Persimmon Cookies

...or kaki biscuits, depending on your linguistic preferences  Although, these things are definitely cookies, I reckon.  You know the ones that Cookie Monster devours (I'm told he's now a politically correct veggie monster!). 

Anyway, I'm often asked what I do with my kaki / persimmons / sharon fruit, whatever you want to call them.  Some people apparently simply eat them, but I'm really not very keen on them, so have always turned them into my "I can't believe it's not mango chutney" chutney.  But now our little helper Cat has found another delicious use for this fruit: Persimmon Cookies.  She was reading a book called Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen.  At the end of the book there were some recipes including this one:

Apparently Mennonite cooking is particularly good, because they chain their women to a stove all day.  Cat has made those for us twice so far (we didn't have to chain her up for that!) and they are delicious, retaining a nice moisture.  Highly recommended recipe.

In other news our olive picking is being constantly interupted by rain.  Sometimes this almost enhances the spectacular views from the olive grove in Popetto:

Other times we hardly see a thing:

And we have had plenty enforced breaks and didn't even bother starting on Sunday:

Finally Eddie and Cat are bonding well:

If you want to know what Cat makes of all this check out her blog.

Wild Food of the Month November: Autumn Olive & of Little Helpers

To those of you who have been following my recent posts it will come as no surprise what the wild food of the month for November is going to be.  NO! NOT the coypu, i still haven't managed to catch one, it's the autumn olive berry.

Now I have identified it with the help of my dear friend Mr'H. in Idaho I can't stop singing it's praises!  The name comes from the silvery olive colour of its foliage.  It's a shrub or low tree, not at all related to the actual olive, native in Eastern Asia and producing oodles of bright red, juicy berries.  Eaten raw they taste somewhere between a redcurrant and a cranberry, both fruits that I can't grow to save my life in our climate.

Further research revealed that the berry is not only edible and tasty, but extremely good for you with up to 16 times as much Lycopenes as raw tomatoes, making it a potentially powerful cancer preventative.  The plant is regarded in many places as an invasive non-native species, which has been planted along river banks to prevent erosion, but because of its high germination success has been known to displace native flora in some places.  The site where we found it there are only about half a dozen or so trees, absolutely laden with fruit.

Due to it's ability to absorb nitrogen from the atmosphere in can thrive on extremely poor soils and fix nitrogen in the soil and make it available for other plants.  The wood makes good fire wood, carving wood or can be used to build solid wooden posts.  The fruit, apart from simply enjoying it raw, can be juiced, made into jam, fruit leather, dried, added to cakes etc. etc. etc...

Now I want to save some seed to plant on my land.  Non-native it maybe, but something that prevents erosion, a recent problem as you'll have noticed, and has so many other uses, sounds just like the thing I like to grow.

On a slightly different note, this week we are having a little helper staying with us, Cat from Oregon.  We have recently signed up with a website called helpX, that brings together people who travel on a budget and would like to experience their destination more intimitely and are willing to work for a bed and meals, with people who can do with a hand with something.  So Cat became the first in hopefully a long line of people who decide to share our lives with us.  So today and yesterday we gave her an introduction into our lifestyle by taking her wild food foraging and then turning our spoils into lovely preserves.

It's the season for 3 different fruits at the moment.  One is the fruit of the strawberry tree, which Cat is picking up there and of which I have spoken extensively last year in a post which is proving to be the most googled post on my blog.  The recipe of a strawberry tree fruit jam I posted at the time was only a limited success.  We ate it, but I wondered if it was worth our while again as it turned out to be a bit bland.  So this year I decided to add some different ingredients to make a Christmas Jam.

This is what we did.  We picked about 500g strawberry tree fruit.  Then we added 500g of autumn olive berries.

and maybe 150g myrtle berries

Here's Susan in action picking some of them:

To those 3 fruits we added a chopped apple, zest and juice of one orange, a spice mixture consisting of cinnamon, vannilla flavoured sugar, nutmeg, ginger and cloves.  We cooked that until soft, than added 500g sugar and boiled fast until setting point.  After that we pressed this through my tomato mill to get rid of the rough seeds and achieve a smooth consistency..

 Reheated it and bottled it in hot jars.  Boy was this delicious!  I shall make biscuits filled with this stuff for Christmas if I can keep my greedy mits off it for long enough.

The other experiment with autumn olive berries was along the lines of my (in)famous "I can't believe it's not mango chutney" chutney, in the sense that we made a "I can't believe it's not cranberry chutney" chutney consisting of unweighed and unmeasured quantities of autumn olive berries, apples, onions, ginger orange zest and juice and white wine vinegar.

Mix up and boil for a couple of hours until a good consistency is achieved and bottle into hot jars.  Again, absolutely delicious and will make a great accompaniment for turkey or chicken.

lunch... and other news

Excuse the slightly longer creative break, we're still alive and well. The weather has been cooler and more changeable than usual for this time of year, weeds are growing faster than I can fight them and the tyre house hasn't really progressed much. But other than that life goes on...

After the last post on breakfast I thought I'll let you in on what we do for lunch. I couldn't skip lunch without fainting! Occasionally lunch conists of left-overs from dinner, but more often we take sandwiches to the land made with homemade bread and, well I quite like cheese or salami or ham etc. but these things increasingly become rare luxeries for us so we make our own sandwich fillings such as a bean and olive paté or hazelnut butter.

I'll write a separate entry on how to do these, but I know of some people who find it difficult to make yeast doughs. I have never quite understood where the difficulty lies, but for those who do, here a step-by-step guide to our basic bread recipe:

For 1 loaf weigh 500g wholemeal wheat flour. We get ours directly from a mill. Mix in a teaspoon of salt. Form a crater in the centre of the flour, crumble in a 25g cube of fresh yeast and a teaspoon of sugar.



Measure about 350 ml warm water. Pour some of the water into the centre over the yeast and sugar and stir into a thinnish paste with the back of your wooden spoon.


Cover the centre paste with some of the flour from the outside of the crater, cover up with a clean tea towel and leave in a warm place for 1/2 an hour


This is what it should look like then:


Add the rest of the water


and mix with a wooden spoon


giving it a good beating, making sure it's all nice and evenly moist. If too dry add a wee bit more water. Cover again with the tea towel and leave for at least one hour.

It should have more or less doubled in size



Fill into a lightly greased tin flatten and squeeze into shape with the back of a wet wooden spoon



and place in a cold oven, putting the temperature to about 175C. Bake for about 50 minutes and...

Simple as that! There are of course variations to the theme, you can use different types of flour, you can add herbs, olives, dried tomatoes, olive oil before the second rising stage, but this is the basic recipe which we do every other day or so.

In other news, these are the pretty flowers of the litchi tomato



and this is some spilanthe. Works wonders against toothaches. You chew one leaf and makes the whole side of your mouth go numb.

Go on, guess...

No. You'll never get it. Have a go though. What ingredients do you think I have just made jam out of? ... No ... no not that either ... no you are not even close!

Here's the story while I keep you guessing. You know us gardeners always like to experiment with something new. New vegetables or exotic fruit, or a different variety like yellow tomatoes, or purple beans, or red carrots etc. Sometimes these experiments are a great success and they enrich our dinner table, other times they are not. The latter may be due to problems germinating perhaps, or just not ripening properly, or producing lots of foliage, but no fruit, the list goes on.

Failure may also be due to the fact that the resulting produce simply isn't very nice. Maybe it's a really stringy bean or you've always had a prejudice against pumpkins and approaching them again after years you find out why you didn't like them in the first place (it's the consistency... however I've made a large batch of curried pumpkin soup for the freezer, which I find tolerable).

Well my experiment gone wrong this year (apart from the pumpkin...) is a variety of greeny pink aubergine. I saw the seeds and thought: "hmm, I like aubergines, grilled, as Melanzane alla Parmigiana, under oil, in a ratatouille etc, why do they always have to be purple." They turned out to be earlier ripening than their purple cousins. One plant died misteriously, but a good 7 or 8 of them were doing well.

So it came to the first harvest, I sliced them and noticed an abundance of hard seeds inside. That would be quite good if I wanted to grow this variety again next year, but the taste test showed them to be tough and stringy and pithy with the seeds even when grilled for some time. Not very nice at all!!!

So here I was, with a bunch of happily producing aubergine plants with inedible aubergines. What to do with them? I was tempted to throw the whole lot straight onto the compost heap. Then I passed a stall at the Medieval festa of our town recently (for photos see Facebook...), and they had various homemade preserves on tasting there. And amongst other exotica there was an aubergine and chocolate jam! And you know what? It tasted good.

I didn't want to be rude and ask for the recipe, so today I made up my own. Try it, you'll be pleasantly surprised!

Ingredients:

• 1kg aubergines, cubed
  
• 2 large apples cored and roughly chopped
• 50g cacao powder (maybe less...)
  
• 600g sugar

Method:

• Simmer the aubergines and apples in about a cup of water until well soft.
• Press the mixture through a tomato mill or a mesh thus getting rid of the seeds and skins.
• Return to the pan and bring back to the boil.
• Add cacao powder and sugar and stir in rapidly on a high temperature. Boil for just a few minutes, stirring constantly until the the bubbles plop on the surface.
• Bottle in hot sterilised jars.

Now you didn't see that one coming, did you?

What to do with too many courgettes

It's the time of year again where we're struggling with a glut of courgettes. Here's my method of preserving most for at least a couple of weeks:

Roast Courgette sott'olio

1. Slice courgettes diagonally to about 5mm slices.
2. Heat a griddle pan to very hot and add just a drop of vegetable or sunflower oil (olive oil tends to burn at high temperatures and you might end up with courgette flambée). Throw in a single layer of courgette slices, sprinkle with salt, pepper, rosemary and chopped garlic. Grill a few minutes on both sides until done and clear juices run when you press a wooden spatula on top.
3. Place the slices into a bowl with white wine vinegar. While doing the next batch, turn the slices in the vinegar ensuring both sides are covered, then place in a sealable plastic container.
4. Repeat until you have used up all the courgettes. Cover with good quality olive oil and store in the fridge until needed. Not sure how long it lasts like this, but not very long in our household. If put into sealable jars and sterilised in a water bath, it maybe possible to store it for the winter, but haven't tried that yet.
   
5. Makes an excellent antipasto or mixed with some pasta as a primo.
6. You can also treat aubergines and peppers in the same way and make a mixed roast antipasto. Oh and, whilst it does use up quite a bit of expensive olive oil, you can of course re-use the left-over oil afterwards having acquired a nice rosemary and garlic flavour.
   

Wild Food of the Month May

Alledgedly God invented the rainbow as a sign that he wasn't all going to drown us yet again. So He sent this beautiful rainbow a couple of days ago, seen from our front door.



However, this was a view from our window today, after the rainbow, and I swear, I just saw Noah and his ark float by... and we are 300 metres above sea level! Normally we can see as far as the island of Elba 100 miles from here. Now we barely see the neighbours roof!


This weather is ridiculous! I have never experienced a colder or wetter May anywhere, let alone in Italy. Last year at this time we had 35+ degrees, now it's 14! I apologise for the excessive use of exclamation marks, but there are just no words for it. There's so much to do on the land, but I'm just sitting indoors, twiddling thumbs.

Anyway, enough of that. On one of the few brief breaks in the rain, Sunday afternoon, we went for a wee walk along the coast.

And of course there's no such thing for me as just a walk if there's wild food to gather. I've first heard of the many uses for mallow from my buddy Mr.H. I've since discovered there's loads of it growing around here, I just didn't know what it looked like.

Richard Mabey's invaluable pocket guide Food for Free has an interesting recipe, which I modified slightly to test this new food (new to me that is, because alledgedly Horace ate nothing but olive oil, mallow and chicory).

The variety growing wild here is Common Mallow (it's common alright):



It has numereous health benefits and all parts of the plant are edible. It's high in mucus and as a tea relieves coughs. The root of a different species, marsh mallow, used to be used to make the famous confection, which I believe is now made exclusively from sugar. It is also rich in vitamins A, B1, B2 and C as well as various mineral salts. It can be used externally to treat skin diseases acne, burns and insect bites.

The seeds can be eaten raw as a snack, young leaves and flowers can be added to salads. The recipe I tried is a variant of the Egyptian soup Melokhia:

This is how I did it:

Ingredients:

• 500g mallow leaves
• 1 litre chicken or vegetable stock
• 2 tsp coriander seeds
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 1 dried chilli of your preferred strength
• 1 tbsp olive oil

1. Cook the mallow leaves in the stock for some 10 minutes
2. In the meantime mash the spices and oil to a paste in a pestle and mortar, then fry gently in a separate pan for a couple of minutes.
3. Add the paste to the soup and leave to simmer for anothe 2 or 3 minutes.
4. Serve with bread

It's a lovely warming soup on a miserable, raniy May day.

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 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!

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.