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Working up an appetite: dinner guests sow for their supper

Roslyn Grundy
Roslyn Grundy

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Supplied

It's tough enough cooking dinner for 200 people in an improvised kitchen. But the degree of difficulty soars when you're using ingredients donated the day before by a ragtag army of home gardeners.

The Local Growers Supper, a community dinner to be held at Queen Victoria Market on November 24, will rely on urban farmers and foragers to contribute most of the food, in return for a heavily discounted ticket.

Organiser Jess Miller, from urban farming community Grow It Local, says the caterers will buy ingredients such as meat, dairy products and eggs from some of Victoria's best producers. ''But the magic really comes from the diversity of what people rock up with. You never really know what you're going to get until the day before.''

At a similar event in Sydney last year, Grow It Local expected about 100 guests to attend, but 200 people turned up clutching bunches of herbs and baskets of lemons. One guest, a police forensic officer, arrived with two garbage bags filled with hibiscus flowers, which were transformed into ice-cream.

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For the Melbourne dinner - part of The Age Good Food Month, presented by Citi, which launches on Tuesday night - tickets will be sold beforehand, giving Richmond-based Artistic Catering some idea of how many are coming to dinner, if not exactly what they will eat.

Artistic Catering is used to staging events in usual locations. General manager Pip Danaher says the Richmond company has served meals for up to 35,000 in car parks, aircraft hangars and derelict buildings with no power or water.

But this dinner has its own demands. ''We have no idea what food we are going to receive and we have a small turnaround time to work out what we're going to serve our guests. It's going to be a huge, huge challenge, but one that we're certainly up for.''

Brewer and environmentalist Dean O'Callaghan, from Brunswick's Good Brew Company, is crafting a beer for the dinner, using donated hops, grains and Healesville spring water. He will also serve organic cider and a ''magic tea'' made from fresh apple juice, green tea and botanicals.

The event taps into the burgeoning urban farming movement, which encourages people to grow their own food using backyards, windowsills and vacant land.

''We're asking people to start sowing things now that you can grow specifically for the end of November, so any of the annual herb varieties like basil, coriander, parsley and chives, and things like spinach, chard [silverbeet], lettuce and greens,'' says Ms Miller.

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Roslyn GrundyRoslyn Grundy is Good Food's deputy editor and the former editor of The Age Good Food Guide.

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