Every Day’s A G’day
  at Nat Grant’s
Outback Kitchens

 

BY EUAN BEAR

nce upon a time in late
summer in St. Louis,
little Nattie and her

mum would “go walkabout”
in their small city garden
hunting the last green toma-
toes. Nattie’s mum,
Maragaret, would chop them
up with onions and wonderful
spices to make the most deli-
cious chutney in the world.
And then they’d go walkabout
to all their neighbors and give
the jars away. The recipe came
to America from Australia
with Margaret. And even
though Nattie’s aunt
(Margaret’s brother’s wife
Carol) made a very similar
recipe back in Australia,
Margaret always whispered to
Nattie, “Mine’s much better
than Carol’s.”

That ritual ~ and its
image of dueling ladles —— gave
birth to Huntington’s Outback
Kitchens and its sole product:
green tomato chutney. The
label has morphed the dueling
ladles image into a feisty box-
ing kangaroo with green toma-
toes for gloves, but Nat Grant
promises that what’s inside is
her mother’s own recipe — the
best chutney you’ve ever tast-
ed, and possibly the best use
ever invented for Vermont’s
never-going-to-ripen tomatoes.

You can’t hear any
Aussie in Nat’s speech,
although she does call her
crop “ta-MAH-toes.” But
she’s gotten an outback-style
“school of hard knocks” edu-
cation in founding a specialty

' food products business and

growing its main ingredient
over the past 4 years.

We’re looking out her
high kitchen window at the
bare bones of the greenhouse
and the now fallow raised bed
garden in the field below. The
greenhouse floor is bright with
winter rye that will be tilled
in. '

Enter the uh-oh school
of experience: “This is the
first year I’ve tried a cover
crop, and now I’ve found out
that winter rye is particularly
hardy and likes to come
back,” says Nat. The first year

 

she grew tomatoes (ta-MAH-
tos) in the roadside green-
house, one neighbor confided
to another, “That girl’s grow-
ing pot in there, you know.”

The greenhouse is 50
feet long by 14 feet wide. The
20 raised beds in the fenced,
open-air garden average 3 by
12 feet, but only five of them
will be planted in tomatoes
this year. A second green-
house, like the first, of galva-
nized steel ribs with heavy
UV—stabilized plastic sheeting
is in the plans for this year as
well. Nat doesn’t use mechan-
ical heating or ventilation.
When it’s hot, she rolls up the
sides by hand.

Another chalk-it—up—
to-experience story: “Those
pesky cherry tomatoes. We
just couldn’t eat enough of
them, nobody could. You can’t
dry them, really, so some
eventually ended up in the
beds, in the soil. The next year
I got only one batch from that
bed because of disease.” You
get nightshade—family (pota-
toes, tomatoes, peppers, and
tobacco) diseases when plant
material in that group over-
winters in the soil, diseases
like early and late blights and
tobacco mosaic virus.

Water is always a con-
cern. She looks up towards the
eaves of the roof, imagining
the system she’ll build to effi-
ciently catch rainfall and fun-
nel it to the 4-nipple soaker
hose arrangement she uses
now. The barrels that in the
later spring catch rainfall are
now in use by a neighbor
catching maple sap.

Nat gets up to bring a
chutney three-pack to the
table. Excelsior cushions the
jars in a miniature crate, and
“Outback Kitchens,
Huntington, Vermont” is
burned into one of the wood
slats by hand. “I build these
crates, you know,” Nat
declares, “I burn the name in
myself. It’s a nice way to
bring my wood shop into the
business.”

She started in this
business “as a carpenter-
woodworker, knowing nothing
about specialty food produc-