Bell’s kitchen garden

There’s a lot of reasons that I support a locavore lifestyle as basis of good cooking and eating. Top of the list for me are the pivotal benefits of optimum freshness, maximum taste and rhythms of seasonality.

Thankfully like the re-educated and converted sustainable home cooks, thoughtful restaurants and chefs are leading the way in green food, returning to an understanding that what is sometimes lost in menu consistency is gained in seasonal flavour.

Last weekend I had the pleasure of catching up with friend and celebrity chef Stefano Manfredi in the kitchen garden of Bells at Killcare.

Locavore Stefano showed me round the kitchen gardens at Bells, the first of which, is in view of the restaurant. Much of the food at Bells is grown right there in the restaurant’s backyard. It’s easy to forget when you’re living in the city, just how fresh food can be. Am I preaching to the converted? Well I’m an advocate of fresh local seasonal food, and I’d forgotten just how fresh is fresh. I didn’t want to leave the garden. We ate as we talked, savouring mouthfuls of a number of the organic vegetables straight from the soil. I even joked I’d need to cancel my dinner reservation for the restaurant that evening, as I was enjoying eating straight from the garden so much.

Interestingly, the young tender broad beans (pictured above) were sweet, didn’t have that white layer, didn’t need to be double peeled, and I held my hand out like Oliver Twist for more.

I’ve booked a group at Sydney’s Universal for the next monthly Lunar dinner where Stefano is guest chef with his Garden to Plate special menu. We talked about the planning of a menu before such an event dinner, and therefore the need to plan the produce and plant the garden weeks ahead. Growing in Bells’ kitchen garden, I could already see the start of that upcoming Universal feast: broad beans, white radish, borage, nettles, sugarloaf lettuce, treviso & much more.

We ambled further down the garden, to visit the chooks, where they were already enjoying the scraps from the restaurant kitchen. They are happy hens and productive in the laying. That evening my dinner just had to start with a straight from the kitchen garden ‘Primo’ (first course) of eggs, asparagus, white radish with salsa verde.

While fresh seasonal and local are best for flavour, there are also of course the sustainable benefits of reducing transport and packaging, and lowering food miles when eating direct from garden to plate. Bravo Stefano!

+61 2 4360 2411

www.bellsatkillcare.com.au

and you can follow Stefano Manfredi on Twitter too www.twitter.com/manfredistefano