Spring Tart and another award

I'm happy to have received yet another award from a fellow blogger. This one I received from Jenn of Sweet Water (http://murphyjenn78.blogspot.com/) ( I still haven't worked how to do proper links). Jenn blogs in Canada about cooking, photography and her fight against depression and I always enjoy her posts. Today's post will mostly be about something I know is close to her heart as well, i.e. local food.

But first I have to deal with the obligation coming with this award of listing 10 things which make me happy. So here it comes:

1. A disvovery of a new food topped by the fact that it is gathered for free. I love experimenting with such ingredients and when it does work out, like the example below, that makes me extremely happy!
2. A walk / hike in the country, especcially if it's coupled with finding some wild foods. (there's a theme developing here, I feel)
3. A good glass of wine. It doesn't have to be your top of the range classed growth Bordeaux (although I wouldn't say no), but an obscure discovery gives me just as much pleasure.
4. Watching seeds grow and become fully fledged vegetables that sustain us.
5. A musical jam session with our next door neighbours. We are extremely lucky to have some really musical neighbours. Mauro plays the squeeze box and bag pipes, Marco is multi-instrumetalist, playing the guitar, banjo, fiddle and other instruments. Between them they know some of best musicians of the province. Occasionally all those gather in our neighbour's kitchen and they don't mind me contributing my feeble efforts on guitar, banjo, harmonica, tin whistle and vocals, and we just make music for hours on end.
6. A good book
7. An act of kindness towards us. As I said a few days ago, there's nothing like "a little help from my friends".
8. Eating my first meal of broad beans in spring. It's the first veg ready on our land. I love it just boiled briefly and with some olive oil and lemon juice over some pasta. It's the taste of spring (well I'm going to have to add my spring tart now as well (see below))
9. Following number 7, it makes me even happier if I can help others. So if you need anything, if it's in my power, just ask!
10. Best of all would of course be all the above in combination! A good meal and a nice few bottles of wine shared with friends, while making music contributing all in various differing ways. What could top that!

Finally I would like to pass the award on to the following:

• Mrs. Ayak at http://ayak-turkishdelight.blogspot.com/ (I believe it's Linda isn't it? How do you do?) She normally sends awards in my direction so now it's my turn to return the compliment. I reckon her village in Turkey and ours in Italy should be twinned as they sound just the same.
• The other one I would like to pass on to Beck at http://greenspain.blogspot.com/. This is for offering to share some of her tomato seeds with me. She is relatively new to blogging. She writes about her efforts to live a more sustainable lifestyle in Spain, something that can only be applauded.

Right so much about that. Remember a couple of weeks ago I was blogging about the edibility of primroses and reprinted an historic recipe for a spring tart from http://www.theoldfoodie.com/. As the recipe was from 1733, it was rather lacking in detail and also when I was posting about this, another ingredient, the violet, wasn't ready. However now they are and this is my take on this ancient recipe.

Spring Tart

Ingredients:

For the pastry:

• 200g flour
• Pinch of salt
• 75g sugar
• 1 egg
• 125g cold butter

For the filling:

• ca. 2 pints of mixed leaves of primroses, violets and wild strawberries
• 1 handful of primrose and violet flowers
• 150g spinach
• 400ml cream
• 100g grated sponge biscuits
• 2 eggs, beaten
• Pinch of salt
• ½ grated nutmeg
• ½ tsp grated cinnamon

30g sugar

Method:

1. Mix the flour with the salt and pile on a your work surface. Make a mould in the centre. Put the sugar and the egg into the centre. Dot the cold butter cut into flakes around the edge. Knead all this quickly together into a smooth dough. Wrap in foil and refrigerate for an hour or so.
2. In the meantime make the stuffing. Wash the leaves well and separate the flowers and set aside in a small dish with some water to keep them fresh. If you have a juicer, simply juice your spinach and keep the juice aside. If not, maybe just boil the spinach with a drop of water and liquidise. Use a little less spinach in that case.
3. In a large saucepan bring a little water to the boil. Add the leaves and blanch for a couple of minutes. Drain well and place in a food processor together with the cream.
4. Whiz leaves and cream in the food processor and return to the pan. Bring to a boil and simmer for another few minutes (3 or 4). Take off the flame and leave to cool for a moment. Add the grated biscuits, the eggs, the salt, the nutmeg, the cinnamon and the sugar and stir well. Finally add the spinach juice to colour your tart green and most of the flowers set aside, leaving a few behind for a garnish

1. Preheat oven to 175 C. On a lightly floured surface roll out the pastry to fit a round cake tin with about 2cm going up around the edge. Grease the tin and place the pastry inside. Pour in the filling and bake for about 40 minutes.

• Leave to cool and garnish with the remaining flowers

I think it should have turned greener, but it sure was tasty. We had a bunch of people around for a wine tasting yesterday and I let them judge without giving away the ingredients beforehand. It was an unqualified success!

Wild Food of the Month: February

Here comes No. 2 of the series wild food of the month. This month I'm featuring the primrose:

This photo was taken last year, as they are not in flower this year yet. I learnt about the edibility of this pretty herald of spring from afore-mentioned calendar from our local hardware store. It says both leaves and flowers are edible and suggests either throwing them into a salad or boiling them briefly and serve with olive oil, lemon juice and a bit of salt.

Now both these suggestions seem to be the standard in Italy for anything edible from the wild. If in doubt, add to salad or serve with olive oil and lemon juice. It does go on and further suggest adding the flowers to soups or an omelette, however I was after something a bit different, so googled for other recipes involving primrose.

During my search I came across this brilliant blog called "The Old Foodie" (http://www.theoldfoodie.com/) by an English woman in Australia. She has made it her mission to find a traditional food / menu for each day of the year. This became a bit of an obsession by the sounds of it and she has collected 100's of historical recipes and anecdotes in the process.

According to her, 5 February is primrose day and she published a couple of recipes for that. I couldn't collect primroses yesterday, because it rained all day. The recipe that I will have to try, but can't do quite yet is called Spring Tart and is taken from the Cook's and Confectioner's Dictionary from the year 1733. It goes like this:

"To make a Spring Tart.Gather such Buds, in the Spring of the Year, that are not bitter, also the Leaves of Primroses, Violets, and Strawberries; take also a little young Spinage, boil them, drain them in a Colander; then chop them very small, and boil them over again in Cream; add to them Naples Bisket grated, and so many Yolks and Whites of Eggs as will make the Cream very thick, colour all green with the Juice of Spinage; season with Salt, Nutmeg, Cinnamon and Sugar, and bake it in Puff-paste or otherwayes."

The main reason I haven't tried this yet is that the violets aren't quite there yet. I saw one single solitary one today. Saying that, it does say the leaves, doesn't it? "Naples Bisket" I'm told is a type of sponge biscuit. So shall try this out very soon and let you know the result and quantities used.

For today we shall use some with everything else we gathered on todays wild food gathering expedition in a wholesome soup involving potatoes, lentils plus wild chicory...


...wild onions, daisies, borage, stingy nettles, salad burnett aaannd... I think that's all. Anyway, just to give you an idea of our walk today. After 24 hours of rain the air had cleared beautifully and the views were magnificient. It was one of the few days in the year when we could see Corsica clearly in the distance.

This a view back to our village:

and that one over towards the sea and the Gulf of La Spezia.

Unfortunately the photo doesn't do reality any justice, but it gives you an idea.

Here's to you Paddy

Well happy St. Patrick’s Day, everyone, for a start. We were going to go to our favourite bar, Pegaso at Arcola, which has a do on tonight, but unfortunately we are to broke for that. We’ll just nip over to our neighbours with a couple of beers to have at least a wee celebration. Spring has definitely arrived in force now. The weather has been fine since the last post, glorious sunshine and daytime temperatures in the upper teens and even lower twenties. These primroses above I spotted on a walk I went on near Brugnato yesterday, while Susan was giving her class. They were in a little wood, which was literally covered with them. Incidentally, to anyone reading my post on the wild salad, I don’t recommend the use of primrose leaves at any rate, unless you have a fetish for drinking your bathwater. It tastes of soap!

The moon is now waning and as a general rule of thumb as far as I understand, things that grow downwards should be sown during this period. So today we were out in Arcola and sowed out potatoes at one of the top terraces and carrots on one of the beds, which has already onions growing in it. Carrots and onions are said to make excellent companion plants as the smell of one repels the pests of the other. I have so far not had much success with carrots. This is partially due to our heavy soils and on the other hand due to the fact that evolution seems to be extra quick around here. As soon as you grow something like carrots, all surrounding weeds take on the same shape, so you don’t know which is weed and which is not. So you either pull out things you meant to keep or leave things in you didn’t. Either way you can’t win! We had, just before the full moon sowed out one more bed of peas as well; hope not too late.

From previous years experience we tend to get one more cold spell at the end of March. Hope we’ll escape it this time. As my dad would say: “Wouldn’t mind if the weather stayed like that until… Christmas… and then slowly got better.” Well a bit of rain would be useful, as long as it falls at night and not too heavy.