New Norcia, Western Australia

I don’t know what will become of this blog now that I have relocated to Australia temporarily. Will it be about rekindling ties back home through food, processing nostalgia in the process, even looking for substitutes for those elusive ingredients that have been synonymous to home? Will it be about Australian food, how a Pinoy like me tastes and appreciates it? I’m keeping my plans in order so I guess it will be about most everything else. But I do hope that you, dear reader, will stick with what we got here and continue to read the inanities of consumption despite the place.

It’s been a tough first week: I had to go through the bureaucracy of the first world, attend two conferences, look for a house, move in and out of two cities (three if you count Manila) with disparate time zones, endure Melbourne’s temperamental weather and now New Norcia’s biting almost-zero winter. Nice things have come my way too: a good landlord who has helped me move stuff from hotel to house, a football game featuring long-time rivals Collingwood and Carlton, a trip to Perth where I got to see old college friend Anjo who is also commencing PhD studies at University of Western Australia, and now this trip to New Norcia that simply has the most amazing food.

A lot of it, in part is that a lot of the food is local. New Norcia is a small town two hours off the city of Perth. Benedictine monks who were mainly concerned with—as they themselves said it rather cringe-inducingly bluntly—educating the aborigines, built the town. They crafted the economic and social fabric of their everyday life around the land. And the journey from city to town is an eye-opening testament to the wonders of simply going local: rolling hills that abound with sheep and cows, sprawling vineyards and orchards, even the scent of lavender in the cold winter air and signs every few kilometers or so that offer free tasting of wine, cheese and even chocolates.


Fresh, local ingredients can do a lot. In Manila I often find seasoning food an emblematic problem which I attributed before to taste. I would pour on the salt and the pepper to a bunch of seemingly fresh ingredients bought in the produce section of groceries. What freshness has been able to accomplish is the elimination of a radical amount of salt in the diet. Zucchinis taste sweet and potent, eggplants are robustly bitter, tomatoes are pudgy and sweet, and the cheese brims with flavors despite being relatively simple in the manner it has been processed. So you don’t need that much seasoning with fresh ingredients—something we ignore when we are made to believe that what we consume is fresh. So the ultimate lesson to be learned here is not to be deceived by the appearances groceries make when they put out seemingly fresh ingredients: produce that have hibernated far too long in refrigerated pantries or, even worse, genetically modified fruits and veggies that look great but taste really paltry. It does take a lot to identify freshness, and one sure-fire way is to go local. Know the soil, and take pride in what it can breed.


Culture is inevitably another point of contention in assessing how New Norcia’s food can be valued. The Mediterranean has been transplanted here. Wine has been a staple product of the Benedictine monks and has been in production since 1846 under Bishop Salvado’s leadership. They made different varieties including sherry, port, sauterne and the dessert variety Muscat, all popular in Australia. According to the monk who gave us a guided tour these wines were even exported to as far as India and the Philippines during the Second World War.


The monks also introduced flour production in the region in the 1850s. Their flour mills produced some of the best flour coming out of Western Australia, inevitably producing what many say is the best bread not just in the region but in the entire country as well.


The bread are good on their own, but are wonderful after you get them fresh from the oven to be brushed with butter. It makes the perfect accompaniment to soups like this one made with tomatoes.


Aside from flour and wine, there’s also olive oil, honey, nuts and other products that just make a multitude of wonderful feasts. Salad greens are tempered with a nice balance of olive oil, a light drizzle of balsamic vinegar, char-grilled bell pepper, zucchini and eggplant.

The same trio of vegetables is introduced to tomatoes and cheese creating a wonderful sauce for vegetable lasagna.


Add eggs and mushroom to that mix and you have this really wonderful quiche.


I am living in Australia on a student’s allowance and it’s such a treat to be rewarded with a trip to New Norcia where the food is great. Honestly, we had such little expectations of the place considering it was bereft of modern conveniences. There was just one phone for the entire town, there is no mobile phone service, no internet, and its electricity and appliances are in need of a terrible upgrade. It was an eerie place that spoke of failed colonial aspirations and religious imperialism. In a lot of ways it failed to move with the times and the town’s quiet is literally shattered by the temporal passing of trucks every hour or so that remind you of those conveniences from the outside world. Then again, if the outside world was able to penetrate this place, could we still enjoy such bountiful feasts?