Pomiane

It was Brazilian Night...

2012-01-31T08:40:00.000Z

...at the V&A, on Friday. One of their 'last Friday of the month' events, when - in theory - the entire place is given over to party crowds, and carnival dress and exuberance amongst the artefacts is the order of the day. Or so it had been the last time we'd encountered one of these evenings (pretty much by accident) a year or so ago, and had found the Cast Halls full of people conga-ing along in day-glo costumes, and en route to the third floor of the Medieval Gallery, had stumbled across some strange kind of musical event in play. Buzzy and all rather wonderful.
So, you'd have thought that an evening arranged in collaboration with the Brazilian Embassy would have been Mardi Gras in small, since spontaneous partying is surely what Brazilians are supposed to do best. Maybe that was what was wrong, though - not enough Brazilians, and, in their absence, too much reliance on spontaneity (which wasn't really happening). There were loads of people - loads - and the place was generally heaving; all waiting for something to happen, that they could stand and happily watch. But, in practice, the much vaunted Samba Flash Mob turned out to be three blokes with drums, wearing brightly coloured t-shirts and banging away with great enthusiasm, but actually looking as though they'd just wandered in from Esher Rugby Club! And all the while the DJ in the opposite corner of the Hall was churning out, at high volume, what sounded like Stevie Wonder interspersed with early Michael Jackson. Which, I suppose, given that the V&A is a museum, wasn't entirely inappropriate...

I endured the war zone that surrounded the bar in the Central Hall not once but twice - having lost heart after ten minutes, the first time around, and given up; only to realise that my taste buds had been warned to expect something heartening, and I was just going to get bad-tempered if expectations weren't met. So, I tried again, and succeeded in returning with a couple of caparinhas. Which turned out to be a glass of very expensive crushed ice, at the bottom of which was sloshing around a generous squirt of lemon juice, and some colourless and flavourless alcohol. A bit like a Pisco Sour, but without the kick.

However, it wasn't all disappointing. With an unerring nose for these things, the Technical Dept had noticed in passing that, tucked away in the direction of the Sackler Centre, there was a new display of things recently woven from Madagascan golden spider silk - a cope and a shawl - which is not only extremely strong, but is naturally golden in colour. Having disposed of our glasses of slush, we made our way there, and weren't disappointed. Beautiful things. And fascinating. Definitely worth the journey.

And then, on the way out, just as I mentioned that I'd be interested to see Rodin's bust of Eve Fairfax (having just read Michael Holroyd's latest book, in which it features prominently), but that it would probably be in some obscure corner of an upper gallery....suddenly, quite serendipitously, there it was, right in front of us. Which was splendid!

But not enough to keep us for long from heading out and home, and in search of a decent drink!

Tonight's Dinner:

Rotolo of Green Pasta, filled with Spinach and Pancetta.

Rabbit braised in White Wine; Fennel, breaded and fried.

Orange bavarois.

Making Marmalade

2012-01-24T11:51:00.000Z

The citrus trees in the garden are dripping with fruit - perhaps 500 lemons, in all, spread between the two or three most prolific fruiters; and the sweet orange which climbs up to the office terrace is producing almost as generously. The newly-planted mandarin is showing willing with a token offering (which bodes well for future years) ...and the bitter oranges are going great guns, with many kilos of fruit hidden away amongst the rich dense foliage. From the sweet oranges, we have freshly squeezed juice each morning; the lemons will all find a good home over the next few months (Lemon Tart; Lemon & Sage Risotto; Pasta with Hazelnut & Lemon; Guinea Fowl with Lemon & Garlic...as well as salads, and fish, and apple pies, and cake...) and, this week, the bitter oranges are being put to excellent use for marmalade.

I've circled warily round the marmalade process for some time, as I'd always understood it was quite complicated. Which it isn't, in the least.... and so now regret all that useless circling. It requires very little watching as it cooks, and so takes only the time needed for the hands-on preparation stages. Before trying it for the first time, I researched widely, and came up with a method that is essentially 'Colonel Gore's Recipe' - which came from the family archives of Rosemary Hume - combined with Prue Leith. As follows:

For three and a half kilos of Marmalade.

Ingredients: 2 kilos of fruit (I use entirely bitter oranges - the ones we grow are very bitter indeed, so need no help from any additional lemon juice and pith; if using seville oranges, though, it might be better to substitute a couple of large lemons for the equal weight of oranges, to give you still a total of 2 kilos); 10 pints of water; 3 kilos of sugar.

Method:

1. Cut the fruit in half, and squeeze into a ceramic or glass bowl large enough eventually to hold all of the fruit and the water. (I use an electric citrus press for this stage, and to do all of the fruit takes about ten minutes).

2. Collect all of the pips, and tie them in a piece of muslin (or, failing that, a new j-cloth). Add the bag of pips to the juice.

3. Finely slice the fruit husks - using the slicer disc in the food processor means this job takes about two minutes in total. Add the sliced fruit husks to the bowl with juice and pips, and add to it all of the water. Cover, and let stand for 24 hours.

4. After 24 hours, transfer the contents of the bowl to a preserving pan. Bring to a simmer over low heat, and allow to simmer for two hours.

5. About an hour and forty minutes into the simmering time, warm the sugar in an oven set at around 60 degrees C (I pour it into a couple of glass roasting dishes for this purpose). At the end of the simmering time, carefully add the warmed sugar to the preserving pan, and raise the temperature to a slow boil. Keep boiling , stirring from time to time, and at the end of about forty minutes - at which point the mixture visibly thickens - begin to check the temperature using a jam thermometer. When it reaches 106 degrees C, it's done.

6. Allow to cool for ten minutes, and then transfer to sterilised jam jars. Cover each jar with a circle of greaseproof paper - and if you have tops that can be screwed in place, do so, tightly, before the marmalade has cooled.

An excellent sauce for fish...

2012-01-14T19:21:00.003Z

This was the sauce we had with the first course at dinner on Christmas Day. A classic technique, but none the worse for that! As with all good sauces, the secret is to reduce, and reduce, and reduce - so all those wonderful flavours end up concentrated in a spoonful of something which is so luxuriously delicious that it practically defies description.

On this occasion, we were eight for dinner, and I had a couple of gloriously meaty Dover Sole, the fillets from which were 'poached' over chopped shallots and white wine in a gentle oven, and then served with a light coating of sauce. In practice, the sauce will work with any white-fleshed fish....and if you don't want to faff around with the filleting and making the stock from scratch, then substitute a quarter cup of ready made (good) fish stock, add to it the same quantity of white wine, and then reduce by a half before proceeding with step two of the recipe.

You can make the sauce in advance, but if you do, then be very careful when reheating, and only do it slowly, and over the gentlest of flames.

Makes sufficient sauce for 6-8 servings (2 tbs each)

Ingredients: 2 fish carcasses;1 bottle dry white wine;1 pint of creme fraiche* - preferably home made**;1 stick celery;parsley stalks and/or fennel stalk;1 onion, roughly chopped.

Method:

1. Poach the vegetables and the fish carcases in the wine for an hour. Strain, discard the carcases and vegetables, and reduce the stock to next to nothing - ¼ cup say.

2. Add the cream and reduce until you have 250ml or 2 tablespoons per serving. Season before serving.

* Creme fraiche is acid and produces a completely difference sauce to, say, double cream. You can use double cream and add lemon juice, but the flavour will not be the same. I also find double cream has a greater tendency to 'split' than creme fraiche.

**To make creme fraiche at home, you will need to buy a small amount of creme fraiche the first time in order to start the process (and then use the tail-end of the first batch when it comes to making the next lot).

Heat a litre of whipping cream to 40°C - I buy screw top paper cartons and put the carton in the warming drawer. As when making yoghurt, mix a couple of tablespoons of existing creme fraiche with some of the cream from the carton. Mix very well and return the liquid to the carton. Turn the carton upside down a couple of times to amalgamate and leave in a warm place(22-24°C say) for 24 hours. Turn the carton upside down occasionally to mix the contents. I sit the container on top of the gas central heating boiler. Refrigerate for a day before using. It will keep 10 days or more.

First-rate Art...

2012-01-13T16:19:00.002Z

and third-rate scholarship. We were in Florence on Wednesday, with the Belfortes, for an exhibition at the Strozzi which was supposed to explore the relationship - accommodation, maybe? - between commerce and religion in the fifteenth century, as manifested in florentine works of art from the period. It's a valid thesis, and the works of art advertised were reason enough on their own to make it worth seeing. (The title of the exhibition was 'Botticelli, Bankers, and the Bonfires of the Vanities' , and although I've no great liking for Botticelli, there was enough on offer otherwise to whet the appetite.)

Many of the pictures were excellent: at the very least, a couple of beautiful Fra Angelico's, a wonderful Jacopo del Sellaio, and three panels of a predella by Pesellino that I would quite happily have pocketed had nobody been looking. All-in-all, it was a morning well spent. As long as it remained possible to ignore the banalities on the accompanying narrative panels, that is. The 'art' occasionally had to struggle quite hard to rise above the inadequacies of the text, for which joint responsibility (or do I mean blame?) was presumably shared between the two curators, Ludovica Sebregondi and Tim Parks. La Sebregondi is apparently an art historian - although anybody reading her contributions to the signage of the exhibition could be forgiven for not having realised it - and so perhaps has less excuse than Mr Parks, who is, when all's said and done, a popular novelist. Ok, he has one light-ish weight work of Medici-related social history to his name, as well - but I'm not sure that really qualified him for the position of joint curator of this event. Who knows what struggles between these two went into the labour pangs of the enterprise, but as a scholarly exploration of a complicated - but not too complicated - subject, the end result read as though it was aimed at an audience of eight-year-olds, and was quite frankly pitiful.

Oh, and there was a further highly-ignorable dimension to the event which, fortunately, I managed to tune out fairly comprehensively. Throughout the exhibition, an undertone of distaste was discernible with the whole subject of banking and commerce, and wealth and luxury that could quite easily have come from one of the great-unwashed who were so recently camping on the pavement outside St Paul's, and clogging up Wall Street. Tiresome, witless, and childish. The subject deserved better.

However...lunch afterwards at Cammillo (just for a change!) was even more delicious than usual, with the stracotto I had being about as close to a work of art on a plate as you could hope to get. And as we subsequently headed off to Santa Maria Novella for our train, we waved the Belfortes off and into the Armani shop, where they had every intention of wallowing in luxury, encouraging commerce, and flouting every sumptuary law they could think of! Plus ca change...

Tonight's Dinner

Phyllo Shells, filled with Fegatini and Mushrooms, in a Marsala Cream.

Prawn Curry.

Pineapple Soufflés Glacés

Passing on Recipes...

2012-01-08T10:47:00.005Z

In the early sixties, Kira Petrovskaya talked about the time she'd asked an aged bubushka how it was that she made such memorably excellent piroshki. "Well," the old lady replied, after a long pause for thought, "first of all I wash my hands...and then.....well, then, I tie a clean kerchief around my head." This was followed by another and longer pause..."And, then?" she was prompted. "Ah, yes. And then....then, I make sure to put on a very clean apron, and tie it tightly." At which point, the explanation required another prompt, and the babushka folded her hands together, and with a smile of apple-cheeked sweetness, concluded with an understated flourish 'And then...well, then, I cook the piroshki!". Petrovskaya was entirely convinced by the innocence of the delivery that she was in the presence of a natural cook, who couldn't conceive that any recipe could require explanation...someone for whom cooking was, after all, something that just happened when one was in the kitchen. Never being entirely persuaded by apple-cheeked innocence, however, I have my own view of what was what was going on here, and take a more cynical view of the babushka's inability to communicate...

We were in Belforte for the weekend, for a birthday. For a starter at dinner on Friday, we were served a dish of wonderfully succulent courgettes, gently sautéed to a melting softness, the flavour rich, but with an undertone of tanginess. "How have you done these?" I asked, and got a vague response, that it was an adaptation over many years of something that had originally come from Hazan. "Yes, but what's the recipe?" I persisted. To be met with an explanation that it was necessary first to cut up and salt the courgettes...which led to a discussion of whether or not this was actually necessary, since I never bother with this step, any more "Ah, but unless they're absolutely garden fresh, you have to..." which I think is nonsense, since no water ever comes out of the things, I find, even if I do salt them and leave them to sit for an hour, and so it's a complete waste of time. And by this stage we were on the second glass of grappa - the local production of which in Belforte is absolutely lethal, and is shortly followed by collapse of stout parties - and so that was the end of that particular conversation.

"You never actually explained how you cooked the courgettes," I reminded her, over coffee, the next morning. "Ah.....didn't I?" And the evasive tone might have existed only in my imagination. "Yes, we did that bit..." I said, as a repetition of cutting and salting your courgettes seemed about to start. And this time we got as far as heating olive oil in a sauté pan...."But, it must only be very good oil, and Olive oil, not sunflower, or peanut, or any of those other things they suggest in recipes...".

And then the phone rang. And although there might not actually have been an element of 'saved by the bell' about it all, it was with a raised eyebrow that the TD and I exchanged a glance across the kitchen table, as the explanation trailed off in the direction of the trilling machine.

"About those courgettes," I tried again, sometime later, over a rising pile of chopped carrots and leeks, as a couple of lamb shoulders were being prepped for lunch (Belforte lamb is melt-in-the-mouth wonderful!). "Hmmm?" Difficult to concentrate on lamb and a recipe explanation all at the same time, of course, but slowly, step by painful step (of which there are only about three, anyway) we finally managed to get there. Finally. Almost twelve hours after having first posed the question. Talk about pulling teeth!

And, I would pass it on here, so we can all enjoy the perfection of the end result....but I can hear the phone ringing....and then I have to wash my hands ....so...perhaps another time! (Perhaps)

Tonight's Dinner:

Tagliatelle 'fata in casa', with a mussel and cream sauce.

Scaloppine alla milanese, with a cheese and prosciutto stuffing; fagiolini, with tomato and onion.

Apricot Cream 'Crimean style'.

Recipe: The Best Chocolate Ice Cream...

2012-01-03T12:36:00.001Z

...bar none. According to the Technical Department, at any rate - and he considers himself something of an aficionado.Neither too bitter nor too sweet, with a velvet texture, and an undertone of vanilla which kicks the whole thing up a very definite notch.

I found the recipe, several years ago, buried deep within the pages of a volume called 'Chocolate Passion', where it formed merely a part of an elaborate and overly-constructed dessert. The rest of the dish left me cold - as did much of the rest of the book, in fact, with a lot of illustrations of rather indigestible chocolate concoctions that sat heavy on the stomach just from their photographs! Following Nico Ladenis' philosophy that the purchase price of any recipe book is justified by the discovery in its pages of only one recipe that enters your repertoire, though, I don't begrudge a cent spent on this one. Try it and you'll see what I mean.

For five servings:

Ingredients: 5 medium egg yolks; half a cup of sugar; generous pinch of salt; one and a quarter cups of cream; 1 cup of milk; 6 ounces of dark chocolate (coarsely chopped if in one piece; I generally use small chocolate buttons); 4 teaspoons of vanilla extract.

Method:

1. Heat the milk and cream in a bain-marie or simmertopf, along with all but two tablespoons of the sugar, and the pinch of salt.

2. In a bowl, beat the egg yolks with the remaining sugar, until they are pale yellow in colour and leave a tail behind the whisk.

3. Add the liquid to the egg yolks, mix together thoroughly, and then return the combined mixture to the simmertopf. Cook over medium heat for about five minutes, until the mixture it has visibly thickened and will coat the back of a spoon.

4. Turn off the heat, add all of the chcolate and let it stand for 30 seconds before whisking the chocolate into the custard.

5. Remove the chocolate custard to a bowl, and whisk in the vanilla extract. Allow the mixture to cool completely, stirring from time to time, before churning it in your ice cream machine, and then freezing.

If the ice cream has been in the freezer for more than a couple of hours, remember to put it in the fridge to defrost slightly for about half an hour before you want to serve it.

Back from the Dead!

2012-01-02T13:55:00.002Z

Phil lives, once more!

Or, at least, 'Phil' is how he's known in this house. More accurately, his name - or perhaps, his title - is a Jura Impressa F50. But he was christened 'Phil' within about five minutes of arrival, five years or more ago, when the first command he bleated at us was 'Fill Coffee', shortly followed by 'Fill Water' - only after which would he deign to produce two excellent cups of coffee (which is, after all, his sole reason for existence). And downhill of those commands, we soon got an 'Empty Grounds'. He's a bossy little sod, when's all said and done. It's a little like living with Hal from 2001, except without the mellifluous good manners. Where Hal was all courteous helpfulness, Phil comes across as rather prissy and prim, and entirely lacking in a sense of humour. He is Swiss, so I suppose it's not surprising. Every so often, and generally without warning, he makes a series of odd noises, which I think are some sort of self-cleaning process - somehow, though, it seems to be rather a personal moment (as though he's strenuously adjusting his knicker elastic, or worse) and not an activity to be shared. Time to hum loudly and look elsewhere, until he's finished.

Generally, I leave Phil to the Technical Department. It may be my imagination, but every time I attempt to persuade him to produce coffee, I get a refusal ...or, at least a refusal until I've done something for him, along the lines of filling something or emptying something, or closing some flap or other to his satisfaction. I lose patience with that sort of thing very rapidly. Oh, and he's multi-lingual - on one occasion TD went off to London for a few days and inexplicably left Phil set to operate in German. Which I don't speak. After the first attempt to have him produce an espresso for me had floundered against a stream of incomprehensible Deutsch, I had to resort to the time honoured cafetière instead, until the TD returned.

You'd think, from all of this, that Phil is more of a bane than a blessing. But nothing could be further from the truth. The coffee he produces is excellent. And endless. Practically.

The water here in Pisa, though, is very chalky. And at one point - on cup number 6,284 (he counts them all and keeps a record; I told you....he's Swiss!) just after we'd started to comment that the coffee Phil was making wasn't as hot as it used to be, he suddenly stopped altogether. He'd got furred arteries, and needed an urgent transplant. We were stricken; and so were many of our friends and relations...who looked in alarm at the semi-dismantled automaton in the corner of the kitchen and immediately asked what the matter was with him. And, as time went by, they'd arrive, and look, and ask if Phil still hadn't recovered? Which gives you some idea of how good his output normally is.

Technical Dept sent off for the relevant spare parts. Which were sent to London. And then got lost. So, a second lot were sent for. Which did arrive. However, it transpires that Phil needs a special tool to be properly taken to pieces, and this needs to be supplied especially. Otherwise, we risked terminal damage. So, special tool was ordered, and arrived. And it was only then that it became clear that the spare parts supplied were for a more modern model than our Phil, and so yet more spare parts had to be ordered. Which eventually also turned up....and then TD rolled up his sleeves and got on with it. And from the combination of the expression on his face, the growing pile of spanners and diagrams and proliferation of little glass bowls full of Phil's innards, the need for re-thinks and strategy breaks...and the fact that the task stretched over days (and days), without much sign of progress, it seems that the construction of a lunar module would have been childsplay by comparison.

And then, yesterday, in time for the start of the new year, Phil was finally reassembled, the last screw tightened on his casing, the appropriate buttons pressed and a cup held in place, and we had the first post-op tasting. Perfect!

So, to all Phil's fan club out there, we can announce that the surgical intervention has been a complete success. Anybody fancy a coffee?

Tonight's dinner:

Foie Gras (the last of the Boxing Day vertical tasting, where we decided that the poached version beat the salt-cured method by a hair's breadth), along with Harry's Bar Bread Rolls.

Shepherd's Pie (the end of the Lamb loin)

Chocolate Soufflé Crêpes

Foolproof Roast Lamb...

2011-12-28T12:12:00.003Z

Slow cooking in the oven is an absolute godsend for the harrassed host. In the place of precise timings and last-minute stress, this method means that the work is all done hours in advance (freeing up the time to be stressed about another course instead!). By the end of this past Christmas weekend - which, in practice turned into three consecutive dinner parties, interspersed with two consecutive lunch parties (a lot of fun, but....well, you know) - to be able to turn to this method for the main course for dinner on Boxing Day was an enormous help. Painless, and entirely reliable. (One thing to remember, though, with this method is not to rely on your oven controls to tell you what temperature the oven has reached, but to put an oven thermometer in the oven alongside the meat and to take your readings from that - something I've learned from bitter experience!)

For one Lamb Loin (enough for eight servings):

1. Remove the joint from the refrigerator for long enough for it to reach room temperature, (about 3 hours before you want to start cooking). Then , using a blow torch, flame the joint all over to kill any surface bacteria. Season and tie the joint neatly.

2. Pre-heat the oven to either 60°C (for medium, or pink lamb at the end of cooking) or to 65°C (if you prefer your lamb more cooked). Place the lamb in a dish with a piece of foil loosely laid over the meat, and cook for 3½ hours. (For those that like lamb really 'well done', set the temperature at 70°C.) If your oven has multiple settings, make sure to use the setting without the fan, as otherwise you risk the joint drying out. Once the joint has heated through, remove it from the oven and it can be 'held' until needed

3. 30 mins before serving, heat the oven to maximum. When the oven has reached maximum temperature, set the joint on a wire rack and roast until the outside is well browned, 10 - 15 mins. (If you have a gas grill or similar you can use this to brown the joint, instead).

4. Keep the joint warm while you have your first course then carve, season and serve on hot plates with a little hot sauce of your choice (I normally make a reduction of stock and red wine).

And so, this is Christmas...

2011-12-24T18:09:00.001Z

The tree is dressed, and ready. The fridge is groaning (foie gras, curing in its salt; duck, boned and stuffed with lemon-butter and sage; bowls of mincemeat, fish stock, and sausagemeat prepped for rolls; venison pavés; sides of smoked salmon; fillets of sole...); the senior four-footed, as a Christmas treat to all, has just had a bath, and is looking disconsolately fluffy and smells wonderfully of shampoo; the house is filled with the heady aroma of sauce veneur simmering on the stove, along with the dulcet tones of Brenda Lee trilling 'Frosty the Snowman' (although I can see the post-modern ironic humour of that wearing thin rather quickly). Bread dough is rising in the kitchen, and enough puff and shortcrust pastry has been made to supply an army with sausage rolls and mince pies, in between actually eating.

The Belfortes are about to descend on us en masse, and after the Brancolis arrive tomorrow morning, we can embark on all the festivity stuff. This year the tree has been banished to the barn, with the idea that we rev up the wood stove and keep hypothermia at bay over present-giving with a combination of mulled wine and warm pastries. Fortunately, the forecast is for the day to be (wintry) warm and sunny...so we might just about last the course before somebody remembers that it's the middle of winter, and we're all about to catch our death.

Then, indoors again for lunch (tomato and pepper tarts; artichoke frittata; smoked salmon; salad; and an array of glorious french cheese, promised by the Belfortes), after which we're sending them all off on a scavenger hunt for the afternoon. They don't yet know this, which could mean we risk a minor rebellion - but in the absence of the Queen's Speech, we have to find something for them to do in the afternoon (and, more importantly, get them out of our hair, while we get on with preparing dinner, which is after all the main event of the day). And then.....dinner: devils on horseback (by popular request) before we sit to Sole Normande, followed by Venison (with sauce veneur), and finish with Grand Marnier soufflés. The Brancolis are supplying due and tre bicchieri bottles (Avvoltorre) to go with the venison, so we can indulge in a vertical tasting as we go. Not the last vertical tasting of the holiday, though, as, during dinner on Boxing Day, we're planning to compare salt-cured foie gras with the poached variety.

By the 27th, they'll all have gone, the cupboards will be looking sadly empty, and we can allow ourselves to subside into midwinter lethargy. And the senior four-footed will be well on the way to recovering that eau de 'spaniel left out in the rain' aroma that he particularly favours.

Tonight's dinner:

Mussel Risotto

Duck, boned and roast, with lemon-butter and Sage pushed under the skin; wild mushrooms; diced potatoes fried in goose fat

Aosta apple and orange tart.

Recipe: Tomato and Pepper Tart

2011-12-02T10:48:00.001Z

The success of this recipe is all about concentrating the tomato flavour until it is rich and intense and edgy. A deceptively simple presentation, but when you go through the sliced tomato surface and get to the complicated combination of flavours beneath, it really is show-stoppingly good. I pefer to make it with phyllo pastry shells, which means the finished dish is light and more-ish - but a buttery shortcrust would work just as well, I'm sure.

For two individual tarts.

Ingredients: two pre-cooked phyllo pastry shells; three medium sized Tomatoes; 2 tbs finely diced Red Pepper; one small Onion; two Garlic cloves; a Bouquet Garni; 2 oz butter; Olive Oil; 1 tbs Tomato Paste; half a dozen Basil leaves, shredded; 1 tsp dried Thyme; Salt & Pepper.

Method:

1.Finely slice one of the Tomatoes (you want about twelve slices, in total), and put in a bowl with the diced Pepper; melt half of the Butter over low heat, then pour this over the Tomato and Pepper mixture, add a little salt, and mix together. Set aside.

2. Melt the remaining butter in the pan, with a little Oil. Sauté the onion, finely diced, for a few minutes until visibly softened. Dice the remaining tomatoes, and add them to the pan, along with the Garlic (minced), Bouquet Garni, and tomato paste. Cook, stirring frequently for a bout ten minutes, over medium heat, until the mixture has entirely collapsed and has lost most of its liquid - it should be quite thick at this stage.

3. Discard the Bouquet Garni. Check and add seasoning to taste, and stir in the shredded basil leaves. Divide the mixture between the two pastry shells.

4. Arrange the slices of Tomato (along with the diced Pepper) over the top of the Tomato mixture, to cover. Bake for ten minutes in a 180 degree C oven, until the slices are visibly dried out, and have started to colour at their edges. Remove from the oven, and drizzle a little Olive oil over the top of each tart, and sprinkle with the dried Thyme.

Venice in November

2011-11-30T14:14:00.002Z

Crisp and sunny....and empty! Some tourists - inevitably - around Saint Mark's ....but the quiet side canals of Dorsoduro and Canareggio were largely deserted, apart from locals en route to the market or else snatching a quick coffee and a minute or two of autumn sunshine. Venice was so quiet, in fact, that we actually went inside the Basilica, for the first time - always previously having been put off by the queues outside, and, seeing nobody waiting in line as we crossed the Piazza on Monday afternoon, we seized our chance and nipped inside. To a mess of drugget strips and guard ropes and signposts, the gloomy interior illuminated by pools of light wherever a dickensian prelate sat hunched over a cash desk, ready to sell access to some other part of the inner sanctum. We ventured inside the Treasury - three euros each - to find a rather tatty display of saintly body-parts encased in gimcrack and generally dented silver-gilt containers; all against a background of the low murmer of several hundred people all simultaneously observing the regulation 'silenzio'. We didn't stay long. Gennaro assures me that the place is magical by candlelight, for midnight mass on Christmas Eve. I'll take his word for it.

Conversely, San Sebastiano, on Monday morning, and the dalmatian Scuola di San Giorgio, on Tuesday were quite spectacular. In the former, we'd gone specifically to look at the recently restored Veronese ceiling panels (in practice, I thought they'd been overdone, and the effect is clumsy) but the church as a whole is a gem...as is San Giorgio, with its painted ceiling, and Carpaccio's panels of Saint George and Saint Jerome. We had both places to ourselves, and luxuriated accordingly. As was the case also in San Rosario, where the reflection of the sun on the waters of the Giudecca Canal outside shimmered over the foreshortened images in Tiepolo's incredible ceiling.

Otherwise, the Kieffer exhibition on the Zattere was impressive - great sheets of lead, suspended from a long rack, displaying the colours of minerals and decay - and we even managed to shoehorn ourselves into a poetry reading, on Monday evening, in a small gallery in the Ghetto, where Michael Glover's rather bland verse set off to perfection the sharp-tongued observations written and read by Philip Morre.

And we feasted. An excellent lunch in La Zucca (just to the north of San Giacomo de l'Orio), and a pretty good one the day before at the Vecio Marangon, in Campiello Centro Pietre; dinner at Vini da Gigio was a bit ho-hum (and, not for the first time, it smelt of drains ....I think probably it can now fall off the list, as no longer vaut le detour) whilst that at Fiaschetteria Toscana couldn't have been bettered: a perfect risotto of clams and baby squid, to start with, and then deep-fried monkfish cheeks, all washed down with a memorable Gavi di Gavi, 2007. As we were leaving, La Signora bore down on us and - for some reason - starting talking with great animation of the celebrations being organised in Verona for her friend, Marcella Hazan's imminent (ish) ninetieth birthday - she appeared to think we might be on the guest list, but (sadly) I suspect she was confusing us with somebody else.

And then, of course, there were all the numerous and necessary halts along the way for coffee, and spritz, and beer, and prosecco with which any trip like that has to be punctuated - on this occasion, most memorably on Sunday evening, when we emerged from a bar, to find a dense fog had suddenly descended, to swirl in eddies around the streetlamps, and along the edge of the canal....and then on Monday (brilliantly sunny, once more), at the wonderful enoteca on Fondamenta Nani, which is packed in the middle of the day with venetians eating and drinking on the hoof, and all engaging in high-energy gossip at the same time.

Art, and ozone, and walking (and walking!) and food and drink....and, before our train had even reached Bologna on the return journey, yesterday, I was out for the count!

Tonight's dinner:

Courgette Soufflés

Scaloppine alla Milanese (with prosciutto and cheese inside); braised fennel

Apple tart.

Robuchon - my book of the year

2011-11-26T09:28:00.001Z

Yes, I know - the year isn't yet over. But I have no doubt whatsoever that my award for book of the year will go to 'The Complete Robuchon', which I've been working my way through, during the past few weeks. A lifetime's experience distilled into one authoritative volume. No-nonsense, spare, intelligent, and all-round excellent. There are no pictures - so not something for the coffee-table audience - and the recipes are well-structured and efficiently written. This is the sort of 'bible' to be compared with, say, Madame de Sante-Ange....and, dare I say it, it shows how far we've moved on since the late great Julia first published 'Mastering the Art...'. Just off the top of my head, new discoveries for me from Robuchon have been a splendid tart of tomato and red pepper - light and exquisite - a recipe for red mullet in saffron cream; a version of scaloppine alla milanese, in which prosciutto and cheese are sandwiched between the scaloppine; rabbit, roast in a mustard poultice; a cornichon sauce for pork chops; a different method for pintade au chou; porcini with broad beans....the list goes on, and I'm still only a third of the way through the book!

For anybody thinking what to give themselves as an early Christmas present, I can't recommend this one highly enough!

Tonight's dinner:

Will be up at Brancoli, so I don't know what it will be; although I will be making an apricot and cinnamon cake to take as a guest-offering. And then, tomorrow we leave for Venice for a couple of days, so dinner will be the responsibility variously of Vini da Gigio and Fiaschetteria Toscana.

Recipe: Fond d'artichauts with foie gras & mushroom stuffing

2011-11-04T09:17:00.003Z

This might sound extravagent, but it really isn't. For two servings, it takes only 50g of foie gras, which we regularly buy raw at Metro - the local cash-and-carry - and home cure. One foie served with brioche is appropriate for six people, and this sort of recipe is an excellent way of then using up any leftover trimmings. The combined flavours are first class, and although the presence of the foie gras is clearly detectable within the mix as a rich and unctuous undertone, it doesn't brashly push itself forward for attention.

This dish has the added advantage of being (low-carb) dietarily sound, as well, since it avoids the otherwise necessary consumption of carb-rich brioche. (And for those readers in Kent who recently, and repeatedly, made negative comments about my weight dynamic, I'll have you know I've gone down almost two notches in my belt within the past month!)

For Four servings.

Ingredients:12 prepared fond d'artichauts; 100g foie gras trimmings; 30g Butter; Olive Oil; 1 tablespoon Flour; 100 ml Milk; 1 shallot; 125g Mushrooms; 3 tablespoons grated Parmesan; Seasoning.

Method:

1. Cook the fond d'artichauts in boiling salted water for about ten minutes, until tender (omit this step if using bottle fonds, which will already have been cooked). Drain, and place in a baking dish (in fact, I divide them between individual egg dishes to bake, which can then go directly to table for serving).

2. Melt two-thirds of the butter in a small saucepan, and gently sauté the diced shallot; once the shallot is wilted, add to it the finely chopped mushroom, raise the temperature, and cook for a couple of minutes until the mushroom liquid has been released and cooked away. Take off the heat.

3. Melt the remaining butter in a simmertopf or bain marie, add to it the flour, and then whisk in the milk. Cook, stirring, until it thickens, then remove from the heat, and stir into it the mushroom-shallot mixture. Check and adjust seasoning as necessary.

4. Divide the foie gras between the fond d'artichauts, and then spoon over it the mushroom sauce. Sprinkle grated parmesan over the top, and then bake in a 190 degree C oven for fifteen minutes. Allow to rest outside the oven for a few minutes before serving, to avoid burned mouths!

Autumn is upon us

2011-11-03T11:07:00.002Z

Glorious, mellow sunny days. The garden rich with the deep colours of parthenocissus, drooping in great swathes from the branches of the cypresses, and in curtains hanging down from gutters and wires. Doors and windows are left strategically open in the course of the day, but firmly closed by nightfall, and the evening air is crisp and now carries with it the unmistakeable smell of woodsmoke.

The winter gardening timetable has begun, now that the days are cooler, and the endless hours spent watering in summer can be devoted instead to more productive tasks. I've just completed the first tranche of bulb-planting....crocuses, and pushkinia, narcissus, bluebells, aconites, muscari, nerine, cyclamen, alliums, and snowdrops. The tulips will have to wait until the end of the month, when I should also have the new climbing roses to plant on the north pergola, as well as some more ground-cover roses to go in amongst the camellias. We've added another dozen azaleas to those already lining the entrance walkway, and all of the rododendrons have been moved from behind the church, where they got far too much sun and struggled in the summer heat, to the welcoming shade beneath the palm trees and pines at the southern edge of the woodland area.

The quince harvest is pretty much finished, the cachi trees are heavy with fruit (industrial quantities of the stuff, and since we don't have a taste for them, the Pauli - and all of their friends and relations, and indeed anybody else they can think of - have been invited to come and pick), and the blossom on the nespole is hosting an impressive display of pollinating activity from bees. The orange and lemon crops are coming on well - just now beginning to swell and to take on some colour - and even the bitter orange crop in January should be pretty good.

Since the clocks have changed (much to the confusion of the four-footeds and their dinner hour, for which they work on God's time, and they've been much put out since they still haven't entirely adjusted to the change ) it's dark by five-ish, which means gardening is forced to finish for the day, and a great deal more time is available once more to be devoted to dinner. Generally after a welcome soak in a hot bath for half an hour, accompanied by a glass of prosecco and an improving book; I'm just finishing a deeply irritating work on the design of early Medici gardens, by somebody called Rafaella Fabiani Giannetto - lots of interesting information that she uses to support an extremely stupid thesis....Oh, well.

I've also been working through Joel Robuchon's recently published 'Complete', which I can't recommend highly enough. A lifetime's experience at the rockface distilled into a treasure trove of splendidly practical recipes. To-date, I've tried his version of pintade au chou (twice, in fact!); rabbit roast in mustard, with a cream sauce; clams & mussels in curry-flavoured cream; courgettes, sautéed with mushrooms and broad beans; and a tart of tomatoes and peppers, about which the Technical Department hasn't stopped raving ever since!

And now, since the sun is streaming in, I think I'd better make the most of it and finish demolishing the oldest of the compost heaps, to be used as top-dressing round all of the hydrangeas. The forecast is for days of rain as from tomorrow...

Tonight's Dinner:

Fond d'artichauts, stuffed with Foie Gras, in a Mushroom sauce

Salmon fillets, larded and baked, served in a horseradish-cream sauce; Fava beans

Fresh Pineapple

Elizabeth David knew nothing about cooking...

2011-10-30T10:56:00.005Z

Or so the 1951 review in the Manchester Guardian of her second book 'French Country Cooking' stated, with great disdain. "Recipe Books come in two sorts," it declaimed, "the decorative, and the practical...and Mrs David's work falls clearly in the first category". The recipes were merely copied from elsewhere, it went on, and it seemed unlikely that ED had actually ever cooked many of them; her quantities were wrong, her techniques suspect, the timings were out....and, all in all, she really didn't have a clue.

The reviewer was somebody called Lucie Marion, who happened to be French (nose out of joint, perhaps, at feeling her home turf was being invaded?), and had recently published one recipe book, and had another one on the way at the time of writing. Could it be that she didn't relish the competition? Not that her work and La David's bear much resemblance to each other - I have a copy of her second one, The Home Chef, which focuses quite a lot on the constraints of cooking 'in these difficult times' when butter was still unavailable, and fingerbowls had not yet emerged from the deep storage they'd gone into at the start of the war. Lots of household hints, as well, such as keeping a bowl of oatmeal beside the sink at all times as a drying agent for one's hands, in order to avoid them ever looking red or, perish the thought, chapped! And a fundamental premise for Ms Marion was that there should always be a quarter of an hour free at the end of preparing dinner, during which time, the hostess (or mother, or housewife) could compose herself, change her frock, and powder her nose, before presenting herself once more to her guests or family. Somehow, I can't imagine Elizabeth David ever actually using the word 'frock'.

As for what La David made of the review, history appears not to relate. Given the ironclad Grande Dame image that she presented in later years, it's hard to think she would have bothered very much with Lucie's pointed criticisms, though. She-who-must-be-obeyed in Belforte once had a run-in with ED when she had her shop in the Kings Road, many years ago, and although I can't remember exactly what the bone of contention was, I do recall that SWMBO came out of it distinctly the worst. Which says much.

And if Ms Marion's nose was out of joint at the appearance of the first of the David oeuvre, I can't imagine she got any happier over the years, as the David star rose ever higher in the firmament, until the grande dame acquired practically mythical status. And the ironic thing is, LM's original criticisms - unfortunately snippy though they were in style - were largely correct...the quantities were sometimes off, and you couldn't entirely rely on her timings...but then, I would have said that's probably true of almost any serious recipe book ever written - they're supposed to function more as a guide than as a precise technical manual. Otherwise, one might just as well be adding an egg to a Betty Crocker instant cake mix, for all the skill that might be required.

I tried to find out what happened to Lucie Marion downhill of 1951. Without much success. In all, she published three books, all much at the same time, in the early fifties, and then seems to have disappeared without a trace. Not even a Wikipedia entry - which, in this day and age, is almost eery. I can only hope she went back to France, where she wouldn't have had to watch with increasing bitterness as the 'decorative' output of Mrs David reached out to an ever larger and more appreciative audience over the years...

Tonight's Dinner:

Flamiches

Pintade au Chou

Petits pots a la crème au Chocolat

Recipe: Cumin & Olive sauce for Magrets de Canard

2011-10-17T11:46:00.001Z

Adapted from a recipe of Bruno Loubet, this sauce is excellent with duck breasts which have been very simply grilled (trim the fat from the breasts and 'slash' the remaining skin, then coat lightly in oil, season well, and grill for six minutes skinside, a further five minutes on the other side, and then allow to rest for two minutes before slicing to serve). The sauce is delicious, with lots going on in terms of flavour, and it marries well with the flavour and texture of the duck meat. As a vegetable to accompany this dish, caramelised onions work well.

For enough sauce for two servings:

Ingredients: 1 carrot, finely diced; 1 stick of celery, finely diced; 1 small onion, finely diced; 1 oz Butter; 1 tbs Oil; 3 tbs Honey; 2 tbs Red Wine Vinegar; 1 tbs light Soy Sauce; 1 Bayleaf; 1 clove Garlic, minced; approx 1 pint good Stock (Chicken, or Duck, or Guinea Fowl is perfect); generous pinch of Cumin; half a dozen stoneless Green Olives, finely diced; Salt & Pepper.

Method:

1. Heat the Butter and Oil in a medium sized pan, then sauté the Carrot, Celery and Onion until the vegetables have collapsed and just begin to colour (about five minutes, over medium heat).

2. Add the Honey, Vinegar, and Soy Sauce to the pan, along with the Bayleaf and Garlic. Stir to incorporate, then add the Stock. Bring briefly to the boil, then reduce heat and simmer for an hour.

3. Strain the contents of the pan into a bowl (discard the diced vegetables at this point) and return the sauce to the pan. Over medium heat, reduce the sauce by about two thirds, then add the Cumin and stir.

4. At this point, set the sauce aside until you start to grill the duck breasts. When you do, re-heat the sauce, and carefully continue to reduce it until it is a rich, coating consistency, at which point add the diced Olives and keep warm until the duck breasts have been sliced and plated. A generous spoonful of sauce for each serving, and that's it.

Recipe: Salmon Carpaccio

2011-10-07T09:55:00.000Z

I'm slightly out of time on this one, as it's been a new favourite starter during the hot summer months, and today appears to be the first day of autumn. The temperature has dropped dramatically, and for the first time since May, the doors and windows are closed, and we took morning coffee indoors. The promised rain has yet to materialise, though (annoyingly, since we haven't seen a drop in almost three weeks, and had another dry period before that of over a month), and this morning's heavy sky has given way instead to blustery sunshine.

Anyway....salmon carpaccio. In fact a second cousin to both ceviche and gravadlax, but not very close to either, I've come across versions of this recipe in both Anna del Conte and in Harry's Bar, in Venice. My version is closer to Anna del Conte. The trick to slicing the salmon is to leave it in the freezer for an hour or so beforehand, so the slices can be wafer-thin but without falling to pieces - and, in fact, I use a salami slicer when doing this, but a decently sharp long-bladed knife ought to be just as effective.

The way the textures and flavours in this dish complement and work against each other is first class. And, in practice, I'm sure will be just as delicious served against the background noise of autumn storms, with the shutters firmly closed, as it was when dining al fresco, under the stars.

For two:

Ingredients: 2 Salmon Fillets, each approximately 200g; 2 tbs Olive Oil; the juice of 2 large Lemons; 4 fl oz Single Cream; Salt & Pepper; Cayenne Pepper; 1 small Fennel bulb.

Method:

1. Slice the Salmon fillets as finely as possible, and arrange in a single layer to cover two dinner plates. Drizzle each plate with a tablespoon of Olive Oil, and divide between the two plates the juice from one of the Lemons. Season with Salt & Peper, then cover each plate with clingfilm, and refrigerate for three hours or so.

2. About an hour befores serving, mix the cream with the remaining Lemon juice, and add Cayenne Pepper to taste. Take the plates from the fridge, remove the clingfilm, and divide the cream and lemon mixture between the two plates, in a layer that should pretty much cover the salmon slices. Don't refrigerate again, but leave the salmon to get back up to room temperature.

3. Finely dice the Fennel, and just before serving, sprinkle it over the top of each plate.

This week...

2011-09-25T09:30:00.005Z

...started with a disappointing opening to the 2011 Anima Mundi concert programme. Doubly so, since I'd really been looking forward to it: Mozart Requiem, performed in the Duomo ought to have been sublime...but for some bizarre reason Christopher Hogwood, conducting, took the whole thing at a jog-trot pace that robbed it entirely of its majesty, and reduced it to little better than opera bouffe. Maybe he had a bus to catch, or a hot date after the show...but whatever the reason, Hogwood unquestionably made a pig's ear.

Tuesday's concert in the Camposanto, on the other hand, made up for everything. Alice Sarah Ott playing Mozart (perhaps not her strongpoint), Beethoven (excellent!) and Liszt (beyond description, wonderful). A stunningly good performance. Quite, quite superb. Not a bad setting, as well, with Ms Ott's backdrop being a motley collection of Roman sarcophagi and ottocento funerary statues, all set against Benozzo Gozzoli's increasingly well-restored frescoes.

On Sunday, we had rain. We actually had rain. And no half-hearted shower, either, but a good old Pisan downpour, which saw the courtyard flooded within minutes, as we rushed around and had the usual drama with rolled bath towels stuffed against the bottom of the dining room doors against a possible influx into the house (Canute-like in practice, if the water actually does rise that high...which, thankfully, it normally doesn't) . The garden liked it; the watering department (i.e me) liked it, a lot...and then we went back to summer again, which was also ok.

Monday was the Technical Dept's birthday. The Belfortes came for dinner (and to stay for Ms Ott's show on Tuesday evening): Langoustine Tart; grilled magrets de canard; and a three-chocolate parfait, to finish. The rain had sufficiently cooled things down that we actually ate indoors, for the first time in three months, and there was a sense that summer is finally showing signs of winding down. Although, Tuesday was hot once more, and we sweltered over an afternoon game of croquet, where the TD ended well ahead of the field, followed by the Belfortes, who went the wrong way round the course at one point, and (not unusually) matters ended in confused disagreement about the rules, before we broke for tea.

On Wednesday, we departed en masse to Tarquinia, to look at etruscan tombs. Glorious things - and many, many, many of them. Lunch on the deserted beach at Tarquinia Lido beforehand was perfect, as we consumed delicious fried morsels and pasta marinara (of various kinds), basked in late-summer sun, and decided that although the second bottle was probably inadvisable, we would anyway.

Early evening found us standing on the ruins of the Queen's Temple, on the ancient site of the etruscan city, with a view in all directions of the soft profile of the Lazio hills under the lengthening shadows cast by the evening sun; just us, and from somewhere way-off in the distance the sound of sheep bells, and not another person anywhere to be seen.

Dinner (and overnight) was an hour away in Sutri, in preparation for a morning of Roman ruins on the following day. The town has charm, and the restaurant (Locanda di Saturno) boasted a fine medieval courtyard; the kitchen was competent, but the menu a little too mannered for my taste: chicken, with peach and almonds; rabbit with port and orange...all a bit too complicated and trying too hard. Possibly I'm getting old, but increasingly my preference is for traditional dishes, cooked well.

Sutri: a medieval cathedral, where a rather appalling late interior gives no hint of the beautiful early medieval crypt concealed beneath; an impressive roman amphitheatre, carved directly from bedrock, and surrounded by a confusion of tomb-caves that made up the roman necropolis; and a splendid (if dank and gloomy) early-christian cave-church, in a space which had previously been a temple to Mithras.

We completed the trip by heading back north, into Tuscany, just in time for a late lunch at Il Fornacino in Guazzino, just off the Sinalunga exit on the Autostrada da Sole. Well worth the drive - everything was excellent:crostini alla toscana; tagliolini con tartufo; quails cooked with olives and white wine, and an extremely good rosso di Montepulciano (Boscarelli, Prugnolo 2009). Following which, in time-honoured fashion, we wended our way home, tired-but-happy.

Tonight's dinner:

Prawns 'Newberg' (cooked in butter, with diced shallot, then sauced in vermouth, cream, and paprika)

Duck Confit; grilled sprue.

Bramble Mousse

Recipe: Campari & Prosecco Sorbet

2011-09-14T08:14:00.000Z

This summer's signature dessert, this recipe is simple, straightforward and superb. Nobody guesses what the flavours are (well, Paola did, after a bit of thought...but she's the only person who has), but they all hoover it up with great enthusiasm as they consider the matter. Generally, I serve it with fresh raspberries, and the combination of flavours and textures works well. It might seem a little strange to be posting a recipe like this as we head into mid-September, but summer in Tuscany is just going on and on and on - temperatures were again up in the thirties, yesterday, and the forecast is for yet more of the same stretching ahead as far as the eye can see.

For four servings.

Ingredients: 200 ml sugar syrup (made by briefly boiling a litre of water with a kilo of sugar - or pro rata'd down, if you want to make a smaller amount, but I generally make this quantity and keep it in the fridge to use over several weeks, since it doesn't go off ); 250 ml Prosecco; 4 tablespoons Campari.

Method:

There almost isn't a method, since the process is so simple. Chill the ice cream machine, then add to it all of the ingredients listed above and churn for 20-25 minutes, until the sorbet is quite firm. You might need to churn a little more than with other sorbets, as it's important that all the campari is properly incorporated into the sorbet mixture - if you stop too soon, then the campari can be still slightly liquid, and the flavour too prevalent when you serve it.

Put the sorbet into a container, and into the freezer for several hours before serving. It should be soft enough to serve straight from the freezer, without any intervening 'softening' period in the fridge. Garnish with fresh raspberries to serve.

Hollinghurst: "The Stranger's Child"

2011-08-30T10:05:00.001Z

This is 'Booker Longlist' time of year, when I'm trying to second-guess the judges about what will make it onto the shortlist (to be announced tomorrow week), and so polish off as many of the shortlist as I can before we're in endgame territory. The judges have never (since I started doing this, anyway) agreed with my choice of winner - although they've come close, on occasion. And the point of having read all of the shortlist before the announcement is in order to make an informed decision in advance of the official one - whatever it might turn out to be. I didn't mind when Hilary Mantel won, for example (although I thought 'The Glass Room' ought to have won, that year) or when Hollinghurst won in 2004 (although the book by Colm Toibin that was also shortlisted that year, 'The Master', was by far the better piece of writing). Last year's winner (Howard Jacobson) was a poor choice - but then, the shortlist itself was a complete mess, last year - and the occasions when they chose Anne Enright and Kiran Desai were just completely barmy.

Anyway. I've just finished Hollinghurst's 'The Stranger's Child' (originally the bookies' favourite, but apparently it's now dropped to third place) and realised that the whole thing is an enormous game on the part of the author. Each part of the book reflects the work of a notable author in the twentieth-century english canon: part one is Forster ('Room With a View' meets 'Maurice' meets 'Howard's End'); part two, inevitably, is Waugh (but rather than 'Brideshead', it seems to be an amalgamation of 'A Handful of Dust' and 'Vile Bodies'); part three is probably Iris Murdoch (but, since I've never been a fan, I couldn't pinpoint which novels precisely); part four, I would guess is Anthony Powell (later volumes of 'A Dance to the Music of Time') or possibly C.P.Snow....although the latter might not be 'important ' enough for Hollinghurst; and part five is a tongue-in-cheek (it's to be hoped, anyway) reference to Hollinghurst himself (obvious references back to 'The Swimming Pool Library'). Oh, and the bit in part four with the interview with the lecherous octagenarian is probably another reference back to Forster, as well. Even the title of the book, which is ostensibly explained as a reference from 'In Memoriam', could reflect the idea of planting chunks of new writing, cuckoo's-nest-style, in the oeuvres of the aforementioned late, greats. All things considered, it's probably too self-consciously 'clever' (typical of the author in person, I gather) for its own good, and the game gets in the way of the book - which isn't to say that I didn't enjoy it immensely, of course.

Onward and upward. 'Derby Day' (D.J.Taylor) is next.

Tonight's Dinner:

Prawns in Garlic and Wine.

Chicken Korma; Rice Pilaff.

White peaches with fresh Raspberry Sauce.

Recipe: Greek Yoghurt

2011-08-28T09:39:00.002Z

We've been regresssing, this summer. I think it began when we 'adjusted' the access to the courtyard, in June, and suddenly found we were using it much more often than before. Bizarrely, we were both struck by how reminiscent it was of the small courtyard in the first house we lived in in Greece, in the Seventies....something to do with the shape, and the whitewashed walls, and the beautifully 'hidden' quality of the place (and although the presence of a stonking great thirteenth century church forming one wall of the courtyard ought somehow to diminish the similarity, it doesn't manage to). The fact that Esselunga were running a BOGOF promotion around that time for FAGE yoghurt was another factor in the equation, and before we knew it, a habit had developed of bowls of greek yoghurt (sprinkled with hazelnuts and raisins, and liberally drizzled with honey) to accompany coffee, taken in the courtyard each morning at around 10.00. The habit took hold, we became firm devotees...and then Esselunga finished their BOGOF. Scottish genes being what they are, I revolt at the thought of paying one euro thirty for a pot of yoghurt, and the only alternative was to see about home production. And discovered that it couldn't be easier. The fact that UHT milk can be bought, ready sterilised, in screw-top containers is an enormous help, since it means that all you need do in terms of preparation is introduce (with the aid of a scrupulously clean coffee spoon) a couple of tablespoons of yoghurt into the milk container, replace the lid, and shake.

Anyway, the actual steps are as follows:

1. Add a couple of spoons of yoghurt to a litre of UHT full milk; try and ensure that no air remains in the container before you replace the lid, as this can swell during the process, and might cause problems if it swells too much.

2. Shake the container, to combine the yoghurt and milk, and warm for seven hours at around 43 °C. The best place to do this is in the warming drawer - if you have one - of the oven; failing that, it also works if you heat water in a deep fat fryer to the right temperature and then immerse the milk container in that.(The warming drawer is preferable, though, since it allows a number of containers to be processed at the same time). Do NOT allow the temperature to go above 55°C, as the yoghurt culture won't survive at that temperature.

3. After seven hours, place the containers in the fridge for about a day (from the afternoon of one day, they'll be ready for consumption the following morning), and then strain them through fine cloth (I use a linen napkin, placed inside a collander over a bowl) for about an hour, in order to achieve the thickness of traditional greek yoghurt. If you want a thinnner, runnier version - the sort appropriate for indian cooking - then strain for less time.

That's it.

I believe the yoghurt will keep for up to a week, or so - but not in this house! TD calculated that the home made yoghurt came out at a fifth the cost of the commercial version (not including the cost of the electricity for the warming drawer) - but that you then have to reduce that saving by 50%, as we eat twice as much of it at each sitting!

We've taken refuge in London...

2011-08-26T09:02:00.001Z

...from the current heatwave in Tuscany. The last couple of weeks have been unbelievably - and increasingly unbearably - hot! The Belforte's passed by for dinner a couple of nights ago and reported that the temperature on Monday in Colle Val d'Elsa (their local market town) had reached an unprecedented 44 degrees. 'In a hill-town in Tuscany', they said, with incredulity in their voices...and we all shook our heads in disbelief, wondering whether that might actually have been a breath of evening breeze that we'd just felt. Which of course it hadn't been...

Too hot to type; too hot to garden; too hot to cook; too hot to do anything apart from collapse into heavy sleep, for hours each afternoon, and through the night. We leave the doors and windows wide open 24/7 (burglars, take note) to try and encourage airflow, and we keep the shutters closed during the day on the sides of the house which take direct sun. And evenings - which paradoxically are already getting shorter, so it's not possible to do anything beyond 8.30 - are spent in complicated manoeuvres trying to ensure that all of the garden gets sufficient water to keep it going through until some rain arrives once more (which is variously promised for sometime around the end of next week...but will then worryingly and inexplicably vanish altogether from the forecast without warning, from time to time, just to tease). For this weekend, while we're away (back to the inferno on Monday - although I see by then temperatures are forecast to have dropped to the upper twenties, only) we've left the place festooned with hosepipes, rigged up into a series of temporary watering systems attached to timers. Some plants might struggle...but frankly, in extreme conditions like this, it's a matter of sauve qui peut!

Tonight's dinner:

Chicken Liver Parfaits with Hollandaise

Roast Beef & Potato Gratin

Phyllo White Peach Tarts

Summer Drinks

2011-08-12T12:11:00.001Z

High summer: drinking tea on the lower terrace and watching the early morning sun wash over the south lawn; long, afternoon siestas in a darkened room, as the town dozes all around (those few who haven't departed for the beaches of Calabria or Sicily, that is) ; evenings spent mowing the grass and endlessly watering the garden; dinner, late, by candle-light in the courtyard, under the stars. We eat differently in summer - less time to cook, since the garden is so demanding, and less inclination to stand near a hot stove or oven in these sorts of temperatures. Salads and chilled soups have replaced pasta and risotto; sorbets, and ice creams, and fresh fruit in chilled prosecco (with lemon zest and crushed mint...delicious!) instead of tarts and stuffed crepes and soufflés.

And we drink differently, too.

Sometimes daiquiris - peach, or apricot by preference, although strawberries work too, and so do bananas, and raspberries:

In a blender, combine the flesh of a whole peach per person (or equivalent amount of whichever fruit you have to hand) with a handful of crushed ice, 2 fluid oz of rum, a tablespoon of lime juice and one and a half tablespoons of sugar syrup (made in advance and kept in the fridge: 2 cups of sugar boiled for three minutes with one cup of water, then cooled and chilled). Blitz the whole thing for about a minute, and serve in chilled glasses. Then get ready to make more, as one is never enough!

But recently, after Sarah introduced us to the concept, when she came to stay for a few days, we've been drinking Bitter col bianco. A slug (technical term, meaning approximately a generous tablespoon) of campari in the bottom of a champagne flute, then topped up with chilled prosecco. Beyond excellent! And none of that rather depressing process whereby the ice in the campari and soda melts into the drink and renders it progressively weaker and less enjoyable as the level in the glass descends.

Tonight's Dinner:

Poached Eggs on a bed of spinach, with Gruyère Sauce.

Fiorentina, with Rocket and Parmesan (dressed lightly with sesame oil, rather than olive oil, and lemon).

Burnt Lemon cream with Blackberries.

To Oxford...

2011-07-30T17:02:00.002Z

..to see the Macedonian treasures currently on view at the Ashmolean. Glorious, glorious things: delicate golden jewellery; beautiful (and surprisingly colourful) painted jars for scented oils; grave goods; and statues; and ornaments; and military artefacts; wall paintings; silver cups and jugs;exquisitely carved ivory...Wonderful! Pleasantly un-crowded, and sensibly presented - presumably since it was aimed at people who take an intelligent interest, rather than at the grockles who gawp uncomprehendingly, as their tele-guides drone away in the background, and who these days seem to gum up every exhibition of any note in Central London (British Museum and National Gallery, take note!)

It was striking, though, that there are clear stylistic and cultural similarities between these treasures and etruscan remains from the same period - and yet, nowhere have I ever seen any reference to a connection of any kind between the two. Even stranger, given that the Macedonians were little connected with the wider world until quite late on. Odd. I wonder what the reaction would be of an etruscan specialist to this particular collection...

And then, lunch. On the terrace on the Ashmolean's roof, with a splendid view from behind the bum-end of the rooftop statuary (which, presumably, the original architect had never intended to be on general view). Practically a Zuleika Dobson moment. The place was great; the food less so. In homage to Alexander, they were offering a selection of greek mezze in addition to their normal fare, and we decided - almost nostagically - to try it. Not a particularly wise move, as we discovered that they weren't so much operating a kitchen as an unpacking operation, and everything that appeared at table could quite credibly have come from a box, packet or tin, probably opened ten minutes earlier and almost certainly to be found in any M&S Food Hall. Oh well. The cheese plate (English) was excellent, though, and was served with a bunch of red grapes which had been macerated (it turned out) in cold mulled wine, and which were both intriguing and delicious. (Note to self: sometimes, it does pay to sample the garnish, rather than merely to leave it sitting dispiritedly at the side of the plate).

Oxford was heaving. Horribly so. And we took refuge for what remained of the afternoon in the Botanic Garden. Beautiful, calm, and enviably well-tended. Botanic gardens can be dangerous places, and a casual visit several months ago to the one in Amsterdam resulted in my having a couple of hundred Pachysandra Terminalis and Ajuga Reptans to plant, right in the middle of blisteringly hot July - when in fact all any sensible gardener in Tuscany wants to do is to take refuge, and hope that things actually make it through until the weather cools down again. Oxford BG was no exception, and we came away with a cell-phone full of plant images and the names of about fifteen new 'possibles' to research - but not before the autumn, at the earliest!

This afternoon, we're off to a screening of 'The Valley of the Bees' at The National Gallery, and then tomorrow it's back on the bus (metaphorically speaking) to Pisa - to the four-footeds and, inevitably, to the watering...

Tonight's Dinner

Scallops with Almonds and Parsley sauce.

Raie au beurre noire, with new potatoes

Raspberry Soufflés (the link is for strawberries, but just substitute)

Recipe: Greengage & Almond Tart

2011-07-21T08:33:00.001Z

The Plum and Greengage season is upon us, with a vengeance. Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of the things, and all - helpfully - at the same time. Paola has come and picked (industrially) three times, and I've been pressing bags of fruit on anybody who stands still for long enough not to avoid it. Still, the branches are loaded, and I'm afraid I'm just going to have to leave the remainder for the birds. Part of the problem is that there isn't actually a great deal to be done with them, once picked...they've gone into ice cream, and tarts, and bavarois, and fruit salads, and even been used to make daiquiris. But unless you want to go the 'chutney' route, which I don't really (the fruit/meat combination isn't something that works for me), then the options run out fairly quickly.

One delicious way of using them - either plums, or greengages - though, is baked in a crisp tart shell, on a bakewell tart base. Good with plums, and even more delicious with greengages. The recipe comes from Jane Grigson (who seems equally stumped when it comes to breadth of uses for fresh plums) and is definitely one to be repeated as often as you can get the fruit for it.

For an 8" diameter tart.

Ingredients: shortcrust pastry made with 125g butter, 150g flour, 50 ml water and a pinch of salt; 100g ground almonds; 100g melted butter; 1 egg; 100g sugar, half tsp almond essence; sufficient greengages that halved they will properly cover the surface of the tart.

Method:

1. Roll the pastry into a greased false-bottomed 8" tart tin, and blind bake at 180 degrees C. Allow to cool slightly

2. Combine all the other ingredients apart from the greengages, and mix well with an electric beater. Pour into the blind baked shell.

3. Halve and stone the greengages. If they are still hard, then poach them briefly in a very little water and a spoonful of sugar, just until they soften. If they're properly ripe, you shouldn't need to bother with this stage. Be careful if you are poaching them not to let them go too far, as the appearance of the tart will be compromised if the greengages are a soggy mess!

4. Place the greengage halves, skin side up, on the almond base, arrangeing them pretty much to cover the surface of the tart. Bake for about half an hour, until the almond mixture has risen and puffed around the greengages. remove the tart from the oven as soon as the almond cream begins to brown.

5. Serve either warm or cold.

Recipe: Mascarpone Sorbet

2011-07-08T09:26:00.001Z

One of Jennie's offering's for last month's Masterchef Weekend, this is light, delicious, and perfect for the current summer heat. If you like, you could add chopped fruit (plums, cherries, strawberries...whatever you happen to have) to the basic recipe, as it churns in the machine - but, personally I prefer the refreshing crispness of the penny-plain version. Perfect at the end of a languid summer lunch...

For six servings.

Ingredients: 250g Mascarpone; 270g Sugar; juice of one large Lemon.

Method:

1. Heat the Sugar gently along with 350 ml water. Stir until the Sugar has all dissolved, then raise the heat and bring briefly to boil, before removing from heat.

2. Add the Lemon juice, and then leave to cool down for twenty minutes or so.

3. Put the Mascarpone intoa bowl and whisk to lighten the texture, then stir into this the colled Sugar syrup.

4. Put the mixture into the fridge to chill for about an hour, then churn as normal in the ice cream machine. Freeze - but remember to transfer the sorbet from freezer to fridge about half an hour before serving, to allow the texture to soften appropriately.

And this was yesterday's B******t!

2011-07-07T09:26:00.004Z

In 1891, in 'La Scienza in Cucina e l'Arte di Mangiare Bene', Pellegrino Artusi wrote (concerning the traditional recipe for Risotto Nero Colle Seppie Alla Fiorentina'):

" .....Tuscans, Florentines in particular, are so fond of vegetables that they would like to stick them in everything. Thus, in this dish they put Swiss Chard, which, in my opinion, goes with it like the bread soup with the Credo[i.e. not at all]. I fear that this excessive use of vegetables may be one of the causes, and perhaps not the least one, of the weak constitution of certain groups of people who, when struck with some illness, are unable to fight it off, and so drop to the ground in droves like leaves in late autumn..."

So stick that in your 'five a day'!

We must surely be about due for a shock-horror discovery that in fact Fast Food, in industrial quantities, is the healthiest choice of all!

Tonight's Dinner:

Triglia Risotto

Steak in Diavolo Sauce; potatoes roast with garlic, sage and rosemary (Gian Carlo, who is currently building for us the new pergola which will ultimately go round three sides of the North Lawn, yesterday produced a crate of potatoes and tomatoes from his own garden, with a gruff injunction to try them, and see if they weren't better than the water-filled stuff you buy in the market)

Phyllo Tarts of Raspberries and Blackberries, on a vanilla-flavoured Crème Patissière

A summer lunch in Tuscany...

2011-07-06T09:11:00.003Z

The Belfortes passed through, one of them en route to the airport (sometimes I wonder if we aren't actually operating an additional departures lounge), and we lunched in the open barn. A bakingly hot day, so something light and refreshing was called for (although the Technical Department was muttering about replicating the wedding breakfast that Alain Ducaisse churned out last week for the 1600 guests at the Monaguesque wedding!).

Kir Royale (with passion fruit, rather than cassis), was served, with bourekia.

Chilled Pea Soup.

Fillets of Triglia, lightly fried, with a green olive tapenade, on a bed of Courgettes, wilted Rocket, Capers and Garlic, all sautéed in butter.

Apricot Ice Cream (in fact, vanilla ice cream, but with the last of the fresh apricots from the garden chopped into it while it was churning.)

Coffee.

Carriages (for the airport and the station) at 15.30.

Recipe: Chilled Pea Soup

2011-06-26T16:31:00.003Z

High summer. Early mornings, followed by a retreat into the shade by ten o'clock, and then a siesta during the blisteringly hot hours of the afternoon. Dinner each evening is taken late, when the heat has diminished somewhat, and we sit in the candle-lit barn, with the backdrop of the fountain splashing gently into the lily-pond, and the very last few fireflies of the year flit gently among the undergrowth.

This is a perfect starter for this time of year. Minimal cooking required, and the result is elegant, delicious, light and refreshing. If you didn't know what the main ingredient was, then I suspect you wouldn't guess...just an elusively delicious flavour, just out of reach.

For two generous servings:

Ingredients: 500g frozen peas (petit pois are probably best); 3 cups of good light broth (I used stock from a couple of guinea fowl which had been spit-roast earlier in the week); Salt; a quarter cup or so of Cream; chopped Chives, to garnish.

Method:

1. Cook the peas in the stock for about five minutes or so, until done. Add salt to taste. Allow to cool in their cooking liquid.

2. Liquidize the whole lot, once cool, and then work through a sieve, pushing through with the back of a wooden spoon (tedious, I know, but it makes all the difference). Discard the fibrous stuff you're left with in the sieve at the end.

3. Stir in the Cream, and chill for an hour or so until ready to serve.

4. Adjust seasoning if necessary, then serve in chilled bowls, with chopped Chives sprinkled over the top.

Memorably good!

Buon Compleanno!...

2011-06-13T08:56:00.000Z

...to the Junior Four-Footed, whose second birthday it was yesterday. No longer a puppy, although he spent the morning behaving like one, as he seemed to have slight earache and was being deeply pathetic about it (typical dog...at the slightest provocation, they do the 'dying duck in a thunderstorm' act, generally until dinner time). A celebratory Bonio took his mind off it, though, and instead - since he chose to keep his biscuit , rather than eat it, long after Senior FF had wolfed his down - we spent the afternoon with deep and threatening growls emerging from under the desk, as Senior FF attempted to persuade him to surrender it. Even at the advanced age ot two, life doesn't become straightforward....

Tonight's dinner:

Triglia Risotto

Saltimbocca alla Romana, with Cipolline al' agro dolce

Mille Feuille of Raspberries

Recipe: Fondue Parmesan

2011-06-09T16:47:00.001Z

This was excellent, at two meals during last weekend's Masterchef event - once, served formally on Saturday night, with a rocket salad in sesame dressing, and then again for Sunday lunch, when we guzzled shamelessly on all of the leftovers. This is very straightforward - you just have to remember to start making the 'paste' on the previous day, in order to give it time to firm up sufficiently to fry without falling to pieces. The 'croquettes' (since that is essentially what these are) should be light and elegantly creamy, but with a good, edgy flavour that definitely sets the taste-buds tingling for more.

For about 24 individual pieces:

Ingredients: 150g Butter; 150g Flour; 750 ml Milk; 3 eggs; 300g grated Gruyère; 150g grated Parmesan; a pinch of Nutmeg; ground Pepper; 150g fine dry Breadcrumbs. Oil, to fry, in a deep-fat fryer.

Method:

1. In a bain marie or simmertopf, melt the Butter, then stir in the Flour, until amalgamated, and add the Milk. Keep stirring until the mixture thickens. Add the Cheeses, Nutmeg and a few grinds of Pepper and mix thoroughly; remove from heat.

2. Separate the Eggs, and stir the yolks into the cheese mixture. Put the egg whites in the fridge until the following day.

3. Put the cheese mixture onto a platter and form it into a rectangle which is about 2 cm thick; place this in the fridge and leave overnight, or for at least twelve hours.

4. After the mixture has come out of the fridge once more, put the egg whites into a soup plate and whisk lightly with a fork; pour the Breadcrumbs into another soup plate.

5. Cut the cheese mix rectangle into individual pieces, each one 2cm x 4cm (no larger or smaller, or they won't cook properly). Carefully dunk each piece first in the beaten egg white and then into the Breadcrumbs.

6. Heat the oil in the fryer to 170 degrees C, and fry the croquettes four at a time for six minutes each.

Serve immediately.

Masterchef Weekend 2011...

2011-06-08T11:56:00.000Z

...has just finished. Despite dire forecasts of rain throughout, it was hot and sunny almost without respite, and every afternoon saw us all taking post-prandial refuge in a much-needed siesta, before rolling up sleeves and getting on with it for the next three courses! Highlights were Jennie's mascarpone ice-cream on Friday night and her veal roast with porcini on Saturday (when the Carducci's also joined us for dinner),

and the Technical Dept took the prizes for starters and dessert with his Fondue Parmesan (light as love...and very practical, as a second serving for lunch the following day was just as good, even after having spent an additonal night in the fridge), and a mille-feuille of fresh raspberries and crème chibouste.

My offerings were a ravioli of asparagus and prosciutto crudo on Friday, and a dartois of frangipane and loquats (from the garden) for Saturday's dinner...and after that I bricked out of dinner courses, and instead made croissants for breakfast for two days out of three, and ended up with pains au chocolat to ring the changes on the last day.

No disasters, and some interesting discoveries along the way - the TD, for instance, produced a beautifully tender blanquette de veau on Sunday, which started with long slow poaching of the meat in a water bath, before adding to it the sauce which had been cooked entirely separately at the same time. I'll be posting the recipes here over the next week or so...as garden duties allow the time to do so - although that may be not such a challenge this week, as we've now entered a period of very welcome thunderstorms, and every half an hour or so we seem to experience another tropical downpour.

Tonight's Dinner:

Poached Eggs on Parmesan-Potato cakes, with Leek Sauce.

Chicken Breasts stuffed with Emmentaler, served with lemon-flavoured Spinach.

Cream and Walnut Tart.

A perfect day...

2011-06-02T21:51:00.001Z

in Amsterdam. A boat ride on the canals ... a decent glass of champagne, as moorhens looked on, and the sun reflected gloriously off the mansion facades that lined the Herrengracht. Some words exchanged at some point en route...before we were dropped off at The Amstel Hotel, for a lunch that extended luxuriantly into the watches of the afternoon: many and various amuse-gueules (my favourite was a deep fried cherry tomato, with a crusty sesame skin, served on a bed of ginger-flavoured granita), followed by course after course after course...until it felt as though one could happily continue being presented with yet more tantalising delicacies, practically for ever!

Life ain't all bad...

Tonight's Dinner:

Artichoke hearts, with Pork & Parmesan stuffing.

Grilled Duck breasts, with braised Fennel

Macedoine of fresh Peaches and Strawberries, in Prosecco , Lemon and Mint.

Making Bread

2011-05-19T10:31:00.002Z

Bread has been my kitchen focus for the past few months...both in practice, and via research in the pages of many, many writers on the subject (E. David; Linda Collister; Eric Treuille; Jane Grigson; Elisabeth Luard; and Andrew Whitley, to name but a few). I was keen to get myself to the stage - as with making pastry or pasta dough - where I wouldn't have to think about what I was doing, but could judge the 'rightness' of the dough by either look or touch, and therefore the effort and time required would be reduced almost to nothing. And, I think I've got there (after a number of varying degrees of 'interesting' results along the way).

This post will be of no use whatsoever to anybody outside Italy - bad luck - , since the basic challenge with breadmaking is in identifying the correct flour to use from the choice of whatever is readily available locally. I admit, I have broken down and brought back from London a bag of stoneground rye flour, in order to make a sourdough starter, for future use with Italian flour - but the idea of bringing flour from London on a regular basis simply to make bread is too silly even to contemplate. All the sources quoted above, though, specify all sorts of esoteric sounding flours ('wholemeal', 'stoneground', 'unbleached', 'multigrain'...) which have yet to grace the shelves of any grocery store this side of the Alps, and arguably even this side of Calais. And so, it's taken some time to work out from the flour available here what will actually translate most effectively into the stuff I've read about. That, and a process of cherry-picking from amongst all the various methods described, to come up with a combination of exactly which steps will produce the desired result...in fact, I think I've ended up with a little bit from almost everybody mentioned.

At the moment, I'm regularly making the following two loaves - alternating between the two, and baking a new loaf approximately every two to three days. And the repertoire may stay at that level until the end of summer, as the weather is warming up now, and as more and more time is taken up with watering the garden, then the attraction of experimenting in a hot kitchen decreases in direct proportion!

Crusty Farmhouse Bread

Ingredients: 600g - plus a quarter cup of extra flour if needed, which I normally find it is - Manitoba Flour (comes from North America, and so has a much higher gluten content than Italian flour), at room temperature; 400 ml tepid water; 12g Fresh Yeast; a small pinch of Sugar; 2 tbs Salt (adjust to personal taste).

Method:

1. Dissolve the crumbled yeast along with the sugar in a few tablespoons of the water. Put the flour and salt in a large bowl, stir together thoroughly, and make a well in the centre of the combined mixture.

2. After the yeast has visibly dissolved and slightly frothed in its water, stir with a fork to combine properly, then pour the liquid mixture, along with the remaining water, into the well in the flour. Stir the liquid rapidly with a fork, incorporating enough of the flour/salt mixture to make a paste, then flick a fine covering of flour over the top of the paste, cover with a damp towel, and leave for about twenty minutes.

3. Empty the mixture into a mixer bowl, and then knead for ten minutes or so, using the dough-hook attachment. If, at the end of this time, the mixture appears 'sloppy' then add the extra quarter cup of flour and beat for a minute or so at high speed, until the dough is a honogenous lump that comes cleanly away from the side of the bowl.

4. Return the dough to its original bowl (cleaned out in the meantime), cover with a damp towel once more, and leave to rise until doubled in size in an oven with the door closed, at the bottom of which you have placed a roasting pan filled with boiling water. The time taken to double in size will vary...normally it should be between one and a half and two hours.

5. Once doubled in size, put the dough on floured surface, and roll it sausage-like until it is twice the length of the bread tin in which you intend to bake the loaf. fold the sausage into three, so it is about two-thirds the length of the time, then flatten the dough into a rectangle. Fold a third of this towards you, then the third nearest you over that, flatten it with the heel of your hand (which should produce a rectangle of dough slightly smaller than the base of the baking tin, and about two thirds its height) and place it in the baking tin, with the seam facing down.

6. Slash the top of the dough once lengthwise with a sharp knife, then cover again with a damp cloth and leave to rise again back in the closed oven, until approximately doubled in size - about fifty minutes.

7. Pre-heat the baking oven to 230 degrees C (and, if you have it, activate the steam function). Bake for twenty minutes at this temperature, and then reduce the temperature to 200 degrees C and bake for a further twenty minutes.

Voila. (Try not to eat it all in one go!)

Six-braid Zopf

Ingredients: 680g Semola di grano duro, rimacinata - plus a little extra, if needed; 450 ml tepid water; 12g Fresh Yeast; small pinch of Sugar; 1 Egg; 30g Butter; 2 tbs Salt; Egg wash made with 1 beaten Egg; 1 tbs Poppy Seed.

Method:

1. Crumble Yeast into a small bowl along with the sugar, and add enough Water to dissolve the Yeast. Put the Flour and Salt into a large bowl, mix together thoroughly and make a well in the centre of the Flour.

3. Empty the mixture into a mixer bowl, along with the Butter and Egg, and then knead for ten minutes or so, using the dough-hook attachment. If, at the end of this time, the mixture appears 'sloppy' then add the extra flour and beat for a minute or so at high speed, until the dough is a honogenous lump that comes cleanly away from the side of the bowl.

4. Return the dough to its original bowl (cleaned out in the meantime), cover with a damp towel once more, and leave to rise at room temperature until doubled in size . The time taken to double in size will vary...normally it should be between one and a half and two hours.

5. Once doubled in size, empty the dough onto a floured work surface, cut it into six equal portions, and make from these six 'sausages' of equal length. Follow the directions for a six braid plait given here (except that I fnd it easier to braid starting from the middle of the loaf to the end, and then turn it round and braid again from the middle of the loaf to the end - when I start braiding, it is always looser than when I finish, and the final result looks better if the 'loose' braiding is at the centre of the loaf, rather than all at one end).

6. Once braided, put the loaf on a non-stick baking sheet, cover once more with the damp cloth, and leave to rise at room temperature for a further fifty minutes or so, until doubled in size.

7. Pre-heat the oven to 230 degrees C (with the steam function switched on, if you have it). Brush the loaf with egg wash and sprinkle it with poppy seeds, then bake for twenty minutes at 230 degrees C, before lowering the temperature to 200 degrees c for a further twenty minutes.

And that's it!

Tonight's Dinner:

Ravioli of White Fish, in Butter and grated Bottaga.

Fegato alla Veneziano

Phyllo tart shells, with fresh strawberries (the first of this year's crop from the garden) on a base of Fiori-di-Sicilia flavoured Crème Patissière.

Irises

2011-05-01T14:30:00.001Z

I love them, but have never been very successful with them. In the garden in Via Fucini, we planted 18 bearded irises, about five years ago, and I nurtured them carefully over time. They grew, and multiplied - to the extent that when it came to transplanting them to the garden here, I found I now had about 50 of the things! - but rarely did they bother to flower. Until now. This year, they are more than making up for lost time, and long may it last!

Tonight's Dinner:

Parsley Ravioli

Roast Lamb, with Roman Broccoli

Apple Dartois, with Vanilla Ice Cream

Breakfast...

2011-04-25T08:40:00.001Z

...in South Kensington is a multi-cultural event. In a french café, the order given to a ukrainian waitress for 'café au lait' is translated (in Starbuck-speak) to the pakistani guy working the coffee machine as a 'latte', and what eventually arrives is, in fact, cappuccino.

Who needs air travel, when it's possible to encounter two-thirds of world culture just in the course of buying a cup of coffee!

The Marmalade Taste Test

2011-04-24T10:06:00.001Z

I don't make marmalade - I never have. Up at Brancoli, though, it's practically a cottage industry, and each year's production is eagerly awaited by households the length and breadth of Tuscany. It came up for discussion over dinner one evening, in January, when our bitter-orange trees were heavy with fruit, and I airily suggested that perhaps Brancoli Inc might like to include a 'Santa Caterina' line this year, if we supplied them with the fruit to do so. "No', was the firm answer to this one - Brancoli would not be interested to do any such thing. 'Make your own!'.

However...several glasses later, and after a heated (and, on my part horrified) discussion about whether or not an 'interesting sounding' marmalade recipe should be tested from the awful Delia, we found ourselves out in the garden, in the rain, picking oranges by torchlight. It sounds like some kind of mystic ritual, but was more a question of striking while the iron was hot - by the cold light of day, enthusiasm would have waned, and the Santa Caterina marmalade would never have made it beyond outline sketches on the drawing board.

As it was, a blind tasting was talked about for when the production line had done its stuff. And last Monday was the day!

Four different marmalades to choose from: the Brancoli method using their own oranges; the same, but using ours; Brancoli oranges and method, but 2010 vintage; and finally, Brancoli oranges, but using Delia's method. Nail-biting stuff, as there was a risk that I could have ended up saying that I actually liked Delia's version...which would have been beyond appalling. Each marmalade was decanted into an anonymous serving glass, and labelled only numerically. I'd made a six-braid zopf to supply the toast we required, and we got stuck in. We did 'spoon' tests, to see if a spoon would stay upright in each marmalade (it did), and a colour comparison: number 2 was very dark; number 3 was refreshingly clear, and the shred in that one was also particularly well spaced. Number 1 seemed very high in pectin, which made it look slightly cloudy...but the flavour was extremely well-defined. We tasted, and considered... and a second round of toast was called for. We gave our scores....and the identities were revealed.

Nobody gave Delia top marks - although, I confess, I did quite approve of the strong flavour; Technical Dept was quite damning about it, though, and said the method clearly overcooked the marmalade and it came out like orange-flavoured caramel (Way to go, TD!). He ended up giving top marks to ours (fortunately) and lowest marks to Delia; I gave highest rating to this year's Brancoli oranges...but was more than delighted to receive a year's supply of 'Santa Caterina' marmalade at the end of the whole process.
By the end of which period, I suspect I'll be pushing my luck if I think Brancoli might continue its Santa Caterina line into 2012. Time to research marmalade recipes of my own, I fear...

Tonight's Dinner:

Flamiches

Roast Lamb; sautéed Salsify

Lemon Soufflés

Garden Update

2011-04-23T14:13:00.001Z

Lots of things gloriously in flower: wisteria - for the first time since it was planted (it must like having been transplanted from Via Fucini) azaleas...lilacs...arum lilies...wonderfully scented orange blossom...climbing roses on the entrance pergola...

Recipe: Peshwari Naan

2011-04-23T13:46:00.000Z

To the San Lorenzo's for dinner on Saturday, where they excelled themselves in producing an Indian menu that rivalled Mumbai's finest (in small.....since we had Pilau Rice, Aloo Gobi, and Chicken Tikka Masala). Our contribution was an offering of Peshwari Naan - a successful experiment, and childishly satisfying to make, since they swell up gratifyingly when cooked and look exactly like they should, at the first time of trying.

The first half of the evening resembled a Feydeau farce, as the SL's dining room is at the fulcrum of their apartment, and has half a dozen doors which open into it. Through which a dizzying array of people appeared and disappeared with great frequency, as we sat at table: a pint-sized neice, who'd been left with them for the afternoon, and appeared to have been forgotten by her parents; a teenaged daughter (and assorted friends) who was getting ready to go out to a party, (which, since this involved trying various clothes and different hairstyles, could have been the same person or an entirely different one each time she - or they - reappeared); and a brother-in-law....who eventually arrived to retrieve his abandoned offspring. To add to the theatrical effect, Paula wore a sari, and Paolo an increasingly thunderous expression, as yet another door opened, to intrude upon his carefully prepared menu. All ended well, as the extras gradually peeled off, and calm descended upon an excellent dinner.

For five Peshwari Naan.

Ingredients: 250g Plain Flour; 2 tsp Sugar; half tsp Salt; half tsp Baking Powder; 120 ml Milk; 2 tbs Olive Oil; 30g Slivered Almonds; 1 tbs melted Butter. Filling: 70g Ground almonds; 35g Raisins; 1 tsp Sugar.

Method:

1. Combine Flour, Sugar, Salt, and Baking Powder in a bowl. Separately, mix together Milk and Oil, and pour into a well in the centre of the dry ingredients; using a fork, gradually draw the dry ingredients into the central pool of liquid, until all has been combined into a sticky ball of dough. Knead (either by hand or using a dough hook) for ten minutes or so, until the dough has become a soft, smooth ball.

2. Place in an oiled ball, cover with a damp cloth and leave in a warm place to 'prove' for an hour.

3. Divide the dough into five equal pieces and on a floured surface roll each piece into a circle approximately 10" in diameter.

4. Combine the filling ingredients in the food processor and briefly work until reduced to a fine powder.

5.Cover half of each dough circle with the powdered filling, leaving about an inch free round the edge, then brush the exposed edge with water, before folding each circle over, to enclose the filling fully.

6. Roll each semi-circle out to make a tear-drop shape. Sprinkle with slivered Almonds, and place on a baking sheet under a hot grill for one or two minutes, until the Naan swells and the surface is spotted dark brown.

7. Before serving, brush each Naan with melted Butter.

We're back...

2011-04-02T10:57:00.001Z

...and summer has arrived, in the meantime. The garden has burst into leaf, and the sun, as we sat on the terrace for coffee this morning was almost too hot for comfort. Bliss!

The week away was pretty busy. In all, more planes, and trains, and airports and stations than is desirable in such a short time. "This" muttered the Technical Department, half way through the Great Trek from the ticket hall to Platform 28 in Rome Central Station "is like the hiking holiday from hell, interspersed with a few short spells on aeroplanes". He had a point. Much of the week seemed to be spent lugging bags to gate 110 at Gatwick North, or gate D87 at Schipol, or some out-of-the-way platform at the railway station in central Amsterdam. And ending up being diverted to Bologna on Thursday morning, when Pisa was closed for incoming flights due to fog! These things are sent to try us...

It wasn't all bad...dinner at the Garrick on Monday evening was memorable (thanks, Richard!), and on Wednesday evening, as we dined very well in the restaurant in the Muziekgebouw, looking through the windows at the rain-swept Amsterdam docks.

It's good to be home, though. And I think the four-footeds agree, as they work on demolishing the groups of narcissi which have appeared gloriously beneath the pine trees. Each casualty is added to those which have gone before, in a pewter jug in the kitchen....I might have to graduate to a bucket, at this rate! Dogs and highly-manicured gardens? Forget it!

Tonight's dinner:

Ravioli of lamb and parmesan, in a leek and tomato sauce. (Re-cyled from last night's main course, when our new friends from Via Carducci came to supper)

Grilled lamb chops with green beans (yes, I know - lamb, and lamb....but cooked so differently that I don't think it matters)

Limoncello panna cotta, with fresh blackberries.

Recipe: Soufflé base (sweet)

2011-03-29T10:59:00.002Z

Completely different from the usual method for soufflé base, this version comes from Gaston Le Notre ( the late, and very great), and is one of the 'basic' recipes to be found at the front of the wonderful pâtisserie book he published in the seventies. The flour-to-milk ratio is very much higher than I've found anywhere else, and in fact the process is more akin to making choux pastry than to making a custard. The result is much more robust than a soufflé made using a creme patissiere base - although not noticeably denser in texture, to the palate of the unwary diner - and will make the journey from oven to table with much less risk of deflating en route. Casting around, I find that the identical approach was suggested by Madame Saint-Ange, when she was publishing recipes around the end of the 1920's...so Le Notre wasn't making it up!

The first time I tried this method, it was a disaster, and the soufflé came out with the density of a pudding. I was tempted to think the method was wrong, but decided that it was worth trying again, on the basis that Le Notre was a fantastic technician, and it made no sense that he would have been advocating a process that didn't work. The trick is at the 'boiling' stage (see below); if you cook the flour too much, it produces a dense cowpat of stodge that will resist any attempt to rise in the oven. When I tried it again, and was much more careful, the result was perfect ....as it has been every time subsequently.

For enough soufflé base for two individual sweet soufflés: half a cup of milk, 30g Sugar, 22g Flour, 2 medium Eggs, 10g Butter.

Method

1. In a bowl mix the Flour and Sugar with about 3 tbs of the Milk.

2. In a saucepan, bring the remaining milk to the boil, add it to the Flour/Sugar/Milk mix and stir well, then return all to the saucepan.

3. Stirring vigourously with a whisk, bring the mixture to the boil, and cook until it visibly thiskens - probably about thirty seconds. Remove from the heat, stirring for a further ten seconds or so, then add to this the Butter; cover the pan with a lid, and leave for ten minutes.

4. After ten minutes whisk the melted Butter into the base, along with the 2 Egg yolks.

5. Add whatever flavouring ingredient you want to the base, and leave to one side until time to cook the soufflés; then whisk the egg whites and fold in as usual.

6. Cook the soufflés in a 180 degree C oven for fifteen minutes (no need to use a bain marie with this method)

Serve.

Stunning!

2011-03-25T13:01:00.002Z

To Rome, for a rare opportunity to see the inside of the Palazzo Farnese. The French have been using the building as their embassy since 1874, and for the most part it remains resolutely inaccessible, apart from the odd few days a year when they're required by the Italian State to allow visitors into a few of the rooms - probably every third Thursday after epiphany, as long as it's raining and there isn't an 'r' in the month...I haven't actually been able to find out how it works, but since the French Ambassador confidently asserts that they let in around 8,000 visitors a year, I suppose one shouldn't disbelieve him.

A cynical interpretation of the current 'Open House', through until the end of next month, might be that the French are keen that their lease be renewed when it runs out in a little over twenty years from now, and so are being unusually accommodating. I couldn't possibly comment. What I can say, though, is that the place is stunning. Breathtaking. Wonderful. We were there, first thing yesterday morning, and for about an hour enjoyed the place in the company of perhaps a dozen other people, before the mass hordes descended just as we were departing.

As part of the event, a number of Farnese treasures had been borrowed back from far-flung musueums (although nothing much from the Louvre, which was surprising), and there was a series of very good portraits of various people associated with the history of the building. The highpoints of the experience, though, were Michelangelo's double height 'Salon d'Hercules', and, surpassing everything, the ceiling of the Carracci gallery. Which is beyond-description wonderful. Rich and brilliant, with a degree of technical mastery which simply leaves one gaping. When I first went into the gallery, the shutters were open, and the room was bright with morning sunlight - and by the time I went back for a second look, before leaving, somebody had found the light switch, the shutters had been closed, and the ceiling was bathed beautifully in a golden glow. Glorious - simply glorious!

And Rome was looking its springtime best, as well. Clear sky and warm sunshine, as we walked en route to the Farnese by way of Trajan's Column, the Wedding Cake, and the Campo dei Fiori...and afterwards, as we sat and basked in the Piazza Farnese, and drank coffee (and then prosecco) as we waited for Charles to join us for lunch (by chance, he was also in Rome for the day, from Milan).
And in fact, at lunch it was almost too hot, with a table outside at Pierluigi, and as the sun moved round, the shade actually came as a welcome relief!

Tonight's Dinner:

Celeriac & Asparagus Terrine.

Pork Loin, stuffed with Emmental & Prosciutto; Parsnips, with Sherry & Walnuts.

Raspberry-vanilla Tarts.

Saturday...

2011-03-19T19:08:00.004Z

A glorious day. Warm sunshine on my back, as I weeded round the bearded Irises, before giving them their annual feed of phosphate...Almond blossom is over, but now plum blossom is at full strength, and the peach blossom isn't far behind. Apricot blossom - arguably, the prettiest of the lot - is just beginning to stir, and the roses are putting on new growth at a rate of knots.
The new planting for this year is just about completed, with the camellias and azaleas that went in last week rapidly followed by a whole lot of hostas and hemerocallis, which I'd ordered from a supplier in Rimini back at the end of January, and which unexpectedly arrived only a couple of days ago. With no fear of any further frosts, the more tender of the water lilies, which had to go indoors for the winter, have now been returned to the lily pond - although the temperature of the water is still cold enough that I didn't linger over the process of 'planting' them once more, but did an extremely quick in-and-out.

After a soul-enriching afternoon spent with wheelbarrow and hoe - with demands from the junior four-footed every two minutes that I throw for him the pine cone that he carefully placed in the middle of whatever I happened to be doing at the time, just in case I might miss it - tea was served beside the fire in the barn. As we sat, the sky got darker and darker, in readiness for what felt like the first of the summer thunderstorms. Which I love. The heavens opened, thunder rolled and crashed, and I retired to a long hot bath, in the company of Elizabeth David ('Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen' ), as flashes of lightning periodically split the darkness beyond the bathroom window...

Tonight's Dinner:

Risotto of Funghi Porcini

Guinea Fowl with Garlic & Lemon; braised Leeks

Zabaglione

Recipe: Apple Sorbet with Calvados

2011-03-16T09:34:00.001Z

Another one from Anne Willan - the additional garnish of dried apple and a further splash of calvados was at the TD's behest, as he felt the sorbet on its own lacked edge. This recipe produces a wonderfully soft-textured sorbet, with a good strong flavour. It keeps pretty well - although, like all sorbets, it will become granular if left in the freezer for more than a couple of weeks (in which case, simply leave it to melt at room temperature for an hour or so, and then re-churn it in the ice cream machine; it will be restored immediately to pristine condition.)

For 8-10 servings.

Ingredients: For the Sorbet: 2 large Apples, peeled, cored and diced; 1.5 litres of Water; 250g Sugar; 1 tsp powdered cinnamon; 125 ml Lemon Juice; 150 ml Calvados.

For the garnish: 2 large Apples, peeled, cored and diced; juice from 1 Lemon; 1 tbs Sugar; half a tbs ground Cinnamon; Calvados.

Method:

For the Sorbet:

1. In a saucepan, heat the Apples, Sugar, Water and Cinnamon, stirring until the Sugar has completely dissolved; then cover and simmer for 15 minutes or so, until the Apples have completely broken down.

2. Sieve the mixture, then stir in the Lemon Juice and Calvados (at this stage, taste for sweetness and add more Sugar if necessary).

3. Chill the mixture, and then churn in an ice cream machine. Freeze until needed (if hard-frozen, then let it soften in the fridge for about an hour before serving).

For the garnish:

Mix the diced Apple with Lemon Juice, Sugar and Cinammon. Spread the pieces out on a silpat sheet, or on a baking sheet lined with greaseproof paper. Dry for an hour in an oven pre-heated to 125 degrees C, then leave aside to cool - the texture at this stage should be pleasantly chewy. When serving the Sorbet, garnish each serving with a small amount of dried Apple, and a spoonful of Calvados.

Camellias - a Discovery!

2011-03-13T10:06:00.004Z

We decided ages ago that we wanted some more Japonicas, to go under the pine trees, in amongst the hydrangeas, so that there would be something going on in that part of the garden during the winter months, when the hydrangeas are resolutely dormant. Already, we'd put in a row of camellia japonicas - half a dozen different kinds, but all with predominantly white flowers - between the entrance pergola and the pine trees, and the idea was to plant more, disappearing off into the distance, towards the South Lawn beyond the pine trees - but to have them gradually going through whites, to light pinks, to that kind of strong, deep pink that Camellias are so good at. It's the perfect time of year to go and buy the things, as they're just now properly coming into bloom, so you can actually know what it is you're getting. (All the japonicas we put in a year ago are now absolutely dripping with either blooms or buds, and look splendid).

I researched suppliers, and narrowed the choice of possibles down to two: somebody in Cappanori, near Pistoia, who looked as though they operated a pretty straightforward commercial nursery, and an intriguingly eccentric outfit up towards the Garfagnana, with a website (www.camelieantiche.com) which seemed all about re-discovering camellias from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which had somehow got 'lost' in the passage of time. There wasn't really a website for the business itself, but digging around I managed to find an address and a phone number, which at least allowed us to confirm that yes, they were going to be open that afternoon. Based in Borgo a Mozzano, which looked interestingly pretty and historic, we decided to make an outing of it, and piled into the car.

Borgo a Mozzano, we found - pretty, it isn't - and after that we got conclusively lost for half an hour or so. Eventually, we located some broken-down old greenhouses, and a front door (by which stage, I was thinking wistfully of Cappanori), which was answered by the daughter of the camellia grower. No, Mamma wasn't here...she was at the nursery which is actually in Piana della Rocca...another village, about five minutes drive further up the valley. Time was marching on, tempers getting frayed, and we risked not getting to the place before it closed. However...

We did.

And it was amazing. Thousand upon thousands of Camellias, all looking beautifully healthy and jostling for attention...and even more thousands (upon thousands) of azaleas, which it turns out is the speciality of Signora Garibaldi (the Camellia grower)'s husband. Like a chlorophyll version of the 101 dalmations, every time a door was opened or a curtain raised, there were yet more massed ranks of the things...everywhere. And, indeed, Signora G's speciality is all the old varieties, many of which she has 'recovered' from the gardens and parks of the huge old villas in the hills around Lucca - two that we bought, were from cuttings that came from the gardens of the Villa Reale, and all of them could be traced back to some aristocratic garden or other from the neighbourhood. They described themselves as 'appasionati' of camellias - which I think must be an enormous understatement; completely, but wonderfully, obsessed would be more like it. She showed us her working lists of the camellias she'd re-discovered, and when and where, and their overall provenance, and where she had gaps she was looking to fill...and her level of enthusiasm was contagious.

In the end...after an hour or so...we just about managed to load into the back of the car six large camellias, four medium white azaleas, and an enormous blood-red azalea, which is now in the large copper pot near the garden gate. It was as much as we could fit in, in one go.....but we'll be back, for more!

Tonight's Dinner:

Deep Fried Pork and Prawn Won Ton.

Osso Bucco; Celeriac and Potato purée.

Bitter Orange Soufflés.

Spaghettini alla Nursina...

2011-03-10T17:57:00.002Z

It wouldn't happen in London. The San Lorenzo's dropped in for a cup of tea, a couple of days ago, and at the same time handed over some black truffles that somebody had given them, and which they thought we could put to good use. (Paolo seems to have grateful ex-patients the World over, and the S-L's generally have some exotic form of comestible blocking up their hallway - a case of verdelli just arrived from Sicily, for example, or a cool-box with melt-in-the-mouth mozzarella sent from Naples, or a package of spicy 'nduja from Puglia...)

Best not mucked around with, the truffles went in their entirety into two servings of Spaghettini alla Nursina as a starter for dinner, last night - 40 grammes was just about enough. Sliced wafer-thin, and then cut crosswise into the most delicate of julienne, they were doused in olive oil, and left to sit, macerating gently along with two or three finely sliced basil leaves. Mixed with a light anchovy sauce just before being added to the al-dente spaghettini, the result was perfect!

And not about to be repeated any time soon, either - not unless we win the jackpot, or the four-footeds suddenly become useful and discover truffles growing in the orchard!

Tonight's Dinner:

Funghi Porcini Tarts, in Polenta Crust.

Hamburgers, with braised Celery.

Apples baked in cream, with Brown Sugar and Cinnamon.

Breadmaking - a tip....

2011-03-07T17:57:00.001Z

I'm making bread again. I'd stopped, for years, on the basis that I wanted to avoid getting fat. But on the, probably spurious, basis that I can offset the effect by all the strenuous labour in the garden, I've thrown caution to the winds and got stuck back into bread dough. Which is wonderful stuff!

My problem, though, was for ages that I didn't know how best to create the right environment in which to leave the dough to rise. It wasn't a problem I'd ever encountered back in catering days, when the ambient temperature of the kitchen was always perfect for leaving bread to rise (but generally lousy for tempering chocolate). 'Leave it on a shelf in the airing cupboard' suggest some books - I don't have one - or, 'it's best in the oven, with just the pilot light on', say others - fine, except I've never actually had a gas oven. Playing around with pre-heating the oven to a low temperature and then turning it off, in the hope that it would be about right, was very hit and miss...and I mean very.

And then, I thought to consult Elizabeth Luard, who is not only splendidly no-nonsense, but has loads of experience of cooking in kitchens of varying levels of lack-of-sophistication, as outlined in the period that went towards her masterwork on 'European Peasant Cooking'. She suggests putting a roasting pan of boiling water at the bottom of the oven at the start of the rising period, and then leaving the door closed (temperature off) until it's time to knock the dough back and get on with the next stage - and if you're following a method that has multiple risings, then replenish the boiling water in the pan at the start of each new rising period. It works. It's wonderful. I've tried it three times in succession, now, and had a perfect result each time...

Tonight's Dinner:

Pan-fried Foie Gras, with Wild Mushrooms and Rocket.

Fillets of Sea-Bream, sautéed with Tomato, Basil, Rosemary & Lemon.

Limoncello Panna Cotta, with Fresh Raspberries.

Recipe: Terrine of Chicken with Chicken Livers

2011-03-05T10:19:00.003Z

Closely based on something from Simone Beck's collection of recipes published in 1972, this is an excellent terrine - up there with the best, and certainly as good as the rabbit and lemon terrine that has for me long been the acme of this kind of dish. Not particularly complicated to construct, once the list of ingredients has been assembled, it is vital that it remain untouched for at least a week - and preferably ten days - after having been cooked; as the terrine matures, the flavours just get better and better.

It's an advantage also if you have a mincer to process the ingredients that go to make the 'binding' element in the terrine, rather than resort to a food processor; the latter isn't impossible, but I suspect that, with a food processor, you risk reducing the mixture to a purée, which will compromise the quality of the finished product in terms of both texture and flavour.

Serves 10.

Ingredients: 4 Chicken Breasts; approx 15 slices of rindless unsmoked Bacon (for lining the terrine; in Italy, I use slices of lardo, which aren't generally available elsewhere);250g diced Pancetta; 250g cooked Ham; 250g Chicken Livers; 2 tbs Butter; 0.5 tsp dried Thyme; Salt & Pepper; 0.5 cup Cognac; 1 large Egg; generous pinch of Nutmeg; 0.25 tsp ground Coriander; 2 tbs mixed finely-chopped Tarragon, Oregano, Parsley; medium Bay Leaf, dried and ground to powder; 250g Prosciutto (preferably in one piece, so that it can be cut into thick strips, but if you can only get pre-sliced, this will work as well).

Method:

1. Line the terrine mould with the slices of Bacon, leaving the ends hanging over the sides, so that once the mould is full they can be laid across the top.

2. Cut two of the Chicken Breasts into slices and then into half centimetre strips.

3. Put through the mincer the remaining Breasts, along with the Pancetta and Ham; mix together thoroughly in a large bowl.

4. Cut each of the Chicken Livers into four pieces and sauté in melted Butter for three or four minutes, until coloured, then add dried Thyme and season with Salt & Pepper, pour in half of the Cognac, and flame. Once the flames have died down, remove the Livers with a slotted spoon, and add the cooking juices to the minced mixture, along with the Egg and the remaining Cognac. Stir thoroughly, and mix in the nutmeg and herbs; add Salt and Pepper as appropriate.

5. Cut the Prosciutto into strips.

6. Assemble the terrine: into the lined terrine mould put a third of the chicken mixture, levelled to fill the mould evenly; cover with a layer of strips of Chicken Breast (half of the total amount), then a layer of trsips of Ham (half of the total amount), then a layer of Chicken Livers (half of the total amount). Repeat the process with half of the remaining chicken mixture, topped with layers of the remaining Chicken Breast, Ham, and Chicken Livers, and finally a layer of the remaining chicken mixture. Fold the strips of Bacon over the top of the filling, and cover the whole thing with a layer of aluminium foil, and then the lid of the terrine mould.

7. Place the mould in a bain marie, and cook a 180 degree C oven for two hours.

8. Remove from the oven, and allow to cool for an hour or so, then remove the lid from the terrine, and place a weighted board on top of the foil covering; remove the water from the bain marie, but leave the mould standing in the roasting pan while being weighted, as liquid can leach out at this stage. After 12 hours, put the entire thing in the fridge, and only remove the weight after 48 hours.

9. Serve only after a week has elapsed - this terrine doesn't unmould well, and so is best sliced directly from the mould. Serve with slices of cornichons, and a green salad.

Treasure trove!

2011-02-27T13:21:00.001Z

Bound copies of 'Cuisine et Vins de France' for the entire period from April 1965 through until the end of 1973. The Technical Dept found them languishing on French ebay - apparently having spent the last few decades gathering dust in an attic in Besancon - and he snapped up the lot! Quite apart from this covering the years during which Richard Olney was writing for the magazine, it is an absolute Aladdin's cave of 'new' material. Logically, you'd think that anything good from that period would have made it into the culinary firmament and long ago become tried-and-trusted and thoroughly familiar - but in practice, it doesn't seem to work like that: I've recently been digging through a couple of books of recipes by Simone Beck, dating from the early seventies, and have unearthed one previously (to me) unknown gem after another in the process. Cuisine et Vins promises many, many excellent things...

With sources like that available, it makes me even more jaded when contemplating the endless quantities of glossy offerings from the likes of Nigella and Angela and Delia and Gordon...where (although I confess, I don't actually own any, but I have glanced at them in bookshops, on occasion) it seems that a few rather obvious ideas are being milked ever more painfully to death.

And yesterday morning, it was with horrified fascination that I listened on Radio 4 to somebody who called themselves a 'food futurologist' wittering on about 'popcorn, coated in white belgian chocolate, served with strawberries', and extolling the apparent virtues of cupcakes. Pitiful!

Tonight's Dinner:

Steamed and fried Gyoza with vinegar dressing

Celery Risotto

Chocolate Zabaglione

There are drawbacks ...

2011-02-26T10:09:00.001Z

..to having kitchens in two different houses, in two different countries. And I don't just mean those occasions when reaching into the cupboard at a critical moment for sugar that I know I bought only a couple of days ago, only to remember that in fact the sugar is sitting in a different cupboard half a continent away (and the shops are now closed, and anyway, people are arriving for dinner in twenty minutes...so, improvise!)

No, the drawbacks can be more complicated than that. Like the evening before last, when I'd decided to make cream and walnut tart for dessert, and put the pastry shell into the pre-heated oven to bake, as I then focused on getting the cream reduction underway.
Except that I'd forgotten I wasn't in Italy, where the fan-assisted oven setting on the right-hand oven is two turns anti-clockwise from 'off'......which is what I did. In London, however, that setting starts the self-clean function going, which means that the temperature is raised to a planet-scorching level of intensity...and it was only as the distinctive self-cleaning-hot-metal smell wafted into my consciousness that I realised something might be wrong.
By which time, the self-clean self-lock facility had also come into play (a little gizmo which prevents non-existent children from immolating themselves by opening the oven door during the self-clean process), and all I could do was watch helplessly through the glass panel as the pastry shell burnt to a crisp, and I wrestled in vain with the locked door, willing the oven to cool down sufficiently for me to get the bloody thing open.
Which eventually it did....and it was just as I finally retrieved the sad and sorry burnt-offering that the cream - unwatched - effortlessly boiled over and flooded the entire hob.

It was (sigh-makingly) more like the Keystone Cops, than cooking.

Tonight's Dinner:

Steamed Prawn Won Ton.

Slow-roast Pork with Garlic & Star-anise; Spinach sautéed with Spring Onion

Chocolate Mousse, with fresh Raspberries

Recipe: Poached Egg on a Potato Galette, with Leek Sauce

2011-02-20T11:27:00.000Z

Think of this as a first cousin to Eggs Benedict - although, you could be forgiven for comparing it also with a more prosaic 'egg and chips' (which may sound rather ho-hum, but where the flavour-combination of runny egg yolk with cooked potato is in fact incomporable, IMHO). The addition of the leek sauce in this version lifts the dish to a whole different level, though, and makes it something you could readily serve to guests without blushing.

The success of the dish depends on getting the eggs right - cooked a point, so the yolks are still runny, but the whites are perfectly firm. Over the years, I've researched countless methods for poaching eggs, and found that everybody seems to advise a different approach: add vinegar to the water (or not); make whirlpools before you drop the the raw eggs in; aim for (or avoid) the areas of water which are bubbling most fiercely; stir the water around the eggs as they cook, to wrap in their 'tails'....and in fact none of these methods has ever really worked for me. The method I use (which I recently discovered is very similar to that advocated by Richard Olney) is to heat water to a boil in a large sauté pan, and then to turn off the heat, and poach the eggs inside individual serving rings for exactly three minutes, with the cover on the pan. Use tongs to remove the rings, once done, and take the eggs from the water using a slotted spoon. If you don't have individual serving rings, then use the forms from small tuna cans, with the top and bottom removed (which can also subsequently be used btw, on a baking sheet, to shape individual pastry shells, in the absence of appropriate false-bottomed flan tins)

For two.

Ingredients: 2 large Eggs; 2 medium-sized Potatoes; the white part of a medium sized Leek; 2 tbs Butter; 2 tbs Oil; 100 ml White Wine; 100 ml Cream; Seasoning.

Method:

1. Dice the Leek finely, and sauté it gently in half the Oil and Butter for five minutes or so, until softened; add the Wine, raise the heat to bring to a boil, and then add the Cream. Reduce the heat to a simmer, and cook, stirring regularly, for five minutes or so, until the sauce has thickened. Keep warm, and taste and adjust the seasoning just before serving.

2. Peel the Potatoes and cut them into matchstick-thin julienne (do NOT wash them once peeled, as it is the starch in the potatoes which makes the galettes stick together...washing them will remove the starch). Heat the remaining Oil and Butter in a heavy frying pan over high heat, and then arrange the julienne strips in two 'cakes' in the pan. Season the Potatoes, press down lightly on them, and after a minute or two, gently ease the blade of a palette knife underneath, to ensure they aren't sticking to the pan (as you do so, tilt the pan slightly, to allow more oil and butter to run beneath each galette). After four minutes or so, use the palette knife to turn each galette over, and repeat the process; adjust the temperature throughout to maintain a high heat, but not so high that the galettes start to burn. Four minutes on each side should be sufficient.

3. Poach the two Eggs using the method described above.

4. To serve: on warmed plates, place each poached egg on top of a potato galette, and spoon leek sauce over the top. (And for a more formal presentation, sprinkle with chopped parsley).

Senior Four-footed - Bulletin...

2011-02-13T14:17:00.000Z

In response to the numerous e-mails and phone calls wanting to know how the senior FF is getting on, I thought I'd better post a bulletin, much as they do (or did...I expect it would all be done digitally, these days) on the railings at Buckingham Palace.

He is greatly improved, and, thankfully, seems unlikely to be muttering 'Bugger Bognor' any time soon. (For anybody unclear on the reference, I suggest you google it...)

He's looking a little thin, and puffs and pants for many minutes from the effort of climbing the stairs, each time he does it - but apart from that is cheerful, and clearly on the mend. The pill regime is rather daunting: pills to coagulate his blood, others to suppress any infections, cortizone to do whatever cortizone does, and then another course of pills to address any possible side-effects from the cortizone...and then there's yet another course of pills, the purpose of which escapes me right now, but he has to have them twice a day. Currently, he takes five and a quarter pills of various colours in the morning, a further one and a quarter at midday, and just after dinner has another four and a quarter, to round off the day.
I suspect the battery of treatments reflects the fact that the vets haven't managed specifically to identify the problem (the latest prognosis was a vague reference to an 'auto-immune' reaction...which seemed shorthand for 'we haven't a clue, frankly...') but since the pills aren't likely to do him any harm, then we're happy to go through the process. Technical Dept and I are still fairly convinced that it was rat poison, and that the coagulant pills and the antibiotics would actually do the trick on their own...

Tonight's Dinner:

Tagliatelle with salmon and orange

Pork Chops in cream and mustard sauce; green beans with tomato

Lemon cream

Recipe: Risotto of Celeriac and Tarragon

2011-02-12T14:26:00.001Z

Not a classic combination, but delicious for all that. Intriguing, too - as the combined flavours are complementary but elusive; the Technical Dept couldn't idenify a single ingredient that had gone into the dish when I served it up to him several days ago (but he was enthusiastic for a second serving, anyway).

The secret is to dice the celeriac very finely, to start with, and then sweat it slowly so that the fibres break down, and the texture of the vegetable is indistinguishable within the finished risotto. For this initial stage, I used some leftover butter from a boned and stuffed chicken which we'd had several days beforehand, and which had the advantage of lots and lots of flavour; duck or goose fat would be good, too - but, failing that, just sweating the celeriac in plain butter should do the trick.

For two.

Ingredients: half a small Celeriac, diced very finely (you want to have about one and a half cups, once the Celeriac has been peeled and diced); 2-3 tbs butter (or duck or goose fat, if you have it); two-thirds of a cup of rice (Carnaroli, by preference - these days, I use Baldo, but I doubt it's generally available, and Carnaroli is the next best thing); one glass of dry White Wine; approx one and a half pints of 'white' stock (chicken, duck, or veal); 2 tbs of chopped Tarragon; half a tsp of White Truffle Oil; Seasoning.

1. In a large sauté pan, over low heat, melt the Butter and in it sweat the diced Celeriac until thoroughly softened, stirring from time to time. This should take around 35 minutes. Try to avoid letting the Celeriac colour as it cooks.

2. Heat the Stock in a saucepan.

3. Once the Celeriac is properly softened, add to it the Rice. Raise the heat under the pan, and stir everything together for about a minute; add the Wine, adjust the heat so that the liquid is just bubbling, and continue in classic risotto style, adding the heated Stock by ladlefuls as the liquid in the pan is absorbed by the Rice.

4. Start testing for doneness after about twenty minutes, and continue the cooking process until the rice has lost its 'bite'.

5. Off the heat, stir in the chopped Tarragon and the Truffle Oil; add seasoning to taste, and serve.

It's been a bumpy ride...

2011-02-08T21:32:00.000Z

...but we hope things are now looking up. Having congratulated ourselves on surviving a close shave, we enjoyed the senior FF bouncing around, all weekend, and generally being a joy. And then, on Monday, he seemed to get very listless, and we decided not to wait until his appointment on Tuesday to have his red-blood-cell count checked, and instead took him back to the clinic immediately. The test showed his count was down again, and we ended up leaving him there overnight once more...and came home to a very glum evening, with all sorts of things not being said.

By this morning, he'd had x-rays (nothing untoward showed up) and tests for parasites (again, all ok), and they said he'd have to wait until early evening to have an ultrasound....so we went and fetched him home for the day, as there was no point in him sitting needlessly in a cage all day, feeling miserable, if we could have him at home and lavish TLC on him instead.
In fact, when we went to spring him from gaol, he seemed grumpy and opinionated about being there, rather than miserable - which seemed a positive sign rather than otherwise. So, he spent the day sprawled on the Office floor, having the occasional quiet conversation with one or other of us, and then we went back again for his next set of tests early this evening. Having lost our last three four-footeds to various kinds of cancer, I think we were both quietly resigned to it being bad news.

And it wasn't!!

He got a clean bill of health. Nothing showed up anything that confirmed our worst fears....and so, he's back on the anti-rat-poison treatment, had a shot of cortizone, and came straight home again. He and the junior FF spent much of the evening wrestling together (junior FF hasn't known what to do with himself without his mate, when he's been in the clinic, as they haven't been apart for a day since Junior FF was ten weeks old), and now they are happily crashed out nearby....and all is well with the world.

There are many more pills to be taken and blood tests to be endured before we're entirely out of the woods...but the prognosis is now encouraging.

I think I need a drink!

Dog Days...

2011-02-06T17:46:00.000Z

But in the canine-crisis sense, rather than the languid mid-summer bucolic one. We noticed last week that the senior four-footed was looking off-colour (but put it down to his age, rather than anything else) and after a couple of days of not eating, which for him is unheard of, we whisked him off to the vet on Friday morning...just to be sure that it wasn't anything serious. Not a moment too soon, it transpired, as a blood test showed that he was dangerously anaemic, and an emergency blood transfusion was organised within minutes of getting to the surgery. Fortunately, we'd taken the junior four-footed with us for the trip, and before he knew it, he'd been scooped up onto an operating table, and was giving half a litre of life-saving blood, to be immediately pumped into his partner-in-crime. Had we left it a couple of hours later, according to the vet, then it would very likely have been too late...

It can only have been rat poison, which works by causing internal bleeding, and eventually causes the system to collapse entirely. Where he'd picked it up is entirely a mystery, though - not in the garden here, for sure, and generally when they're out the four-footeds are kept firmly on a lead. The senior FF does have a habit of nipping through to the church field next door whenever he can, though, for a general scavenge and forage, and that seems the likeliest place where he would have picked it up. Both Don Guido and Loredana say that nobody has been putting any poison down there, though...and so the matter remains officially a mystery.

Senior FF was allowed to come home yesterday morning, although his blood count is still pretty low, and he has to go back on Tuesday for another blood test. He positively rattles with pills at the moment (he's on a course of coagulents for the next month, and antibiotics as well, for a week or so), and so it's lucky that he actually quite likes taking medication - it makes him feel important, I think, and makes the junior FF quite jealous that he isn't getting any of whatever it is.

Bit of a close call...

Tonight's Dinner

Will be at Pergoletta in the Via dei Belli Torri. Sarah is here for the weekend (arrived in the middle of Emergency Ward 10!) and she's treating us.

Mid-winter...

2011-01-31T18:12:00.001Z

...but, in fact, anything but bleak. Blissful sunshine, and days on-end of perfect gardening weather. I'm a little concerned that some plants will be foolishly persuaded that the cold weather is over for good, and throw caution to the winds as they come into flower - it happens ever year around this time, and since we risk frosts right through until the beginning of March, invariably some plant or other ends up being frost-burnt and looking sorry for itself at the real start of spring. I can understand why they do it, though - today felt glorious, as I hacked the tangled branches of the Cachi trees into shape, and it was difficult to think it wasn't going to be like this in general from now on...

The camellia japonicas ( camellias japonica ?) behind the church are starting to flower (at the right time for them, thankfully), with luxuriantly creamy blooms - they're a range of varieties, and flower in series, so we should have some camellia action in some part of the garden from now right through until the end of March; some of the later flowering bushes are a beautifully pure white, which is positively ethereal.

I was surprised that the dwarf purple irises along the sides of the causeway have suddenly poked their heads above ground - I wasn't expecting them for another few weeks, at least. Delicately patterned, they look like oriental silks; there are bulbs of a lighter-coloured variety planted with them as well, but they seem to be a bit more reserved, and are perhaps waiting for more sustained warmer weather before they come out.

Much of the winter garden chores have now been done - most of the transplanting is complete (roses, agapanthus, a few small trees) although I still have to move some of the raspberry canes, as well as a flaming-red chaenomeles, which needs a cooler position than it's had so far. Other than that, I have to finish pruning the fruit trees, sort out the grape vines, and get the fruit cage sorted out for this coming year before I can consider we're in good shape. The weather looks good for the remainder of the week, so perhaps I might get it all done by the weekend...before sod's law says the weather will close in and I find myself sitting beside the fire again curled up with a book for the whole of February!

Tonight's Dinner"

Onion Tarts.

Fiorentina, with Parmesan and Arugula.

Lemon Creams.

Recipe: Slow-Poached Rabbit, stuffed with Orange & Walnuts

2011-01-30T12:54:00.004Z

This might sound complicated - it isn't. And I can readily state that this is the most delicious thing I've eaten so far this year.
With only a very few changes, the recipe is from an Australian food-writer called Christine Manfield (a friend of Christian's...he sent a copy of her latest tome for Christmas - an extremely weighty volume rather worryingly bound within day-glo velour covers, which gave long pause for thought once the outer wrapping had been removed).

The secret to painless slow-poaching is to use a deep-fat fryer as a water bath, where the accuracy of the temperature control means you can wander off and leave the poaching to take place entirely unsupervised; otherwise, it's a matter of hovering nervously for the entire cooking process, and endlessly checking thermometers and adjusting heat up or down, to ensure you have the correct constant temperature. It isn't my idea, I hasten to add - I first came across it in one of Jane Grigson's books, where she advised a deep-fat-fryer as the best means of poaching fruit in syrup. It works.

If you want an example of boning a rabbit, then follow the link through from my previous rabbit recipe, here.

For six.

Ingredients: a mature Rabbit, boned (with the liver still in place, preferably, to be included in the stuffing); 2 tbs Olive Oil; 1 small Onion, finely diced; 3 cloves Garlic, minced; 30g Pancetta, cut into julienne strips; 1 tsp ground Coriander seed; half tsp ground Cumin; 3 tsp Salt;1 tsp ground Black Pepper; 125g coarsely minced Pork meat + 125 coarsely minced Pork fat; 1 tbs chopped Parsley; 50g small black Olives, pitted and roughly chopped; 40g chopped Walnuts; zest of an Orange, finely chopped.

Method:

1. Lay the boned Rabbit out flat; butterfly the breasts open, and lay next to them the thigh and leg meat, to make as evenly covered as possible a layer of meat. Sprinkle with 2 tsp Salt.

2. Sauté Onion and Garlic in Oil, until they start to colour, then add the Pancetta, and continue cooling until the strips have become crisp. Stir in the Coriander and Cumin, add Salt and Pepper, and leave to cool.

3. Combine the cooled mixture with the minced Pork and fat, Rabbit liver (minced), Parsley, Walnuts, Olives and Orange zest. Heap this mixture along the longest end of the Rabbit 'rectangle' closest to you, and then roll the rabbit lengthwise, to enclose the stuffing tightly.

4. Wrap the rolled Rabbit in two layers of clingfilm, expel all of the air from within the package, and then twist the ends tightly to make a 'sausage'. The clingfilm should be tight enough that it holds the Rabbit in its sausage shape, and must be a good seal, to prevent any water from getting inside.

5. Fill a deep-fat-fryer with water to maximum depth (allowing for the displacement which will take place when the rabbit is submerged) and set the temperature to 75 degrees C. Once the water is at temperature, submerge the wrapped Rabbit, and leave to cook for 2 hours (turning every 30 minutes or so to ensure even cooking). Once cooked, remove the Rabbit from the water, and leave inside its wrapping for 30 minutes before unwrapping and slicing it to serve.

6. For a sauce to go with this, the rabbit bones can be used to make a light stock, which is then heavily reduced along with some white wine or vermouth to 'spooning' thickness , with seasoning adjusted just before use. (If your Rabbit arrived ready-boned, then use any light stock you have to-hand, instead of Rabbit Stock - chicken, veal, duck...they're all fine for this)

Found...

2011-01-23T09:11:00.000Z

In an otherwise empty shopping trolley in Waitrose, a discarded shopping list. On a lined sheet that had been torn from a small spiral-bound notebook, in uncertain handwriting, the necessities of life were set out:

Vodka

Sausages

Breed (sic)

Baked Beans

Vodka

Is this a sign of the times?

Prometheus-like...

2011-01-22T16:03:00.004Z

We have fire!

Giancarlo emerged from his year-end hiatus, a couple of days ago, and neatly and efficiently installed the wood stove in the barn (where it has been idly waiting for the past few months, looking pristine and splendid...but not actually attached to a chimney). It works wonderfully, and although primarily intended for use during the shoulder months of the year...drinks in front of the fire in November, for instance, or afternoon tea in March...we resolutely lit it each afternoon this week and sat before it being very British and 'outdoors' in the middle of winter, hugging steaming mugs of tea and commenting to each other on quite how warm we really were.

The four-footeds were less impressed, and ignored the fire entirely...but they raced around anyway, on the basis that anything 'al fresco' seems like cause for a celebration.

Tonight's Dinner:

Scallops with Almonds, in Parsley sauce.

Raie au beurre noire; new potatoes (yes, we are in London for the weekend, and I have been down to Les the Fish, in Bute Street)

Raspberry Tarts.

Recipe: Pasta Sauce with Mascarpone, Gruyère & Cinnamon

2011-01-18T09:29:00.000Z

Yes, Cinnamon. When divorced from sugar (and I freely admit, I have a weakness for desserts which include generous quantities of both cinnamon and brown sugar), this is a spice with a beguiling bitterness, which, used carefully, can also be a splendid addition to savoury dishes. Here, it is a mere sprinkling over the dish at the point of serving...but the aroma is unmistakable as the plates of steaming pasta are set down - and the bitterness of cinnamon works well both with the sharpness of the gruyère, and as a foil to the creaminess of the mascarpone and egg in the sauce.

Stevie Parle published a distinctly iffy piece on pasta in The Telegraph recently - where, amongst other sillinesses, he gave the Southern Italian recipe for eggless pasta, as he waxed lyrical about the tuscan countryside around Radicondoli, where you wouldn't find eggless pasta in a million years, intended as it is for piquant southern sauces such as arrabiata and puttanesca, and not for the unctuous coating sauces of Northern Italy. One bit he did get right - although hardly a revelation - is the fact that different sauces are better suited to particular kinds of pasta. And a creamy sauce such as this one is best served with any of the flat-strip kinds of pasta, such as fettucine, tagliatelle, papardelle...any of those.

This is definitely a sauce for fresh, rather than boxed pasta (which doesn't mean it will be awful with boxed pasta...just that you won't be doing it full justice). Quick and simple, as well as elegant, this dish works equally well for an informal supper as for the pasta course of a grander dinner.

For four:
Ingredients: Pasta dough, made with 1 cup '00' flour, 1 cup semolina flour, 3 medium eggs, generous pinch of salt, and 1 tsp olive oil; 250g Mascarpone; 50g Gruyère (or similar cheese); 1 tbs Butter; 1 Egg yolk; 1 tsp ground Cinnamon; Salt.

Method:

1. Roll the pasta dough into eight strips, following the usual rolling method, lightly flour the surface, and leave to dry for twenty minutes or so; either cut by hand, for broader strips of pasta, or put through the fettucine cutter on the pasta machine.

2. Grate the Gruyère and mix it thoroughly with the Mascarpone and a large pinch of Salt.

3. Cook the pasta in salted water until it is al dente, then drain it, but reserving a cup of cooking water from the pasta.

4. Place the pasta pan back on the stove, and heat the reserved water in it, along with the Butter. Once the Butter has all melted, return the pasta to the pan and cook, stirring , for a couple of minutes. Remove the pan from the heat, and tip over the pasta the Mascarpone mixture, along with the Egg yolk. Stir to mix well, and then serve in four heated dishes.

5. Sprinkle a dusting of ground Cinnamon over the top of each dish, and serve.

Allan Bay - A Discovery.

2011-01-17T10:31:00.001Z

One of this year's parcels under the Christmas tree was a slim volume by an italian food writer by the name of Allan Bay. The book is called 'Cuochi si diventa 2' (which loosely translates as 'Cooks are made, not born'), and is pretty good. The man himself has an interesting history - having spent much of his adult life selling machinery to manufacture light bulbs, in his mid-forties he decided to become a food journalist, rapidly gained a foothold in a number of reputable italian publications, and before he knew it, had been appointed as Professor of cooking at the University of Pavia. Which is presumably a lot more fun than spending one's days pondering the vicissitudes of light-bulb-making machines.

His style is irreverent and enthusiastic, and he has a curiosity about food which leads to a number of worthwhile culinary departures, all of which are based on a solid foundation of traditional recipes and techniques. The book is mostly a list of actual dishes, but is interspersed, generally amusingly, with sections of 'rants' (I approve...he calls these items 'Political incorrectness') and 'raves', which are his personal culinary weaknesses... He also has a series of one-pagers which he calls ' Si fa, ma non si dice', which means ' It's done, but not talked about' - which are commercial ingredients which come in bottles and tins and which most self-respecting cook would never admit to having on their pantry shelves...but, of course, we all do. Things like stock cubes, and Worcester sauce, and Colmans Mustard. Allan Bay's list includes things like Campbells tinned soup, and Nestlé sweetened condensed milk. I thoroughly approve - although, I'm immediately reminded of the disapproval at Belforte that met my admission last Christmas that the rosemary sauce I'd just served for fettucine included a teaspoon of chicken stock powder (Knorr); sometimes, it's better just to lie!

Tonight's dinner:

Tart of Celeriac, Gruyère & Pancetta.

Salsiccie with garlic-roast tomatoes.

Lemon Curd ice-cream.

Technical Glitch...

2011-01-16T11:47:00.002Z

Still, I can't sort out the problem I've been having with uploading pictures to this blog. A short description on Google of the problem I was having quickly identified that it was nothing to do with my camera-computer interface (so, no need to waste any more time fruitlessly trying to find the camera manual), but that the problem is actually with Google's Blogger programme....and that many, many other people have been experiencing this problem with their blogs over the past year and more. Uploading images I've copied from elsewhere on the web isn't a problem, but whenever I try to upload a picture of my own I get a 'server rejected' message....and that's as far as I can go.

Hours spent upgrading things, and downloading other things, and cleaning out things, and checking various different settings has proved completely useless. Various dark mutterings from other 'victims' suggest that this might be Google trying to force bloggers to pay in order to use Google's online Picasa function in order to store their images....I can't comment on that....but if I can't sort the problem out p.d.q, then I suppose I'll just have to stop using Google's blog hosting facility and move Pomiane to a different hosting platform. Which will be tedious...but I'm not sure I have any choice.

Watch this space.

Recipe: Almond Marquises

2011-01-11T09:53:00.006Z

Elegant, light, dinner-partyable, and delicious. As a dessert form, marquises went out of fashion ages ago - I think the last time I saw a recipe for one was in one of Michel Guerard's books, more than twenty years ago - and IMHO they are long overdue for a comeback. This particular version comes from a collection of recipes from Normandy published in 1976 by somebody called Ray Compas (no idea who he or she was, since beyond this particular collection, there was just one other book of dessert recipes, and that constituted the full Compas oeuvre).

My one word of warning concerns the quality of the langues de chat used to line the ramekins - there are plenty of versions of these biscuits commercially available, and I've found that some of them are so light in construction that they effectively dissolve into the marquise filling, and when you come to unmould the marquises, the biscuit 'casing' has disappeared. Not a complete disaster, but the appearance of the marquises is compromised somewhat, and you lose the 'bite' of the biscuit shell, in comparison with the smoothness of the filling. If you can't find good quality langues, then making them is not difficult - Julia Child has a perfectly reliable recipe in Volume 2 of Mastering the Art .

For four individual Marquises:

Ingredients: 125g Butter; 125g Sugar; 125g Ground Almonds; 250 ml Milk; 1 tsp Vanilla essence; 3 Egg Yolks; approx 150g langues de chats

Method:

1. Cream the Butter with the Sugar (I use an elctric whisk for this); once properly creamed, add to this the Almonds and continue beating until thoroughly amalgamated.

2. In a separate pan (or simmertopf), heat the Milk with the Vanilla, then pour onto the beaten egg yolks in a bowl; mix together, then return the mixture to the pan and continue cooking gently, to make a light custard. Leave to cool, then mix into this the almond-butter-sugar mixture.

4. Grease 4 individual ramekins, and then line the base and sides of each one with langues de chat (cut the ends off with a knife if necessary, before lining the ramekins, in order to have a good clean fit and to ensure the ends of the biscuits don't stand proud of the side of the ramekin).

5. Fill each lined ramekin with the almond mixture; cover the base with remaining biscuits, then place in the fridge for several hours to firm.

6. Run a small knife round the edge of each marquise in order to loosen from the ramekin before unmoulding onto individual serving plates.

And the last Day of Christmas...

2011-01-06T08:49:00.003Z

...was in fact yesterday, but since today is Ebufana and therefore another public holiday, it feels as though this is still the final gasp of the Christmas break. The tree will come down today, to go out in the garden to be planted, and then that's it for another year.

Now is the best time to buy Christmas decorations, so I've just gone online to find replacements for the ones which didn't survive this year's festive season (breakages which were nothing to do with me, I hasten to add!). And we're still wondering what happened to the ones I bought last January, which we both remember unwrapping when they arrived, but when it came down to it, neither of us could recall where they were then put for safekeeping- some rather beautiful crystal droplets, I remember, that would have looked splendid on the tree (and possibly might yet, another year, if we ever find them again)

Much Christmas largesse, in the form of books by various lesser-known (or not published in the last few decades, at any rate) food writers: Allan Bay; Ray Compas; Simone Beck; Sonia Stevenson (two from her!); Alain Ducasse (which I mentioned in an earlier post); and Elisabeth Luard. The Technical Department must be feeling seriously in need of greater variety in dinner menus. Last night's supper included two new dishes: a starter of poached egg on a potato galette, dressed with a leek-cream sauce.....and dessert was individual almond marquises...both of which were excellent - so, I suppose his strategy works.

Perfect! - the sun is coming out, so I can let the junior four-footed out into the garden, and get on with transplanting things...half a dozen roses are getting a new home, and I need to move one of the smaller peach trees from one side of the North Lawn to the other.

No pictures in this post, as my camera and computer don't want to talk to each other at the moment, and the thought of trying to locate the instruction book for either, right now, is not something I can even bear to contemplate.

Tonight's Dinner:

Pain de Laitue

Shepherds Pie (made with the last of the half-lamb which we bought as a complete carcase from one fo the farmers in Belforte, and roast for dinner over New Year)

Lemon Cream.

Recipe: Cream & Walnut Tart

2011-01-03T08:06:00.004Z

I've been playing with this recipe for some time now, and it's taken quite a few attempts before being satisfied that I've worked out exactly how to get the result I want - which is a rich, but light cream tart, against the sweetness of which the slight but insistent bitterness of fresh walnuts works perfectly. This tart has all of the luxurious self-indulgence of a white chocolate ganache, but without the cloying richness which tends to make white chocolate tart heavy going after a mouthful or two.

The recipe is both simple and challenging at the same time: there are really only three steps involved, but the process of reducing the cream for the filling will differ depending entirely on the fat content of the cream you use - with italian cream, which is somewhere between single and double cream, I need to reduce it for an hour before I've got all of the water out; but with double cream, if I'm making this in the UK, then it will be sufficiently reduced in about half that time. The secret is to stand over the pan, the first time you make the tart, and keep an eagle eye on it: the cream will be sufficiently reduced at the point where it becomes very thick (the consistency of porridge, really) and starts, very slightly to change colour (which I imagine is the sugar within the mixture starting to caramelise, once all the water has been removed from the cream). At this point, the cream can be removed from the heat, as it will now set properly once it has been poured into the pastry shell, such that after several hours it can be cut into neat slices; if the water hasn't all been removed from the cream, then it will never thicken properly, and when you come to cut the tart, the filling will run all over the place.

It's worth getting it right - the result really is delicious. Even more so if served with a few fresh raspberries.

For an 8" diameter tart.

Ingredients: Shortcrust pastry, made with 125g Butter, 300g Flour, 50 ml cld water, & a large pinch of Salt; 750 ml Cream (see note above); 60g Sugar; 10 Walnuts, either in halves or in large pieces.

Method:

1. Grease an 8" false-bottomed tart tin, and line it with the rolled-out shortcrust pastry. Bake blind for ten or fifteen minutes in a 200 degree C oven, then remove the weights and finish baking it completely for another ten minutes or so, until the base of the pastry shell is crisp and golden brown. Leave aside to cool.

2. Put the Cream and Sugar into a saucepan and bring to the boil over a medium heat. As soon as the Cream begins to bubble, reduce the heat so that the Cream visibly simmers and keep it at that temperature as the liquid reduces, stirring frequently. (The level of heat required will again depend on the sort of Cream being used; in Italy, if I go down to the lowest flame, then the cream stops simmering, but with thicker cream, in London, not only does the flame have to be as low as possible, but I also have to put the pan over a heat-diffuser - the first time of doing it has to be a process of trial-and-error). Carry on reducing the Cream until it is very thick, and begins very slightly to colour. At this point, take the pan off the heat.

3. Arrange the Walnut pieces in the base of the cooked pastry shell. Transfer the Cream to a jug, and carefully pour it over the Walnuts, until the shell is filled (best to pour over the back of a spoon, as this diffuses the flow of the cream, and stops all of the walnut pieces from being pushed to the edge of the tart).

4. Leave to 'set' for at least four hours. Best left in a cool place to do this, although NOT in the fridge, as this will just make the pastry soggy.

Enjoy!

On the first day of Christmas...

2010-12-26T10:08:00.003Z

It rained incessantly. The Technical Department gave me a copy of Alain Ducasse's weighty tome on pasta and vegetables (so, the unsubtle hints dropped at the start of December weren't entirely a waste of time), and we all went off to Mensano for a lunch-to-end-all-lunches: generous antipasti, of cheeses, crostini, frittata, prosciutto crudo, and onion salsa; a capon soup, with tagliatelle; papardelle, with an excellent duck sauce; bollito misto, of chicken, beef, and pork (some began to weaken at this stage....but we carried on regardless); roast pork, with a side dish of sformato di gobbo (which I was under the impression meant 'dwarf', but clearly not), and finally, a dolce di natale, which in fact resembled half a house-brick, topped with some rather sweet custard and assorted bits of colourful fruit(I've talked elsewhere and at length about the italian inability to understand desserts, beyond zabaglione and tiramisu...)

Lunch eventually over, we emerged into darkened streets, that were further obscured by a heavy mist which had gathered as we were at table. As we walked through the deserted village, christmas lights emerged eerily from the mist, and rainwater dripped heavily from the eaves. En route back to the car, we passed by Mensano's beautiful and very plain romanesque church; empty and candlelit, the crusader capitals brooded from on top of the heavy, squat columns which line the nave.

And then, back home. To an evening of Pasolini on DVD - we watched 'The Canterbury Tales', which was an appropriately decadent ending to a thoroughly self-indulgent day.

Tonight's dinner (we'll be eight):

Flamiche (made with fresh leeks from the garden)

Capon, boned and roast, with Pommes Maximes.

Crepes Suzettes.

We made it!

2010-12-24T10:54:00.005Z

Finally, after days of endlessly searching airline timetables, and repeated - but fruitless - trips to the airport, we escaped! It was slightly unnerving, sitting in Gatwick North terminal on Wednesday evening, to see a delay posted against our flight to Amsterdam...but it wasn't extended, and the flight actually departed only about an hour and a half later than scheduled. After the experience of the past week, I didn't trust it not to turn round in mid-air, and it was only as we touched down in Schipol that we could be certain we'd made it - we'd actually got away!

We spent the night in a rather strange hotel attached to the airport (a triumph of design over functionality, in practice...and when somebody at dinner last night told us the place had a reputation as a 'rendezvous' hotel, it made sense, since about the only horizontal surface in the small room was an extremely over-sized bed!) and then we caught a pre-dawn flight down to Pisa. A very wet Pisa, but an extremely welcome sight for all that. All the snow from last week has disappeared, leaving very little trace, apart from broken branches around the place - and three of the supports for the fruit cage have snapped, which is quite impressive, given that they're a good three inches in diameter. We had worried that the romitorio roof might not stand up to the weight of the snow, but it shows no sign of having succumbed.

No point in hanging around in Pisa, since we were due down in Belforte for Christmas weekend, anyway. With slight misgivings, we arranged that the four-footeds would stay in Calci until Monday (their boarding fees since we left have already racked up to equal the national debt of a small country, so a few more days won't make much difference) and we high-tailed it to Belforte in time for tea and then pre-dinner drinks before a blazing fire. The weather's terrible, but who cares...

Tonight's dinner:

Fettucine with rosemary sauce.

Loin of Veal; celeriac, roast in cinta fat.

Chocolate tart.

Easyjet Nightmare continues..

2010-12-21T06:21:00.004Z

There was a glimmer of hope...not through any efforts on the part of easyjet, of course (four hours hanging on the phone on Sunday, in the vain hope that they might actually answer their laughingly termed 'Customer Service' helpline - they didn't - and still no option online either to transfer or to get a refund from our cancelled booking last Saturday). No seats from London to get home to Pisa on any airline this side of Christmas, and so we decided to try through Amsterdam, and shelled out for tickets for the 8.15 flight today (on easyjet.....through gritted teeth, since nothing else was available) in order to connect with the early afternoon Transavia flight.

Up at 5.15 this morning, to head out to Victoria...and by 5.17 a check online confirmed that indeed easyjet had cancelled the 8.15 to Amsterdam 'due to bad weather' - which is strange, since you'd think the same bad weather would also have caused them to cancel the earlier 6.15 flight to the same destination. Which they hadn't. A trawl through other options revealed there were two seats left on the BA to Amsterdam at 9.00 this morning, and so we went for them. Except that by the time the online booking got through to processing the payment, it flashed up a message that they'd been sold even as I was workiing the keyboard.

And now? We can transfer our Transavia ticket (at no charge - easyjet, please note) to their dawn flight on Thursday...and have flights booked on various airlines both on Wednesday evening and on Thursday morning.

The four-footeds are in Pisa; we're stuck here...and Christmas increasingly recedes into the distance...

The Easyjet Nightmare!

2010-12-19T10:38:00.005Z

Ok, so there was snow - which didn't help. But then, there was downright incompetence. Ignorance, as well...but mostly just plain old-fashioned incompetence. Bucketloads of it....and most of it on the part of easyjet staff.

We were loaded onto a plane on Friday morning, bound for Pisa. Slightly frustrating to be told almost immediately that we wouldn't be able to take off for nearly two hours, as Pisa airport was closed due to a snowfall. Annoying, but there you go - these things happen. So, we sat, and patiently waited. Time passed. Nothing happened. More time passed; the two hour delay was long finished. The Brancolis were with us, and they thought to check on their ipad what the Pisa airport website had to say...which was that the airport was still closed. Then, the Technical Department thought to call Davide who works as an electrician in the control tower at Pisa airport, and he confirmed that the place was closed and wasn't likely to open again that day.

Some passengers demanded to be let off the plane, and the cabin crew grudgingly said that they could, although they wouldn't be let back on, and would lose any chance of a refund on their fares. About a dozen still insisted on doing it. And then, they couldn't get off anyway, as it turned out there was nobody available to man the exit door from the outside... and so we all sat there, effectively imprisoned.
The cabin crew handed out cups of water and packets of crisps - grumbling that they'd be losing their commission on all of it - and still we sat there.

Eventually, they found somebody to open the door, and those people left who were buying their liberty at the cost of their plane ticket. Around 3.30, the crew were out of time, and were replaced by another crew. The replacement pilot blithely announced that we were eleventh in the queue for de-icing, but that we should be airborne shortly thereafter. Meanwhile, Pisa airport announced that it would be closed until at least eleven in the evening. We pointed this fact out to the blonde (in every sense) stewardess who came past; she said she'd pass it on the captain, but almost immediately we heard her saying to somebody else that we could expect to be arriving in Pisa at around 6.30. They obviously don't hire them on the basis of their IQ.

An american in front of us spoke to his italian wife inLucca, who had also spoken directly to Pisa airport. Yup, it was definitely closed. Confirmed by somebody else who had a friend waiting for her at Pisa, and who had sent an SMS, to say that it was be closed until late in the evening. The TD went to have a word with the pilot, who seemed surprised to hear that Pisa airport was closed. Nobody had said anything to him about it; he'd check.
As more announcements regularly followed to give us updates on our imminent departure, unrest was growing in our part of the plane, where it was generally known that there was no way the plane was going to be taking off at all. Given that it had nowhere to go to. After another hour, and having checked once more with Davide, TD went to see what was going on. "Oh", the pilot said "I put in a call to head office about an hour ago to check whether or not Pisa was open, and they haven't got back to me yet." So, it isn't just the cabin crew who aren't hired on the basis of their brain power.

Eventually....finally....almost seven and a half hours after we'd boarded, there was an announcement that - shock! horror! What a surprise!- Pisa airport was, in fact closed, and so the flight wouldn't be leaving after all. We gathered ourselves together, and got off the plane. But the nightmare, even for that day, wasn't yet over. Instead of taking us to the baggage hall, some idiot took everybody back into the main departures lounge, and then abandoned the passengers there for over half an hour, while they presumably tried to sort themselves out. We were eventually then taken where we should have gone in the first place - which involved walking most of the way back to the gate we'd just left - and then waited for the best part of an hour, while they tried to find out what had happened to the luggage. In all, it took almost two hours after we'd got off the plane before we were finally free of the place.

The Brancolis decided to make other plans, and not bother to try and travel on a replacement easyjet flight. They'd just had enough of the whole thing, and if they couldn't sort out a flight on BA, then they probably wouldn't bother to go at all. With the four-footeds to collect, however, we didn't have that luxury - but at least while all the other passengers were put up for the night at some Gatwick hotel, we could go back to a decent fireside and dinner in London, which is what we did.

As soon as we got in, I looked online, and found that we'd automatically been re-booked on a Saturday flight at 11.00....and with some misgivings, we decided to go for it. Gluttons for punishment, we headed for Gatwick, and for another day of misery. The snow came down, and Gatwick was closed, which involved another six hour wait in the departure lounge...but as soon as the runway looked set to open, easyjet called us all forward....and then THEY DID IT AGAIN!
Unbelievably, THEY DID IT AGAIN!

We'd called Davide directly, around two in the afternoon, and he said that Pisa airport was closed still, until at least six in the evening. I checked on the airport website, which said that it wouldn't be open until at least seven...but still, easyjet were boarding the plane. The same plane as the day before, at the same gate. Talk about groundhog day! At the gate, I asked why they were boarding the plane, since Pisa wasn't open...."Oh?" They said. "Nobody's said anything to us" I got slightly irritated, and for my pains, was held until last, so that somebody could come and see if I was the same person from our group of passengers who had apparently thumped one of their staff the evening before. I hadn't been, in fact...but I do wish I'd seen it!
As I stood there, reading the paper, and waiting to be 'identified' I listened to a well-padded girl (not built for speed) called Hannah, who was checking people in, give them a whole string of not-quite-lies just to get them to move along and get on the plane, and out of her hair: "Yes, you'll be taking off almost immediately", "Oh, definitely... in less than an hour"; "You'll be there, oh, by 7.30, for sure". And eventually, having pointed out to them that since I had three witnesses to the fact that they couldn't pin an assault-and-battery charge on me, I was allowed to board...I was given the option of not boarding, of course, but as with the previous day, it would have meant forfeiting my not insubstantial fare. Easyjet do love their bottom line!

Oh, Lord! I feel weary just at the memory. Same plane, slightly fewer people (since some had fallen by the wayside). Announcements about imminent departure. Then, the fact that actually Pisa airport, it appeared was closed, but that it would be open again in time for our arrival. Then, that the departure time was being put back.....a little. In fact, relatively speaking, the pain was not great, since this time we sat on the plane for less than two hours before they acknowledged that Pisa wasn't going to be opening again any time soon, and that the flight had been cancelled.

The passengers were brilliant. Well-behaved, restrained, due medals all-round. So, it was a surprise and deeply inappropriate that the ground handling staff met the offloaded passengers behind a security cordon of uniformed police. The staff then said that nobody would be able to leave the gate area until all duty-free that any passengers might have bought had been handed in. Despite the fact that there isn't any duty free between the UK and Italy; hasn't been for years. "Oh, yes there is", they assured us confidently when this fact was pointed out. Where, in God's name, do they find these people?

Back to the baggage hall (en route, I had the pleasure of passing well-padded Hannah, who looked green as I commented to her that it was a 'shame she'd screwed it up again...'). It was only at the point when the luggage appeared to have been lost, that some of the italians started to lose it. Not in a major way, but perhaps more emotionally than the anglo-saxons would have done. And that was when the uniformed police decided to wade in, perhaps rather unwisely. As they tried to lead two italian women away, the cries of 'No', and 'Shame!' and booing from the rest of the passengers turned into shouts and became more insistent; and the whole thing looked to become really quite nasty, when it was announced that the luggage was arriving on a carousel at the other end of the baggage hall, and everybody immediately rushed over there, and the italian women were allowed to go with them.

We retrieved our luggage, and it was only as we were on the train back to Victoria that it occurred to me that no announcement had been made about hotel accommodation and about further flight arrangements. For the simple reason that there were none. Unlike the previous evening, no re-booking had been made, and the passengers had simply been abandoned to their fate. Many of them with babies and young children; nowhere to stay; no alternative flight arrangements made; and no available seats on any airline to Pisa this side of Christmas. (And, btw, easyjet are required by EU law to provide accommodation for people who are stranded like this, who are their responsibility; they seem to have decided to ignore this detail)

First thing this morning, I found that I'd received an e-mail at 2.00, saying that I could either re-book my flight or have a refund by choosing the appropriate option on their website. Of course, when I went to try to do one or the other, neither option actually exists. The TD has just been on hold for over two hours (at 10p a minute) to try to speak to somebody at easyjet, before he gave up; that wasn't a long answering-queue, it was just somebody at easyjet having decided not to bother.

Yes, there was snow. But that was only a small part of the problem. The misery we and all of our fellow passengers endured in the past two days was almost entirely due to mismanagement by easyjet. Had they had proper communication of information about conditions at Pisa, then we wouldn't have been trapped for eight hours on the plane on Friday, and nor would we have wasted the whole day at Gatwick yesterday, since they would have known to cancel the flight much earlier in the day. How unimpressive is it that on both occasions the passengers in the back of the plane were much better informed than the people in uniform at the front?

That isn't the way to run a whelk stall, let alone an airline!

Recipe: Broccoli, Roman style

2010-12-12T13:03:00.004Z

Perfect with any simple grilled or roast meat, this dish has the sort of complex structure of flavours which makes it a first cousin to ratatouille...but with a list of ingredients which takes it straight back to the pages of Apicius, if not before.
Eminently suitable for entertaining, as all of the work can be done hours in advance, and the wonderful smell of cooking that greets your guests on arrival will have them salivating even before they hand over their coats! And, just as with ratatouille, any leftovers are excellent re-heated the next day, and served with a lightly-poached egg as an informal starter.

For four.

Ingredients: the stalks from two large heads of Broccoli - you need about 350g of stalk (reserve the florets for another day, to steam, or to use for purée, for example); 2 medium Onions; 60g stoned Black Olives; 4 large Anchovy fillets; 50g Parmesan; Salt; Olive Oil; 10 fl oz dry Red Wine.

Method:

1. Peel and thinly slice the Onions; peel the broccoli stalks, and slice wafer-thin.

2. Lightly oil the base of a heavy iron casserole, or a sauté pan with a lid. Distribute half of the sliced Onion over the base of the casserole, and cover with a layer of sliced Broccoli stalks, again using half of the total amount.

3. Thinly slice the Olives and Parmesan, and chop the Anchovies into small pieces. Over the layer of Broccoli stalks scatter half of the Olives, Parmesan and Anchovies; salt lightly (not too much, as the cheese and fish are already salty) and a light dressing of Oil (about half a tbsp).

4. Repeat with another layer of Onion, then Broccoli, and finally the remaining amount of Olives, cheese and Anchovies. Lightly salt, and moisten with a little more Oil.

Set aside until about an hour before you want people to come to table.

5. Pour the Wine over the assembled dish, and heat over a low heat for an hour, with the lid firmly in place. Check and adjust seasoning just before you serve.

I find it works well if I remove the pan from the heat just as the first course is served, and it can then rest, with the lid on, for the duration of the first course, ready to be served along with the main course.

To Sarteano, and beyond...

2010-12-01T08:36:00.009Z

With only pause to take breath and change baggage in Pisa, on Saturday, we were off the plane from London and on the road to Belforte practically seamlessly. Sunday was a zero birthday for She-who-must-be-obeyed in Belforte, and a commemorative trip had been especially organised for a private viewing of a painted etruscan tomb at Sarteano, which was rediscovered only about five years ago. The weather, of course, was filthy, and on Saturday evening the cross-country route to Belforte took much longer than usual, as rain lashed down and the windscreen wipers struggled at times to keep pace. Although, I suppose the fury of the weather outside only increased the home-and-hearth sense of wellbeing, as we dined beside the blazing kitchen fire, on beautifully tender roast lamb, washed down with some hearty burgundy that wasn't quite also celebrating a zero birthday, but was still doing pretty well!

More rain on Sunday, as we made the journey across from Siena to join the Autostrada del sole (hollow laughter) and then down to Chiusi, from where it's just a short climb up to Sarteano. The hill towns in that area were shrouded in low cloud, and the rain had diminished to a steady constant drizzle by the time we'd finally arrived: dreech, I think the Scots call it.

To re-charge batteries before the cultural event of the afternoon, we lunched at the Trattoria di Merlo in Cetona, a pretty little town, but one which I can imagine in summer is absolutely heaving with tourists, and only to be recommended out of season. In the screen version, lunch would of course have been memorably wonderful - but in fact, it was rather disappointing. There was more enthusiasm than skill in the kitchen, and the menu largely comprised dishes that aimed at edgy creativity, but where in fact two plus two ended up being merely a rather unexciting four. Oh, well...

And the tomb. We were met in the middle of a damp and misty olive grove by one of the local archaeologists, who led us down a muddy path, and past the openings to numerous other tombs, en route to what is the only frescoed tomb in that particular necropolis. Through a locked door, and down a dripping sandstone tunnel, we were met by an astonishing sight: walls bright with the mineral colours of paint, exactly as they would have looked when they were painted nearly twenty-five hundred years ago. A large hipocamp, and an enormous three-headed serpent; diners at a banquet (presumably, the occupants of the alabaster sarcophagus in the main tomb chamber); and a dramatic image of Charon charging off to the underworld, in a chariot pulled by gryphons and lions, surrounded darkly by an enveloping black nimbus. Stunning! Completely wonderful!
Although visitors are normally whisked in and out for only a couple of minutes at a time, in order for their breath not to damage the fragile paintwork, we ended up staying for the best part of an hour - probably because of SWMBO's archaeological credentials - and drank in every last detail. And we emerged eventually to the same damp olive trees that must have been familiar to the builders of the tomb, all that time ago, leaves dripping heavily onto the grass beneath, and the leaden mist obscuring the lower slopes of the grove, further down the hill.

After an hour spent in the otherwise deserted museum, back up in Sarteano itself, we set off for Sorano, some distance to the south-west, where dinner and a hotel had been organised - although, in fact, we almost didn't make it. The heavens opened once more, and at Castel Giorgio we were turned back by flood waters, and sent off by the local carabinieri into the great unknown...more precisely, in the direction of San Lorenzo Nuovo, where the floods didn't have any carabinieri attached to them, and we suddenly found ourselves, in the middle of dark countryside, ploughing through water about a foot deep, and several hundred yards long. Much more of it, and we'd be there still!

As it was, we eventually - somehow - made it to Sorano, and trudged through narrow, steeply-sloping cobbled streets to the hotel (designed for high summer, we were the only guests, and the off-season chill was less than optimal) and thence to the Trattoria Aldobrandeschi for a very good dinner. Blazing fire, an excellent prosecco, a profusion of white truffles (with tagliatelle), meltingly-delicious guanciale, and a grappa from Friuli that was one of the best I've ever tasted.
We were the only diners, and in fact the town itself was pretty much shut up for the winter - the houses, these days, are largely second homes for Romans (Rome is only ninety minutes to the south), as well as lots of Dutch, and Swiss, and Danish (according to mine host). On the one hand, it saves the place from falling to pieces, but at the same time, renders it rather lifeless - I suppose there isn't a perfect answer.

Rain throughout the night, and then we woke to cloudless skies, and brilliant sunshine. Perfect to wander through the town, emerging occasionally from the labyrinthine streets to glorious views across the ravine beneath the town, looking across to the wooded slopes beyond, all rich in autumn colours. Warm enough for a last cappuccino, consumed as we sat outside the cafe in the main square...and then it was time to hit the road...

Tonight's dinner:

Fettucine, with Mussels & Funghi Porcini.

Spezzatino di Manzo.

Coffee Meringue Nests with Ice Cream and fresh Raspberries (the garden is still producing, quite generously)

Recipe: Risotto with Red Mullet

2010-11-23T08:34:00.005Z

When deconstructed, this is simply a risotto made with fish broth - but the broth that goes into the dish is so good that the end result is quite spectacular! Light, unctuous, and absolutely delicious. This particular recipe is normally associated with Livorno where the red mullet ( or 'triglia' as they're called round here) is dirt cheap, and mullet recipes are generally given the handle 'alla livornese'. I have seen it said that the mullet in this recipe could be substituted by any firm-fleshed white fish - I'm not so sure about that; triglie have a flavour which is particularly full, and give to the stock a richness which I suspect might be missing if cod, say, or bream were to be used instead.

Quick and straightforward, the entire dish takes about forty minutes in total (much of which is elapsed time, when other work can also be done): twenty minutes of which is to make the stock, and another twenty or so to produce the risotto.

For four.

Ingredients: 4 tbs Olive Oil; 1 Carrot, diced; 1 stick of Celery, diced; two or three Red Mullet Fillets, cut into 2 cm pieces; 1 Bay Leaf; 200g chopped tinned Tomato; 5 cups Water; 2 cloves Garlic, finely minced; 1 1/3 cups Carnaroli Rice; 1 wineglass of White Wine; Seasoning; Chopped Parsley (for garnish).

Method:

1. Heat 2 tbs of Oil in a saucepan, and gently sauté the Carrot and Celery, along with the fish pieces, for ten minutes. Stir occasionally, and keep the heat at medium.

2. Add the Bay leaf, Tomato, and Water. Bring to the boil, and then reduce to simmer, for a further ten minutes. Allow to cool slightly, then sieve into a clean pan, pressing the pieces against the sieve to extract as much of the flavour as possible. Put the sieved broth onto medium heat, to simmer.

3. In a large sauté pan, heat the remaining Oil, and gently colour the minced Garlic. Add Rice and stir to coat in the Oil and Garlic for a minute. Add the wine, maintain the heat such that the liquid barely simmers, and keep stirring until all the Wine has been absorbed by the Rice. Start adding broth, one ladle at a time - only add a new ladleful of broth once the previous one has been absorbed.

4. Keep adding broth either until it has all been used up or until the Rice is properly cooked. Depending on the quality of the Rice, this should take twenty minutes or so. If the broth is finished before the risotto is ready, add water instead, until the Rice is cooked.

5. Add seasoning, to taste (none has gone into the broth, so it will definitely be needed at this stage) ans serve, garnished with chopped fresh Parsley.

The rain, it rains...

2010-11-20T08:20:00.007Z

On and on. Fairly typically for November in Tuscany, it has to be said, and the garden looks very happy for it. Lush and green and soaking. Fortunately not so sodden that I couldn't plant several hundred bulbs in the few rain-free interludes we've had in the past couple of weeks (a couple of hundred narcissus to line the grass walk under the pine trees, to the north of which I've planted two hundred mixed alliums, around the hydrangeas; and hundreds of dwarf irises under the silver birch and on either side of the causeway that leads to the romitorio.) I even managed to cut the grass (all of it - having realised from the forecast that it would be my last opportunity for weeks) on Wednesday, and it looks agreeably soft and well-behaved as a result.

And so, we're largely housebound, either watching the rain through the windows, or else listening to it thundering overhead in the watches of the night. The four-footeds have got over their frustration at the doors to the garden no longer being left open all the time, and in fact are developing a fondness for soft furnishing, which requires constant vigilance to prevent the senior four-footed from curling up on one or other of the new sofas (which he's prone to do at the first opportunity).

It's our first winter actually living in this house - last year, it was a building site right through until April - and it turns out to be agreeably warm and cosy. The Technical Dept is pondering a construction of glass screens to enclose part of the sitting-room terrace; you'd think it would be for our convenience, as a winter sun room...but, in fact, it's because he thinks the four-footeds would appreciate an indoor vantage point from which to monitor the entrance pergola (this is the man, after all, who considered raising the china cabinets on blocks, years ago, when the previous senior four-footed was a puppy, and was dismayed when he grew too much to be able to tunnel excitedly beneath the cabinets, which had been his favourite game when he was very small!).

I'm in the middle of Miles Unger's hagiographic biography of Lorenzo the Magnificent, in between bouts of painting skirting boards (where the brazilians managed to smear them with floor grout), and the Technical Dept is doing...I don't know, really....technical things.

It's all go!

Tonight's Dinner:

Crespelle, filled with ricotta and bietole, in a parmesan bechamel sauce

Pork loin, pot-roast in milk; roast celeriac. (The four-footeds are having sausages, as a special treat in honour of the senior four-footed's eleventh birthday)

Apple sorbet.

Recipe: Apricot & Cinnamon Cake

2010-11-14T12:42:00.004Z

Adapted from a recipe of Linda Collister (I found her version a little dry, frankly, so I played around with the proportions of the ingredients until I had something I liked), this is an excellent - and quick - light fruit cake. So light, that it risks being consumed all at one sitting!

This cake definitely benefits from being left for several days or so after baking, to allow the richness of the fruit and the cake itself to blend together thoroughly.

To make an 8" diameter cake:

Ingredients: 130g Butter; 130g sugar (muscovado, if you can get it, which I can't in Italy, and so I just use demarara instead); 170g self-raising Flour (again, if you can get it; if you can't then use plain flour, and for each cup of flour, add one and a half teaspoons of baking powder, and half a teaspoon of salt); 1 tsp ground Cinnamon; 30g ground Almonds; 3 medium eggs; 220g ready-to-eat dried Apricots, chopped finely; a handful of slivered Almonds.

Method:

1. Use a hand-held beater to cream the Butter, then add to it the Sugar and keep beating, until light and fluffy.

2. In a separate bowl, combine the Flour with the Cinnamon and the ground Almonds.

3. Add the Eggs one at a time to the creamed Butter & Sugar, beating to incorporate after each Egg has been added, and including a spoonful of the Flour mixture along with the last Egg.

4. Fold in the rest of the Flour mixture, along with the diced Apricots.

5. Put the mixture into a prepared cake mould (greased, if using a cake tin, or the base lined with greaseproof paper, if using a silicone mould) and sprinkle the surface with the slivered Almonds.

6. Bake for an hour at 170 degrees C. Check for doneness by inserting a knife into the centre of the cake and seeing that it emerges completely clean - if not, then bake for a fewer minutes lnger and test again.

7. Allow to rest for five minutes, before you turn it out to cool completely. Keep in an airtight container box for three days before serving.

Restaurant Gauthier, in London...

2010-11-13T10:14:00.009Z

...was included recently in the Wall Street Journal's list of the top ten places to eat in Europe. It's in Romilly Street in Soho, in the building which was Lindsay House for such a long time (somewhere I recall as falling significantly short of its PR positioning, frankly...the food was definitely 'OK', rather than anything special). Anyway....Gauthier. Technical Department and I were discussing the WSJ listing in the car the other evening, as we drove up to Brancoli, for dinner and to return their lawnmower which we'd borrowed when ours broke, back in August. TD, who had read the WSJ article ( I hadn't) was of the opinion that the Gauthier menu included far too much mackerel for his liking, and that the overall tone of the place seemed to be as a place of worship rather than somewhere just to go and have dinner. (We grew out of the food-as-a-form-of-worship thing many decades ago, and these days, great food should be good enough to cause a short pause in good conversation, but should then act merely as an adjunct to it, and not take over.)

So, it was with interest that we heard that the Brancolis had dined at Gauthier a couple of weeks ago, and had been served rather more protein than advertised in the menu. In the form of two dead beetles (one each....clearly, it was an equal opportunity slip-up) in the base of their wine glasses. They were working their way through the tasting menu, item four (or so) of which was some kind of venison, accompanied by a southern rhône. And a couple of beetles. Both very dead. The sommelier and waiters gathered round and gazed in silence at the offending corpses, leaking redly onto the tablecloth, before efficiently removing them, and then carrying on as though nothing had happened. To the extent that they made no mention of the incident even as they presented the eye-wateringly large bill at the end of the evening. The Brancolis were probably more stunned by the lack of reaction than they had been by the event itself. ..so much so, that they were out in the street before they'd thought to raise the matter (although, equally, since it was a celebration dinner, neither was keen to cause a scene). No apology was forthcoming, no offer of recompense (money off? a bottle of something? an invitation to come back as guests on another occasion?....forget it!). Incredible.

The only explanation we could come up with for the bizarre lack of reaction was that the business model for a restaurant like Gauthier must be that dining there is expected to be a one-off event, and that they don't think their clientele will become regulars (and so they don't need to bother). Which is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophesy, if you think about it. I know of at least two diners who won't ever be going back! But then, I can also think of two others who won't now consider it even for the one-off option...so, possibly the business model is flawed. Pause for thought, Monsieur Gauthier.

Tonight's Dinner

Ravioli, stuffed with bietole and ricotta.

Sautéed Chicken Breast, in a Rosemary & Lemon Sauce; Courgettes, with Thyme.

Bakewell and Black Plum Tarts.

Recipe: Pasta with Rosemary Sauce

2010-11-10T12:48:00.003Z

This is one of the best last-minute dishes I've ever found. Perfect for those occasions when prep time has disappeared, and dinner needs to be conjured out of airy nothing in about ten minutes flat! Best of all with fresh pasta (I generally serve it with fettucine...which takes around ten minutes to roll out and cut, with about fifteen minutes elapsed time between the two processes), this sauce is still pretty good even with the stuff out of a box or packet.

The recipe comes from Marcella Hazan, and is to be found lurking amongst the also-ran pasta sauce recipes in Volume 2 of Classic Italian Cooking -I'd owned the book for years before I got round to trying it. Many recipe writers today (and I suspect Hazan herself would be amongst them, these days) would disdain powdered stock as an ingredient; in fact, it is quite brilliant here, and works wonderfully well with the astringence of the rosemary.

The sauce is so quick and simple, you need only start it at the same time as you put the pasta-cooking water onto heat (for fresh pasta) or after you've put boxed pasta into the pan, and you still have a few minutes before it's done.

For four.

Ingredients: 4 oz Butter; about 6 sprigs of Rosemary, each one 4" or so long; half a teaspoon of powdered chicken Stock, or half a stock cube, crumbled between your fingers.

Method:

1. Melt the Butter in a small pan, over low heat; the butter wants just to melt, and certainly not to colour or start to bubble.

2. Strip the Rosemary needles from their stems, and chop very finely. Add this to the melted Butter, along with the powdered Stock.

3. Stir everything together, until the powdered Stock has dissolved into the Butter. At this point, turn off the heat, and stir into the cooked pasta as soon as it has been drained. No further seasoning should be necessary, and parmesan shouldn't be served with this dish, as it would only fight with the delicious flavours already there.

And then the sun came out...

2010-11-08T08:01:00.006Z

It was a lousy week. Easyjet managed to smash the Della Robbia cast that we had optimistically given over to them to transport from London to Pisa (not 'broken', but well and truly 'smashed'...); the lawnmower broke down again, about an hour of use after it had last come back from the workshop; the car got a flat battery twice; the van bringing new sofas from Florence got within 200 yards of the house, and then encountered roadworks and simply turned round and took the sofas all the way back to Florence once more ; the TD's laptop died on him; and we had day after day of rain, which gave rise to significant canine cabin-fever...

And then...the sun came out. The garden looked glorious, rich in autumn colours, the citrus trees are groaning under a phenomenal crop of lemons and oranges, and we found it was still warm enough to lunch outdoors for three days in a row. I planted bulbs, and jasmines, and cleared all the weeds out from the azaleas around the water garden. We went to Lucca for the day - perfect sunshine and an intense blue sky - and admired the beautiful stained glass in the Duomo, before sitting outside Trattoria Gigi in Piazza del Carmine for a leisurely lunch of pasta and a carafe of house wine.

All things considered, life isn't bad!

Tonight's Dinner:

Funghi trifolati (the amantea man was selling enormous porcini the other day, and we loaded up with them)

Salsiccie, with Gratin Dauphinois

Chocolate Tart.

Les, the Fish...

2010-10-25T09:10:00.007Z

...in the Farmers' Market in Bute Street on Saturday mornings is one of the highlights of any weekend in London. I'm not normally a great fan of Farmers Markets - they always seem like a good idea, but in London, at any rate, they tend to be over-priced, the range of things on offer is fairly limited, and although the quality ought to be wonderful, it isn't always noticeably better than the alternative. The attraction seems to be a specious back-to-nature urge that drives people away from the plastic-wrapped environment of the supermarkets, and towards things that still have earth clinging to them (which comes with a price tag, but frankly, not a lot else).

Les, however, is different - as you can tell right from the other end of Bute Street. It isn't a particularly busy market, and most stalls are lucky if they've got even a couple of people pondering their wares. Which is why the queue that always snakes away from Les's stall, reaching practically to the end of the street, is all the more noticeable.

He operates a mailing list, which goes out electronically every Friday evening, as soon as the catch is in and he knows what he'll have for sale on Saturday morning. And, presumably at some ungodly hour in the middle of night, he sets out from deepest Dorset and makes the journey all the way to SW7, in time to open, around nine-ish. His produce is wonderful! It couldn't be fresher - there's no argument to muck around with complicated cooking methods, since the flavour of the fish cooked simply is incomparable - and the prices are actually better than I can generally find in Pisa.

Pretty typically, we joined the queue on Saturday morning, and indulged. As a result, on Saturday evening, we had cockles, cooked á la marinière (but with a dash of pernod added to the cooking liquid - delicious!) followed by fillets of baked Sea Bass, coated in the velvet softness of a buerre blanc*. Last night's starter was a cold lobster each, with saffron mayonnaise, and this evening, we'll finish this week's Les-largesse with sole meunière and new potatoes. And that's it until we're back again next month...

If you want to get onto Les's mailing list, then he can be reached at christchurchfish@live.co.uk.

*For Buerre Blanc: 1 finely minced shallot, half tbs wine vinegar, 1 tbs lemon juice, 2 tbs vermouth, 1 tbs water - boil together to reduce to about 1 tbs liquid in total; strain into a simmertopf, or double boiler, then heat gently, gradually whisking into the liquid 3-4 oz chilled butter in half oz dice, until the consistency is appropriately thickened and velvety. Takes 7-10 minutes in total. Leave in the double boiler until needed, giving it one final whisk just before serving.

Tonight's Dinner:

Parsley crêpes, wrapped round asparagus spears, with hollandaise sauce.

Sole meunière, with new potatoes.

Steamed Orange pudding, with orange cream.

Sated!

2010-10-20T19:11:00.008Z

We spent the morning at the Opificio della Pietre Dure in Firenze, with our noses (literally) pressed up against Giotto's Croce from the Church of the Ognissanti, which has just emerged from a painstakingly detailed nine-year restoration project. Available for viewing, by prior arrangement, for one week only before it will be hoisted back up into position, we took the opportunity to study it from the distance of about two centimetres (if we wished)...and did so for several hours. Stunning!

For more information and pictures, have a look at

http://www.opificio.arti.beniculturali.it/index.php?it/304/giotto-croce-dipinta-della-chiesa-di-ognissanti

or better

http://www.opificio.arti.beniculturali.it/index.php?it/544/galleria-fotografica

...they do say there's an english text coming soon to the Opificio site, but given the nine years it's taken them to work on the Giotto, I think we should take 'soon' as a pretty relative term.

The place itself is pretty amazing. Arranged rather nonchalently, a couple of yards away from the Giotto, was an enormous and very beautiful Fra Angelico Madonna (normally to be found in San Marco), which had also just been restored. Nearby were panels with life-sized figures of various attendant saints, as well as several of the pradella panels, which were arguably the most beautiful of all. Vibrant, delicate...and oh so eminently pocketable (if it weren't for the CCTV signs dotted around the place!) I wasn't convinced that these smaller panels were also Fra Angelico (much of the detail looked much more like Perugino), but there was nobody much to ask....and in any event, whoever had painted them, they were unquestionably very, very fine.

And then, inevitably, lunch. Somewhere called Trattoria La Biritullera, way up in the north of the city (not far from the Opificio) and well away from the tourist area - a bit like the Florentine equivalent of St.John's Wood. Heavily Sardinian-influenced, the food was excellent: gnudi verde in butter and sage, and a light tomato sauce, and then a spendid dish of squid, accompanied by fresh tuna, lightly-grilled inside a wafer-thin wrapping of aubergine. Two bottles to windward (the first had insufficient personality for the Belforte palate, and so a second, with more going for it, was requested) and we emerged into afternoon sunshine (after the lightest dessert of delicate pastry, filled with apples and fig jam).

Fortunately, the walk was largely downhill back towards the centre of town, and the cafés of Piazza Santa Maria Novella...where our previously-intended visit to the Bronzino exhibition at the Strozzi bit the dust. The combination of warm October sunshine, a decent espresso, and the opportunity to wander gently round SMN for half an hour or so was all too much, and the Bronzinos were consigned to another day. They're there and available until sometime in January, so there's no particular need to rush. Instead, the luxury of looking at a second Giotto Croce (how's that for a vertical tasting?) followed by heated discussion about the relative merits of the Ghirlandaio and Lippi frescos in the Tornabuoni and Strozzi chapels respectively (personally, I favour Ghirlandaio) took up the rest of the afternoon, before dozing gently through the return train journey back to Pisa.

Days don't get much better than that...

Tonight's Dinner:

Rabbit & Lemon Terrine.

Nodini di Vitello, in Sage & Wine Sauce; Celeriac roast in Duck fat.

Pears, baked in Marsala & Brown Sugar.

Recipe: Rabbit pot-roast with Parma Ham & Fresh Herbs

2010-10-14T17:31:00.006Z

Apparently a piedmontese recipe, this is the most delicious method I have found for cooking rabbit. Bar none. It's one of those dishes where the first mouthful is followed by an appreciative silence around the table, as conversation falls away and people devote their full attention to the seductive flavours put before them. In the course of cooking, the ham dissolves to nothing inside the pot-roast rabbit, leaving just a rich and concentrated flavour, that mingles wonderfully with the finely-chopped fresh herbs, while the cooking juices in the pan provide a sauce which is gloriously unctuous.
The only thing to be wary of in this dish is the tendency for the sliced rabbit to fall apart when served, if the process of boning the rabbit has been a little haphazard. If your boning technique isn't first rate, or you're concerned that you won't get perfect slices, then the best thing to do is to let the rabbit cool down once cooked, and only slice it once it is almost cold, when the meat will hold together once more; the old catering trick is then to serve the cool slices on very hot plates, with a spoonful of very hot sauce over the top, both of which re-heat the meat pretty instantaneously.
I have to say, when I served this the other day, and I'd had only half a rabbit to work with, my finished slices fell to pieces pitifully, but the Technical Department said the flavour was so good that the presentation was entirely irrelevant!

For four.

Ingredients: 1 Rabbit, boned (if you can get this done professionally, then it is probably a good idea); 2 teaspoons each of fresh herbs: rosemary, sage, and thyme; 4 slices of Parma Ham (San Daniele is best of course, but any good parma ham will be fine); 3 carrots, peeled; 3 celery sticks; 2 oz Butter; 2 tbs Oil; 1 cup White Wine; 1 cup Chicken stock; Salt & Pepper.

Method:

1. Take one of the carrots and one of the sticks of celery and blanch them for a couple of minutes in boiling, salted water. Drain and refresh under cold water.

2. Lay the boned rabbit out flat, neck-end towards you, and season it with salt & pepper. Finely chop the herbs, and spread these evenly over the rabbit, and then cover completely with slices of Ham. Arrange the blanched carrot and celery along the end of the rabbit nearest to you, trimming and slicing as appropriate so that there is an even strip of both carrot and celery all the way along (the idea being that once the rabbit has been rolled and roast, when it is sliced, each slice will have at its centre a piece of cooked carrot and a piece of cooked celery). Roll the rabbit up, and tie tightly.

4. In a heavy casserole, melt the Butter with the Oil, and then brown the tied Rabbit on all sides.

5. Remove the Rabbit from the casserole, and sauté the remaining Carrot and Celery, cut into 1 cm dice, for five minutes or so until they start to colour. Return the Rabbit to the pan, season it generously, raise the heat and pour over the Wine over the Rabbit. Reduce the wine by about half, and then add the Stock. Once the liquid has returned to the boil, reduce the heat to a simmer, cover the pan and leave to cook for an hour and a quarter.

Leave for about ten minutes before slicing, and serve with the vegetables and cooking juices from the casserole.

Postscript: Somebody has very helpfully sent me this fascinating link to a how-to video for de-boning rabbit. Positively mesmerising.

Autumn Days

2010-10-12T09:47:00.009Z

Glorious days of golden sunshine, still warm enough to sit on the terrace for morning coffee, and to work in shirt-sleeves in the garden...but definitely cold enough at night that all the doors and windows are closed after sundown, and the four-footeds find the floor tiles too cold for them to sleep on in comfort. Which has led to some confused incidents when both of them have decided to jump onto the bed in the middle of the night at the same time, and then become noisily territorial as they both tell the other one to eff off, at two in the morning. Now sorted, as the older one has his own bed to sleep on, and the younger one has nobody to fight with.

The Booker Prize is announced today. My vote goes clearly to Emma Donoghue for 'Room' - excellent writing. I was dismayed to see that the favourite is Tom McCarthy's 'C', which I confess I struggled to finish. Derivative, clumsy, self-consciously 'clever', inconsistent, and in places just silly...I found myself sighing from time to time as I pushed myself to plough on with the thing. I do hope it doesn't win, although this year's shortlist was so thin in general that I don't trust the judges' judgement at all - not least since they didn't include such gems as the offerings by Helen Dunmore and David Mitchell, both of which I would recommend highly.

This week's major discovery has been Baldo rice - I'd never heard of it before, but the Tecchnical Department came across it recently, and ordered a year's supply online. I think it comes from somewhere in the Po Valley and fortunately, given how much of it is now on the pantry shelves, is superb. Light, with loads of starch, and a character that means that the grains remain quite distinct even once cooked. I've now tried it twice, once in a risotto with limoncino leaves, and then again a couple of days ago in risotto with some chanterelles which we found at the amantea man's shop in San Francesco. Both times, delicious - the second time, even more so, as the risotto was made with a sofritto using fat from the partridges we were given in London a couple of weeks ago (and which the TD plucked and drew, before we put them in our luggage to bring back to Pisa), as well as stock from a spit-roast guinea fowl, which we had on the evening we got back.

Otherwise, a good apricot and cinnamon cake, decorated with crystallised limoncino leaves (yes, a theme emerges - but prompted mostly by my need to give the limoncino bush a haircut, rather than culinary necessity), and a fairly delicious walnut baklava, which I'd never tried to make during all the years actually living in Greece. Pretty delicious, and in fact indistinguishable from that made by the baker who's oven used to back onto the house we lived in back in the seventies.

I think it must be instinctive - as the evenings draw in, the home-and-hearth impulse kicks in, and baking comes to the fore!
Tonight's dinner:

Asparagus & Gruyère bundles in Parma Ham, roast and then served with a Balsamic dressing.

Roast rabbit, boned and stuffed with Celery; braised Broccoli stalks.

Plum Tarts.