Check out Episode 6 of the new food podcast,
Chicken 'n Waffles!

The class I am in now is an elective called Gastronomic Tourism, which focuses on… gastronomic tourism. Yup. I’m getting my Masters degree so I can tell you things like THAT. Feel free to bow in awe now.

Part of the class involves going on field trips that involve tourism, food and/or wine in some way. Score.

Follow up:

We started off at Bird in Hand winery in the Adelaide Hills. We got a bit lost, but that is only because Australian maps suck and street signs are nonexistent. Like you are just supposed to know where you are wherever you go. We didn’t. The map to the winery told us to look for the infamous water towers! This makes one think that these water towers can be seen from a few miles away, like a signpost saying, you’re almost there! Keep on trucking! Yeah, we couldn’t see them until we pulled into the parking lot. Way to go, map.

The land used to be home to a dairy farm, which lent perfectly to a winery, with its concrete floors and large, open buildings. This next picture is where they used to milk the cows.

This is what I like to see at any good winery…a bin FULL of empty wine bottles.

They are probably from the cellar door tasting room, but I like to think the winery held a house party the night before we arrived and this was just the damage. Noice!(Oz slang for ‘nice’)

Since our class is about gastronomic tourism, we asked the tour guide how much the winery focused on tourism, and they said they didn’t. It did not seem important to them, which is a problem, because the tourism industry and the wine industry could really benefit if they were the least bit interested in each other. So many wineries are not tourist friendly, but there is a lot of money to made if wineries do start to give a hoot. The funny part was before we asked him that, he was telling us about a wedding they had on the grounds and a charity event they did a few weeks earlier…which drew more people from out of town to their winery. People like tourists. Hmmm.

After our tour of the winery, we went back to the cellar door to try some wine, olives and olive oil made on site.

I’m pretty weak when it comes to gourmet food and wine shops, so I ended up taking home a bottle of their Rose, a bottle of their Port (a fortified Merlot I tried more than once, you know, just be sure it was good) and a bottle of first pressing extra virgin olive oil. Gotta love 10am wine tasting.

This is Kristen and I in front of the vineyard.

Kristen is a classmate you may remember from such blogs as this one and this one.

And if you look really closely, you can see my gloves have little happy crabs on them. That’s just how I roll.

Next we headed over to Tumbeela Native Bush Foods where we met up with Warren Jones, owner and general manager of the company.

It was basically a large property up in the Hills where Warren decided to start growing his own native bush food (also known as bush tucker.). The conditions were perfect and he wanted to keep a part of Australian culture alive. Warren gives group tours where you learn about each product, wander through the fields and pick your own.

We started off with a glass of lemon myrtle tea, made with leaves from his farm. It was light and refreshing, and served with lemon myrtle biscuits (cookies in the States), it helped shake off some of that early morning wine buzz we all had.

What was interesting about Tumbeela is that it was started in hopes of selling the products to local restaurants and gourmet shops. When that did not profit much, Warren started giving tours and selling his products at the end of them. He found that people really enjoyed the interactive experience of seeing where the food came from, and it helped sell a lot more of his product. Without tourism, his business would not be alive.

We first tasted a dried bush tomato, which was small, wrinkly and red, and had a strong sour tomato flavor when you bit into it. I was surprised how intense the flavor was!

We took a walk through his gardens to his mountain pepper bushes. The leaves can be used, but the berries were the real treat—little deep purple globes that were so spicy, my lips went a little numb.

Next, we hit up the lemon myrtle trees. You just grab a leave, mash it up a bit in your hand, and sniff.

It smelled a lot like lemon grass, and I'm sorry but the only way I can describe it is it smelled lemon Froot Loops. In a good way. Honestly, could Froot Loops really ever smell bad?

He had used the leaves to steep our tea, but the dried and ground lemon myrtle is great for baking and cooking. When we got back from the gardens, we tried lemon myrtle ice cream and wattle seed ice cream. Wattle seed is a variety of the Acacia seed, and it is roasted and ground before being used. It looks a lot like coffee, and has a strong scent of hazelnut, chocolate and coffee. So the ice cream tasted a bit like chocolate coffee ice cream with coffee grounds, IF coffee grounds were okay to eat and tasted like little delicious balls of coffee goodness.

We also tried a dried quandong, which is a native wild peach. It was rehydrated in some orange juice, and was very sour with just a hint of sweet.

I ended up leaving with the wattle seed in hopes of recreating the ice cream (future blog, I promise).

By that time, we were all hungry, so we stopped at the Organic Market & Café in Stirling for lunch. I had seen this place before but never stopped in. It has a café in the front with an organic market on the back. The best part was that the food was really good AND affordable. I got my entire meal for $9.

The market part had your typical organic ingredients, but also a nice mix of gourmet food products. Their fruit displays were really eye catching, and the spice wall behind the register made me more excited than it probably should have. I blame the wattle seed.

But more importantly, let me talk about what I actually ate. One of my classmates had the soup, which I believe was a potato and leek soup that day. I was happy with the spoonful I tasted.

Another classmate got the chicken and leek ravioli, which was equally as tasty.

I ended up with a focaccia stuffed with mozzarella cheese, black olives, pesto and tomato. This is perfect…it was a windy cool day outside, and this sandwich was huge, toasted and oozing with cheese and salty things. I’m not certain the bread was actual focaccia bread, but I had no trouble putting it all away. On my nonexistent food tasting scale of one to ten, one being horse manure tastes better and ten being I busted into God’s pantry and stole a sausage, this sandwich was an 8.7.

The sandwich and the ravioli came with side salads that were huge and better than any side salad I’ve had before…there were lentils, fetta cheese, chick peas, lettuce, hunks of bread and cucumber deliciousness.

Here are the goods I got on the trip. Not a bad day at school, if I do say so myself.

~LTG