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Super Express Lasagne

10/18/2018

Mary Berry's express lasagne is one of our favourite recipes

This delicious lasagne recipe is by Mary Berry, a British food writer and television presenter. She's an old school family cook and many of her recipes are ingenious time savers - like this one. It's the perfect dish when you fancy a sumptuous and satisfying lasagne but not the palaver of making sauces. This recipe cuts corners cleverly but is still home cooking made from scratch - just super quick - guaranteed half the prep time of a normal lasagne! The flavour combinations are also genius - it's really quite scrumptious.

Slow cooked pork with pasta

9/20/2018

Massimo Mele's slow cooked pork with pasta

Last year some of our pork was cooked by chef Massimo Mele for the Farmgate Festival Saturday night dinner. Massimo cooked a beautiful dish, similar to one his Mama Maria cooked when he was young - slow cooked with mushrooms and sage and served with hand rolled pasta.
I like to cook as the mood takes me and had remembered this dish slightly differently.

Brand New Kitchen

7/29/2018

When you make sausages for a living, you need a kitchen. Small food businesses often begin in a domestic kitchen, and then move to purpose built premises when the time comes. So it has been with our own small enterprise.
This week, Oliver finally moved out of our farm kitchen, into a swanky stainless steel wonderland of his own making. Laurissa Smith from ABC's Country Hour visited the farm to see the processing room, and get a few words from Oliver...

All in One Breakfast Bake

6/29/2018

We're deep into the full English cooked breakfast as a winter warmer and means of keeping the spirits up and the energy flowing here on the farm!

Being English, we've always been suckers for a Big Brekkie, and being farmers we think there's no better way to start the day than with any dish that features our Breakfast Sausages. here's fabulous recipe from Taste which puts all kind of goodness together on one plate and couldn't be easier to make.

Make your own ham

6/7/2018

Winter is the perfect time to make your own ham, using a leg of pork from Langdale Farm! It's easier than you think.

All you need to make your own ham is plenty of salt, a large food grade container, some lard, some weights for squishing the ham down during the salting stage, and plenty of time.

Cauliflower Soup with Bacons Bits

5/31/2018

Nothing goes together better than winter and a warming velvety soup. We make a cauliflower soup regularly and keep pots of it stashed away in the freezer, bringing it out for lunches and light suppers. We like to serve it with things on top - a drizzle of olive oil, a drift of chopped parsley and best of all, a sprinkled of bacon bits sizzled up in the pan. Our streaky bacon or lardons work brilliantly for this.

Here's a recipe to keep you warm through the winter months.

Yes, we have gluten free sausages!

4/22/2018

Gluten free pork sausages Tasmania

At last we've cracked it! For many a year we've been trying to make a gluten free sausage. And we've never found the right ingredient to replace breadcrumbs.

Then we got a tip from Peter Twitchett, Head Chef of brand spanking new restaurant Grain of the Silos in Launceston. He told Oliver, who makes all our sausages here on the farm, to try potato starch. We tried it, and we loved it!

Massimo Mele visits Langdale Farm

3/15/2018

Massimo Mele with Langdale Farm bacon

We had a great morning on the farm yesterday when chef Massimo Mele brought the team from Launceston's new Peppers Silo Hotel and its restaurant Grain to visit.

We met Massimo last year for Farmgate Festival. He was feature chef and created a beautiful menu for the festival dinner using our pork and produce from other farms in the festival.

So it was great to welcome him to our small patch in the Tamar! Sausages were cooked, the smoker was smoking, pigs were visited, and even the Examiner visited!

Massimo and the team have been touring farms and producers in Tasmania, and Grain will have a focus on product from businesses like ours, local and producing something a little bit different.

Pheasant for dinner

8/31/2017

One of our customers gave us a pheasant for dinner. We had to google how to prepare it.

There’s a tradition in rural Tasmania of swapping foodstuffs. It’s the edible black market in things from the river, the land and the larder. Over the years we’ve dealt in eggs, pork, salmon, venison, wallaby patties, Riesling and sausages. When we became artisan food producers and joined a farmers’ market everything went up a notch, and now it could be craft beer, sourdough bread or kombucha.

Now, we have been gifted a pheasant. The benefactor is a customer, a man who likes Oliver’s bacon so much he buys a whole side at a time. He takes it on holiday with him to far flung islands and invites friends along for epicurean feasts. This man went on a pheasant shoot in Victoria and shot more than his own tastes required, so gave us a bird.

I collected it from the drop-off point, a Launceston providore where the girls were a little freaked out by the sight of a fully feathered dead pheasant, and had popped it on the floor of the cool room in a corner, with its head tucked under a cabinet.

Holy Smoke!

7/31/2017

Why we'll be smoking sausages at events from now on

It's unexpected, but Oliver has turned out to be right about something. This is unprecedented in the course of our marriage. It may only be about the matter of sausages, but to us it's a big thing. Over the years, we have agreed. I am generally right, and he is generally wrong. Obviously he continues to disagree with me even though he realises this, on principle.

Things I’ve been right about include coming to Australia, moving to Tasmania, and having children, although the jury’s still out on that one. But it turns out that Oliver is proven right about using the smoker to cook our gourmet sausages at events.

Oliver made all four of our smokers himself. They stand around our bush block looking a bit like Ned Kelly costumes. Each one is bigger than the last. They're made from barrels, steel boxes and old air compressors and Oliver entertains himself by carving a pig face into the fire chamber. The latest is made from a double fridge he brought home from the tip. One day I’ll push him too far and you’ll find me swinging in there by the ankles in a fog of apple smoke.