A hard day's work...

Time for the lavender to be dead-headed...a task I normally put off as long as I can. Watching the stalks lengthen and the flowers come into bloom marks the onset of summer, and when they're over it's difficult not to think of the season passing and the approach of September. Except that in fact autumn here can be the best part of the year - so, what's not to like? - and the newly-shorn lavender bushes suddenly make the garden look surprisingly tidy....the causeway lined with them, looking like two rows of those hedgehog-shaped shoe cleaners that decorate the back doors of English country houses. And now, from a bowl on the hall table, the scent of lavender wafts gently through the house, as the flower heads dry.

Harvesting continues apace. Having finished the apricots several weeks ago, we picked a boxful of newly-ripened plums to take with us to Belforte, where we weekended recently - and then returned to find the plum tree suspiciously empty of all other fruit. Either extremely thorough birds had been at work, or else the gardener from the seminary next door had nipped in and helped himself (as I'd previously found him doing with the smaller plum tree, which fruits a month earlier). NB. one of the tasks for August: install a new and lockable gate between us and the seminary grounds!
We aren't short of fruit, though, as the large pear tree has just surrendered serious quantities of small and succulent pears, and the apple trees in the old orchard are now just about ripe for picking. After that, we have the figs, quince and grapes to look forward to...not to mention the late-fruiting peach trees, which fruit through until the end of September, I think.

Gian Carlo is hard at work, building the walkway for the new entrance we're installing at the south-west corner of the garden, and the pergola which will link it to the end of the barn. Much to the relief of the climbing roses which were planted just before Christmas, and have been increasingly gasping to have something decent to climb up, and looking deeply frustrated by their pro-tem bamboo frames.

And the four-footeds are hard at work, too, generally getting in the way of either building or gardening work...or else concentrating deeply on ball control!

Tonight's dinner:

Sformatini of Fennel, with Gorgonzola sauce.

Pork, pot-roast in milk; Fava Beans.

Lemon Tart.

Portrait of a Lady

We found her languishing - grubby and unloved - at Sothebys in Milan, several years ago. Generations of grime had left her peering out from a stygian gloom that could have been the depths of a coalmine, for all it was possible to tell, and the canvas sat within a tacky, vaguely art-deco gilt frame of apologetically mean proportions. Sloppily, Sothebys attributed her to John Riley (it's standard, clearly - anything from that period that they can't be bothered to think about gets listed as being either by Riley or by Kneller), but in fact she's a relatively early Michael Dahl. Same period, better painter.

A trip back to London to be cleaned, and suddenly colours emerged, an elaborate coiffure, and a sylvan landscape disappearing off in the background. Obviously a lady from the later Stuart Court, we have no idea exactly who she was - although her features have a strongly 'House of Windsor' look to them, and she could readily be (the current) Princess Anne in fancy dress. How she ended up, in the twenty-first century, being Lot No.182 on a rainy November afternoon in Milan is anybody's guess...

Eventually, after much searching, we found a replacement frame for her - the canvas is an unusual proportion, and it was ages before something of exactly the right size came up at Bonhams - and then the fun started! When we went to pick the frame up, not only was it too large for the car, but we couldn't even fit it into the back of a Black Cab... and eventually carried it home between us, going the back way, via Montpellier Square and the bum end of Holy Trinity, Brompton Road. Then, it turned out to be too large to fit through the cargo door of an Airbus, so had to sit around in London - for many months - until the next time we were shipping enough things down to Italy to make sense of a truckload.
And, once it got here, it was clear that the frame was too tall for the room in Via Fucini which the portrait then graced, and there was a conflict between a ceiling vault and a quantity of gilded gesso. So, again, the frame sat around doing nothing for a year or so...and it was only once we were moving house that an appropriate wall became available for it. In much need of restoration, the frame was delivered to Juliana about six months ago, for her to work miracles on...which she duly did. Yesterday, for the first time, canvas and frame were united, and the end result is stunning.

The Lady herself looks pleased with the result. Which means everybody is happy.

Tonight's Dinner:

Snails, in Garlic Butter.

Guinea Fowl in Champagne Sauce; Swiss Chard, baked with Parmesan.

Peach and Apricot Tarts.

Recipe: Plum & Walnut Lattice Tart

I promised the Brancolis I would post this, having served it to them at dinner a couple of weeks ago...and now, I need to get on and do it before I completely forget what went into the thing The recipe was the result of a bowl of garden plums sitting on the worktop in the kitchen, and the need to do something with them before they got up and left of their own accord...and walnuts and plums are always a good combination, where the bitterness of the nuts matches the sweetness of the plums (which can sometimes seem a little one-note-ish).
The quantities are given in volume measures, rather than by weight, as I made the recipe up as I went along.


For one 12" tart.

Ingredients: Shortcrust pastry, made with 300g '00' flour, 250g butter, 50 ml water, & a pinch of salt; 4-5 cups of small, ripe plums (the ones I used were about the size of large cherry tomatoes - larger fruit would work, too, but would need to be cut into eighths rather than quarters); half a cup of demerara sugar; one generous tablespoon of cinnamon; 20 walnuts, shelled and cut into large pieces; rind of one lemon and one orange; one cup of ground almonds (or, in the absence of almonds, you can substitute flour - the point of this ingredient is to absorb the juice that the fruit will release during cooking, which risks making the pastry soggy); one egg white; caster sugar (for sprinkling).

Method:

1. Heat the oven to 200 degrees C.

2. Use slightly more than half the pastry to line a greased, false-bottomed tin. Blind bake until it begins to brown, then set aside while you make the filling.

3. Stone and quarter the plums, and then combine with all the other ingredients, apart from the ground almonds, egg white and caster sugar.

4. Spread the almonds evenly over the baked pastry shell, then fill the shell with the plum and walnut mixture.

5. Roll out the remaining pastry and either cut it into strips to make a lattice top for the tart, or else use a lattice template (which I always do - much quicker and more straightforward). Brush the top of the tart with beaten egg white, and bake for about half an hour, until the pastry is a rich golden brown. Immediately on taking the tart from the oven, sprinkle the top with a couple of spoonfuls of caster sugar.

Best served warm or cold, not hot.

The Apricot Harvest ...

...is in! Each one practically the size of a tennis ball, I was expecting them to be watery and tasteless - but, in fact, they have a wonderful flavour, almost more like peaches than apricots. I've probably never eaten apricots straight from the tree before now ( I don't remember....perhaps once, many years ago, which might explain why I always expect them to be delicious, and they generally disappoint). The ones which are available commercially tend to be picked while still hard, I suspect, so that they won't bruise in transport, and so have no flavour whatsoever, even though they look so inviting.

I was so surprised by their peach-like quality thatI researched peach-apricot hybrids. Jane Grigson says of 'Peach Apricots' that she understands them to be the acme of the apricot family...but, then again, pêches apricots in fact appears to be the term the french use for a standard yellow peach... so I'm unclear what exactly she was talking about. There are all sorts of peach-apricot hybrids in production, but the pictures I've seen all show them to have a smooth skin, more like a nectarine, whilst ours have a definitely fuzzy exterior.

We have two apricot trees in the old orchard, which, when we arrived last year, were oozing large quantities of a gelatinous substance from wounds at the base of their trunks. "Oh, those have had it," we were confidently informed by an authoritative source. "You'll have to get rid of them". Fortunately, Signor Tempestini took a more relaxed view: "E gommosa..." he said, and handed over some blue powder that had to be mixed with water and painted onto the affected areas. Two coats and several months later, and all was well.

Delicious on their own, they sit in a bowl on the kitchen counter, and those which escape the depredations of passing locusts in the course of the day have so far been used in bavarois, strudel, sorbet, and tarts. I had researched how to oven-dry the ones which wouldn't get used immediately, so as not to lose them - but I realise now that there's little danger of that happening.

Tonight's dinner:

Almond-coated goats cheese, baked and served on a bed of purple figs, basil and baked red peppers.

Fiorentina, with rocket and parmesan.

Pear Soufflés

Busy doing nothing...

Christian - who was staying with us for a couple of days last week - remarked of some friends of his who live in Galicia that 'they do more work in not-working than anybody I can think of'. It's a concept I can relate to (occasionally).

This week: Monday was the latest (and last before the autumn) round of heavy-duty planting, with new poplars, silver birch, sorba, cypresses, arelias, pieris japonica, and black bamboo; Tuesday, Brancolis came for dinner, which was splendid and late; Wednesday, we flogged down to Torre Mozza outside Piombino for lunch, as something to do while Christian was here which wasn't either cooking or gardening; Thursday, we collected the tiles for the new kitchen in Via Fucini, and sorted out the details for the new french windows for the first floor terrace at Santa Caterina; Friday was weeding, and watering, and mowing, and hacking-and-slashing in general in the endless process of trying to wrestle the garden into submission. (In fact, the garden is behaving well at the moment, with many things in bloom: roses, delphiniums, hemerocallis, agapanthus, water lilies, verbenas, and some late deutsias...)

We now have high summer. Blissfully hot, day after day, and already town is subsiding into summer somnolence, listless and exhausted in the heat of midday, and returning to life in the relative cool of the evenings for passagiato and al fresco living. Gardening is limited to early and late - avoiding the midday sun - with evenings spent watering the fruit trees, as the sun goes down and shadows lengthen across the north lawn.

The nespola harvest is over, and for the first time I've actually found a use for the things - in the past, I've generally found them slightly sour, if they had any discernible flavour at all; one of the nespola trees we've inherited, though, produces fruit of a remarkable sweetness and succulence, and I picked bushels of the things during the short fruiting season. Excellent, baked in a tart over a frangipane base. One of the plum trees is also already finished - the one that produces quite small fruit, with red and yellow skins (perfect when combined with walnuts, brown sugar and cinnamon) - and the other one, with much larger fruit, is heavy with plums that should probably be picked next week. Ditto, the apricot and greengage trees, and after that quinces, and then industrial quantities of apples and pears. Despite their unfortunate leaf-curl earlier in the year, the peach trees are delivering quite well, and even the white peach, which we transplanted from the garden in Via Fucini at quite the wrong time of year, produced a solitary (but perfect) offering, which we solemnly shared between us a few days ago. The fruit from that tree is quite simply the most delicious imaginable...

The midday bells are ringing out from San Francesco, which has roused the four-footeds from their normal (for now) state of general drowsiness.

Onward and upward...

Tonight's Dinner:

Tagliatelle, with a sauce of Celery & Tomato.

Pork Loin, roast in Pancetta; Fagiolini with Parmesan.

Pear & Cinnamon lattice tart.

Recipe: Sicilian Swordfish Pie

Slightly adapted from a recipe of Alan Davidson - for who's writing I have a lot of time - this rather surprising dish is excellent. Surprising, because of the unusual structure, where effectively two pies are baked one on top of the other, not unlike a pair of steamer baskets. In fact, the middle layer of pastry simply disappears in the finished pie...and, on reflection, the structure isn't a million miles away from a version of good old lasagne.
The flavours included in the stuffing suggest this is a very, very old dish - shades of Apicius, if not even earlier. Definitely, this would be credible as part of an ancient roman buffet, or else being carried in hefty slices as food to eat whilst working the fields or organising the odd legion or gladiatorial display.
I've simplified the pastry which Davidson uses, and I've taken out the step where he egg-and-flours the slices of courgette before frying them - the latter step is important in reducing the water content in the courgette, but the former merely wastes time, IMHO, as the crisp coating that results from frying in egg and flour completely disappears once the courgette has been incorporated with the other stuffing ingredients.
This pie is delicious served either hot - as we had it several weeks ago when Pietro came down from Montemarcello for dinner, one evening - or cold, for lunch on the day afterwards.

For eight.

Ingredients: Shortcrust pastry, made with 250g butter, 280g '00' flour, a pinch of salt, and approximately 50 ml of water; 500g swordfish; 2 medium onions, finely diced; 2 tbs tomato paste; 2 celery stalks, finely diced; 100g greenolives, chopped; 2 tbs capers; 5 medium courgettes; olive oil; 1 egg yolk.

1. Make the shortcrust pastry:

• Freeze the butter in the freezer until it is rock hard. This is imperative.
• Grate the butter straight from the freezer using the grater disc on the food processor; add the remaining dry ingredients to the processor bowl and process using the blade until it has resolved itself into large flakes.
• Add water in very small increments through the top opening, whilst the processor is running. Be very careful not to add too much.
• As soon as enough water has been added, the mixture will form itself into one large solid lump and will adhere to the blade as it goes round. Stop the processor at this point.
• Remove the pastry from the bowl and perform the fraisage - using just the heel of your palm, push the mixture six inches or so across the work surface in half a dozen or so bite-sized pieces, then gather them back together into a ball and wrap in cling film. Only do the fraisage once - the success of good pastry lies in limiting contact with your hands to a bare minimum, as otherwise the heat from your hands will cause the butter to melt within the pastry, and it will lose its shape as it cooks.
• Preferably leave the pastry to rest in the fridge for several hours before rolling it out for use - again, this allows it to relax, and reduces the risk of it sliding out of shape or shrinking as it cooks.
  

2. Gently cook the chopped onion in oil until it begins slightly to colour, then add to it the tomato paste (diluted in a quarter cup of water), celery, olives and capers. Cut the swordfish into small cubes, add this to the pan, and cook, stirring over medium heat until it is well amalgamated and noticeably thickened - about twenty minutes. Check and adjust seasoning.

3. Slice the courgettes into thin strips, then these into approx 2" lengths; sprinkle with a little salt, and then fry them briefly in hot oil, until slightly coloured, and then drain them on kitchen paper.

4. Grease an 8" spring-form pan. Divide the pastry into three pieces. Roll out one of the pieces, and use it to line the base of the pan, with pastry coming halfway up the sides. Into this, put half of the swordfish mixture, topped with a layer of half of the pieces of fried courgette. Roll out the second piece of pastry, and repeat the process exactly (so you have your two pies with stuffing sitting on top of each other), and finally roll out the last piece of pastry and use it to make a lid, pressing it firmly into place all round the edge.

5. Brush the top of the pie with beaten egg yolk and bake for fifty minutes at 150 degrees C.

Serve either hot, at room temperature, or else cold. Delicious, whichever.

To London...

Theoretically for three and half days, but Easyjet 'went technical' on Tuesday afternoon and we ended up leaving Pisa a day later than planned.
Bitter experience meant that as soon as the airport staff were announcing a delay of around eight hours, we knew exactly what that would mean in practice (i.e that the crew would be 'out of time' before the plane was fixed, and that nobody would be flying off that day, for sure). So, before pandemonium broke out, and even as they were still making their announcement, we hoofed it, back through passport control, down the stairs and out - the wrong way - through security, across to the taxi rank...and probably were already half way home even before they'd begun to field the onslaught from irritated passengers. One phone call later, and we'd transferred to the following afternoon's flight...which was definitely preferable to the 6.20 departure in the morning that practically everybody else seemed to be subjected to. I noticed only one person on our flight the next day who had been on our first, aborted flight, so assume that the rest of them must have dutifully boarded the early morning alternative, bleary-eyed and in fighting mood; since this is the busiest week of the year in Pisa, with both the Luminara and the Palio taking place, then I should think hotel space was limited, and our hapless fellow passengers ended up being bussed out to somewhere like the Holiday Inn in Migliarino...a prospect not to be entertained lightly!

So, London timetable was a bit crammed - although, in fact it didn't terribly matter, since there was nothing much on offer anyway. Nothing whatsoever to see at the cinema - presumably because they were expecting everybody to be watching 'the football', and so didn't bother - and only The Summer Exhibition on at the RA, which I'm generally happy to miss. Charles Spencer's review of it in The Telegraph was wonderfully damning, and merely confirmed me in my suspicion that it would be just as dreary this year as it always is.

Fitting in around the chores, we managed a dinner party on one evening (Lamb, Apricot & Coriander koftas; Papardelle with Burro Rosso; Pork loin in Mustard, with Marsala Carrots; Cherry & Almond Tarts) and headed off to the Horace Walpole exhibition at the V&A for their late night opening on the following one. Agreeably empty - due to 'the football' - it was an 'eclectic' lot of stuff. HW clearly collected rather indiscriminately, and, moving from exhibit to exhibit I was increasingly reminded of Harold Acton and all that tat (with optimistic, but not very credible attributions) in La Pietra. I suppose Harold would have been gratified by the comparison, if nothing else.

And then, the horror of the airport for the return journey. Total and apocalyptic chaos. Thousands of people milling around in increasing levels of stress, as flight closures approached, queues got no shorter, and the airport staff appeared to have surrendered the will to live some time before. By the skin of our teeth, we got the flight - leaving only an hour later than advertised - and even managed to re-connect with our baggage on arrival...which, in the circumstances, seemed a minor miracle.

No more airports for another month!

Tonight's dinner:

Mackerel Rillettes on Tomato Salad, with Lemon Vinaigrette.

Lamb Shoulder, stuffed with Garlic & Anchovy; Baked Fennel.

Pear Tart, with Orange & Cinnamon.