Koko Black, and Stone Tools

Having a sweet tooth is an advantage for a hunter gatherer. On that sort of diet sweet foods, and calories, are difficult to find. These days a sweet tooth is not so useful, but I’m always looking for excuses to indulge mine. A day outdoors, investigating remnants of tool making by hunters, is the perfect excuse to say you’ve burned enough calories to earn a sweet treat.

For a Chocoholic Sydneysider one of the best sweet treats in Canberra is Koko Black. First though, we had to earn our chocolate by exercising. Luckily we had the pleasure of doing this in springtime in Namadgi National Park. We were looking for Aboriginal stone tool making sites.

The remnants of stone tool making are flakes which have split off from the tool when it was being shaped. The site we visited was located on a sunny granite outcrop above a creek, but the flakes were from a fine-grained igneous rock. The raw materials for the tools must have been mined elsewhere.

Our fearless leader lead us to the site using his antique GPS. Dating to the 1990s it even predated graphics. You needed a separate compass to use the bearing the GPS unit calculated for you.

Back in Canberra we had worked up our appetites, so after dinner we headed to Koko Black. The Chocolate Icecream Martini is hard to resist, with it’s intensely flavoured icecream served with fudge sauce and an artistic chocolate curl.

The Chocolate Tart is very rich, and accompanied by a contrasting orange cream.

Leaving without visiting the chocolate counter was impossible, and I came home with a little paper bag of goodies. My old favourite Baileys was a must, and the new honey ganache turned out to be good too. Most impressive though, was the rum and raisin, which managed to taste very fruity without actually containing any chewy bits. It might be my new favourite.

It’s nice to get your sugar fix as honey ganache, rather than having to gather wild honey. Being a hunter gatherer can’t have been easy. At springtime in Canberra the bees are feasting on wattle, but I’m glad I’m not the one who has to rob them of their honey.

Koko Black
Canberra Centre
Bunda St
City ACT

Ratings (out of 5 snorts)

Price	3 snorts
Taste	4 snorts
Service	4 snorts
Atmosphere	3 snorts

Standard Recipes for Fifty

I recently had the pleasure of leafing through a book called Standard Recipes for Fifty. I hadn’t really felt the urge to become a cookbook collector until I came across this volume. Now I can understand the cookbook obsession. I’d just love to get my hands on a copy of this book.

The Australian Government Department of Labour and Immigration first published the book in 1942, and the one I saw was the first metric version printed in 1972. It is no longer published. This isn’t surprising, since it would have had to undergo massive changes to suit modern tastes. Some of the recipes were really dated. Kidneys and bacon served on fried bread for breakfast anyone?

Not all of the recipes were quite so outrageous, and the head volunteer chef at the NSW Rogaining Association said she finds the book very useful. Rogaining is the sport of long distance cross country navigation. Participants walk or run through the bush for between six and twenty four hours looking for checkpoints, which are marked on a map. Of course this is hungry work, so providing a good meal for the rogainers when they finish the event is important. On this occasion our head volunteer chef was catering for two hundred people for dinner. The first hundred people were due to arrive at 6pm, after having been on the course for six hours. The more adventurous hundred people were not expected until midnight – and after twelve hours of exercise were going to be very glad of a hot meal.

While the rogainers were out navigating the catering volunteers were working in very primitive conditions. The event site was a large paddock which was kilometres from the nearest small town. We were working in tents without running water. Water had been brought in with a fire truck, and was decanted into ten litre containers with taps for our use. Washing up was carried out in a series of large plastic tubs. We had refrigeration, powered by generators, for some items. Fresh vegetables were ok at room temperature (about fourteen degrees Celcius), especially since the overnight temperature dropped to the equivalent of true refrigeration. Amidst all these primitive arrangements only the cooking seemed relatively normal. We had gas burners and barbeque plates running off small gas bottles.

Looking at all the equipment in the catering tent I quickly understood why the catering trailer weighs three tonnes. All of the gas, stoves, pots and pans, knives, tea towels and so on had to be transported. Luckily the large tent and shelving had been brought in by a local company, but then we were on our own. There was no shop down the road if something was forgotten. When it became apparent that a couple of the large pots were missing one of the volunteers offered to drive to town and buy some. The head chef laughed and said, “If you’re imagining Coles, Woolies and Bunnings, try rolling them all into one tiny shop that also sells the newspaper.”

To feed two hundred people the pots were enormous. The quantities of vegetables that had to be chopped up for the dishes was also astonishing. Our chef had planned quite a range of dishes that could be boiled or barbequed. There was pumpkin soup, vegetable soup, pea and ham soup, beef curry, chicken stew, mashed potato, salads, sausages and veggie burgers. I couldn’t believe the number of potatoes and pumpkins that had to be chopped and cooked, and there was masses of bread to be buttered. Our chef taste tested everything, and adjusted things with salt and stock cubes. She also had to keep an eye on quantities to make sure that the 6 hour people would have a good meal, but leave plenty of food for the twelve hour group.

The hungry rogainers arrived back ravenous as expected, and queued up to be served straight from the giant pots. Everyone brings their own mug, plate and cutlery, which is very important considering how many people are being served. It would be a lot of landfill if everyone used disposable versions. Once their plates were filled people moved back to their tents, or sat around a communal campfire to eat. On such a cold night it was very nice to be eating a hot meal in front of a blazing campfire.

I was very impressed by the huge efforts of the volunteers. They did the shopping on Friday and brought the food from Sydney, which was a four hour drive. Then on Saturday they spent all day preparing food, which was still being served after midnight. Under very primitive conditions they did a wonderful job of cooking a filling and varied meal. I’m glad I wasn’t in charge of catering for so many people, but I’d still love a copy of Standard Recipes for Fifty.

Bushwalking food – the plan

My dad was once horrified to hear me say that the two best things about bushwalking are the food and the company. I think he has a stronger appreciation for the adventurous aspect of it than I do. I do enjoy the scenery and the wildlife and that’s why I go walking in the first place. Nonetheless while I can eat and chat at home, I like to be able to eat and chat while bushwalking too. The food on a bushwalk always tastes extra yummy because you’re seriously hungry. This is a bit of a mixed blessing. Sometimes hunger can give you the ability to eat horrible things that you wouldn’t consider reasonable at home, like cheesesticks, 5 minute macaroni cheese, bizarre combinations of chocolate and salted nuts…

I’m currently planning my longest bushwalk ever and trying to set a menu for three. We’re going to be out for five dinners and we plan to do our cooking in a single billy on a gas burner.

There are lots of things to consider here, most of them relate to the weight of your pack and not to the taste of the food. Ideally I would like to optimise both these parameters. You also have to be able to store the food without refrigeration for the better part of a week. Washing up will be no fun either, since soap is discouraged, I need to be able to most of the cleanup with a scourer.

To minimise weight you want
- to use as little gas as possible, short cooking times are favourable
- to use dried foods where possible, cans are heavy and produce bulky garbage
- have sachets not glass and avoid things that might leak

Now if all these requirements in combination with a desire to eat nice food is starting to sound impossible, let me show you what we had last time.

This meal was made with rice, basil in a tube, sundried tomatoes, snow peas, pinenuts and cheese. It actually tasted pretty good and was far easier to clean off the billy than the block of Mexican hot chocolate we boiled up for dessert. Now all we need is four more meals of the same calibre and some cheese that will last a week.

To come up with a plan for our meals I went out for lunch with the Gourmet Runner and her sister. Everyone else in our office invited themselves along, even though they won’t be walking with us. They had a good time making suggestions for what they thought we should eat. Some of the suggestions were even useful. The Gourmet Runner and her sister are Chinese-Malaysian-Aussie and had quite a few suggestions for dried foods I wasn’t familiar with. I haven’t seen laksa paste in a sachet before and I didn’t know you could get powdered coconut milk. Both of these are small revelations compared with the novelty of meat floss. This dried minced beef with sugar, salt and chilli surprised me by tasting quite ok. James was once served it on a plane in a sachet labelled “contains shredded beeves”. Obviously if the plural of leaf is leaves, the plural of beef is beeves.

So here is our planned menu. We’re planning to have an indestructible vegetable like snow peas or beans with all of these meals. Hopefully you can’t get scurvy in a week. We also need to decide whether it’s worth taking some oil for frying onions in terms of both ease of washing up and danger of spills.

Italian Rice
rice, sundried tomatoes, tube of basil, pinenuts, cheese

Indian Rice
rice, cinnamon, cloves, almonds, raisins, coconut powder, onion, garlic

Mushroom Pasta
pasta, dried porcini, chilli, salami

Laksa
rice noodles, sachet laksa paste, coconut powder

Chicken Rice
rice, stock cubes, onion, garlic

Does anyone have any suggestions? Do you know of something light and flavoursome that doesn’t need refrigeration? and what’s your favourite gluten free flat bread?