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Newsletter # 4.
Nov 2007

The right of return

There have been moments in the last six months when maintaining any form of credibility was pretty hard. In all that time, we've been amazed that our readers' and the regional food producers' support hasn't wavered. "It's a great idea, you have to continue", "Just do the magazine!", and other words of encouragement have meant a lot, and now is time to give you all something back.

Stand by for Issue 3, the return of Regional Food Australia. Then we'll be back on a quarterly schedule for 2008 in Autumn, Winter and Spring.

We'll be available again in newsagents across the country, at food stores and Farmers' Markets. We always have a list of outlets online but to ensure you receive a copy you can subscribe.

We will be organising the subscription lists and mailing out copies ourselves (hopefully saving heaps). We see our subscriptions as a way to ensure you get a copy without chasing around newsagents. There's no big discounts, we do offer you free postage (and we'll try and find other ways to make subscribers feel special, special offers etc.). Our subscriptions do have the extra value to us of making advertisers feel comfortable that there are regular readers!

We're even going to offer a single issue order service online, payable by credit card. You won't save anything, but this will also be a good way to order an extra copy for friends and we'll mail them with a note saying it's from you if you'd like.

We're hoping to close the issue for ads mid December, then run to the printer before Christmas, and deliver a New Year present from us to you at the news stand or in your mail box.

Thanks for all your patience,

Fred Harden. Editor #1
(Jan O'Connell is Editor #2. It's more like E1 and E2 but without stripey pyjamas.)

Ok, so what's in that Issue 3?
Well, starting with the cover (and this is only a mock-up ok? We do lots of cover mock-ups! I thought this looked Christmassy. The berries are from our garden.)

On the cover you can see the actual three regions we're covering. The Fleurieu Peninsula content was ready to go in March and we'll now have to cut down and rewrite a lot of that. The Blue Mountains region has a dynamic food culture and great history (and they have 'weather'). And the Gold Coast Hinterland is a real buzz with very different stories to what you'd expect.

That extra regions coverage is supported by some big changes in the other content. We've enlisted the help of chef and cooking teacher Jan Gundlach ( that's Jan as in German, pronounced 'Yaan'). We've helped him with a few bits over the years, and he's returning the favour with a new 'how to' food section. Scroll down for more.

Then there's cheese. I can't imagine an issue without at least a couple of cheese stories (or a region now that doesn't have at least one artisan cheese maker) and we've found the right person to make sure that our coverage is interesting and credible. See 'Here comes the judge' below, and welcome Russell Smith as a Contributing Editor.

There are more fresh ideas in the print issue, some we'll leak over into the website beforehand, some you'll read about below.

Here comes the judge (That's a tired line. You saw it here last ok?)

If you had been a regular visitor to the Mart Deli at the Fyshwick Markets in Canberra a year or so back, you'd recognise the face at left in this photo.

That's Russell Smith who along with his partner Sally, ran the Deli as a home for all things gourmet including cheese. Testing dozens of cheeses a week was part of the job, so it didn't take much of a push when Russell was asked to train to become a cheese judge. Now he's retired from the deli and has been judging at national competitions non-stop. He has only paused to help Regional Food find its feet, and to write our cheesemakers profiles for each featured region. We're working with Russell to create that new section I mentioned, that we reckon is the first dedicated section in a food magazine about artisan cheesemakers and the industry.

In the photograph above he is with (from left) Sue Rogers from PIRSA - Food SA, Kris Lloyd chair of CheeseSA and instigator of the South Australian CheeseFest event, and at rear, Neil Willman who was the Chief Judge at the event (and is a master consultant cheese maker).

Russell is doing an occasional cheese podcast on the new RF website called Talk & Cheese. Click on the website link Pods, Pics & Flics and have a listen. The winners of the South Australian competition are up there as well, and I'm working on a photodiary story to accompany it all.

Plate up.
In response to your feedback we've had to address the request for 'more recipes'. We hope we can persuade you that what would be more useful, is our new Plate section. At the stove is Jan Gundlach, a Michelin starred chef and owner of the Flavours Culinary Centre at Canberra's Fyshwick Markets (do you spot a trend here?).

What we believe is more useful than just another recipe to follow, is to give you the knowledge about the produce we feature in that issue. Then you will know how to select and prepare it, what flavours are involved, ideas for other products that are similar or compatible. And we'll have just a few recipes to get you started so you can take the knowledge and run with it.

(But never run with sharp knives. Here, have this cutting edge magazine instead.)

The Regional Food website has had a nose job. It will almost certainly continue to have cosmetic alterations but this was a simpler format to keep updated and looking pretty. It will synchronise with the print issues, we will sometimes have longer versions of the interviews, stories we had to drop, bits of video and photographs that we didn't have room for. There are a couple of issues we need to address - the forums need to work as a way for us to talk to each other, and we could do with a regular newsletter that didn't have to make excuses all the time about being late. There's too much good material coming in to keep it for three months until a new print issue so the website is important. That's why I did the Truffle and Nettle stories. The bottle neck is me, and as I can't type faster, we needed another pair of hands and eyes.

So ladies and gentlemen, please welcome back Joh O'Dell. Joh helped us set up the site originally and we've talked him into taking it back and giving it some love and attention. You'll hear his voice come through as well, which will be a welcome change from mine!

There's also a move to a new fast web server with lots more space for video and photographs, and with secure transactions so we can accept credit cards. This is serious stuff.

is one of the new sections in the magazine and online. It is meant for producers or wanna-be producers. This will be our way of sharing some of the information we receive as we travel around, and the press releases that we get that relate to small businesses in the food industry. We didn't imagine that there would be as many hands-on readers who would buy us to find out what other producers are doing. I hope this section proves useful.

Food Blogs, are big. One we were so pleased to discover was The Old Foodie. This is such an assured and professional site, that you can't imagine that the writer isn't a professional food historian. Or will be any minute. Setting a target of 400 words five days a week she has so much to share that it leaks out into a Companion site. We've asked the not-so-old author to write a regular food history page for Regional Food Australia based on one of the featured products in that issue. Welcome Janet Clarkson!