Wild Food of the Month: March

Here comes part 3 of my popular series of wild foods of the month. As I had said, I was going to feature the Judas tree, but I have to find one first, so today I'll be talking about something slightly less exotic, borage. I know for many of you it's simply a garden plant, but here it grows everywhere in abundance and it's at it's best right now.

Many of you will know it as a salad ingredient. Pick the young leaves and the pretty blue flowers of this plant. The leaves are rather hairy and coarse so need to be chopped finely. They also make nice additions to refreshing summer drinks or are good as a tea. However I would like to introduce you with my favourite way of eating borage, as a stuffing to ravioli as what the Italians call ravioli al borragine. It makes seasonal appearances on restaurant menus here and is usually quite expensive. I've never looked at a recipe of it, but came up with my own version, which follows here:

Ingredients:

For the stuffing:

• 1 pint borage leaves, plus a handful of flowers
• 250g ricotta cheese
• Juice of ½ lemon
• 100g hard cheese, i.e. Parmesan or Grana Padano or a mild pecorino, but not too mature otherwise it will mask the delicate flavour of the borage
• 2 tbsp of breadcrumbs
• Pepper and a couple of spoonfuls of olive oil to taste

For the pasta dough:

• 100g white flour (grade 00) per person plus 100g extra if anyone wants seconds!
• 1 egg per 100g flour
• Pinch of salt and a touch of olive oil

To serve:

• Large knob of butter
• A handful of sage leaves
• Some grated cheese (optional)

Method:

1. Place all the ingredients except the flowers for the stuffing into a food processor and blend until smooth:

1. Knead together the ingredients for the dough to make a smooth dough. If too dry add a splash of water.

1. In batches roll out the dough as thinly as possible. If you have a pasta machine, use it, I unfortunately don’t. Cut dough into rectangles of about 3x4cm. Don’t worry if some are a bit bigger or misshapen. Into each rectangle place a dollop of the stuffing.

1. Brush the edge of each rectangle (trangle, trapeze, strange wobbly shape...) with some water and stick together to form a little pasta pocket enclosing the filling. Set aside. This part of the job is a bit fiddly so give yourself plenty of time.
2. Bring a large pan of salted water to the boil. In the meantime gently heat the butter in a frying and fry the fresh sage leaves until crispy. Drop the ravioli into the boiling water. Once they float to the surface, which should only take a couple of minutes, they are ready. Taste one to make sure. Drain the ravioli and serve with the sage butter, the reserved borage flowers and, if you like, some grated cheese
   

It is delicious, but it ain't half fiddly. I stood in the kitchen for 2 hours. I don't know why I keep doing it, we didn't even have guests to impress with this. Those photos should also show everyone why I could never be a chef. Presentation has never been my strong point, I'm mostly concerned that it tastes good.

Spring at last

Spring does seem to have arrived at last, but only after winter really had hit out again one more time. Yesterday we returned to Villa for the first time since planting the new vines. All of them had suffered frost damage. They had been reared at the relatively mild coastal climate above La Spezia and had already sprouted green shoots, well ahead of their cousins up in Villa. Now all those green shoots have died. I hope the vines still have enough in them to sprout again. We gave them a good watering anyway and can now only hope. It can’t have been lack of water anyway, as there had been plenty of rain, hail and possibly up there snow.

Still lacking a plough, (the local bicycle and small machine repair man in Santo Stefano said he’d keep a lookout for a second hand one for us), we were hard at it to dig over a large area to bury the potatoes. After some 5 hours solid digging my shoulders were about to drop off. We managed to plant most of the spuds we had, but we’ll have to finish off the job tomorrow. Hope they won’t get dug by the local wild boar population. There only seems to be evidence of them lower down though and not 3 terraces up. They obviously don’t like climbing, but you never know once they get the scent of some nice nourishing potatoes…

Today we were back in Arcola to plant out some radicchio lettuces and water the veg we planted the other day. One of the cucumber plants had been dug by the neighbour’s cat, what a nuisance. The peach and plum trees are pretty much finished flowering, now it’s the turn of the cherry (top photo) and pear trees. Many wild and semi-wild flowers are also in bloom. The bees love the borage (middle photo), which has sown itself out between the strawberries (bottom photo). Borage and strawberries are said to make good companion plants and once you’ve sown borage they will happily sow themselves out year after year. I love the delicate flavour of ravioli al boragine, borage and ricotta filled pasta. And as for strawberries… shouldn’t be long now for the first crop.