sure that that step symbolises Australia’s not-so-happy colonial past.)

If you have a wire tray you can put the lamingtons on that while the icing sets a little. I had no problems letting them set all piled up on a plate, I just made sure they had lots of coconut on them so they wouldn’t stick together.

Yum! Blurry lamingtons! Now for a cup of tea!

* Well, I assembled Australian cakes.

^ Proper meat pies with tomato sauce and an iced coffee are my major Australian craving that can’t be easily satisfied in Berlin. Anyone know if I can get Australian-style pies at all in Germany?

Jasmine tea has always been important to me when living overseas. My odd penchant for cold and wet places means that I keep on missing out on important stuff like sun and flowers. One of the ways I’ve got over that is by drinking jasmine tea, closing my eyes and thinking about Adelaide.

I think that one of the reasons why I’ve begun to focus on friendship is that it actively draws my mind back to people I care about. I have a strong academic and creative interest in the theory of friendship which is very important in motivating me to explore the area. But there is also the payback of regularly acknowledging the presence of the people I know, whether they are my most intimate friends or people I used to serve beer to.

There are the usual “Aussie Tucker” suspects of Vegemite, meat pies, pavlova, lamingtons, spag bog and Anzac biscuits. But in comparison to people who’ve come from most other countries (Canada and USA are probably the other exceptions) we can’t really identify distinct food cultures and rely instead on a few recipes and a salty, yeasty brand name. Our national identity is defined by events taking place during a little over two centuries of (primarily European) migration, and doesn’t really reflect a cohesive culture.

So I’ve thought and I’ve thought about this concept of food and national identity. Historically the French, the Italians, the Finns, the Spanish, the Germans, the Chinese, the Indians were not nations of people, they were many smaller regional and cultural groups who just happened to live within more recent borders. Migration, globalisation, the media, supermarkets, freezers and microwaves didn’t exist for thousands of years and so regional food cultures evolved out of eating seasonal, local foods.

Where people seem to have gone wrong in identifying Australian food culture is by looking for one food culture to rule them all rather than letting many smaller, localised food cultures emerge. Even the true food cultures of the Indigenous Australians seem to have been reduced down to a “bush tucker” of witchetty grubs and wattle seed, quandong, honey ants, lemon myrtle and kangaroo, ignoring the full spectrum of groups living on foods specific to the coast, rainforest, arid grasslands and bush.

Other people have probably come around to this idea before, but I’ve only just articulated this thought: As Australians we should be looking to our immediate bioregions as a way of identifying the seasonal foods which will then shape a plurality of culinary cultures. We should be taking pride in our local brands, environment and farmers, recognising the layers of food cultures, both indigenous and immigrated and working out what grows best where and when. Once we know what plants and animals are best suited to our local regions we can learn how to cook and eat the foods that make up our food culture.

Currently I can identify only one type of edible wild mushroom and teeny tiny native cherries, but part of my longer term garden plan is to plant a couple of areas with indigenous plants including those suitable for food. In the meantime I’ll be feeding my summer guests Vietnamese cold rolls with seasonal vegetables (some coming from my garden), suggesting they drink Coopers’ beers, Bickford cordials and local wines to be be followed by Haighs’ chocolates and local fruits.

Maybe in two hundred years my descendants will be able to say with more certainty what dishes make up the contemporary Tandanya bioregional food culture, but right now I’ll just have to play it by taste.

Hopefully the reflections off the snow help keep my friends happier through the scary dark month of November. And the fact that it’s November already means that in less than 3 months I’ll be getting on a plane to head back over to the other side of the world. I can’t wait to go back to Finland and visit other parts of the world, but at the same time I really don’t want to leave my lovely hometown.

i know. i miss you! by Fighting Tiger.

A few months ago I tried to articulate to a friend who’s spent some time living in Japan the feeling that you get when you’ve really fallen for another culture and group of friends. It’s not that you don’t love your origins anymore, but that your heart just stretches and gets bigger to fit all the new people and experiences in. It is a frustrating experience, because you know that if you spend a significant amount of time in either place you’ll always end up missing what you don’t have.

Lately I’ve been desiring specific experiences that were easily come by in Finland – as I can still talk to my friends and listen to the music, the experiences I was looking for were mainly culinary. Last week I tried to find cheese equivalent to the rather bland Finnish juusto and a rye bread similar to the amazing black bread splits I lived off – but to no avail. I’ve also been regularly stocking up on Dutch salt liquorice in a desperate attempt to capture the ever so slightly different taste of salmiakki. On a trip to Ikea I stocked up on gloggi (mulled wine) mix, lingonberry jam and was over the moon to find a carton of blueberry soup. The lingonberry jam will be dolloped on spinach pancakes (pinaattiohukainen), and breakfasts for the next week will be porridge with cinammon (canelli) and blueberry soup stirred in. Pure comfort food.

Finnish Christmas Food by Fighting Tiger.

As Christmas rushes towards us, I’m planning on making piparkakut (gingerbreads) to eat while sipping on vodka spiked gloggi, and maybe I’ll even attempt to make some of the traditional casseroles. Carrot and rice casseroles will be easy to recreate – but my favourite casserole was made of lantuu (rutabaga or swedes) which is a winter vegetable, so that will have to wait for another time.

Despite the possibility to recreate the culinary experiences of Finland, the consumption will not be entirely satisfactory, as the food may be real, but the experience will be a simulacra of something I remembered. I’ll pick nettles to dry for tea and sit down to my porridge and blueberry soup for breakfast, but I won’t be eating it in the company of Ninnu, Sid and Ronja. In February, when I’m sitting down with the people that I miss in kitchens on the other side of the world, it’s almost guaranteed that I’ll pull out my tube of Vegemite and be plotting the creation of pie floaters in an attempt to taste the memories of this side of the world.

pie floater prototype by Fighting Tiger.

Add the muesli that you made by hand, roasted, toasted, made the most of: oats, triticale, pepita, sunflower, sesame, coconut, almond and cinnamon (call it kaneli, Suomi style). You’d stirred in melted honey, oil and grapefruit juice before crunching it in the oven. And finally mixed in chopped up dried apple, pear, apricot and peach bought at the farmers market.

Now pour the milk, from foreign sounding Alexandrina Jersey cows.

Chew your breakfast and think about plane tickets you’ve already bought, waiting to be booked and used.

Earlier this winter I’d hopefully planted seeds primarily so I could use the nettles as a nitrogen rich green compost, but they didn’t grow very well, so I’ve been looking out for some wild plants to harvest from. I’d seen some nettle-like plants by the side of the road earlier in the week, but my tentative stroke of the leaves didn’t result in any stings – so yesterday I took a braver approach and put my hand flat onto the leaves which did confirm my suspicion that the plants were indeed nettles.

It’s not that painful. I figure that nettle stings are the discomfort equivalent of eating warhead lollies – some people are braver or have a higher tolerance than others – luckily for me the sting is bearable.

So I borrowed some rubber gloves (I’m not yet brave enough to enter a nettle patch with bare hands) and scissors and picked a bag full of prickly leaves, ready to be dried and made into tea.

What did seem really weird that it was just over a year ago, in Finland’s early summer that I helped Ninnu prepare nettles for tea. But temperature wise I figure that there’s not much difference between July in Australia and early June in Finland.

Now of course I’ve remembered that nettles can be added to soup (fresh and dried), risottos, pancakes and used as a hair tonic as well as being a tea for people and gardens.

Aliese, it looks like I’ll have to come over this weekend and do some “weeding” for you!