Because we missed the community-visit to Finke (see one of my previous posts), and not all of us work on projects that require us to go out bush (including me, I’m just pounding away on my keyboard and talking to people!), two of the Directors of the Women’s Council cooked us a bush picnic today. Margaret Smith and Julie Anderson both live in Alice Springs, and showed us how it’s done.
We drove a short way out of town, and built two small fires. On these fires, we cooked a damper (a type of bread specific to Australia, baked in the coals of a campfire), sweet and normal potato, and… roo tails. Preparing and eating the roo tails felt a little bit like an initiation.
The ladies clearly have heaps of experience and skill. The way they prepared the damper impressed me to no end. The bread dough was baked in the hot sand and coals, where the fire had been burning for a bit. The sand is covered with flour, the dough (shaped a bit like a focaccia bread) is placed on top, more flour goes on top, and then a stack of hot coals and sand. And yet, when the bread comes out after about twenty minutes, there is not a grain of sand on it. Eat with salted butter and golden syrup. THE BEST.
I don’t have to tell you how to prepare potatoes in a campfire, but the roo tails may bear some explaining…
First of all, you can buy roo tails at the butcher’s. Which is cheating of course, but oh well. An insight. The tails are placed in the fire, as is, to burn off the fur. When they’re blackened, but the skin isn’t bursting open yet, you can scrape off the burnt fur with the blunt side of a knife. The tails are subsequently packed in aluminium foil, and placed in the hot embers of a fire “until you start to smell them”. Which, I guess, was after about 20 minutes. While we waited on the tails to cook, we gorged on the damper that was delicious. Or maybe the fact that the damper was a vessel for butter and syrup was… no never mind!
The tails then get cut between the vertebrae, you peel off the skin and hey presto! There is your magical meal.
I will admit that while the meat is tasty, after one piece I had enough. The tail is a sinewy and nervy, sticky business, and finding the meat takes some digging around. I loved the process and the chat with the ladies though. In hindsight I should have asked them many many more questions because they have such impressive lives. They speak a number of languages (English would be number 3 or 4), and they travel all over Australia. Of note and for my friends who were there as well: they performed in the Sydney Olympics Opening Ceremony.
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