A word from our Community Garden Australia’s Tasmanian Coordinator, Jo Dean about the ‘Flavours of Launceston’ recipe project, July 2023
We hear much about sustainability and food security, but do you know it is something we can all participate in? That is what we are doing with the Flavours of Launceston project and it is something our partners, the eleven community gardens of this city that contributed recipes, do every week in their gardens.
Flavours of Launceston is a truly multipurpose book. The recipes can be used in language training and also by our community and school gardeners. The book provides links to participating gardens so you can find them. It provides information on how they work as well as about the environment of our northern Tasmanian city nestled alongside the Tamar and North and South Esk rivers where the gardens are irrigated by Tasmania’s clean rainfall and caressed by its cooling winds.
Through this recipe book, we share a language that reflects both the social and culinary Flavours of Launceston with recipes carried as stories passed down through generations and that are linked with times of joy and celebration from around the globe, expressions of ‘good times on the land’, when the earth, sky and air provided perfect conditions for growth and created abundance so that everyone could be nourished. We begin to understand the climates and growing conditions of where our Launceston community have travelled from and their adaptations to recipes to include local substitute ingredients that grow here in our cool temperate-climate gardens. We learn to value the food plants which have been part of the landscape for thousands of years and bring their sometimes subtle and sometimes strong flavours into our cooking.
Please share widely and encourage others to do the same. This book is just the beginning. Community Gardens Australia’s online recipe website will continue to nourish people throughout our global gardening community.
It is impossible not to smile when you pick and eat your first snowpea of the season. Why not join the network and share some of your favourite flavours in this online recipe website so that others, too, can smile as they harvest and cook their fresh foods?
READ ADOBE PDF ALOUD — click on the link, How to Read Aloud, and the Flavours of Launceston cookbook is yours to hear.
There is much peace in knowing where your next wholesome, delicious meal comes from.
…Jo Dean
Tasmanian Coordinator of
Community Gardens Australia
Photo: Jo taste tests ‘Ash-e-reshte’ at City Seeds Community Gardening