of getting side-tracked

It's easy to get side-tracked in any walk of life. There's been a couple of things recently which illustrate this nicely. First of all I have recently received this award, which I was meant to pass on to a deserving recipient. Well, ok I almost forgot about it..., but after much deliberation I have now come up with two deserving blogs to pass this award on to. Both of them go to America, which just goes to show that not everyone in that strange country is humourless and thoughtless. Gives you hope really... Sorry, I didn't mean to alienate all my American readers, but I've had some bad experiences. I know you sensible Americans also exist! Here it goes anyway:

1. http://subsistencepatternfoodgarden.blogspot.com/. In this blog Mike describes his adventures of living self-sufficiently in northern Idaho. He's clearly keeping his sense of humour despite battling the elements in this northern climate. He even manages to convince his wife to raid the flower bed for edibles, so well done that man!


2. http://siciliansistersgrow.blogspot.com/. This one I only very recently started following. It is about 2 sisters (according to the blog name of Italian decent?) growing and gathering most of their food needs in California. Again a great read and good tips for the small holder anywhere. They even keep exact count on what they grow over the year, that's what I call efficient!

Do have a look at their blogs, if you are at all interested in alternative living.

The other illustration on getting side-tracked (apart from forgetting to pass on awards) is when you get down to do relatively simple job. Being still hampered by that stupid piece of bamboo in my arm, we have recently got rather behind on a lot of the heavy duty jobs, such as chopping wood, digging over beds, strimming down the bush etc. On Sunday our next door neighbour Marco turned up with an apricot tree he had just dug up from his garden, did Iwant it? Well, yes, even if I think he dug it up a bit early in the winter.

Sunday we didn't have time to plant it. Monday the weather was appalling and we were stuck indoors trying to keep the rain out of our leaking window. Tuesday was glorious again, however we couldn't stick it into the car and take it to the land immediately, because it was far to big and needed to be cut down first. All our gardening tools however, including any secateurs and loppers, are sensibly stored on our land (for those new to my blog, we live 10 km away from our food source). So we decided to go over to the land, digging a hole for the tree as well as doing a couple other jobs, then bring back some loppers to cut the apricot to size.

So on Tuesday Susan started turning the compost, our annual job for the waning moon phase in November, whilst I started digging the hole. Now how long can that take? I found a nice spot, i.e. next to where last winter we felled a majestic but ill cherry tree. A ring of the hollowed out trunk still remained, so I thought I'll just split that quickly into a few logs for fire wood. The first couple of logs split easily, but on the next one my axhead got irretrievably buried. So I got another axhead to get out the first one. That also ate itself into the wood and wouldn't budge.

Not having done a lot less physical work recently due to my injury I also found that my strength wasn't what it used to be and I developed blisters on my hand. Finally after much huffing and puffing, with the help of Susan, an iron bar as leverage, a pick ax and a spade we managed to free the ax heads and chop the wood into bite-size bits.

It was getting time for some lunch and I still hadn't dug my hole! After lunch I passed my recently sown bed which was to contain fennel and celery. I noted with satifaction that the fennel was doing exceptionally well, but needed a bit of weeding, whilst I couldn't see any sign of the celery. I sowed the celery late this year, because last year, when I did sow it in spring, I had loads of celery in the summer. I like celery in soups and stews in the winter though, and by then there was nothing left! So I thought I'll try for a winter crop.

This is what the fennel looks like now (after weeding):

As I looked closer at the row where I sowed the celery, I found there were some tiny seedlings, but that all the weeds around it had contrived to look just like celery. So after going through it with a fine tooth comb (no hoeing here possible!) I did find quite a few seedlings. They were sown at the same time as the fennel, but are a fraction of the size. At this rate, they'll be ready in the summer again...

This all took quite a while again and Susan had gone on to dig over a large bed, which was home to cucumbers, melons, courgettes and tomatoes this year, where we are planning to plant onions next. Finally before it got dark, I managed to get this hole dug (I'd have done it in the dark!) and filled with compost in readiness for the apricot tree, but taking some 5 hours to dig a hole is what you call getting side-tracked.

So today we went back in sometimes lighter, sometimes heavier drizzle and planted this tree. Here it is. I hope it will survive. It still had all it's leaves before it got dug up, but at least it got watered in nicely.

Finally, number 5 in our ever popular series of strangely shaped vegetable: The alien potato:

"ET phone home..."

A walk to clear the head

Last night I had a bit of an argument with this new telephone company we've joined earlier in the year over a phone bill. This morning, to my great annoyance, it stopped working all together, i.e. no internet no phone connection. We weren't overdue or anything. Phoning their service line is free from a land line, but not from a mobile, apart from the fact, that we have bad reception in our house anyway and they put you through the usual routine for 10 minutes: "if you are an existing cutomer press one, if your granny wants a new phone line press twentytwoandahalf," etc, etc. So I just went off in a big huff this morning.

We had some business at the local commune in the valley, so we left home on foot to sort that out. Then I said to Susan, I could do with a beer for lunch now, fancy wondering over to our cheap shop on the other side of the river in Albiano. Arriving there I still felt I needed to let off steam, so I said let's explore the hills above Albiano and see what's up there.

Well I can tell you now, we've had a fantastic day! Climbing up the hill opposite our village we came across a signpost towards Stadano Bonaparte. I don't like walks where I return the same way we went, and I knew there's a bridge at Stadano back across the river. Incidentally, you may have guessed, the small village of Stadano Bonaparte is the ancestral home of Napoleon, however, you wouldn't know about it, it's all modern buildings now.

Here's a view towards it:

The best thing was though that the path was not well trodden and absolutely teeming with beautiful mushrooms. To my regret I can not identify many for definite, but one of the most impressive looking and most easily identifiable is the parasol. I put my phone next to this specimen to give you an idea of the size of the bugger!

By the time I had the camera ready the small family of fairies sheltering under it had already disappeared, they don't like having their picture taken. You just have to take my word for it. Oh hang on there was a big fairy peeping out from one...

This is one from above:

and another which hasn't opened yet:

They are great fried with a bit of bacon. The closed ones make good stuffed mushrooms with a sage and onion stuffing. We only picked 2 as we couldn't possibly eat more than that, but I've read in the meantime that they dry well, so we shall return to pick some more.

Soon we found out, why the path wasn't so well trodden, it had eroded away shortly before Stadano and ended in a sheer cliff above the river. So we did have to return the same way we went. Here are some more impressions from our walk:

holly oak

fern on a stone wall

an autumn view of the village of Caprigliola.

And when we returned home, the phone line was ok again, thank god.

of strawberry trees

"Hah!" I hear you people laugh, "now this country bumpkin is trying to tell us strawberries grow on trees! He's been on the funny mushrooms again!" Well no, not exactly, but this is my latest discovery on my search for free edibles gathered from the wild.

I had long noticed these evergreen trees with colourful strawberry like fruit growing on them, but assumed they were only good for the local bird population. In fact the fruit of the strawberry tree, Arbutus unedo, also known as Irish Strawberry or Killarney strawberry due to the fact that they grow in the south west of Ireland too, is perfectly edible. Ok, it's not as tasty as a strawberry. In fact Pliny the Elder explains the Latin name unedo as meaning unum edo, I eat one, referring to the fact that you really aren't tempted to have another one once you've had one.

The fruit, known as Corbezzolo in Italian, doesn't taste bad raw, just slightly sweet, a bit bland and very pithy. In fact with it's tiny seeds it has a similar consitency to strawberries too. According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strawberry_Tree) only the Portuguese and the Italians utilize the fruit to make liqueurs and jams. This is what it looks like:



I had a recipe in my Ligurian preserve recipe book, which I thought was worth trying out for a jam. I have no idea what the nutritional value of the fruit is, but we collected just under a kilo to see what we could do.



Here's the recipe: to each kilo of strawberry tree fruit you need 400g sugar and a small glass of alchermes liqueur.

Slowly boil the fruit with a splash of water until soft. Press through a tomato mill and reheat together with the sugar and the liqueur. According to the book you are then to let it simmer for a couple of hours, but mine would have turned to caramel by then. 45 minutes was more than sufficient.

As far as the liqueur is concerned, it's a traditional Italian red herbal liqueur. It went out of fashion, when people discovered that the red colour was made from crushed insects. Modern commercial versions of the drink use some chemical food dye instead, and people prefer that. Isn't it odd that people rather take in some artificial colourant than a flavourless natural dye, just because it's made from some creepy crawly... As far as the actual flavour components of alchermes is concerned, they are cinnamon bark, cloves, vanilla, coriander seeds and nutmeg. You can make your own version, by steeping those in alcohol for a couple of days, then filter and add sugar and water to get to about 30% alcohol and leave for another month or so. If you want the traditional red colour, you can add maybe some beetroot juice.



On our wild food gathering trip we also picked some more juniper berries

as well as more chestnuts, pine kernels and even a few mushrooms. The latter I haven't positively identified yet, so might not get eaten.

Finally here a picture of our chilli loving kitten Rooney. She has curled herself up inside a flowerpot with a chilli plant.

just a quick follow up on the last post

This lovely rainbow taken from outside our front door yesterday, marked the end of the brief rains and heralded in some warm sunny weather again. Time to go out wild food gathering again.

Here is yet another of my high tec gadgets, purchased last weekend at the St. Happy Fair, a chestnut cutter. A simple device cutting the small slit into the skin of the chestnut before roasting or boiling them. Yesterday we laboriously peeled (mostly Susan, as my arm started hurting again soon) 1 kg of chestnuts to preserve them under Whisky (see my post from last year at this time for the recipe).

And here just a quick photo taken today of the broad beans planted a month or so ago.

of St. Happy and rainy days

The weather all over Italy had been getting quite unpleasant in the last couple of weeks except for with us. The North, the Alps and subalpine regions have been having their first snow already, as did higher regions of the Abruzzo, well south from us. Sicily, Calabria and Puglia in the very south have had severe flooding. The weather maps kept showing a large curved area of bad weather, just leaving us out.

We are protected to the North by 2 mountain ranges, the Alps and the Appenines from bad weather coming from there. To the East the massive Apuanan Alps shield us from anything coming that way. Only when the dreaded Scirocco wind blows from the South-West do we ever get rain. So whilst the rest of the country was sheltering indoors we spent a sunny afternoon on Sunday at the Fiera di San Felice, the 'St. Happy Fair'.



It's an annual event here in Santo Stefano and is basically just a huge sprawling market selling anything from the latest imported plastic toys from China, to all manner of kitchen ware, clothes, tractors and other agricultural eqipument, garlic, olive oil, cheese, useful and useless craft articles, umbrellas, hats, live and dead chickens, goldfish, pet and eating rabbits, donkeys (alive and stuffed), you name it.



We go there every year, partially as a social event, you meet everyone you know, partially to buy a couple of things we've been meaning to buy for a while, and partially to simply stuff our faces. I don't know what San Felice was famous for, but looking at the number of stands dedicated to this one particular thing, he's clearly the patron saint of porchetta, Tuscan roast pork.

Other food stuffs were available too, such as these delicious foccacette, small bread rolls baked for just a matter of seconds in this wood stove and stuffed with cold meat or cheese of your choice.

At the beginning of the week all weather forecasters seemed to be in agreement that we wouldn't be spared the bad weather for much longer. So Monday we went out to the land to plant the second terrace of broad beans, my absolute favourite vegetable. The first lot we planted 3 weeks ago together with some peas is already doing well. Now that we will have 2 terraces of this wonderful spring veg, the first cropper of the season, I think I shall hold a broad bean sagra next year. Note down the first weekend in June and you are all welcome!

The rain did arrive then yesterday and big time last night. We barely managed to sleep last night with a big electric and wind storm. As usual our house was struck by lightning about 3am, but I had luckily already unplugged the computer after having had a close shave with only my monitor and an old modem melting through earlier in the year. Also the new phone line didn't get cut off, like the old one did every time we had a storm. The electricity was only off for a few minutes.

So being confined inddors today we decided to give our store room a bit of a tidy up, firstly because we could hardly get in any more and secondly in case some stray bra would turn up(see last post). Here is a before picture:

Unfortunately we are severely restricted for space. I found this really interesting blog of a couple of smallholders in North Idaho, http://subsistencepatternfoodgarden.blogspot.com/, thank you Silke for the tip. They talk about their root cellar and pepper room. For a start I wish I could grow enough root crops to justify a root cellar. Everything goes in here, not only conserved and dried food, but also tools, our wardrobe, jackets, shoes and everything else that clutters up your day-to-day life.

I know I'm a messy pup, but we try and recycle as much as possible, and with recycling I don't mean carrying rubbish to the appropriate recycling container, but actually re-using things. I wear clothes until they fall off me and even then I am reluctant to throw them out, using them as cleaning cloths, cutting off the buttons for future use or cut out bits of textile as patches for the bits that still hold together.

However, with Susan having been given so many clothes recently and our space restrictions, we just had to throw a load out now. I must make it clearer to well meaning friends and family that, if they insist on buying us something, they should buy us something useful like a grain mill or gardening tools, rather than more clothes. They don't have charity shops here either to unload our superflous rags, not that they would take most of what we've been through.

Here is an after the tidy up photo. I know it's in the other direction, but it shows you that I at least managed get in far enough to take the reverse photo. Does anyone have use for an old but perfectly functioning Yamaha keyboard?

Here is part of our collection of jarred things from this year.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, no lost bras were uncovered...and as I look out of the window, the sun is just peeping out again :-D

Well, ahem, thank you

Well, I don't know what to say. I'm quite speechless. Or to put it in Barrack Obama's words: "Wow!". I received an award!


It was given to me by Mrs Ayak, an English woman living on some hilltop village a bit like ours in Turkey. She talks about her adventures on her blog: http://ayak-turkishdelight.blogspot.com/. It doesn't sound like your usual ex-pat hang out where she lives.

Well, I'm not sure what the etiquette is with these award thingies. Although this blog has been going for some 2 years now, I have only recently, with a bit of extra time on my hands due to the enforced injury break, started looking at some blogs by other people and mingled a bit. It seems you are supposed to stick it on the side of your blog, must work out how to do that, and then pass it on to someone else.

I've been rehearsing my acceptance speech all day in my head, but I think I'll just keep it short and sweet:

Cheers Mrs Ayak and everyone else who follows my blog! I'll have a think about passing it on and keep you posted. In the meantime you are all invited for Prosecco and nibbles this evening.

Unfortunately these news were a bit overshadowed by something very sad for me today. I'm generally a very positive, optimistic kind of person; easy to get on with; not easily thrown by events. I keep my sense of humour if I have to live on a Euro for a fortnight or when things just don't work the way I hoped. But there is one thing that makes me very sad: the loss of a friend.

I rarely put really personal things in my blog, especially if they concern other people. This particular person, I shall call her Y, is not likely to read this, but some people who know us and her may recognise her. She has been a good friend to us ever since we arrived in Italy. She has been almost embarrassingly generous towards us, showering us with unrequested gifts, helping us financially when we were in the doldrums, taking us for meals when we had nothing. Any protests she would put down with a "that's what friends are for."

She has long lived on her own and she doesn't have much in the way of family either, so sometimes I had the sneeking feeling that in her loneliness she was trying to 'buy' our affection. But we got on well, we saw each other often, I liked her sense of humour.

Last week we were invited to her house for dinner. She had sorted through a whole pile of clothes she didn't fit into any more and got Susan to try them on. They fitted her perfectly, so Y gave them to Susan. We had a pleasant evening together and went home late as usual.

A few days later Y rang us up and she said she was near us, could she pop up, she had something else for Susan. I said of course and she arrived with a brand new woolen coat and another cast off pair of trousers. Then she asked if Susan during our last visit, had accidentally taken a silk bra of hers, which may have been lying on the bed with the other clothes. I don't pay any attention to clothes, but Susan said she didn't think so. The two of them then went upstairs to have a look if they had ended up in Susan's underwear drawer. They hadn't. We promised, we'd have another look, as Susan's memory is not always the best.

Today Susan found another bra, which fitted the description and we said we'd meet her today to return it to her, she seemed quite upset about the loss of the garment. When we met up with her she said it wasn't the right one and now openly accused Susan of stealing the bra out of her drawer. Now Susan may have some psychological problems as a result of a brain injury sustained in a car accident 30 years ago, but kleptomania is not one of them. I assured her that I would guarantee her that she definitely did not deliberately steal this bra. If anything she may have accidentally picked it up with the other clothes, but we've had a major tidy up of our bedroom this afternoon, and it hasn't turned up.

Y said she couldn't have it that if she had people to visit that she would have to lock away valuables. Susan of course, and me feel badly insulted and we left under a black cloud. Me on the other hand, can't call somebody a friend who accuses me or Susan of stealing. I'm not too sure how to handle this situation. I'm thinking of sending her a handwritten letter, telling her that she must have made a mistake. But if she insists on her accusations, we could no longer be friends. I'd thank her for her friendship and her generosity, it would make me very sad to do so, but I would have to end it. I'll wait for a few days, in case she suddenly rings having found her bra.

I don't have that many good friends, so I don't like loosing any...

of juniper, pine kernels and castles

Although we don't have any pressing commitments most of the time we do try to stick to some sort of a routine every day, just to give our lives some structure. In the morning we wake up around 8ish. Sorry let me rephrase that: in the morning we get woken up by the cats around 8ish (if we are lucky).

Incidentally, if you've been wondering what's happened to our cats in the meantime, at the last count there were still 5 of them. We have refused any further applications for assylum and have turned back boats filled with cat refugees at sea to return back to Cat Land. Our original cat, Dot is only occasionally visiting now, there's far too much happening in the refugee camp for her liking. She's still cross that we've hung on to her daughter, who was supposed to have left home months ago! The daughter, Mickey, is most attached to us and is home most nights. I go out of the door last thing at night to call her in, and she comes running around some corner. Tigger, who arrived a few months ago as a skinny rake is gaining weight and looking well now. We're going to have to have her neutered next, she seems ready to send her kittens into the world. Luckily we have a friend who will do that for us, as we couldn't possibly afford it ourselves. Of her two kittens, Rooney (named because she has huge ears, just like the footballer) is the more friendly. She purrs happily and loudly if you only as much as look at her. Her brother or sister, we're still not sure yet, we aptly named Senna, because she is as fast as the Formula 1 driver. Apart from running away fast as soon as you move she counts eating as one of her hobbies. Despite the obvious energy consumption of running away a lot she/he seems to develop a double chin already!

Anyway, I digress. We start the day (after feeding the cats...) with a good breakfast, which is usually Susan's job to make: Juice, from our newly aquired juicer, muesli, wholemeal bread with homemade jam and coffee. If the cats get me up particularly early, Mickey will sit on my head purring, I will do the first part of the breakfast.

Next I will sit down on the computer to see if anyone's been sending me any messages or if there've been any other exciting news, while Susan clears up the kitchen from the night before. Unless there is then anything pressing to do, I'm quite happy to lounge about like that and read the on-line newspaper or so, but Susan tends to get ants in her pants roundabout then and says she needs to go out for a walk to wake up properly.

Today she went on a quite a short roundwalk, the weather was still beautiful and clear, and came back asking me what now? I've gone quite Italian when it comes to going for walks. I don't actually mind going for a walk, but I like it to have some purpose: going from A to B, i.e. to the shops, even if they are an hour or so away, discovering something new or, most importantly, foraging for wild food.

So off we went armed with a couple of bags and jars down the Via Francigena. Our village lies right on the pilgrim route from Canterbury to Rome as walked by Archbishop Segeric the Serious in 995 ad or so. Following this path we headded down the hill towards the nearby city of Sarzana.

Halfway down, I never cease to be surprised, as you leave some woods, on a rocky basalt outcrop, to come across the extensive castle ruins of the Castello della Brina.



Every year archeologists of Pisa university dig up a bit more of it. They are still not sure when the place was actually built. Written records go back to the 10th Century, but they have found items going back to Roman and even Etruscan times. It was destroyed in the 15th century, when it was a castle of the Bishop of nearby Luni. The attackers really bore a bit of a grudge, because they raised the place to the ground and toppled the round tower.


The rocky sub-soils on this hill provide a home for quite a unique flora, such as box, laurel, sloe, Aleppo pines and juniper. So today we were chiefly after juniper berries. In small quantities they are good used in pickles and cabbage dishes. However I'm after making a type of gin, juniper being the main ingredient of course (from Dutch Genever = juniper - short gin). Lacking a still it'll be more of a gin liqueur or 'gineprino' as they call it in Italy.


As we walked on we also found a whole handful of pine kernels, at least €10 worth I reckon. They are quite a pain to gather and even worse to then afterwards shell, but at €3 for some 30 grams or so, it's worth it. We still have a bit of basil growing on the land, so I can make an authentic pesto.

As we walked back I couldn't stop sniffing my fingers, which smelled gorgeously aromatic of juniper and pine resin. (that was until I had an itchy bottom and added a bit of an earthy note...)

In the end we walked all the way to Sarzana (1 3/4 hours if you don't gather anything), because we needed a couple of things from the shop. By the time we got back it was time to think of dinner, which is my job.