Asparagus Sauce for Papardelle

This recipe - which is extremely delicious - in fact comes from a Michel Roux dish of poached salmon garnished with asparagus tips. The salmon dish was pretty good (especially with the addition of a bed of  mash!), but the leftover sauce, of which there was plenty, when served with fato a mano papardelle was stellar!

The sauce requires only the stalks of the asparagus, and so if you aren't using the tips (cooked) as a garnish for your papardelle , I would advise reserving them to use on another day either in risotto, or else as a stuffing for ravioli.

The following quantity is appropriate for four servings of pasta.

Ingredients: 8 asparagus stalks (tips cut about two inches down from the end); 50g butter; 2 shallots, sliced finely; 2 small mushrooms, finely sliced; 1 bouquet garni; 250 ml good quality stock (either fish or vegetable, depending on which you have available); 100 ml cream.

Method:

1. Melt the butter in a small saucepan, and sweat for about three minutes the mushrooms and shallots, along with the chopped-up asparagus stalks. Do not allow the contents of the pan to colour.

2. Add the bouquet garni and the stock, and simmer for three minutes, then add the cream and simmer for a further two minutes. Check seasoning and adjust as necessary.

3. Allow the sauce to cool slightly, and then blend it in a liquidizer for a minute or so.  You can then sieve it, for a really velvety texture, or else leave it slightly 'chunky' - I'm not sure that the difference is discernible once it has been used to coat the lengths of papardelle.

4. If it needs it, reheat briefly in the microwave before tossing with the cooked pasta.

Glorious February Sunshine

The last of the sweet oranges, waiting to be squeezed for the morning dose of vitamin C

The agrumi lawn, morning sunshine, and a four-footed

The northern pergola, looking toward the church

Waiting for warmer months

The satisfying sight of a recently-pruned orchard

And the mountain of pruned shoots, waiting to go through the chipper once they're dry enough

A four-footed, contemplating his options

Recipe: Chestnuts and Celery

Originally discovered as part of a recipe of Jill Norman's for a pot-roast guinea fowl, this is an excellent accompaniment to any kind of game - the chestnut imparts a sweetness which works well with the flavour of game, but the presence of the other ingredients cuts across the sweetness very well, and so avoids any tendency for it to become cloying (which is my gripe with most fruit-meat combinations). This was served both for Christmas dinner, to go with pheasant (boned, and roast with a stuffing of juniper and orange), and again for New Year's Eve, when we had spit-roast venison, along with a rather complicated sauce which included a zibibio syrup and crushed coffee beans. It worked wonderfully!
The quantity indicated here is fine for three servings; when we were eight, for New Year, I tripled the quantities, and had sufficient left over to use subsequently as stuffing for ravioli for six generous servings - which was also delicious, served just with melted butter.

Ingredients: 40g Butter; 50g Pancetta, diced finely; 1 large or 2 medium sticks of celery, diced; 250g peeled Chestnuts; 60 ml Marsala; 60 ml water; salt and pepper.

Method:

1. Melt the butter over low heat, add to it the diced pancetta, raise the heat and cook for a few minutes until the pancetta starts to give off fat. Add to the pan the diced celery and cook, stirring, to soften it, for another three or four minutes.

2. Pulse the chestnuts in the food processor - only briefly.....they want to be broken up but not reduced to a mush - and add them to the pan with the celery and pancetta. Stir to amalgamate, and then add to the pan both the marsala and the water.

3. Cook over low heat (I use a heat diffuser for this stage) for about half an hour, stirring frequently, until the individual ingredients have all collapsed. Add seasoning to taste.

This dish can be cooked in its entirety several hours in advance, and reheated over a low flame once final preparations for dinner are underway; be careful, though - if the heat is too high, the mixture has a tendency to catch and for the bottom of the pan to become a claggy mess!

Christmas Pudding Recipe

That time of year, again. The tree is in its place in the barn (but won't be decorated until Christmas week...we stick firmly to the Anglo-Saxon tradition of having the thing fully functioning not long before the 25th, but if we don't buy it and install it at the start of the month, we risk getting only the ratty remnants left unbought by the Italians, all of whom have to have their Christmas decorations up by December 8th, in time for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Which is today.)
The puddings are steaming away on the stove - one for us, and a larger one for the Paoli, who always have a rabbit's-friends-and-relations gathering for Christmas day.  As I've done for the past few years, the pudding more or less follows a very reliable recipe from Marguerite Patten, which includes not only apple and carrot, but also prunes and apricots...as well as all of the usual more run-of-the-mill dried fruit, and a healthy dollop of black treacle.
The recipe couldn't be simpler. So far, the puddings have had five and a half hours....so, they'll be about ready by the time I've finished writing this.

For two medium-sized, or one very large pudding:

Ingredients: 4 oz Suet; 1 lb 12 oz mixed dried fruit and peel; 4 oz dried apricots, chopped; 4 oz prunes, chopped; 4 oz slivered almonds; 4 oz muscovado sugar; 1 medium carrot, peeled and finely diced; 1 medium apple, peeled, cored and finely diced; 3 oz plain flour; 6 oz fresh breadcrumbs; 1/2 tsp each of cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice; 1 tsp each of grated lemon and orange zest; 1 tbs each of lemon and orange juice; 1 generous tbs black treacle; 8 fl oz milk; 2 large or 3 medium eggs, lightly beaten.

Method:

1. Combine all of the ingredients in a large bowl, and stir carefully to mix together very thoroughly. Leave, covered, overnight.

2. Grease two pudding bowls (or one large one, as you wish), and fill them with the mixture, levelling the top once done. Cover each bowl with a circle of greaseproof paper, with one pleat in, to allow it to expand as necessary, then cover the greaseproof paper in turn with aluminium foil. Tie round the neck of the pudding bowl with string.

3. Steam over a low heat for 5-6 hours; if the lid of the pan is not tight fitting, you might need to replenish the water as you go; always best to check, just in case.

4. Once steamed, remove from heat, and once they have sufficiently cooled,  replace the greaseproof and foil cover with fresh versions of the same. Store in a cool place, until Christmas Day.

5. To re-heat, steam again for 2 hours.

Always served in this house with brandy butter.

Belforte for the weekend...

Looking over the rooftops, and out over the Etruscan landscape

Winter sunshine - deceptively warm, for the first few minutes!

A Siamese on a mission

Vines, tidied away for the winter

The view across the terrace of the Doctor's house

Kitchen 'the morning after', looking surprisingly organised

Tonight's Dinner:

Fettucine Alfredo

Boned Pheasant, roast with orange and juniper, served on a bed of green lentils

Vanilla Apple Tarts

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there's some corner of a foreign field 

That is forever England. There shall be

In that rich earth, a richer dust concealed; 

A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,

Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,

A body of England's, breathing English air

Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,

A pulse in the eternal mind, no less

Gives somewhere back those thoughts by England given;

Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day

And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,

In hearts at peace, under an  English heaven.

For my Father

10 June 1928 - 2 November 2015

Prune & 'Armagnac' Tart

I've lost track of the number of versions of this recipe that I've come across - all are good, some are better than others. The flavours work perfectly together, and the velvety creaminess of the texture, if cooked correctly at low heat, is luxury incarnate! On one occasion, I remember serving this as dessert to 120 diners, at a banquet at Trinity House, and being inundated on the following day with messages of congratulation...all of which with due humility I passed silently on to Marco Pierre White (whose recipe, in essence this is). I've played around to a degree with the quantities in MPW's original, which I took from the pages of his improbably named 'Wild Food from Land & Sea' ; MPW is in general lousy when it comes to specifying quantities, and a common-sense filter is always advisable when translating his recipes from the page to the kitchen -  more often than not, his stated quantity 'sufficient for ten servings' would in fact comfortably feed an entire squadron.
Ramsay has a version which works almost as well as the MPW one, except that in Ramsay's version the filling is blitzed in a food processor before being poured into the tart shell - which has the, to my mind, unfortunate consequence of giving it the worrying appearance of brown sludge.
I've put 'Armagnac' in inverted commas in the title here, since although the trad title for the dish refers always to armagnac,  it would be nuts to use good armagnac for cooking, and instead a perfectly serviceable bog-standard cognac does perfectly well. Armagnac is for drinking.

For one eight inch tart, with accompanying sauce.

Ingredients:
1 x 8" shortcrust pastry tart shell; 140g stoneless prunes; 125g sugar; 75 ml French brandy;  6 egg yolks; 150ml milk; 350 ml cream; generous tsp of vanilla essence (or the scraping of half a vanilla pod, if feeling extravagent).

Method:

1.In a small pan, to 50g of the sugar add 75 ml water; bring to the boil, and simmer for one minute only over medium heat.

2. Dice the prunes into approx 1 cm dice and put in a small bowl. Add to these the sugar syrup and the brandy. Stir briefly, cover, and leave to macerate for at least four hours, and preferably overnight.

3. Blind-bake the tart shell at 180 degrees C, until the pastry has browned nicely. Reduce the oven temperature to 120 degrees C.

4. Mix together the egg yolks, cream, milk, remaining sugar, and vanilla.  Drain the prunes,  add the macerating liquid to the mixture in the bowl, and stir to ensure it is properly incorporated. Distribute the pieces of prune over the base of the pastry shell. Transfer the egg/cream mixture to a jug, and carefully pour into the tart shell as much of the mixture as you can manage to get in before it overflows - you should have about half of the mixture left over.

5. Bake the tart for an hour; the mixture will 'set' at this temperature, rather than bake.

6. While the tart is in the oven, pour the leftover mixture into a simmertopf or double boiler, and heat it gently, just sufficiently to cook the egg yolks.

Serve Tart and sauce while they are still warm (although served cold, they will still be pretty delicious!)