And Christmas Past...

In fact, I'm not quite sure where it went to. Not five minutes after the tree had gone up, it seemed, it was coming down again (and is now planted over near the white grape arbour - although the apparent absence of any roots to speak of suggests both that this is an act of significant optimism, and that the tree appears to have managed to look as good as it did for the three weeks it was decorated and in its pot in the barn was more by luck than judgment!). Ebufana has come and gone, and now everybody has heaved a sigh (either of relief or of appetites satisfied) and the World, as of this morning, is now going about its business once more.

  In a period significantly dominated by Pheasant, and Partridge, and Guinea Fowl, and Tarte au Chocolat, and Marron Parfait, and Christmas Pudding, and Caramel Sauce, I did actually (probably necessarily) get a reasonable amount of garden tasks out of the way. Not only pruning all of the new fruit trees (which takes only minutes, since they're so small - but gratifyingly provides a sense of job-done at the expense of very little effort), but also managed to prune the large pear tree. This is one of the jobs I hate - it takes ages, and is very fiddly, and ends up causing back-ache and neck-ache, with significant risk to life and limb, as I clamber around amongst the upper branches. Fortunately, the Seminary next door is deserted at this time of year - had it not been, then I suspect some adolescent italian vocabularies would have been enriched by a variety of good old anglo-saxon expletives, by the time I was eventually finished. Until this time next year, at any rate.

More or less, the weather has been good. In Belforte, where we were for three days over Christmas itself, we spent days shrouded in fog, and stayed indoors, toasting the season in venerable vintages, and ourselves beside the blazing fire. Back down in Pisa, we've had days of intense calm and winter sunshine. Four-footed has had endless hours of chasing tennis balls, and getting himself gloriously dirty, as I've dug the new flowerbeds alongside the South Pergola and he has 'helped' - followed by a daily bath, which he adores...particularly the bit after he has patiently lifted his paws to be rinsed, each in turn, and then gets enfolded in a towel and energetically rubbed down.

The camellias are just starting to come into flower - and should remain so through March - but, apart from the blossom on the lonicera frangrantissima, everything else in the garden is resolutely dormant. I'm torn between wanting spring to get a move on, and wanting to have enough time to complete all of the 'winter' tasks which yet remain. Actually, I'm nervous that we'll have another cold spell like last February, when it was impossible to do anything other than stay indoors, and peer at the iciness beyond the frost-rimed windows. Oh, well - nothing one can do about it, either way....

Tonight's Dinner:

Is at the Brasserie Julien, in the rue du Faubourg Saint Denis. (If we manage to get to the airport in time - Technical Dept is deep in something else currently, so it might be a close-run thing!)

Christmas..

seems to have begun early, this year. By Friday morning, even shut away as we are from the World, a holiday calm had perceptibly descended on the town, and lots of shuttered windows on the Piazza suggest a general exodus has already happened...with a lot of people probably not planning to return until ebufana, after Twelfth Night. This fortnight is always a wonderfully ramshackle period in Pisa, with some shops and restaurants open on some days, but not reliably so, and even those which are open seem to be in mellow, party mood...business only being a side issue, somehow.

The sun came out. Which was welcome after the generally damp and dismal December we've had up until now. Slightly soggily, I finally managed to plant all of the arabis caucasica - which means that that part of the garden has been transformed from primal nature reserve into something which now resembles an unruly

allotment; the idea is that by June it will be a dense carpet of small white flowers - and I've also put in ficus repens against about half of the posts on the new pergola. Which is finished! (Well, all apart from half a dozen posts, which Technical Dept says he'll have to move, as GianCarlo ruefully admits he made a pig's ear of his measurements on that section, and TD thinks the thing might collapse under the weight of the grape harvest, come September.)

For the most part, though, it looks splendid, and I'm itching to get on with planting a whole new batch of climbing roses and clematis which are due to arrive in January.

As well, of course, as moving all of the plants which are now in entirely the wrong place, as - when I planted them when we first started this garden, three years ago, now - I had to guess more or less where the pergola posts were going to be be, and sightlines and geometry have revealed that I didn't always get it right. I have one complete bed of roses which is going to have to move in its entirety three feet to the west of its current position, and next spring is going to see a magnificant display of tulips right where a path is intended to go, under the South Pergola. Oh well: Rome....built...day...etc

We had a splendid dinner with the Brancolis on Monday, at a new place they've found in Lucca, in Via del Moro. Excellent wine, good food, an over-garrulous patron , and a bill at the end of it which was so low that there's no way the business can survive at that rate! We plan to go again, soon, while it's still there and we can.

And we've managed a couple of evenings round the fire in the barn, with the requisite mulled wine, mince pies, sausage rolls (made with Luganega Sausage, which is spicy and delicious, and perfect for the task), and chestnuts roast on the glowing embers. The locals probably think we're completely nuts, to be sitting outside in late December, wrapped in coats and scarves (them, not us....we're much more British and hardy about it all...perhaps going as far as a sweater and a pair of socks) as we hug the fire and glug gluwein. But then, as a celebration of cultural diversity, there are definitely less self-indulgent ways of doing it!

Tonight's Dinner:

Fish Ravioli

Scaloppine in Orange & Rum Sauce; pommes allumettes

Pineapple Sorbet

Sea Bream with Star Anise

Delicious, easy, quick, and practical (in that, the whole dish can be prepared in advance and then put to one side, ready to go into the oven half an hour before you plan to serve). This is a slight re-working of a Robuchon recipe, where once again, tomato is combined with red pepper, to the benefit of both ingredients - Technical Dept has a bit of a down on both, on the basis that he finds both tomato and capsicum rather 'one-note-ish', and that individually their flavours tend to dominate any dish of which they are part; combined in this way, though, the end result is subtly complex, and somehow both the pepper and the tomato manage to play to each other's strengths. 

Don't be tempted to replace the whole crushed star anise with powdered anise instead - I've tried it, and it doesn't work!

For two.

Ingredients: 2 medium-small sea bream, gutted; olive oil, seasoning; 1 oz butter; half a medium onion; 1 large garlic clove, diced finely or crushed; 2 beef tomatoes, peeled; half a medium red pepper; one and half teaspoons dried thyme; i whole star anise.

Method:

1.  Place the fish in an oiled ovenproof dish. Crush the star anise roughly with a heavy rolling pin (or similar), so you have maybe a dozen pieces; divide these between the cavities of the two fish, along with half a teaspoon of dried thyme (again, divided equally between the two fish). Add a generous pinch of salt and a couple of grindings of pepper to the inside of each fish.

2. Melt the butter in a small saucepan, and gently sauté the finely diced onion for three or four minutes, until it has softened but not coloured. Cut the tomatoes into quarters, more easily to remove and discard the central 'root', and then cut each quarter into about twelve pieces. Add the tomato to the pan, along with the finely diced pepper, the remaining thyme, and the garlic clove. Simmer over a medium heat for about fifteen minutes, until the tomatoes have completely collapsed, and the mixture is quite thick. Add salt as desired (I normally find a scant teaspoon is sufficient).

3. Pour a tablespoon of oil over each fish, and then add the tomato-pepper mixture, effectively to cover the fish. Bake for 25 minutes in an oven pre-heated to 250 degrees C, and serve immediately on heated plates

I don't normally bother with an additional vegetable, as the tomato-pepper mixture is substantial enough to take the place of a vegetable. If you wanted something else, though, then some crisp Pommes Maxims would work well, and not fight with the provencal flavours of the fish and herbs.

Even in the rain...

Genoa is magical. At this time of year, magically empty of foreigners, as well...And the resident groups either of local students or of Senegalese selling umbrellas could have been photo-shopped in from any street scene in Pisa! We had the Villa Doria entirely to ourselves at the end of Tuesday afternoon, as dusk deepened outside, and lamplight gleamed indoors on the rich colours of  renaissance tapestries, with shadows playing up into the recesses of carved and coffered ceilings.  From the shelter of the loggia, we watched the rain lash the black and white tiles of the terrace beyond...

The  Centro Storico  is thronged with centuries of other people's memories, from the Knights Hospitallers in their commanderie which, eight hundred years ago, faced onto the bustle of Genoa's medieval port (but which, unfortunately, these days, abuts instead the elevated highway which blights every part of the Genovese seafront) to the  fantasy palaces of the seventeenth century nobility, to the stolidity of the nineteenth century bourgoisie. To walk through the Old Town is to glimpse, through open doorways to left and right, the sort of architectural cappriccios which improbably adorn the ceilings of baroque churches the length and breadth of Europe....a noble staircase, sweeping up to a balustraded gallery, with, beyond that , a glimpsed pillared courtyard...often with a fountain or some orange trees, and then beyond again, a screen of columns, and another staircase  rising again to some further, unseen, terrace above....and the sky distantly visible through and above this towering confection of fluting and balustrades and  noble elegance. From high above, lofty vaulted porticoes look down, their aristocratic occupants having wandered off only five minutes before...

Over two days, we ploughed steadfastly, umbrella-wielding, down twisting medieval alleys, from one twelth century church to the next, dripping generously wherever we arrived, and never quite staying long enough in one place to dry out properly before we were out in the rain once more. We dripped over the floors of San Matteo, the original Doria family church, and of the Cathedral of San Lorenzo (and even had the the opportunity to drip quite separately over the floors of the cloister and the museum of SL, since it involved a walk of several hundred metres from the main church) and finally, over the floors of Santa Maria di Castello....which threatened to be a bit of a disappointment, until one discovered the sacristy, and beyond that, some steps up to one cloister (with a rainswept view, right down to the harbour), and then more steps up to a second one, planted with orange trees, and then yet more steps winding up through the monastery complex behind the main part of the church.

And we didn't so much drip over the floors of the Palazzo Rosso and the Palazzo Bianco as 'puddle' (if there is such a verb)  as we sought sanctuary from the thunderous deluge that threatened to turn  Via Garibaldi into a river, with us wading ankle-deep through the middle of it. An afternoon of pictures, with the prized possessions of the City Fathers on display over the two upper floors of each of these Palazzi, and a dash (through the rain) across the back garden of the Palazzo Bianco and the back garden of the Palazzo Tursi, to see yet more of the City Fathers' prized canvases, not to mention their prized collection of ligurian blue and white apothecary jars, and all topped off by a room (the wonderfully named Sala Paganiniana) devoted predominantly to Paganini's two favourite violins. Some of the pictures were good. A lot were not. A

Pisanello portrait of a muscovite gentleman, I would happily have pocketed, and there were some rather unexpected Van Dyck's, as well as a Filippino Lippi, which has pride of place in Palazzo Bianco (not my choice for pocketing, though - I've never liked Lippi junior, and this one forcefully reminded me of his frescoes in the Strozzi chapel at Santa Maria Novella,  which I loathe). Other than that, there's an awful lot of ho-hum and 'school of...'.

They have a system, in these galleries, whereby, rather than have a guard posted in each room, there are a number of them, mostly women in black,  who 'float', and who meander from room to room in an apparently aimless fashion in the wake of visitors to the place, just in case anybody, unobserved,  might feel like pocketing anything on their way through (the Pisanello muscovite gentleman being a case in point). In general, the system probably works reasonably well....except, on this occasion, when it was time to leave the Palazzo Rosso and go over the road to Palazzo Bianco, there was no sign of the Technical Department, who had last been seen on the second floor, peering at a Cuyp portrait of rabbits. Rounding up TD when it's 'time to leave' is one of those things one gets used to in life...generally, I find myself scouring the aisles of B&Q or Esselenga, getting increasingly irritated and 'scouring' at increasing pace as he is nowhere to be seen. And so it was on the second floor of Palazzo Rosso, as I went round, several times, from the Van Dycks, to the portraits of the doges, past a whole lot of rather iffy dutch skating pictures, through the blue bedroom, and the striped bedroom, and back again, and round again, and re-tracd my steps (all without success, and all at an increasing rate of knots) ...all before I realised I had a whole train of middle aged 'women-in-black' all trying to trail me at a discreet meander, and all of them desperately out-of-puff and in various states of distress as a result. I smiled vaguely at them, gave up my search, and made my way to the ground floor, where the TD was to be found after all,  standing in wait beside the umbrella stand. Dripping.

We dripped our way also into a good number of bars, for reviving cups of coffee and glasses of something nourishing, along the way...a starkly modern place in the bowels of the Palazzo Reale in Via Balbi, for a very good ligurian white; somewhere basic (very friendly, but with signs on the wall announcing that, after ten in the evening,  drinks would be only be served in plastic glasses....which said much about the clientele) in the backstreets of Castello; opposite the Duomo, a smart cafe, with impressively polished intonaco veneziano; a bar up near the station which got the prize for the most unspeakably awful bar-artwork anywhere, ever...but the coffee was pretty good; and, best of all, Baribaldi, just opposite the Palazzo Bianco, where we quaffed prosecco and feasted much more than was sensible on pastries and sandwiches that continuously appeared as if from nowhere, and could probably quite happily have dug ourselves in for the entire evening, had we not had to be somewhere else.

And the 'somewhere elses' in Genoa are pretty good, too. You go for the fish....and you do not go in vain! The menu is almost the same everywhere: stoccafisso, cooked in various ways; and trofie di pesto (with potatoes and beans); and pansotti, with salsa di noci; and antipasto of mussels (deep-fried, or steamed, or in sauce), and of raw tuna, and  of octopus, and of anchovies in vinegar...and deep-fried fishy flavour bombs, and if you're lucky (we were) capon magro alla gelantina. I believe all of the restaurants had dessert menus as well, but we never actually managed to get that far...the rest of what was on offer was far too good to turn down, along the way. The best restaurants of all were Trattoria Vegia Zena, in Vico del Serriglio (never, anywhere, ever, have I tasted better mussels...) and the Antica Osteria Vico Palla, just at the end of the old harbour. It would have been worth the entire trip just to have eaten in one or other of those two places. Spectacularly good!

A final jog-trot through the Palazzo Reale,  and then we were back on the train, heading for Tuscany and home. And as we did so, the sun came out.



Tonight's Dinner:

French Onion Soup (I have guinea-fowl stock to be used up)

Lamb Cutlets, fried in a parmesan crust; Gratin Dauphinois

Coffee Soufflé

It's that time of year...

Heavy-duty gardening. Non-gardeners (Paolo, for instance, who looked surprised, the other week, when I moaned about the current gardening workload, and asked what on earth there could be to do in a garden at this time of year) seem to think that outside summer months the garden is just left dormant, effectively in mothballs until the first green shoots of spring. Gardeners, on the other hand, know all too well that it's at this time of year that all the heavy-duty stuff needs to get done: planting, and transplanting, and pruning, and building, and any structural changes that have suggested themselves as a possible good idea in the course of the warm months of the year. And so it has been. Bulb-planting: alliums, and narcissi, and tulips....about five hundred of the things, in total. Extending the flowerbeds, under the citrus trees, in order to divide and re-plant what turned out to be around sixty agapanthus, and along the west side of the new pergola, equally to plant newly-divided hemerocallis, dieries bicolore, and ornithogalums, and to make a new bed for a disparate bunch of hitherto slightly 'beached' roses from elsewhere around the garden. New hydrangeas (various quercifolias, paniculatas, and a macrophylla variegata), to go behind the church, and to line some of the paths under the pine trees. Groundcover planting (mazus reptans, veronica spicata, and isotoma fluviatilis...about fifty of each) to fill in the area by the entrance walkway, around the camellias and beneath the white lilacs.  And, the new pergola...

Finally, the new pergola is being erected around three sides of the north lawn....and, in theory, also to extend along the east and south sides of the south lawn...although I'm currently so happy that any of it is happening, that it feels like asking for too much actually to get the whole thing completed in one go!

Giancarlo and his sidekick (who's name I don't actually know) fall through the gate each weekday morning at around 10.00, and then spend the day bumbling around, trampling things underfoot, and breaking things (ladders, generally), and using angle grinders and welding kit (which make a lot of noise and sparks, and presumably serve some useful purpose) and slowly, section by section, the pergola takes shape around the garden. The TD regards them with a sceptical air, thinking that it's best to leave them to get on with it undisturbed, but opines that it's like being invaded by a combination of the keystone cops and those two opinionated old buffers from The Muppets.

Of course, like all such things, it's a matter of pulling on a thread. Now that we can start to see what the garden will look like with its pergola-cloister, I'm starting to think of replacing all of the outer part of the north lawn, between the fruit trees and the borders, with summer-flowering groundcover...a rough calculation suggests that around a thousand plants should suffice.  But that's a job for next autumn...the dance-card is already full for this year!

Tonight's Dinner:

Terrine of Quail and Apricot.

Fried Pork Chops, stuffed with cheese and prosciutto; sauté of onions and courgettes

Earl-Grey infused Creme Brulee

Potatoes and Porcini

A fantastic combination. The potatoes soak up the wonderful flavour of the mushrooms, like blotting paper, and somehow end up tasting even better than the porcini did in the first place. It's a versatile dish - I made it several weeks ago first of all to serve with roast haunch of pork, and the leftovers were re-heated a couple of days later, to be served with sautéed rabbit, and (arguably best of all) the final spoonfuls were eaten cold a couple of days later from a plastic box in the fridge. As a summer cold-potato-salad, made a couple of days in advance and left to go cold, this would be positively ambrosial.

Properly speaking, the recipe calls for fresh porcini, which are not only not always available, and even if they are, you risk wandering into second-mortgage territory with the cost of the things (at about three euros per the amount needed for one serving). Hence the advisability of using reconstituted dried porcini instead. As follows:

 For two servings.

Ingredients: Two medium-large Potatoes; four or five good-sized pieces of dried Porcini; 2 oz Butter; 1 clove Garlic; half a small Onion; a glass of white wine; seasoning.

Method:

1. In a small bowl, cover the dried Porcini with boiling water and allow to sit for 30 minutes, to soften; then filter the liquid through a paper-lined sieve (reserve the soaking liquid) and rinse the softened mushroom pieces before chopping them finely.

2. Peel the Potatoes and cut into dice of about half an inch. Par-boil them for three minutes in boiling salted water, then drain.

3. Melt the butter in a pan which has a lid. Saute the garlic (pressed) and onion (chopped fine) for a couple of minutes, until softened, then add the chopped porcini, and saute for another minute, stirring. Add the wine and the reserved mushroom liquid, and raise the heat just enough to bring the liquid to a boil.

4. As soon as the liquid boils, turn the heat down to medium, and add the par-boiled Potatoes. Stir together, then cover and allow to cook gently together for about ten minutes, until the Potatoes are cooked (and are even starting to fall apart slightly - thay way they absorb even more of the mushroom flavour). Taste and add seasoning as required.

This dish is best made completely in advance, and then reheated (covered and in a medium oven, for about ten minutes) just before serving; the more time the flavours have to blend, the better the end result.

This week...

Shelling almonds from the trees in the garden. It's a much messier and more complicated business than you'd think - at least the way I do it, it is - and involves a lot of banging, and bits of shell flying to all corners of the kitchen in the process. Possibly I'm doing something wrong, since other people write as though it's akin to shelling peas, and something you do as you sit in the autumn sun, sharing a sociable glass of something with a neighbour as you shell nuts and generally pass the time of day. I believe people write untruths in many instances, however...and certainly, any neighbour foolish enough to be anywhere near me as I perform brutal acts on innocent almonds would need ear-plugs and protective clothing, at the very least.

Late roses, flowering prettily. This one is Anna Livia, but we also have blooms on Alec's Red (wonderful scent!), English Miss (possibly the prettiest of all the roses in the garden), Margaret Merrill, Evelyn Fison, Iceberg, and Queen Elizabeth. With luck, and judicious dead-heading, we ought to have some flower on some roses right through until Christmas.

Parthenocissus, puttting on its glorious autumn colour, and draped in garlands over the biggest of the Cypress trees, and above the terrace..

Fruit on the orange trees growing at an alarming rate, and in a quantity that makes me wonder what on earth we'll do with it all, short of providing jars of marmalade to the whole of Tuscany...

 Getting stuck in with the task of widening existing beds and digging new ones, all as part of the new pergola scheme...it all looks a mess right now, but will repay the effort by next spring...( it had better!)

And, since Friday evening, endless torrential rain. With the result being a four-footed with cabin-fever, and a lot of cooking having been done ....cakes, pastry, soup, plombieres...cold weather food.

Tonight's Dinner:

...is a porcini feast with the Pauli. Doubtless, after drinks in front of a blazing fire.