#Irrewarra Sourdough

[otwaycelebrations]

Aunty Bronwyn in Possum Cloak Photo credit: Mark Wilson

Award-winning Gunditjmara artist and master weaver Bronwyn Razem will use art to inspire learning about First Nations culture during three special basket-weaving workshops as part of CrossXpollinatioN 2018.

A Gunditjmara woman from Warrnambool, Bronwyn comes from a long lineage of traditional weavers. She learned from her grandmother Georgina and mother Zelda Couzens.

Bronwyn has evolved the traditional weaving skills into award-winning contemporary art.

Bronwyn said she believes she is playing her part in the role of cultural history and traditions.

“The ’coming together within the circle of meeting place’ brings forth a unified platform for learning, laughing, giving and joy. We come together as strangers and we leave as a united family. This is what gives me great joy in the sharing of knowledge,” she said.

Bronwyn has played a vital role in the revival of the traditional eel trap. In 2013, her Eel Trap with Emu Feathers granted her the Acquisitive Award in the Victorian Indigenous Art Awards.

​The National Museum Australia in Canberra as well as the Art Gallery of Ballarat have curated her Eel Traps for their permanent collections.

​As a representative of Ngardang Girri Kalat Mimini’s  – four of Victoria’s most prominent Indigenous female artists – Bronwyn was selected to attend the Festival of Pacific Arts in 2016.

​A career highlight involved exhibiting two of her Eel Traps alongside artists such as Vicki Couzens, Glenda Nicholls and Maree Clarke—who she had looked up to all her life—in the 2017 Sovereignty exhibition at the Australian Centre of Contemporary Art in Melbourne.

Acting COPACC Manager Tamzin McLennan said Aunty Bronwyn’s workshops would add a new and important dimension to CrossXpollinatioN. “Indigenous people were Australia’s original and first fabric and textile artists, so it makes sense that in the year that CrossXpollinatioN embraces the theme ‘Journeys’ that we go back to where it all began,” Ms McLennan said.

  “It will be a privilege for local people and friends of CrossXpollinatioN to explore the form and function of Indigenous art under the tutelage of one of our region’s most prominent First Nations artists.”

Workshops with Aunty Bronwyn are free as part of CrossXpollinatioN and NAIDOC week celebrations in the Colac Otway Shire, but places are strictly limited.

A three-hour basket weaving workshop will take place on Sunday 8 July from 10am. A three-hour bush animal weaving workshop will take place on Sunday 22 July from 10am. The third workshop is for school children and has been pre-arranged with schools.

To book your place, contact COPACC on 5232 9418 or email copacc@colacotway.vic.gov.au

Places will be allocated on a first-in, first-served basis.

CrossXpollinatioN is proudly presented by COPACC and RRRTAG, and sponsored by Tarndie, Irrewarra Sourdough and Star Printing.

The basket weaving workshops are supported by the Colac Otway Shire Council, Corangamite Catchment Management Authority and the Barwon South West Indigenous Family Violence Regional Action Group.

Featured image: Dingo Dogs

Photo credit: Courtesy of the Koorie Heritage Trust  Inc.

  ‘JOURNEYS’ – Textile & Fibre Art Exhibition – CrossXpollinatioN 2018 Free weaving workshop with Bronwyn Razem

Award-winning Gunditjmara artist and master weaver Bronwyn Razem will use art to inspire learning about First Nations culture during three special basket-weaving workshops as part of CrossXpollinatioN 2018.

‘JOURNEYS’ – Textile & Fibre Art Exhibition – CrossXpollinatioN 2018 Free weaving workshop with Bronwyn Razem Award-winning Gunditjmara artist and master weaver Bronwyn Razem will use art to inspire learning about First Nations culture during three special basket-weaving workshops as part of CrossXpollinatioN 2018.

[ahamiltongarden]

NIGELLA LAWSON’S MEATBALLS IN TOMATO SAUCE

I want to share this excellent recipe with you. The meatballs could team with pasta but we had it simply with some crisp Irrewarra sourdough breadstick and oven roasted pumpkin.

First find some good minced veal and minced pork. I make a double amount so there is some for the freezer - this makes five servings for two people. I am giving you the doubled ingredients. Use a deep, non stick pot.

For the meatballs: 500 g minced pork, 500 g of minced veal, 2 eggs, 4 tablespoons of grated parmesan, 4 cloves of garlic, 2 teaspoons of dried oregano, 6 tablespoons of fine semolina (the secret ingredient), 2 teaspoons of salt and ground pepper. I also added some chilli. Put on latex gloves and knead the ingredients together until they are integrated, making sure the semolina is well integrated. Shape them into small balls and place them on two glad wrap covered dinner plates and put them in the fridge.

For the sauce: Put 2 onions, 4 cloves of garlic and 2 teaspoons of dried oregano in a food processor and blitz. Add this mix to 2 tablespoons of olive oil and two of butter and cook slowly without colouring for 10 mins. I slightly digressed from Nigella’s recipe so instead of two 700 g jars of passata I used some roasted garden tomatoes (about 400gms when cooked) and half of a large jar of tomato paste and 450 gms of water. Add this to the pan of onion with a pinch of sugar, salt and pepper and cook for 10 mins.

The sauce will seem thin but don’t worry. Now stir in 200 mls of full fat milk - the other secret ingredient -( I used skinny) and add the cold meatballs from the fridge one by one into the mixture. Do not stir the mixture after you have added the balls. Cook for 20 mins with the lid partially covering the pot. Check for seasonings - I always add two big shakes of cayenne to give the dish some bite.

The semolina makes the meatballs wonderfully soft and the milk in the sauce takes away the astringent tomato taste. I am sure our home grown tomatoes made a difference in the quality of the sauce. I really love this recipe. We used to have the meatballs at Becco’s bar in Melbourne and tried to make them ourselves but they were always too hard in texture. I wonder what Becco put in theirs to make them soft?

[whatsonforperth]

The Empty Plate: The rise and rise of bread

There was a time I didn't really "get" bread; when I much preferred a pretty white baguette to a heavy, dense sourdough. It wasn't until my first pain au levain sourdough in Paris that I saw the light. The bread of that city's renowned baker Lionel Poilne, in particular, was a revelation. Fed by a "mother" or starter dating back to the 1930s, and weighing in at 2 kilograms, each loaf was a huge brute of a thing, made with flour from four different mills and baked in a wood-fired, brick-and-clay oven. It was like eating a dense, lightly sour, savoury cake. None of that would raise an eyebrow today, but this was back when we didn't know what "artisanal" meant. Our own pioneering sourdough bakers, such as John Downes of Melbourne's Natural Tucker and Myriam Cordellier-Wever of Sydney's Victoire, were seen more as hippie geeks than visionary leaders. Over time, however and the baking of good bread is all about time more people "got" it.

Illustration: Simon Letch The quality of bread in Australia is exceptionally good now. In Sydney, we live on the likes of Bourke Street Bakery, Bread & Butter Project, Brickfields and the newly risen Berkelo, where chef turned baker Tom Eadie is milling his own flour from Lancer wheat grown by the Dawes family in Forbes in central-western NSW. In Melbourne, there's Baker D. Chirico, Tivoli Road Bakery, Baker Bleu and further out, Irrewarra, Zeally Bay, La Madre, Blume's Historic Baker, Red Beard and Lancefield Bakery, and others, too many to mention here. Good bread travels well, too. Igor and Ludmilla Ivanovic left their sourdough bakery in America's Boston in 2008, to open Iggy's Bread in beachside Bronte. Their bread is extraordinary. With a particularly slow leavening period, it has great length of flavour, a strong chew, feisty crust and superb density of crumb. And those who have worked at Iggy's have spread like butter across the land. Hunter Carlberg bakes bread in an old Iggy's oven at Hugh Wennerbom's Argyle Inn in the NSW Southern Tablelands; Mike McEnearney does legendary bread at Kitchen by Mike in Sydney and Mike Russell at Baker Bleu in Melbourne's Caulfield supplies the restaurants of chefs Ben Shewry and Andrew McConnell. It's okay if you still don't "get" naturally leavened, sourdough bread. But if you do, at least there's no problem actually getting it. To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times. https://www.watoday.com.au/lifestyle/the-empty-plate-the-rise-and-rise-of-bread-20190715-h1g8ii.html?ref=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_source=rss_feed

[weijcke]

Irrewarra Sourdough http://www.packagingoftheworld.com/2019/04/irrewarra-sourdough.html