Forage: A Culinary Journey Though Victoria

This cookbook is a live letter to the state of Victoria. With the valuable support of over 80 top chefs, cooks, restaurants, producers and other food folk sharing their recipes and stories of farm to plate, this book captures a snapshot of the food industry as it is right now; a celebration of excellence and inspiration.

Forage has criss-crossed the state of Victoria on an epic 3,000 km road trip visiting the people and places that make this state's culinary scene one of the world's most diverse and exciting.

Your copy of Forage has the added benefit of sharing the spoils with local charity Upside Nepal, supporting subsistence farmers to develop their own enterprises that will benefit their remote villages in Nepal.

Forage is an initiative born from our time in Nepal, where we were inspired by the strong connection between the subsistence farmers, their food and the land that provides it. We want to share this land to plate connection with the Australian people, and in turn, through partnership with Australian charity Upside Nepal, support village development through agriculture enterprise in Nepal. The profits from Forage Victoria will be split with Upside Nepal with the aim of contributing $100K to incubating social enterprise in Nepal.

 

Look up the definition of 'to forage' and you'll see that it's meaning is, 'to search widely for food or provisions.' Synonyms for foraging might include 'rummaging', 'scouring the countryside', 'scrounging', 'hunting for', 'picking', 'to look high and low' and 'to leave no stone unturned', and as you'll see it is just that the chefs featured in this beautiful book are engrossed in. They may not all be mad enough like me to stand knee deep in a local icy (but reliably pristine) stream harvesting watercress, or to tip toe around suspicious bulls for access to the best crop of stinging nettles. But no matter whether they are harvesting their own plantings, sourcing the best heirloom varieties from a farmer, revising their menus on a daily basis based on produce availability, discussing the best time of year to use beets for borscht, crossing town in search of a rumoured new supplier, sharing the name of (in their opinion) the best purveyor of octopus, or creating a product themselves from the ground up using time-honoured techniques, we all share in a common discourse. It's always about sourcing or creating the best.
 - Alla Wolf Tasker AM, Lake House Daylesford Grove