One year on...

It was a year ago this weekend that we first set eyes on the house at Santa Caterina. And already more than three months since we first started sleeping here - I hesitate to say 'since we moved in', as 'moving in' is an ongoing process, and will remain so until the old house in Via Fucini has been sold and the remaining furniture moves from there to here. At the moment, living here is like up-market camping...quite a few of the rooms echoingly empty of all but a few sticks of furniture, windows generally curtainless, and pairs of old doors leaning next to the doorways they're intended to grace (but for which we have yet to find supports which are the right size for their antique hinges).

Having said which, it's wonderful. The topography of the courtyard between the house and the church inexplicably produces a constant gentle breeze which flows from the direction of the Priest's house, and in through the windows of the dining room, on the ground floor, and of the bedroom above. Each morning we wake to the view, two rooms away, through the dressing room window, of terracotta tiles, and then of sunlight on the intensely white facade of the church...blue sky visible beyond.
For the most part, the house and garden are swathed in silence, apart from birdsong...and the few outside noises which do intrude from time to time will soon be covered by the sound of trickling water from the fountains we'll be connecting in the courtyard and on the terrace, and by the sound of water from the larghetto beyond the barn. While we're in London this week, Giancarlo will be working on the ground floor terrace (concealing dusty concrete behind a covering of terracotta) and will then start working on the terrace to be constructed beside the larghetto. The whole project will be work-in-progress for some time to come...but I hope we'll have broken the back of it in time for August, when everybody downs tools, the World stops for two or three weeks, and Pisa, blissfully, becomes a ghost town.

And the other anniversary is the junior four-footed. A year old. I hadn't realised that it had been on the same day that he was born and that we first saw this house. An auspicious date.
He celebrated by running in and out of the sprinkler on the north lawn, and then racing around on the flowerbeds and getting generally caked in mud. In seventh heaven!

Dinner tonight:

Papardelle with Chicken Liver Sauce.

Ossobucci, with Peas & Pancetta.

Tart of Nespole and Almonds.

Lemon Vinaigrette

A recipe from Bruno Loubet. Excellent on tomato salads of all kinds (with spring onion and smoked fish, for example, or on a traditional caprese, with basil and mozzarella). Perfect for summer. The quantities given here make a pint of vinaigrette; you can halve them in order not to have too much of the stuff at one time, but I find it keeps well in a bottle in the fridge for at least a couple of weeks - you just have to remember to give the bottle a good shake before use each time.

Ingredients: 3 pinches of sugar; salt & pepper; 100 ml water; 100 ml fresh lemon juice; 300 ml olive oil; 100 ml vegetable oil.

Method:

1. Combine the water and lemon juice and dissolve in this mixture the sugar plus three pinches of salt.
2. Add all the remaining ingredients, plus three pinches of pepper. Shake well and pour into a bottle and refrigerate until needed.

Nettles to eat.

Frankly.....I wouldn't advise it.

Jane Grigson says of nettles that they're in the same category as spinach, but just not as good. It's the sort of ingredient to be found on restaurant menus throughout France, which people choose for its curiosity value and come away surprised at how 'not bad' it turns out to be. I remember a sauce made with nettles at a lunch in Paris several years ago - rich bottle-green in colour, and with a strongly mineral flavour which gave some character to the bland white fish with which it was served - and that the 'it's really quite good' response was exactly mine at the time.

For years, the Technical Department has been saying 'we should do something with these', every time the four-footeds have led us to the large and vigorous patch of vibrant green nettles which regularly appears near the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens. Needless to say, we never have - but as I was tearing into the shoulder-high patch of nettles under the Cacci trees to the north of the romitorio the other week, I was reminded of the idea, and a large carrier bag was stuffed with the things accordingly.

There are various methods for dealing with them, but essentially all you do is pick the leaves from the stalks and cook them to a mush (either in lots of salted water, or else in a very little water, depending on who's version you follow) before processing them to a purée. At that point, I added them to some diced onion and garlic which had been sweated in melted butter, and then stirred into the mixture a generous half-cup of cream, and adjusted the seasoning. It looks wonderful. But really, that's about as far as it goes. The flavour of the nettles is frankly rather monotonous, and heavy. Thank heavens for the taste of garlic in the sauce, which at least introduces another note.

On the first evening, we had the sauce over fresh ravioli, stuffed with spinach and cheese. The parmesan in the ravioli helped to lighten the oppressive one-note quality of the sauce...but more cheese and less sauce would have been better....and indeed no sauce at all would have been a distinct improvement! I gave the stuff a second chance on the following evening, when I used a quantity of the sauce as the basis for a soufflé. No good. Positively lumpen.

With a last regretful look at the rich, British-Racing-Green colour, I emptied the rest of the sauce down the garbage disposal, and got the wheelbarrow out in order to finish clearing the rest of the things from the garden.

On reflection, we concluded that Jane Grigson's description should be qualified to read: Not as good as spinach...but better than grass clippings. And then, having thought about it some more, the qualification should further read: Better than grass clippings (but not by much...)

Tonight's dinner:

Smoked Mackerel Rillettes, with a Tomato Salad in Lemon Vinaigrette.

Spit Roast Chicken (the wall barbecue is now installed and functioning in the new kitchen!); Broccoli purée.

Melon Sorbet.

Highlights of the week...

Lunch at Da Marino in Serravalle...we hadn't been in years, and managed to persuade the Belfortes to meet there rather than flogging all the way into Florence for lunch at Osteria Uno (or whatever it's called these days, I forget now...) and a De Chirico exhibition afterwards at the Strozzi. In the event, the Belfortes did the exhibition beforehand, proclaimed it a complete waste of time, and lunch was splendid! The lightest ribollito imaginable; a dish of polenta with white truffles and a poached quail's egg...sublime; excellent rabbit; a delicious stifato; a couple of bottles of excellent sauvignon...and the inevitable fragolina to drink with dessert(which was a little ho-hum...dessert, I mean...but then, that's generally the case in Italy; desserts just don't form part of the vernacular, I've come to realise).

Thousands of fireflies in the garden every evening. Literally, thousands. The first evening that I saw them from the terrace, I went along to the end of the church to see how they appeared away from any light source, and looking along the walk at the back of the church was like a miniature version of Oxford Street at Christmas. Myriad pinpricks of light piercing the darkness, flashing on and off as the flies drifted around in the warm night air. Completely surreal.

Poppies, blood-red, suddenly appearing in their hundreds on the north lawn, in the morning sunlight. Renoir would have been reaching for his brushes. I'm afraid I just got the lawn-mower out, instead (nothing against poppies, but it was time for the lawns to be 'done'...and in this garden, it's a constant struggle to keep the forces of nature even halfway at bay; in any event, there were hundreds more poppies in their place two days later).

The first of our strawberry crop!

The arrival, finally and after a few false starts, of summer...

And the low-point of the week? Losing the will to live in the kitchen design department (Ha! If ever there was a misnomer!) of IKEA in Sesto Fiorentino. We're installing a kitchen in the first floor of the old house as part of the process of selling it. Technical Dept thought it would be quickest to order the stone from IKEA, on the basis that they must process hundreds of orders like this every week, and therefore it would all be quick and efficient and painless. As if! Two hours of standing around, while two assistants who clearly had no clue what they were doing ineffectually pressed computer keys for a design software programme which they had no idea how to operate. In the end, we lost patience, and left them to it. For all I know, they're at it even now.
We'll just go back to Signor Roggi, and order the stone from him - even with his eccentric delivery timetables, he can't be half as bad as the witless lot at IKEA...

Tonight's dinner:

Shrimp ravioli.

Involtini, with Leek and Parmesan; Fagiolini.

Lemon Tart

Recipe: Strawberry Beignets

The strawberry glut is upon us...and this is even before our own strawberry beds in the garden have properly ripened! A crate of strawberries ( either from Sicily, or else from the warmth of the polytunnels around Pescia) winked up at me the other day, and at only four euros for two kilos it was impossible to resist. Half a kilo has gone to make a quantity of Balsamic Strawberries, and another half went into strawberry and orange sorbet; a strawberry bavarois for supper tomorrow, and a container of vanilla ice-cream, with chopped strawberries added half way through churning, will finish the crate...after a couple of servings last night of the most delicious strawberry beignets, that is.

Served with a chilled crème anglaise, these are quite wonderful! Individual strawberry and lemon flavour-bombs, crisp inside their batter shells, and blanketed with the velvety richness of chilled crème. Not particularly for a formal occasion, since all the work is done right at the end, and for best results the beignets need to be eaten while still crisp and hot, and so should be consumed while the next batch is still being fried.

For four.

Ingredients: 24-30 fresh strawberries, hulled;
Batter:2 eggs, separated; 1 cup of flour; half a cup of milk; a generous pinch of salt; 1 tbs white wine; grated rind from 1 lemon; 1 tbs oil
Crème: 2 egg yolks; 10 fl oz milk; 1 tsp vanilla; quarter of a cup of sugar.
Icing sugar, to garnish.
Approx 2 litres of light oil, for frying.

Method:

1. Make the Crème Anglaise - heat the milk in a simmertopf; beat the yolks and sugar together until pale yellow, then whisk in the heated milk; return the mixture to the simmertopf for five minutes or so, until it has achieved spoon-coating thickness; whisk in the vanilla, and put aside to cool. Once cool, chill in the fridge.

2. Make a batter with all the ingredients listed, apart from the egg whites and the tablespoon of oil; beat the egg whites until stiff, and stir these into the batter along with the tablespoon of oil.

3. Heat the frying oil until it is very hot (it should read 395 degrees F, or thereabouts). Pour the chilled sauce onto soup plates.

4. Using cocktail sticks, spear the strawberries individually, and coat them in batter before dropping them into the hot oil. Stir them as necessary to make sure they brown on all sides - this should take only a couple of minutes. As they are done, remove them from the oil and briefly drain on kitchen paper. Dredge them with icing sugar, and place half a dozen or so per serving on each soup plate.

Serve.

NB: Make sure to put a lid on the pan in which you've been frying after you've finished; even once the heat has been turned off, the oil will continue to vaporise, and the lid will at least reduce the unavoidable odour which will otherwise penetrate the entire house!

To Ninfa...

Wonderful. Spectacular. Beyond description - even despite the fact that the weather was terrible, and we began by sheltering in the car park for twenty minutes, as hailstones beat on the roof of the car, and muddy puddles turned into small lakes all around us. In fact, I don't think anything, short of the apocalypse, could manage to compromise Ninfa's beauty...

We've been meaning to go for years, and the refrain each year that 'next April...we must go to Ninfa' (normally over a mid-winter glass of something, in the company of the Brancolis) was getting to be like a re-run of To the Lighthouse (leaving aside Mrs Ramsay and the famous daube). I suspect neither words nor pictures can do the place justice - photographs look too posed, and give no sense of the way that wherever you turn, magnificent vistas casually present themselves. Glorious roses everywhere;wisteria cascading over ruined walls, and across streaming torrents; a river massed with thousands of arum lilies in bloom; the walled garden, with serried ranks of mandarin and grapefruit trees, heavy with fruit, beneath the stark ruins of the castle keep...By the time we met the Belforte crew in Rome at the end of the day, we could do nothing but burble incoherently, and at length, about quite how magical the place is. A perfect garden.

And then two days in Rome, avoiding cloudbursts. And eating. Interspersed with culture, in the form of the Galleria Doria (a few gems, in between an awful lot of extremely shaky attributions), the Palazzo Massimo (for the frescoes and wall paintings), and the etruscan treasures of the Villa Giulia - which is a glory in itself, another example of sheer perfection from Vignola.

And to eat? Lunch at Pierluigi in Via Monserrato was memorable - as the rain fell gently overhead, we feasted sumptuously on small fried things, followed by a perfectly grilled fish (which looked to me like an Orata, but, I was informed, was the version from around Naples, the name of which I immediately forgot, but the flavour of which lingers even now...); for dinner, at Evangelista (Via Zoccoletto) the carciofi squashed between bricks and baked were intriguing, and delicious; and a Frascati over lunch the next day at Sant'Eustachio that it would have been all too easy to devote an entire afternoon to....

If only Pisa had one place that even began to compare. Ah, well.

Tonight's Dinner:

Celery 'Flamiches'

Grilled Duck Breast, in Garlic, Bay & Thyme; fresh Peas.

Panettone & Strawberry Bread & Butter Pudding

Recipe: Pollo Tonnato

A poor man's version of vitello tonnato, I'm not sure which came first. Certainly, Artusi included pollo tonnato when he was writing in the 1890's, and it wouldn't surprise me if the better-known version using veal wasn't a later gentrification of an essentially peasant dish. Excellent for a summer lunch, or supper - we had it last Saturday, when some of the Belforte crowd arrived for lunch in the garden, and there were sufficient leftovers again for supper on Sunday. Obviously, the chicken needs to be cooked the previous day, to give it enough time to cool down properly; apart from that, the process is very straightforward, and takes very little time actually in the kitchen.

I served braised lettuce as the vegetable to go with the chicken, and used the reduced poaching liquid (and vegetables) from the chicken to go with the lettuces once they'd been blanched and halved and were ready to go into the oven. It worked excellently, saved much time, and meant there was absolutely no waste. Alternatively, you could strain the liquid and use it for another meal in a risotto or a soup in place of stock.

For six.

Ingredients: 1 large chicken (or 2 small ones, as I used last week - currently, there don't seem to be any chickens of decent size available here) - preferable if you remove the wishbone at this stage, as it makes carving that much easier later on; 2 carrots, peeled; 1 onion, peeled; 2 sticks celery; 1 small (approx 8 oz) tin of tomato; 10 fl oz white wine; 5 peppercorns; 2 tsp salt; a handful of parsley; 2 egg yolks; approx 10 fl oz olive oil; 4 tbs lemon juice; 4 oz canned tuna; 3 anchovy fillets; 2 tbs capers.

Method:

1. In 2 tbs of the oil, heated in a large casserole, sauté the finely diced onion, carrots and celery, until they have completely collapsed (about ten minutes over medium heat). Add the tomato, parsley and wine, and bring to the boil. Add the chicken(s) to the casserole, add seasoning, and cover with water. Bring the liquid to the boil, and then simmer, partially covered for an hour.

2. Remove the chicken from the poaching liquid, and allow to cool completely (overnight, and in the fridge is best). Boil the poaching liquid down until you have about a litre left, and use it as suggested above.

4. With the remaining olive oil and the egg yolks make a mayonnaise, and add to it 1 tbs of the lemon juice.

5. Process the tuna, anchovies, and half of the capers, along with the remaining lemon juice; fold this mixture into the mayonnaise, along with the remaining capers. Check and adjust the seasoning as necessary.

6. Cut the chicken into serving pieces (breasts sliced, and legs cut into thighs and drumsticks), and put half of them in the base of a serving dish; cover with half the tuna mixture, and then repeat. Refrigerate until serving...preferably for at least a couple of hours, to allow the flavours to do their thing.

Serve.