Assessing the Damage

Just to keep livening up the blog, here another archive photo: a view from our window in November.

The rain I mentioned last time has continued and reached it's climax on Christmas Eve, when it was also accompanied by gale force winds, the dreaded Scirocco. I have mentioned this wind before on this blog, because it has so much influence on our weather. It allegedly originates in Africa, in the Sahara desert to be precise and then blows in a North-westerly direction (i.e. it's a South-easterly wind, as winds are named after the direction they come from for some reason).

Now you would think, that a wind coming out of the desert is good news, dry and warm, however you'd have thought wrong. En route to Italy it crosses the Mediterranean, where it has plenty of oportunity to pick up a bit of water. Then as this warm wind travels north it hits the cold air mass coming off the Alps and the Appenines. A great time to shed some of that excess water again. In other words, in our little niche in the Northwest of Italy it doesn't rain very often, but when it does, the Scirocco is usually involved.

To compound the problem, all our windows are south-east facing, and our bedroom window in particular is leaking. Although I did squeeze an entire tube of silicon into various cracks and openings in an attempt to solve the problem, new cracks and hidden holes appeared elsewhere. The net result of all this was that I stayed up Christmas Eve, or rather Christmas morning until half past one, continually mopping the floor! On one occasion, I swear I saw Santa on his sleigh sailing past us and he never made it down our chimney as he got blown on by the wind. Rudolph's nose was Blue! I'm not sure if it was due to the cold or due to prolonged exposure to water.

Anyway, Christmas passed peacefully, as usual with plenty of food and sitting around a blazing fire. What, you want to know what we've been eating? You're a nosy lot aren't you? Ok, we started with bruschette with a chilli paste and with an olive and bean paté, followed by Zuppa Lombarda (consisting of sage, garlic and beans). Then I made up a new recipe: sage and onion stuffed ravioli tossed in olive oil and lemon juice. For main course we had a free-range capon (a castrated cocckerel) stuffed with a chestnut stuffing (which we made during the chestnut season and had put into the freezer), accompanied by rosemary roast potatoes and a Neapolitan style cauliflower salad.

Right, enough of that flippancy. Boxing Day the rain held off for long enough for us to dare a trip to our plot of land to see what damage the snow and the storms did. I'm glad to report that most things seemed fine. The first sowing of broad beans was a little damaged by the wind as they were already quite tall. Peas, fennel, celery, the brassica, onions and garlic all withstood the cold. Only our baby lemon tree looks like it got some serious frost damage. I hadn't covered it this winter, because we never had any frost the last few winters, and if than never this early (more like February or even March). The kumquat looks fine though and might just give us fruit for the first time this winter.

The wind caused a bit more damage than the frost. It blew over a slightly fragile olive tree and broke off numerous branches of other fruit trees, most notably the loquat and a couple of the plum trees. Well, all in all it could have been worse and the days are starting to get longer again, so roll on spring...

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

Boy, I'm getting old!

Today the Scirocco wind is blowing cloud and rain into our direction again, so I have a bit of time for a longer entry. After Tuesday’s digging got interrupted by a shower, we cycled over to Arcola again on Wednesday, this time to glorious sunshine all day. I dug over a whole terrace, which had mostly leeks on it until last week.

Thursday I couldn’t face another day of cycling over and digging (most of it is now done anyway, except a couple of lower terraces) so Susan suggested: “why don’t we go on a ‘gentle’ cycle ride somewhere today?”. The sun was out and there was only a gentle westerly breeze. So I thought why not, I need to write up some more walks and need to start going a bit further afield for them. I had recently read about a small wetland nature reserve along the coast from here (we can see it from our bedroom window) and what could be nicer than a gentle ride along the seafront on a sunny day. Boy I’m starting to get old though! It’s either that, or due to our poverty my calorific input is not great enough to compensate for the output. I must get it into my head that just because I can see something out of my window it does not mean that it is necessarily close; I can see the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Island of Elba, for Pete’s sake! So it turned out a 75odd km return ride. In my youth that was just a warm-up for me, but now I almost didn’t make it up our hill on the way back and I’m still feeling drained today. Susan on the other hand is showing some astonishing stamina, especially considering she was never much of a cyclist before and she’s older than me!

The walk through the Lago di Porta Nature Reserve was very pleasant though. It’s a 4 km round walk with informative signs around what was once a lake, but was drained in the mid-16th Century, because of Malaria being prevalent in those days. It is now a wetland area offering a home to numerous species of birds and amphibians. We spotted a marsh hawk, various ducks and a few frogs as well as some carp and tench in the water. It’s a beautiful little oasis wedged in between the busy Via Aurelia and the A12 Genoa – Livorno motorway near the town of Montignoso, which is dominated by a castle on top of a conic hill.

Incidentally, I learned something new yesterday. I always knew that the coastline of Northern Tuscany is known as the Versilia, what I didn’t know was that it is named after this little river above, which runs into the Med near Forte dei Marmi.

To do something about increasing our calorie intake I’ve decided to bake a cake today. However I was lacking some of the main ingredients you normally associate with cake, i.e. butter and eggs, and our current finances only adding up to about 17 cents, so I had to improvise a bit. Here’s how I did it:

Let’s-see-what-we-can-find-in-the-kitchen cake

Ingredients:
150g sugar
1 vanilla pod
50ml hazelnut oil
50ml olive oil
50g chopped almonds
100g polenta
300g wholemeal flour
1 packet baking powder
A little water
100g plum & apple jam (or any other jam you fancy)
A few sliced almonds
Method
1. Preheat oven to 175°C.
2. In a bowl beat the sugar together with the insides of the vanilla pod and the oils. Add the chopped almonds and mix well, next the polenta and finally the flour and baking powder. Work to a fine crumb, then add a little water and knead to a soft, pliable dough.
3. With a rolling pin roll ¾ of the dough directly onto a baking tin covered with baking paper. Spread the jam evenly over the top.
4. Roll out the last quarter of the dough thinly onto a floured work surface. Cut into 2 cm wide strips and lay on top of the jam to form a grid.
5. Sprinkle with the sliced almonds and bake for about ½ hour.
By the way, don’t throw the empty vanilla pod away. Place it in a small jar and fill up with sugar to make your own vanilla flavoured sugar for next time your baking.

Here’s another recipe I invented a couple of days ago, which was nice:

Chicken Breast on a Bed of Wild Herbs with Roast Potato and Fennel
Ingredients for 2:
Olive oil
1 skinless chicken breast
A selection of wild herbs, i.e. lemon balm, marjoram, wild onion (alternatively cultivated varieties of the first 2 and chives for wild onions)
1 large fennel bulb with the herbage still attached
5 medium potatoes, cubed
A handful of black olives
Salt & pepper
Semi-fermented gorse wine (alternatively Asti Spumante)
Method
Pre-heat oven to 175°C and grease an oven-proof dish with some of the oil.
In the centre of the dish pile up the lemon balm, the marjoram and part of the fennel herb all left whole. Lay the chicken breast on top.
Around the chicken arrange the potatoes, the sliced fennel bulb and the olives. Season all liberally with salt and pepper.
Drizzle some more oil over it and a glass of the still sweet wine. Sprinkle the chopped wild onion over the chicken.
Put in the oven for about 40 minutes until potatoes are soft inside and the chicken cooked through.

of computer problems and climatic anomalies

Well, again some technical problems forced me into a short break from posting on this blog. This time it was a virus on my computer. A pop-up claiming I needed to update my Google tool box turned up on my screen and couldn’t be clicked away. Alarm bells should have been ringing then, but foolishly I clicked ok, the only option that seemed to work and bang! there it was. I couldn’t access the internet for a bit. Our extremely helpful and friendly neighbour Marco came up with a solution though and everything is running smoothly again without any permanent damage. Thank Marco for that!

Talking about technical problems, my printer, a Canon Pixma IP 2000, was also playing up. A message told me that it’s ‘ink absorber’ was full and that I would have to take it to an authorised Canon service department. Marco did a quick internet search and also found a solution to this problem. All I had to do was press a few buttons in a specific sequence and, hey bingo, the printer works again. Is this some sort of scam by Canon to get their service departments some work? You take your machine to one, they tut and hah: “ooh, that’ll cost you mate…”, give it back to you the next day and charge you €30 for a 2 minute job. Sort of an inbuilt, pre-designed fault to make you spent some more money with their company? Sounds ridiculous to me.

Anyway, what else has been happening in the meantime I hear you ask. Well It has rained a lot. A hell of a lot! Shortly after the last post it started. Some villages along the rivers Magra and Vara were cut off from the outside world due to flooding. Below you see a photo of the Magra on one of the few days on which we had a break in the weather and judging by the rubbish stuck in the trees (which normally stand on dry land!) the river was up to about 2 ½ metres above it’s normal level.
This weather is being blamed by a wind called the Scirocco. It’s a south-westerly originating in the Sahara desert in Africa. Now you’d think a wind coming from the desert brings nice warm and dry weather to your shore, but unfortunately it crosses a fair bit of the Mediterranean on it’s way here, where it can pick up plenty of water. Once it arrives up here with us it meets up with a cold air sitting on top of the alps and northern Appenines and simply dumps half of the Mediterranean Sea over our heads.

And talking of climatic anomalies, our car appears to have developed it’s own micro-climate. Somewhere it has sprung a leak and with all that rain there are some serious puddles, if not to say ponds inside the car. This means, even when the sun is shining outside, it’s raining inside the car. It’s like a tropical rainforest. I need wipers more urgently for the insides of the windows than for the outsides! And with us transporting a lot of freshly cut wood in the car, we have introduced quite a varied wildlife to the car as well. In one of the ponds I believe the first signs of some primeval life form have started to evolve.

Enough of all that. Since about Wednesday the weather has finally improved again and the sun is back. We built a small poly tunnel as you can see above and will sow some early lettuces out in there this weekend. Today I sowed the first indoor seeds, namely various tomatoes, various peppers, aubergines, melons, cucumbers, chillies, basil, savoury, chervil, dill. And the best news of all, Mickey the kitten is finally over her period of being on heat and doesn’t miaow at us all night, nor do the toms outside.

Beer out of maize?

Well the last few days the “Scirocco” wind has been blowing a warm wind north from the shores of Africa and it has a brought a change in the weather at last. As the warm wind meets with cooler air flowing off the Alps it builds up clouds and the odd storm develops. One such storm came down over us on the night from Thursday to Friday and this morning we had a heavy, prolonged shower. All this is making it feel uncomfortably humid and the wind barely helps cooling things down. On the plus side, we haven’t had to water for the last few days.

Being in a period of the waxing moon again and having had some rain to moisten the soils, I sowed some more seeds out on Friday, namely celery, spinach, Tuscan black cabbage, lettuce and fennel. We’re also finding a lot of wild food at the moment, especially blackberries and walnuts. We have made a new discovery on Friday. On our way to Arcola we found a prolific source of wild hops growing up some shrub next to a canal. Just picking up a handful and smelling it you realise where the aroma of good quality beer comes from. So of course I couldn’t resist and we picked a whole bag full to make beer with.

Now I watched the beer-making process many times in breweries and whisky distilleries and I know the theory. Hops are of course only a traditional flavouring and preservative for beer the usual main ingredient being barley, or more precisely barley malt. You obtain barley malt by soaking the barley in water for a few days, then spread it on the malting floor in warmish, light conditions to encourage them to geminate. At this stage the starch inside the grain is turned into fermentable sugar. Once that has happened you arrest the growth by kilning the grain. This is done at a temperature of 50 to 60°C until it is dried and crisp. The result is than ground and finally with the addition of hot water turned into a kind of porridge to dissolve the sugar out of the mash. This would be the time to add your hops as well. The resulting liquid is then fermented to make beer. This in a nutshell is the way to make beer.

Whilst I know all this there is one snag: barley is not easily obtainable around here. In theory it is of course possible to make beer out of any grain. Most notably wheat is used for various speciality beers in Germany and Belgium, rice is routinely used in Asia and at least as a part ingredient in many American beers, in the Garfagnana region of Tuscany a micro brewery produces a beer out of a local and ancient kind of hulled wheat known as “farro” and maize is also used in America and parts of Africa to name but a few examples. However, there was a reason why barley is the best raw material, I just can’t for the life of me think what it was. Of the above mentioned grains, the only one readily available to me here is maize. Farro is grown locally, but expensive. I have unsuccessfully been trying to find anything written on the question whether you treat other grains exactly the same as you would barley. Anybody reading this got any ideas?

In the absence of any further info I decided to experiment anyway and soaked a large bowl of maize (or corn whatever you want to call it) to see if I can’t get it to germinate. I can’t say I’ve ever heard of malted maize. Maybe this is the difference, other grains don’t lend themselves to this treatment. I don’t know. Anyone who can shed light on this, please let me know!