Evening sunshine in Tuscany...

Tonight's Dinner:

San Daniele & Melon (the melons this year are spectacularly good....and it's too hot for cooking, anyway)

Baked Trout; spinach with lemon

Panna Cotta with garden raspberries

The locals...

will not be happy. The first day of June, and the rain has been teeming down since before first light; the sky is leaden, and the air is cool (cold?), with no promise whatsoever of summer - which, by the way, should be properly underway by now, and not merely limbering up indecisively, as it appears to be doing.

I hadn't given it much thought, but then realised that although May is now done, we still haven't felt tempted by rising temperatures indoors to move outside to the courtyard for dinner in the evenings. The Pisani shouldn't despair too much, though - according to Tempo Pisa (my preferred online weather forecast), we should be up to the upper twenties by the middle of next week, and so the italian exodus to the beach at every possible opportunity can get properly underway...which means that the Centro Storico, for us, will become a haven of calm in the wake of the departing population. Bliss.
In the meantime, the four-footed is resigned to a day indoors, curled up on his bed, and I'm making Pain de Campagne in preparation for a Glyndebourne-style picnic of smoked salmon sandwiches and chilled prosecco for consumption during the interval in this evening's performance of Bellini's 'Capuleti e Montecci', to be streamed from the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona right to Screen 2 of the Odeon at the end of the street. The wonders of modern technology.
In between dough-risings, the downside of a rainy day is the time available from gardening to look instead at gardening catalogues...and the probable decision that we do perhaps, after all, have room for another half dozen quercifolias...given that they are doing so splendidly this year...and that maybe a New Dawn would flourish in the relative shade of the southern pergola...and that maybe some himalayan climbers would do well growing through the trees behind the church.
Yet another reason to hope that the rain stops!

Tonight's dinner:

Sandwiches

They came, they saw....

and the rain held off!

The house, in sunlight; I'm not sure why that patch of parthenossisus on the right is 'bald' at the moment, but it is slowly coming into leaf

Our first two garden groups....despite the Technical Dept's downbeat opinion that he didn't feel the garden is exactly yet 'ready for prime time'. Well, the good people of Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire (most of whom seem to have been present, last Monday and the one before) either disagreed, or else were extremely nice and understanding about it. The weather forecast was lousy in advance of the day (each time), but in fact the rain cleared up and the sun came out five minutes before everybody arrived, on both days. The roses and bearded irises performed wonderfully, as did the four-footed (who flirted outrageously with everybody who arrived, to the extent that he was exhausted from all that effort by the time they'd all left).

Approaching the citrus terrace, between grapefruit and bergamot trees, with sweet orange straight ahead

Everything was weeded and pruned and mulched to within an inch of its life, and the scent from the bloosom on the trachelospermum was absolutely intoxicating.

The West pergola, looking south: Cecile Brunner in flower, along with Pierre de Ronsard

Looking along the North Pergola

Looking south, from the North pergola

The border beside the North pergola

The rhyll - empty, here, but for the visits it was full and burbling

Looking across the North lawn, from the Uva Fragola pergola

Pink Perpetue, mixing into Kriton.

The SE pergola, with strawberry beds and raspberry canes behind

Looking into the woodland

New steps, leading down to one of the new box-lined paths

And twenty two for lunch, in the barn, each time - expertly looked after by the two Tamaras, who are part of the georgian-mafia-in-Pisa that we interface through Anna, our georgian cleaner.

Lunch: asparagus agnolotti; bass en croute; and iced white chocolate and gingerbread parfait.

I am SO pleased it is all over....to the extent that I don't even mind that it has been raining practically nonstop since they left.






Tonight's dinner:

will be in London, since we're on the 18.15 (again) this evening,  for this month's 48 hour  furlough.

Why...

when it is 25 degrees, with not a cloud in the sky, and the garden is full of bees, birds (and attendant cats), are we on the 18.15 to London, this evening? Something is not right....

Oh, well. Back home again on Sunday evening....so, I suppose it isn't that much of a hardship.

Tonight's dinner:

Scrambled Eggs with Smoked Salmon

Pork Chops, with balsamic sauce.

Crepes Suzettes

Lemon Drizzle Cake

We have a glut of lemons - this is nothing new; it happens every year, and in fact, given the ripening habit of lemon trees here, is almost constant, year-round. As I get more proficient at pruning lemon trees, however (an annual job from which the deadly thorns which decorate the branches of the trees generally leave my hands and forearms well-shredded!) the crop gets ever more intense. Currently, we have three trees which are literally dripping with fruit (several hundred lemons on each one) and two more which are not much less generous, and three or four others which are biding their time...

And so...lemon & sage risotto; lemon chicken; lemon in salads; lemon cheesecake; lemon tart (classic); lemon & lime tart; lemon meringue pie; limencello cake; lemon souffle glace; burnt lemon cream, with blackberries; lemon sorbet; lemon marmalade, lemonade...any and all new additions to the repertoire are gratefully received.

This particular one is a slight re-working of something from Elizabeth Luard's very reliable 'Recipes and Ramblings'. There's much to be said for collections of recipes which reflect a lifetime of tried-and-trusted experimentation, of which this recipe is a clear example. I've made it two or three times now, most recently to go with a cup of tea following an incoming garden-visit...and the requests for further slices (and for a copy of the recipe) not only broke regularly into the conversation, but left the plate entirely empty as a result.

Ingredients: 6 oz butter, at room temperature; 10 oz sugar; 3 medium eggs; 1 cup '00' flour, mixed with 1.5 tsp baking powder, and half tsp salt; juice from three medium lemons and the zwest from one.

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 170 degrees C.

2. Grease a 2 lb loaf tin (approx 10" x 5"), then make a long strip of aluminium foil (folded over a couple of times), long enough to go the length and both short sides of the loaf tin, and leave a good overhang at either end; put the strip in  place on the base and sort sides of the tin, and grease the exposed top of the foil (this strip allows you to get the cake out of the tin without keaving any of it behind - which it does have a tendency to do).

3. Process the butter along with 6 oz of sugar, and then add the eggs and process to amalgamate properly. Add the lemon  zest and the juice from one the lemons.

4. Scrape the mixture into a large mixing bowl, and fold in the flour mixture, before putting the mixture into the prepared tin.

5. Bake for about 45 minutes, by which time the cake will have risen beautifully, and will have come away from the sides of the tin.

6. While the cake bakes, put the remaining lemon juice and sugar in asmall pan and heat gently over a lwo heat, to make a lemon syrup. As soon as the cake comes out of the oven, pour all of the syrup over it, and let it sit, for the syrup to be absorbed by the cooling cake.

7. Let sit in the tin for 30 minutes or longer, before unmoulding onto plate, pulling on the exposed ends of the aluminium foil as you do so, to ensure the cake unmoulds cleanly.  

A thing of beauty...

Well, in my eyes, at any rate. The hamper arrived, this week, along with many boxes and oddly-wrapped pieces of furniture, and chests, and diverse bits of garden kit and other assorted goods and chattels. The family home in Kent is being dismantled - a thought-provoking process, and one where all sorts of long-forgotten treasures have emerged from cupboards and attics and other dusty resting places. My father's army trunks, for example, which were last used in anger when they were shipped back from Egypt, some years before the Suez Crisis (the uniforms inside were donated to the local charity shop, last month, and the trunks are now doing service as containers for the TD's not insignificant collection of shoes and boots...while my father's swagger sticks - one formal, the other less so - are still trying to 'find their place' somewhere around the house), and about a dozen (at last count) crates of books, and some pictures, and various bits of silver...

The hamper came out of the big house at Mount Clare - my mother seems to think it was passed over to my grandfather, probably by Leggett, the Butler, after LHS died rather unexpectedly in 1941. And it was passed on to my parents at some time early in the 1970's; certainly, I can remember it being in active use for a picnic in the grounds of Fishbourne Palace at around that time (an occasion memorable both for my (paternal) grandmother finding it incomprehensible that the word 'pickaninnies' should no longer be acceptable in common parlance, and for the unrelated blazing row later on the same day between my mother and her mother-in-law, as the result of which relations were frigidly distant for several years afterwards, and we had to make an unplanned stop at the gardens at Wakehurst Place on the way home, in order to allow overheated tempers to simmer down somewhat. Wakehurst Place was rather splendid, I recall.)

It's tantalising to think that perhaps the hamper played a supporting role in romantic interludes between Jean Rhys and LHS, whose mistress she was for some time, I think in the mid-thirties. The hamper probably dates from the end of the twenties. Strawberries and champagne and intimate dalliances on the Sussex Downs, perhaps, or at Goodwood, or muffled up to watch a point-to-point in some muddy field somewhere.  TD tends to think otherwise, though, and that their 'interludes' together were likely to have been a lot less public, and more likely ot have been conducted in the privacy of the rented accommodation in which LHS had set her up, in Kilburn or Kensal Rise, I think it was - in which case, little need for a packed lunch at the same time.

It is indeed a lovely thing. Missing only one of the three wicker-covered bottles from the original set, it is otherwise complete and exactly as it was when it left the shop, around ninety years ago. Thoughts gather of a summer picnic somewhere up in the Garfagnana, or on the shaded slopes of Monte Amiata, or on one of the unspoilt beaches down towards Piombino. TD thinks that the well-house at the end of the garden is a more practical proposition...and he may be right.

Tonight's Dinner:

Ravioli, with grana & beef stuffing, in asparagus sauce.

Vallespluga chicken, boned and roast, with garlic & parsley butter under the skin; roast salsify.

Tarts of fresh raspberries, on Marsala creme patissiere.

 

Excellent new kit...

Pictured like this, it looks as though it belongs in a hairdressing salon rather than in a kitchen...but appearances can be deceptive. This is the piece of kit par excellence for tenderizing steak, and I can tell you that it works wonderfully. Technical Dept first came across reference to something like this some years ago, when he was chatting with a rather garrulous australian assistant in Jack O'Shea's (the butcher, all-too-briefly based in Montpelier Street), who blithely passed on the information that they had a commercial-sized one of these down in the basement, and all of their meat, pretty much, was subjected to it before being sold. It works a little like those pin-things that were so popular about thirty years ago, where you could leave an impression of your hand, or face (or whichever parts of your anatomy you felt like representing) by pushing against the pins, and leaving a 3-D reverse image of yourself in the bed of pins. In this instance, however, you push the pins down, and use them very efficiently to puncture the fibres inside the meat you are tenderising - it takes three or four pushes to tenderise one steak (and I tend then to turn it over and do it again from the other side, just to be sure)...and, that's it. Thereafter, a half-inch thick steak takes a minute on each side on a hot grill, and will be tender and succulent, and mouth wateringly good.

I don't know for how long domestic versions of this have been available, but TD was on the case, and I found one of them for me under the tree, last Christmas. It has the clear advantage of my being able to buy sirloin steaks of less than optimal quality, and by tenderising them with this thing, as a result of which they're pretty much as good as the best. These days, I tend to buy a complete entrecote at Metro - generally South American in origin - and then cut it into steaks for freezing...which means that a tenderised-to-be-perfect sirloin steak comes out at around one euro twenty a head. Which has much to be said for it.

Tonight's dinner:

Fettucine with lemon sauce

Rabbit, boned & rolled, stuffed with prosciutto and celery; mirepoix of vegetables.

Vanilla ice cream, 'rippled' with griottes.