Progress on the project...

 ...has been slow over the past few month, for obvious reasons, but in practice we're now very close to being able to move in (and continue the work in-situ, rather than at the end of a commute).

The Lower Stairs: the railings have now been painted, and the doors stained (walnut - it looks quite handsome), while - mirabile dictu! - the upper door, which leads to the outside, now actually closes and seals. 

A view of the Salone: pictures, mirrors, hangings are still all to come. When I can get my head round how best to transport them.

More Salone: the famous stove-from-Torino. Which is not yet plumbed in, but we have at least  worked out with Sandro how it's to be done. Rome wasn't built in a day.

Yet more Salone: a rather dull picture, but justified by the fact that I'd finally managed to get that bloody curtain pole properly installed!

The Master Bedroom: the uneven-ness of the 

 floor means that the bed-frame is treachorous, if left to its own devices, and instead has to be held in place by that relatively discreet chain, which is attached to the roof beam....

In the woodstore-to-be, looking out to the entrance`courtyard, with the security gate for the archway waiting to be installed.

A corner of the kitchen, looking through into the Pranzo...

...and its almost-mirror-image, from the other side of the arch.

The four-footed, waiting to meet and greet at the entrance to the Pranzo from the stairs.

And more kitchen, with a Derby & Derby hearthside chair arrangement.

A view into the office (with the inevitable hand-drill and pot of paint in the foreground).

We're almost there!

Recipe: Lemon Bundt

 

I finally got round to researching Bundt recipes, recently, and was surprised (and, in a way, quietly impressed) to find that, as an idea, they are nothing more than a commercial construct. Even more so than the famous Ploughman's Lunch, which at least had something edible as its baseline. The concept of 'Bundt' it turns out was created by a company in the US, sometime in the fifties I think, as a way of promoting a series of interestingly shaped baking pans..and nothing more. Distantly, the idea was related to the traditional Guglhopf, or rather it was from the idea of the shape of the Guglhopf that the Bundt was derived, but it's at that point  that any connection with tradition of any kind definitively finishes. The word 'Bund' was apparently adopted as a nod to the idea of a 'group' or a 'party', and the 't' was added to the end of the word for no more complicated a reason than that it allowed the manufacturer to patent their product. So, out of the window go all those half-formed ideas of old cobbled streets and the charm of medieval towns somewhere in central Europe...to be replaced instead with the uncharming reality of a modern industrial complex somewhere in ...Pittsburgh, I think it is. 

And, along with all of that comes the recognition that Bundt cakes have no base theme in the sense of a recipe, and variations that flow from it. A Bundt cake is a cake which is made using a Bundt pan, and therefore any version of a sponge format which will reliably hold the shape of the pan once unmoulded will happily fit the bill. This particular recipe produces a dense, but not heavy cake, with good texture and  flavour. 

Ingredients:  4 medium eggs, separated; 160g butter; 250g sugar; zest and juice of 1 lemon; 500g ricotta; generous pinch of salt;1 tsp baking powder; 200g semola flour (or semolina); icing sugar (to decorate).

Method:

1. Heat the oven to 170 degrees C; grease your bundt mould.

2. Beat the egg whites until stiff.

3. In a separate bowl, beat together butter, sugar, egg yolks, lemon juice and zest; add to this the ricotta and salt, and mix in well.

4. In a third bowl, combine semola flour and baking powder, and then fold this into the lemon mixture, making sure everything is thoroughly amalgamated. 

5. Fold into the mixture the beaten egg white, and then pour this into the greased mould, levelling the top afterwards. Bake for 50 minutes (usual test - if a skewer inserted comes out clean, the cake is done).

Leave the baked cake to stand for ten minutes, outside the oven, before you un-mould it, and, finally, sift icing sugar over the top, to accentuate the lines of the pattern.

The Pomiane Notebook

 

This is shameless self-promotion! I realised recently that many of the earlier recipes which I posted on here are probably merely gathering dust in some outer circle of the internet, since there's no reason that  anybody would access them these days unless they already knew they were there, and knew to go directly to them.

And so: a book. As illustrated above, in fact. A collection of some of the best of...

In truth, there was a secondary motive in compiling the thing, which was as a distraction from the TD's recent and rather grim health crisis: he's now in hospital with a broken back, and  recovering from emergency heart surgery (just over a week ago), while they try and isolate the underlying infection which has caused all of this. Anyway, late at night, and in between hospital visits, it's been cathartic just to edit a few more recipes, and to work on the draft for the book. It's now gone live, and can be found here