Recipe: Potato Gratin

This is a wonderful dish for grey, wintry days. Simplicity itself, but with a glorious smell which pervades the house as the gratin slowly does its thing in the oven over a period of several hours. Although meat-free, the presence of a dash of nutmeg somehow implies the use of a rich beef broth somewhere along the line, which gives to the dish a surprising additional dimension.

This goes excellently with pretty much anything... and is equally fantastic when sneaked cold from the fridge on the following day.

For six.

Ingredients: 1 kg Potatoes (something like Maris Piper is fine); 6 medium Shallots; 2 large Garlic cloves; generous pinch of grated Nutmeg; 1 tsp dried Thyme; 8 fl oz Milk; 8 fl oz Cream; 2 tsp Salt; Pepper, half a dozen grinds of the mill; 2 tablespoons of Butter.

Method:

1. Heat the oven to 150 degrees C.

2. Peel the Potatoes and slice them finely, either (carefully) by hand or by using a mandoline. Put the slices immediately to soak in a large bowl of cold water, and leave them soaking while you prep the shallots and garlic.

3. Peel and finely chop both the Shallots and the Garlic; mix them together in a small bowl, along with the Nutmeg, Thyme, Salt & Pepper.

4. Drain the Potato slices into a colander (shake it to remove as much excess water as possible), and arrange a third of them in a layer to cover the bottom of a buttered baking dish. Cover this layer with half of the Sallot-Garlic mixture....then another layer of Potates, then the remainder of the Shallot-Garlic mixture, and finally a last layer of Potato.

5. Combine the Milk & Cream in a jug, and pour it over the top layer of Potato slices. Dice the Butter and scatter it over the top of the gratin. Bake in the pre-heated oven for two hours (and if you don't want to serve it immediately, it can then hold in an oven at 100 degrees C for a further hour, and will come to no harm).

Autumn storms are upon us...

Gale-force winds and torrential rain outside - if I hadn't seen it before, I'd worry for the survival of the garden (but since it happens every year at this time, then one can afford to be sanguine). Indoors, the combined aromas of pastry shells and a potato gratin baking in the oven, a pear poaching gently in red wine (for the top of a tart for supper), and celery tops, diced and sautéeing in butter (to form part of a stuffing for ravioli).

Two dogs sleep peacefully on the floor, having exhausted themselves by energetic games with a tennis ball, up and down the hallways.

Life isn't all bad...

Tonight's dinner:

Ravioli, stuffed with Celery, served in a Parsley & Cream sauce.

Slices of Chicken Breast, in Lemon & Capers; Potato Gratin.

Tarts of Vanilla-poached Pear, on a brandy-flavoured Crème Patissière

Recipe: Apple and Calvados Souffle

Along with grapes, the other glut that we're currently experiencing is apples. Vast quantities of them...and I'm not complaining. Chicken pieces sautéed with garlic and then baked with apple & thyme; thin-crust pies, filled with apple and guinea-fowl, and a sage flavoured cream; strawberry and apple tarts; apple and vanilla tarts, with brandy; apple and cinnamon cake....and now, an apple and Calvados soufflé which is both light and delicious, but with an unexpected edge.

This recipe has the additional benefit that it uses only egg whites, not the yolks, and so is another one for the list of dishes which eats into the ever-present egg-white mountain which lurks in a plastic container at the back of the fridge!

For two individual soufflés.

Ingredients: 2 apples (my preference is for something pink and robust like Gala or Pink Lady); 1 oz butter; 2 oz +1 tablespoon sugar; 4 sponge fingers (or thin pieces of sponge cake - something which will readily absorb liquid); 2 tablespoons calvados; 4 egg whites; icing sugar (to serve).

Method:

1. Grease (or Trennwax) two individual ramekins. Line the base of each ramekin with the peices of sponge finger (or sponge cake) and add a spoonful of Calvados to each ramekin, trying to soak the pieces of sponge evenly.

2. Melt the butter in a small pan, and add to this the apples, peeled, cored and finely diced, and the 2 oz of sugar. Cook over medium heat, stirring frequently, for ten minutes or so, until the apple is good and soft. Allow to cool slightly and then purée in the food processor.

3. Beat the egg whites until quite stiff, then add the remaining tablespoon of sugar and beat for a further ten seconds or so.

4. Stir a quarter of the egg whites into the apple mixture, then fold in the rest of the egg whites and divide the mixture between the two ramekins. Place the ramekins in a bain marie and bake 15 minutes in a 220 degree C oven.

Serve straight from the oven, after dusting the tops with icing sugar.

How to de-seed grapes

We have a glut of grapes, both white and dark. In the fridge currently is of a box of about ten kilos of the things which the Technical Dept harvested from the garden in about three minutes, at the start of the week, and I've been working my way through relevant recipes ever since. A white grape sorbet was pretty good, frothed with some beaten egg white and enlivened with a glass of vin santo, and last night's Duck, pot-roast in white grapes also got significant points. I've tended to stick with recipes where the process of crushing or liquidizing or sieving eliminates the need to deal with the seeds, since de-seeding grapes has always been for me one of the most thankless of all kitchen chores. Until now. Research has unearthed this elegant version of keyhole surgery which is both quick and efficient:

1. Take a standard paper-clip and unfold it into a 'S' shape.

2. Insert one end of the 'S' into the end of the grape which was where the stalk had previously been, and bear down into the grape.

3. Bury the clip into the grape to the depth of the first arm of the 'S', and then invert it, so the bit you first inserted is now pointing back up in the direction whence it came, and you have the curve of the clip in the centre of the grape, positioned to act as a hook.

4. Twist the clip slightly, to loosen the innards of the grape, and then carefully pull the clip out of the grape, bringing the seeds with it.

5. Once the seeds reach daylight, discard them and move on to the next grape.

Couldn't be simpler!

Tonight's dinner:

Celery Risotto (with stock made from last night's Duck)

Sausages of Wild Boar, with a Potato and Shallot Gratin

Clafouti of White Grapes, baked in Lemon & Cognac Cream

Mayhem at the Flower stall...

...in Borgo Stretto, this morning. I've no idea why - perhaps because the dogs had decided to sleep late for a change, and so it was already gone nine before I hit the streets...

Two chain-smoking women who were arguing about the price of lilies, a smartly dressed donna with a ratty little dog that she was holding back from everybody and proudly proclaiming to be 'aggressivo' (which said more about her than about the ratty dog, I thought), the usual shy-looking nun in her white habit, who always spends ages trying to decide how optimally to spend the five euros at her disposal; a bruiser of a woman in an orange jump suit, who looked as though she was about to thump some chap who carelessly walked into her armful of gladioli; a well-coiffed matron in purple who piously crossed herself in front of the shrine at the corner of the street, and appeared pained at the proximity (maybe even at the existence?) of everybody else who was there...and a whole host of others milling around and generally tripping over each other.

Definitely time for the first coffee of the morning by the time I'd extricated myself from the throng and retreated, flowers in hand, to the calm of the street beyond.

The beautiful autumn weather continues...warm and sunny, and intense blue skies - although the forecast is for a week of rain, from tomorrow, which will be excellent for the garden and for my major transplanting exercise. Already, I've moved the azaleas, the white wisteria, a couple of hebes, one marie pavié rose (perhaps a little prematurely - I'll wait a couple of weeks, I think, before doing more roses) and the acanthus plants. Today, I'll do the hellebores and the japanese anemone, and I've started to prepare beds in the citrus garden for the agapanthus plants (all thirty five of them!).

I found two excellent uses for Fragole grapes: a sorbet, which is simplicity itself (stew the grapes in sugar and water, before roughly crushing them, and pushing the cooled mash through a sieve - when cold, process in the ice cream machine, with the addition of a glass of Vin Santo, from the bottle home-made by Beppe, the carpenter up in Belforte); and a version of a Bellini, which in this case is called a Tiziano, where the peaches are replaced by fragola grape juice, in the proportion of one to three of grape juice to chilled prosecco. Delicious. It appears there's a further variation on the theme, where strawberry purée is used instead, which is called a Rossini; the Technical Department tells me I've drunk it, in the bar of the Cipriani in Asolo, but given that that was twenty five years ago, I'll have to take his word for it. Clearly, it didn't make a lasting impression...

Onward and upward. Much to do...

Tonight's Dinner:

Risotto with Onion & Sage.

Bistecca alla Diavola; Beans in Parmesan.

Strawberry tarts.

We all agreed..

...that although it wasn't the worst dinner we'd ever had, it ranked up there amongst the more memorably bad in our group's combined lifetime's dining-out experience of around several hundred years! Last Friday night, a dinner in Poggibonsi, organised by the local chapter (or should it be 'coven'?) of the Slow Food organisation, of which one of the Belforte contingent is a member. We' d been warned in advance to go easy on carbohydrates in preparation, as the theme of this particular banquet was flour, and the menu appeared to consist of seven different pasta courses followed by a chestnut cake...A challenge, maybe, but not necessarily one we couldn't meet...after all, seven pasta courses could have comprised deliciously light capelletti, and ravioli, and papardelle, with unctuous fillings and delicate sauces...lasagne, and strozzaprete, and fettucine....

They could have done. But they didn't. With knobs on.

The people behind the menu seemed 100% signed up to the misguided Slow Food belief that 'real' food has to revert to peasant cooking at its most back-to-nature level, and each course was earnestly introduced with a description of the particular kind of flour which had gone into it. Farro featured quite a lot ('spelt' flour, in English) as did Grano Saraceno (both as farina and as semola), along with various other varieties - but all of the end results on the plate seemed to me like buckwheat pasta, of a uniform grunge colour, whatever particular strain of flour had gone into the dish! On display in the room were trays of the stuff before it was cooked, all of which resembled large and rather hairy grey cornflakes, and even before the food started to appear, slight doubts had already begun to form.

In the early stages, it was ok....an under-seasoned cream of spinach in which lumps of cooked pasta floated was disappointingly bland, but was quickly redeemed by another cream of some kind, which contained boconcini stuffed with ricotta and basil. Thereafter, though, we were assailed by course after course of indigestible brown pasta, all carefully explained to us, and generally accompanied by the statement that this particular kind of flour is 'multo difficile a lavorare' . "So, why bloody bother?" was the muttered riposte, after yet another steaming bowl of the stuff had been set in front of us.

I think we all fell at the same hurdle - a dish of mud-coloured tortelloni stuffed with, of all things, potato, the taste and texture of which was worryingly like some kind of floor covering. Thereafter, a note of slight hysteria crept into the proceedings, and when the issue was raised as to what exactly all of this was doing to our digestive systems it was difficult to avoid a mass return to nursery humour. We managed. Just. I'm not sure, though, that our final flight into the cold and rainy street outside - once we'd waded through our dessert of chestnut cake with fig marmalade - wasn't followed by the disapproving glances of some of the more worthy of the Slow Food groupies we left behind us.

All-told, it had been the gastronomic equivalent of an early-English music festival...resplendent with crump-horns and dingle-flugels and whatever, all of which is probably historically fascinating, but about which our senses tell us that whatever has happened since then very definitely falls under the heading of 'progress'!

Oh, there was one positive note to the evening. Taking refuge from the terrible weather outside, we'd arrived half an hour before we should have done, and were served while we waited with glasses of a spumante called Meissa. From the hills above Piacenza, it was wonderful. Delicate, without being thin, and with a hint of apricot. A splendid discovery.

And the following night, before the blazing kitchen fire in Belforte, we feasted on roast lamb, directly from one of the local farmers, accompanied by green beans and a zucchini gratin - all from the garden - as was practically everything that went into the dessert of apple & rosemary crepes with a lemon and walnut sauce. Now, that was real food as it should be!

Tonight's Dinner:

Papardelle with ragu.

Lemon Chicken, with diced Broccoli stalks.

Chocolate Zabaglione.

Recipe: Peach & Marsala Cream Tart

In the garden at Santa Caterina is an old late-fruiting white peach tree, which produced several weeks ago a crop of small and rather hard fruit - not exactly ambrosial, and although perfectly edible in their natural state, they benefit significantly from being cooked in some form rather than just eating them as they come off the tree. Combined with apples to make the purée base for an apple and peach tart, for example, or used in this recipe, which is an adaptation from a classic Tarte Normande.

For one 8" tart.

Ingredients: Shortcrust pastry, made with 150g '00' Flour, 120g Butter, and approx 40ml Water; 2 large or 3 medium peaches; 2 oz plus two tablespoons of sugar; 1 Egg; 1 oz Flour; 5 fl oz Cream; 3 tablespoons Marsala; Icing Sugar.

Method:

1. Roll out the pastry, line an 8" false-bottomed tin, and leave to rest for thirty minutes before blind baking in a 200 degree C oven.

2. Stone, quarter and peel the Peaches, and cut into thin slices (you want to be able to lay them flat in the tart shell, such that they can be subsequently covered with the Marsala Cream, without it overflowing the rim of the pastry). Sprinkle over the Peach slices the two spoonfuls of Sugar, and return the tart shell to the oven for a further fifteen minutes.

3. Meanwhile, whisk together the Egg and Sugar, then beat in the Flour, and finally the Cream and the Marsala.

4. Remove the tart shell from the oven and reduce the temperature to 150 degrees C.

5. Carefully pour the Marsala Cream over the Peach slices, and bake in the oven for 25 - 30 minutes, until it has puffed slightly, and the top has begun to brown.

Serve warm, and dust the top with Icing Sugar before you cut into it.