Tin Fork. South Johnstone, North Queensland

And speaking of interesting ladies doing mighty fine things with old recipes, here's Marianne's new place:

Tin Fork!
A fabulous restaurant!

It's in the winsy small town of South Johnstone, which you'd know if you've ever seen the Oz film "All Men are Liars", where it's portrayed as 'the worst place in the world'.

South Johnstone is actually quite lovely. It consists entirely of a small strip of restaurants, delis, cafes and a pub ...

The Pub

... with a cane-train railway right through the centre of town ...

The cane train cutting
through the centre of town.

... which is annoying, sure, but only a problem during the 6-week cane harvest time.

South Johnstone is also on the way to near-by Paranella Park, which has won the Ultimate Prize of Best Tourist Destination in NQ several years running and which you can google yourself if you want to know more. Didn't go there - been too many times before - so I don't intend to write about that lovely place.

But we're meant to be talking about Tin Fork!

Marianne's just gorgeous: she's a high school teacher who lost absolutely everything in Cyclone Larry two years ago, and instead of despairing, went all Carpe Diem and decided "From now on, I'm only going to do what I want to do!" and this is what she decided she wanted most to do: own a tiny restaurant that provided very simple plain food made with locally-sourced organic everything. And this is indeed what she's done and it's all delicious ... but there's more:

Marianne, like me, is interested in Healing Foods and that's something else she's doing here: exploring old Aboriginal healing recipes. She cooks up these medicines during less busy days and tries them out on friends - who invariably find them unspeakably ghastly - and then tinkers trying to make them palatable.

She's even sourced a supply of Ooray, the Queen of Aboriginal Healing Fruits, and so is experimenting with making marmalade with them.

Oooh, and here's a funny story: she sent a jar to a friend who's a scientist with CSIRO who found the taste so strange and intriguing that she took it into her lab for tests. (Mmmm, don't know how I'd feel if a friend did this to my cooking!) Anyway, the upshot was that the marmalade was packed with a wealth of serious cancer-fighting chemicals - the Aboriginal witchdoctors, it seems, really did know their stuff - and said that if Marianne wanted to market her marmalade as a medicine for various cancers, she'd endorse it.

So, there you go. Contact Marianne if you want serious cancer-fighting marmalade, or indeed if you'd just like a simple meal full of rich, organically grown local ingredients. And for my personal recommendation, try her ooray and lemon-grass juice. It's intriguing, to say the least!