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...

Vendemmia

Well autumn definitely has arrived. The last few days it has been raining and it has got a lot cooler. So time for autumn jobs, the ‘vendemmia’, the grape harvest. Well, in actual fact, we hardly got anything off our vines at Villa. They succumbed to fungal attacks. As they hadn’t been looked after for a couple of years and I hadn’t quite pruned them to their final form yet, they obviously needed a greater attack of anti-fungal spray to become productive again. So to make the meager harvest worth while, we bought some 90 kg of Montepulciano grapes so we could test out the new winery equipment. Well when I say new, it’s new to us, but I have seen bits like these in a museum…

The hardest part of the job is the cleaning of the equipment.



Next the grapes go through the crusher. Montepulciano grapes have quite a dark juice already, so it is not necessary to leave the skins on the must for long, i.e. in our case we left them on for a couple of hours. We tested the potential alcohol content and it showed a massive 15% AbV! That’ll keep us happy…

Finally the whole thing is put through the press to squeeze out the juice. We got about 60 litres of must. Now it goes into large demijohns to ferment. Hopefully it’ll turn out fine, I’ll keep you posted.

Other than that it was Susan’s birthday, which meant she got a bit of cash through the post and relieving our crisis. We spent the rainy days stocking up on some storable basics and even better, there was a closing down sale at a nearby electrical store and we managed to pick up a cheap freezer, which we went and filled up with several goodies immediately, special offers meats and fish, as well as home-made pesto. Also made some of my special tomato chutney yesterday. On Saturday was the last of the outdoor parties in the village. Mauro had invited the neighbourhood as well as the members of his band for an afternoon of music and food in his back garden. Towards the evening it was getting decidedly chilly though.

The sun appears to have made a re-appearance this afternoon and, if it stays like this we shall plough over a terrace or two in the next couple of days and plant broad beans and peas. Also on the schedule for the next week or so is cider making with the same equipment we made wine with today.