Wild food of the month October & a bloggy visit

Yesterday we had another bloggy visit. Stefani of Sicilian Sisters Grow Some Food came to see us all the way from California for the second time this year.


This time she didn't only bring her husband Eric along, but her 4 children as well, which insisted on being introduced to all the animals around our village.


Here's her youngest trying to feed grass to a donkey's bottom...


So, if you were wondering why she hasn't posted anything on her blog for a while, here's the answer: She's been taken her family on tractor rides in Italy amongst other things.


On another note, it's time for the wild food of the month feature. For October this should normally undisputedly be the chestnut. However, I have in the past written extensively about this beautiful fruit (here for instance), and this year we have an exceptionally bad year for them

Initially I had put that down to the vagaries of nature until I realised that just a few km up the valley, they have an extremely good year for chestnuts. Due to the above average rainfall this year, they have grown to a larger size and the crop is particularly healthy. The area around and just above our village on the other hand seems to have produced hardly anything and on closer inspection the leaves on the trees have started turning autumnal at least a month ahead of normal.

A chance meeting in the woods gave part of the explanation: insects have spread a virus amongst the trees and helicopters have already dropped large quantities of predatory insects to control the harmful ones, but it may already too late to save the extensive woods for a few km around us.

Further research on the internet seems to suggest that we are suffering from a twin attack of chestnut blight, which has caused famines in some of the remoter valleys shortly after the war, and the Oriental chestnut gall wasp. Over in Arcola we have a tree on our land which has not been affected so far, but we do have to go further afield for our chestnuts this year. I hope they'll manage to control these outbreaks, it's one of the most calorie-rich wild foods we gather.

So instead I'll write something on the little blue myrtle berry.


It may be a bit of an exaggeration to call it a wild food. The main use for it is as an ingredient for a Sardinian liqueur called mirto. There are 2 versions of it mirto bianco, made from the extremely aromatic leaves, and mirto classico, a dark red liqueur made from the berries. I have made neither so far, but I've picked a mixture of the berries and leaves today to dry for later use. The berries are also said to be good used cooked with venison or wild boar. The leaves, as I have already found out can be used in these essential oil burners instead of essential oil to spread a pleasant aroma in the room. I imagine they'd be good as part of a stuffing for some rabbit or grouse for example, although again not tried yet. Anyboy knows of any other uses, I'd love to hear.

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.

This was to be my final post on the blasted subject of my wooden arm, but alas... My experience with the Italian health system up to this point has been very good really. I have never before had an operation in any country before, so maybe it's just the way it is done.

The last time I went in for these tests, I thought this was it. They gave me a whole pile of paper about possible risks, both of the anasthetic and and operation in general. There were pages of stuff about not drinking any alcohol the day before, not eating 12 hours before and not drinking (even water) up to 8 hours before. And they gave me an appointment with the amnesty... amnesi.. anneath... the person who makes your arm go numb for noon today (punctually). Ok fair enough, they didn't mention the op as such, but what else do you do at an anaesthi... anseetha... you know what I mean. They'll hardly give you an injection a week before the op, it'll wear off sure!

Well I turned up, with Susan in tow in case I wouldn't be able to drive myself home with a limp arm. The a... the lady was very friendly, asked a few questions, like what was my normal blood pressure. I said I had no idea. So she measured it and told me it was perfect. She listened to my heart and chest and found I was still alive. Finally she made me sign yet another form (god knows what all I have been signing there? I'll expect delivery of the series of encyclopaedias any day now!) and told me she'd put the injection into the top of my arm, near the axle (achsle? my spelling is gone today...).

With that she dismissed me. I looked at her slightly incredulously (this post has a lot of long words doesn't it?) and asked if she hadn't forgotten anything, like giving me that threatened injection. "Oh no," she says, "we'll give you that before the operation." - "And that's not today?" - "No, we'll ring you." - "Ahh, any idea when?" - "oh any time in the next week / ten days."

Right, so what do you do with a day you had been expecting to spend on an operating table? Well eat for a start, I've been keeping to all that fasting they told me to do! But the weather was also glorious today. Just a couple of days ago the view from our terrace looked like this.




We went to work on the land anyway, because the weather forecast was for no rain and it looked as if it might clear up. Of course we had a right downpour and I planted some onions, Cavolo Nero (Tuscan 'black cabbage', it's a bit like curly kale) and white cabbages in the mud.

The next day and today the view turned out like this though. Although not apparent on the photo, behind that bit of sea on the very left we had one of those few days in a year when we could see Corsica (some 100 miles, 150 km away).

So with weather like this we went out chestnut picking again. They looked a lot better than the last lot we had. Whilst out this nosey donkey came to investigate what we were up to and hollered a belching Eeeeeeeeeeeh Haaawww at us.

Of Pinocchio, tomatoes & chestnuts

Right, before I bore you all to death on the story of my arm, It's now coming out Wednesday, the bit of bamboo that is. I had to sign more forms and undergo various tests. I don't know I reckon they fuss too much, all it needs is a sharp knife and a pair of tweezers. I'd do it myself, if I wasn't right handed and the bit of bamboo is imbedded in my right arm. My Dad quipped that I'm turning into Pinocchio, being only half boy, half wood.

Anyway, the weather has been a bit mixed, with a good sprinkling of badly needed rain and cooler temperatues. Our tomatoes are still producing, although not all of them are ripening completely.


I was going to make a green tomato chutney, but as I still have red tomatoes too, and I just saw a recipe on the Guardian web-site by Nigel Slater of a red and green tomato chutney(http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/oct/04/nigel-slater-green-tomato-recipes), I made some of that. It turned out rather delicious!



Today then marked the beginning of a bit of an Indian summer. After I had already packed the shorts into the bottom drawer, we woke up to this beautiful autumn sunshine. The sun reflected so nicely of the sage leaves on our window sill that I just had to take a photo of it.

With this lovely weather, and one of my favourite seasons having started, the chestnut season, we decided to make our annual pilgrimmage to the Sagra della Castagna at Barbarasco. We had already roasted some of our own chestnuts earlier in the week. We simply had to try out the new fire grill that our friend John made us from the leftovers of some railings for their terrace in Calice al Cornoviglio. John is a bit of a dab hand when it comes to welding and our old grill had completely disintegrated.

Well John, if you are reading this, it held up beautifully, albeit bending slightly out of shape, by lifting one leg slightly. Maybe it thinks it's a dog... Unfortunately those first chestnuts were a bit dissapointing...

...which cannot be said about the chestnuts we had today: chestnut lassagne, chestnut pancakes and roast chestnuts, followed by chestnut and chocolate biscuits. To the foreigner, when you talk about lasagne, they tend to think of the dish Italians call lasagne al forno, layers of pasta sheets, meat and tomato sauce and bechamel sauce. To an Italian, the actual sheets of pasta are the lasagne, or lasagna in singular. The chestnut variety is made with chestnut flour and either simply served topped with olive oil and pecorino cheese or a meat sauce, never seeing an oven in the process.

Similarly the pancakes are made with chestnut flour, two of them are used to make a sandwich with a filling of either fresh ricotta or stracchino. In this dish the inherent sweetness of the chestnuts really comes through.

The older generation in Italy are said to not want to eat another chestnut in their life having lived on nothing else through the war years. Our friend Carlo tells us his story of remembering the war years as a 9 year old boy constantly turning the handle of an old coffee mill to grind down chestnuts into flour. Bread made exclusively from chestnut flour does not rise and is therefore a good test for your teeth.

The slightly bizarre thing at the sagra was the fact that it is set in a public park planted with hundreds of chestnut trees, so the ground was littered with them. Yet on a stand selling various chestnut related specialities, you could also buy fresh chestnuts for €3.50 per kg.

I don't know if the actually sold any...

Our Terraces Part I

Well, we’ve been busy, busy, busy. The weather has been doing what you expect of it in April, i.e. the unexpected: showers followed by warm sunshine, then a touch of hail. Nothing overly dramatic though and all in all the sunshine has dominated. So we’ve got all our terraces strimmed nicely and a few more beds dug over in readiness for the runner bean planting next week and to make room for the peppers and aubergines to be planted out. The tomatoes are already out. We are also eating our daily ration of lovely fresh broad beans, as well as lettuces and radishes, which now have reached the size of tennis balls!.

The broad beans are just so nice and they represent the quintessential taste of spring for me. I wonder if some village or other in Italy has thought of doing a ‘sagra della fava’, a broad bean feast, they have a sagra around any other foodstuff. Must find out, and if not, I shall plant 2 terraces with broad beans next year and invite the whole village to my own sagra della fava, probably around the first of May. Anyone else up for that? Or anyone knows a good recipe for broad beans, please leave it on my comments.

Today, it’s raining a bit more persistently today, I’m starting a new 9-part series. Yesterday, on ‘Liberation Day’ (Italians are currently discussing whether to call it Liberty Day or Liberation Day), I took a series of photos, of each of our 18 terraces. I thought I’ll publish them here, so you all have a bit more of an idea of what we’re working on. As my internet connection is excruciatingly slow, downloading all 18 photos onto one blog-entry would take days, and similarly other people with the same problem would need ages, before they would actually see anything. So I’ll bring them out in bite-size chunks, starting from the top, working our way down. All photos were taken on the 25th April at about 10am. Obviously this a snap shot, things were different a week before or a month hence, but it gives you a flavour.

Here is the top terrace:

As you can see, it’s next to the access road and is very narrow. It’s not really much use apart as for somewhere to leave our bikes. I planted am agave, which had outgrown it’s pot and at the far end is a mature olive tree. Along the top is a row of trees, mostly oak, but also one sweet chestnut and one pear. I’m not sure whether they are still ours or not, but I pick the pears and chestnuts anyway. And if one of the oak trees is starting to look a bit pale around the nose, I chop’em down for some firewood. That is because they are a royal pain in the butt. They drop their acorns onto our land, where the seedlings become a right nuiscance. Now if I had pigs, they’d love the stuff. So any ivy growing up those oak trees is positively encouraged. I suppose those trees also serve a function to keep the road on top of our land, rather than at the bottom…, so maybe I should replace any felled ones with something more useful, like more sweet chestnuts for example.

Terrace 2 is what this year is known as ‘the potato terrace’. It’s also quite narrow, so I could only sow one row of potatoes. It’s the first year we’ve put anything on it. In the foreground you see an apple tree and at the far end another olive tree. In between I planted the pomegranate shrub this winter. After lifting the spuds I’m hoping to replant vines onto that terrace next winter.

So much for today, don’t miss part two of the series, coming up on your computerscreens any day now

Some Things to do with Chestnuts

Autumn definitively has caught up with us again and our brief Indian summer has come to an abrupt end. It started raining heavily in the early hours of this morning and as I write this (10 a.m.) it hasn’t even got properly bright yet.

Yesterday we went out chestnut hunting and came back with several kilos of this beautiful fruit. Going out into the woods is quite dangerous at this time of the year, especially on Wednesdays and Sundays. That’s when the hunters are out in droves, shooting at anything that moves and is not dressed in bright orange. So we stuck to minor roads rather than venturing right into the woods. However, there are so many chestnut trees around here that during the war chestnuts became the main food source for the inhabitants of the area. Some of the older generation say they never want to eat another chestnut, because they ate nothing else during the war. I reckon though, rather than being sick of the flavour of this delicious and versatile fruit they are tired of peeling the damn things! Our friend Carlo tells of his main childhood memory of the war being, having to grind the coffee mill day-in and day-out to make chestnut flour. Bread made exclusively from chestnut flour does not rise well, so tends to be hard and heavy, but it can be added to ordinary flour to make a fragrant loaf or used to make pasta or pancakes.

So after we returned from our expedition we started using them having found some interesting recipes for preserving them. Here I’d like to share a couple of them with you. A few general tips first:
First of all a warning: all these recipes of course are for the sweet chestnut, which is no relation to the horse chestnut, which is more common in more northerly climes and is poisonous. Horse chestnuts are great for playing conkers or to make little stick animals with but not for eating!
When out picking chestnuts, bring a pair of sturdy gloves, so you can free them easily from their prickly shells.
If you are picking sweet chestnuts in the wild always add an extra 10% on recipe quantities to allow for any slightly rotten or worm infested ones you may have to throw away.
To peel chestnuts, first cut a slit into the skin of each nut and put them into a saucepan covered with cold water. Bring to the boil and simmer for about 20 minutes. As soon as cool enough to handle, pull off the shells and as much of the inner skin as possible.

Castagne Sotto Whisky
Ingredients: 1 kg Chestnuts, 1 litre whisky, 500g sugar
Method: Peel chestnuts as described above. Choose the largest and best looking chestnuts and keep them as whole as possible. Place the whisky in a saucepan and stir in the sugar. Bring the mixture to the boil. Add the chestnuts and turn off the heat. Leave to cool and bottle into clean jars. Serve as a dessert on ice-cream with a drizzle of honey.

As this is out of my Ligurian recipe book, there was really only one whisky that should be used for this, Glen Grant 5 Year Old Single Malt Whisky. This has long been the best selling whisky in Italy and made Italy the largest importer of malt whiskies well before they became popular anywhere else. This reminds me of a little Scottish prayer which goes like this:

The Lord is my shepherd,
I shall not want
As long as there’s whisky
In Glen Grant.
And if it’s gone,
No more to pour,
We’ll up the line
To Cragganmore!

Cragganmore being a distillery just up the road from Glen Grant in the Spey Valley of the Highlands of Eastern Scotland.

Also from ‘Ligura in Arbanello’ by Laura Rangoni:

Marmellata di Fagioli e Castagne
This is a kind of substitute for the ubiquitous Nutella, just better and less sickly sweet.
Ingredients: 400g dried white beans, 150g sugar, 400g chestnuts
Method: Soak the beans overnight in plenty of water. Drain and boil in fresh water until soft, then whiz them to a fine puree in a food processor. In the meantime peel the chestnuts as described above and chop them finely. Put the bean puree back into the saucepan and, over a low flame stirring constantly, add the sugar. Once the sugar is dissolved, add the chopped chestnuts, taking the mixture off the heat. Bottle immediately into hot jars, seal and turn upside down for about half an hour. Use as a sandwich spread.

Chestnut Sorbet
Ingredients: 300g chestnuts, 1 vanilla pod, 150g sugar, 400ml milk.
Method: Peel chestnuts as described above. Put the peeled chestnuts in a small saucepan with the vanilla pod and sugar. Add 100 ml of water & simmer gently until the liquid becomes syrupy. Scrape the seeds out of the vanilla pod into the syrup. Puree in a blender to a fine paste, then slowly add the milk. Churn in an ice-cream machine.

Finally something that we are going to make today for the freezer in anticipation of Christmas:
Chestnut stuffing
(quantities for a chicken or guinea fowl. Double for a turkey)
450g chestnuts, 450g sausage meat, 1 onion, 50g sultanas, ½ tbsp sugar, pinch cinnamon, 25g butter, salt & pepper to taste, a little tomato juice to moisten.
Peel chestnuts as described above. Slice onions & fry in the butter until golden, then add the sausage meat & cook gently for a few minutes. Do not allow the onions to turn brown. Add the tomato juice, sugar, salt & pepper and the cinnamon. Stir together until well blended, then add the chestnuts, previously minced, and the sultanas. Mix well & allow to cool before stuffing your bird. (Recipe taken from ‘The Wildfoods Cookbook’ by Joy Spoczyinska).

There are many more things which can be made from chestnuts. We will keep a few to dry to turn to flour, there are numerous chestnut soup recipes around (made one last night), or you can make chestnut puree instead of mashed potatoes. See if we can’t get to the stage of being fed up with chestnuts! Anybody with any further suggestions what to do with chestnuts, please post them on the commentary. The best entry may get a prize, if there are a few suggestions.

Well it’s afternoon in the meantime and we’re starting to be thoroughly fed up with peeling chestnuts. In the famous words of Jimi Hendrix: “I’ve got blisters on my fingers!”. At least it was a productive day indoors as the rain still comes down outside. It’s supposed to get better again tomorrow, so the plan is to cut some wood and see to our wines brewing in Villa.

Chestnut season

Allora! The weather is still holding, pleasantly warm temperatures during the day and balmy evenings. Today we were in Arcola finishing the autumn clearing job. I applied the strimmer to the top terraces, even clearing up some corners I hadn’t attempted before. There is a beautiful olive tree on the very top, which I very much assume is on our land, but which was totally overgrown by 2 ancient, rampant vines and plenty of ivy. The tree is actually heavy with olives this year, so I freed it from the invaders and cleared up the ground underneath. While putting down the strimmer for a minute I had a little, actually quite a big, visitor who settled on it for a wee while, a Praying Mantis. Not only people in Italy are religious…

This work ,of course, resulted in plenty of burnable rubbish. So Susan lit a fire nearby, and then went on the hunt for some lunch. Chestnut season is in full swing, so she collected a good kilo of them, which we roasted on the fire, Hmmmmm! We had already feasted on chestnuts on Sunday, when we went to the Sagra della Castagna, the chestnut festa, at Barbarasco on Sunday. Apart from roasted chestnuts we had pancakes made with chestnut flour topped with ricotta cheese, ravioli and lasagne made from chestnut flour with a ragu sauce and finally sgabbei, puffed up bread balls, with a selection of cheeses and salumi with not a chestnut in sight. A couple of handfuls of roasted chestnuts actually fills you up better then a sandwich.

As the fire burned down we threw the hot embers down a terrace into the entrance of a hornets’ nest. Not that I have something against hornets per se, but they built their nest inside the base of a rather large cherry tree of ours, which has been hollowed out by termites and which is likely to die and collapse soon anyway. It also blocks the path to what this summer was our lettuce bed. Just passing the nest was fine, but when Susan was trying to dig it over last week to turn it into a pea bed, they got a bit upset and stung her. So to enable us to cut down this dying tree and to grow peas behind it these hornets, I’m afraid they have to be evicted. Not sure yet if it has worked, but it certainly created a panic amongst the insects.