FuoriBorgo

with orange peels

No squid, octopus or any other sea creature in my kitchen and in this post today, I promise!  From the sound of it, I think many of you will find these images a little more soothing:)

The oranges our new wood cutter gifted us were large, plump and juicy, with fragrant peels that had never been treated with pesticides of any kind - a really precious gift that we put entirely to good use.  

Some of the peels we cut into thin strips, and I made chocolate-covered candied peels - as after-dinner treats for the kids (my big boy loves them).

Other peels, I put in a jar and covered them with acquavite (distilled spirit) to make an orange cordial similar to Limoncello (I shared our Limoncello recipe here), and which will be ready in a couple of weeks time - an after-dinner treat for Tom and me when he's finally back.

The rest, we just peeled, bent and squeezed onto the flames of our candelabrum to make flashes and flares - a timeless during-dinner at-fruit-time fun activity that had my siblings and me mesmerized at my kids' age too!

cinnamon rolls in PJs

In PJs and shawl, I baked cinnamon rolls for our first breakfast of the year.  I followed the heirloom recipe and tips & tricks that Tom's cousin Anne taught me one summer day, several years ago at the family cabin, and although I suspect I had the oven a little too high (Fahrenheits are a mystery to me), my rolls came out almost as nicely domed as Anne's, and the boys declared that they tasted just like hers.  Or I'm sure they would have, had they not been too busy munching!

solo lunch

On that nippy autumn day I was going to be alone for lunch - something that happens extremely rarely - and I made myself one of my favorite soup recipes: open the fridge, throw a bunch of vegetables in the pot (cabbage and pumpkin were on hand), add some herbs, cook, blend, serve hot with olive oil and chèvre.  Then I sat by the fireplace, and I ate it peacefully and happily while reading a book (gasp!), knowing all too well that my kids would be happy too ... because I'd finished the last of the cabbage.

What's your favorite food when you're eating solo?

autumn comfort from my garden and afar

Although I've grown up listening to my mother tell me time and time again how much she loves the autumn, with the typical low fog that, thick and gray, envelopes the northern Italian plane, and the subdued tones of the cold season - I'm always suprised when I hear people say that this is their favorite season.  I, on the other hand, stretch summer as long as I can, stubbornly refusing to wear boots and sweaters until even I have to admit that my favorite season with its warm light and bright colors, and its abundance, has faded away.  These are the days when I need comfort, and this year I'm finding joy and autumn comfort from my garden ... and from afar.

Remeber the jasmine green tea I made back in the spring (here)?  I thought we might use it to make iced tea in the summer, but I don't drink iced tea, and the boys favored peach tea on hot days, so it wasn't until the autumn chilliness started creeping in through the old stone walls of our house last week that I was reminded of it.  My experiment worked, and it tastes so good: warming spring blossom flavor from the garden on a gray autumn day!

But what brought me the most comfort on these first brisk days is a gift of a friend, who knitted especially for me the loveliest pair of socks I've ever seen.  It's a gift that warms my heart as well as my feet.

Ivana is a young woman working in a foreign country, and a super talented and passionate knitter.  She also has a big heart, and because she knows I stopped knitting, she made some socks for me (she included something for each of the kids in her package too).

Aren't these socks gorgeous?  You can find the pattern on Ivana's Ravelry page here.

I don't think there could have been a better way to say hello to the cold season than to be warmed up with sweet spring blossom flavors from my garden, and a handmade gift from a friend.

high summer scents

The different scents of the herbs and lavender I harvested a few months ago (here and here) were almost intoxicating.  They filled the air and clung to my hands, as I stripped the now-dry stalks, storing up the aromatic leaves and flowers, the intense smell of summer blossoming.  And I'm feeling a little nostalgia as that season, my favorite, fades away.

They're pale and ashen signs of summer, my dry herbs are, but their scent is rich and invigorating, and from the garden, by way of my hands, they'll keep bringing the warm months into our home and our kitchen even in the heart of wintertime.

~ from the garden to our kitchen ~

Do you know how certain posts just don't seem to want to write themselves?  I've had this bunch of photos in my "drafts" forever, with an idea to write about how to make a tomato sauce for pasta that preserves the freshness and the flavors of this quintessential sun-soaked summer vegetable, without cooking them (and their vitamin content) away. The ubiquitousness of tomato sauce in pasta is a fallacy about Italian-style cooking: Italian cooks don't always cook their tomatoes to a pulp, especially when those tomatoes are fresh and in season.

So, may I just go ahead and show you my photos of a pasta with tomato non-sauce?

I like to use beefsteak tomatoes, by far my favorite type: each tomato looks so different from its siblings (I love variety, and waiting and see how each individual tomato is going to end up looking as they grow on the vine, see here more beefsteak tomatoes from last year).  Moreover, they're fleshy and not too juicy, have perfect balance between sweet and tart, and don't have too many seeds.  In essence, beefsteak tomatoes have all the qualities that I want in a tomato, whether I'm eating them fresh, canning, making sauce, or lightly sauteeing them to keep their freshness and flavors.  

Here's how we do it.

All you need is pasta, tomatoes, one clove of garlic, and fresh herbs - Italian (and Mediterranean) cooking is more about the quality of a few fresh, simple ingredients than how much of them you use.

Chop up fresh herbs (our staples are chives, basil, marjoram, savory - not enough good can be said about the flavor of this largely undervalued herb - sage, rosemary), and a clove or so of garlic, and fry them lightly in a skillet in extra virgin olive oil.

Chop the tomatoes, add them to the skillet with the herbs, salt, and saute for a couple of minutes only: just long enough for them to take on some of the herb mix aroma.  When you see that they start releasing juice, turn off the flame.

Boil your pasta to a slightly undercooked stage (al dente - you can see a little white rim of undercooked pasta when you bite through one of the noodles), drain, and add immediately to the still-hot skillet, tossing until the pasta absorbs the juices from the tomatoes and herbs.

You're ready to serve, and to enjoy pasta with full tomato freshness and flavor.  Buon appetito!

 

from the fig tree

We all had very different thoughts when we saw the forecasts for torrential rain on Tempo Italia.com (our favorite weather resource, no only because it's accurate but also because of their original weather descriptions - who knew weather reports could be fun?).  The boys' hearts sank, thinking of flooded tennis courts.  Rebecca argued that we could still go to the beach because - you know - the sea is wet anyway (!).  While my thoughts raced to the fig tree, laden with ripe figs which I'd kept putting off picking.  So, off to the fig tree we went, again and again, filling colanders and bowls.  We harvested about 7 kilos of figs.

By the time the rains came, we were home processing or eating our fig loot, in a number of ways:

- fresh figs,
- figs as snacks (figs and mature sheep cheese caciotta di pecora - my favorite, but figs and Parma ham with mint leaves wasn't too bad either),
- fig jam (over 4 kilos of it),
- oven-dried figs (an experiment),
- frozen whole figs (another experiment, so that I can make this fig torta, below, out of season)
- this fig torta, one of the best torta ever.

This fig torta is actually an almond tart (crostata) with fresh whole figs in, and it is divine: figs and almonds are a wonderful combination.  It's apparently a recipe from Tuscany, published by Briton Jamie Oliver in his Jamie's Italy, which I got from a Danish friend ... I don't know how much more circuitous a recipe can get, but I'm so glad it eventually came my way, because this is the best fig torta ever.

Do you have a favorite torta?  Where did you find the recipe?

with a crate of peaches

Here's how we used a crate of yellow and white peaches this weekend:

Peach torta for breakfast.

Iced peach tea to cool off after ping-pong games (it's been hot!).

Fresh fruit salad for desserts.

Peach jam for winter.

And I learned how it pays to be "in the moment" when you make jam: for the first time ever, after years of making jam, it boiled over.  At first I was horrified at the waste of my precious preserves, but soon I was even more horrified at how long it took to clean the sticky, hot mess off my stovetop.  (This must have been a weekend of jam-related disasters, because coincidentally Diane in Portugal burned her pear jam, and posted a recipe for cleaning off a copper pan from carbonized jam here.)

And peach gelato for right now - did I mention how hot it's been over here?  Hot, and gorgeous, and summery, and very, very peachy.

Happy beginning to a new week to you all!

torta from our woods

Here and there in our woods, where the dense tree canopy thins a bit, thorny shurbs grow that give us blackberries around this time in the summer.

Picking them is a slow process.  You walk through the woods, seeking out the long, intricate stems and carefully gathering their berries, while avoiding their vicious thorns.  Picking blackberries in our woods is so different from wandering out to our garden and quickly filling the harvest basket, but it has an element of adventure and of hard-earned achievement.  And while most times our little basket is rarely full at the end of our walks, each and every one of the blackberries it holds is a prize, and tastes all the sweeter.

No matter how full our little basket is, there are always enough blackberries to make a torta (a cake? a pie? a turnover? a tart? - honestly, how many terms are there in English for torta?!  I never know which one to choose!).  

And blackberry torta from our woods is delicious.  Always.

to the caper bush

Some days we take the bikes out, ride down the road to where the caper bush grows, and pick its plump buds, which I preserve in salt or pickle.  (Some help is needed to get the youngest biker up that road again when we come home, but that's what big strong brothers are for!)  This bush grows in a secluded spot on a little sunny lane, straight out of a dry-wall terrace - each year it amazes me how its lush, deep-green branches with their striking white and purple flowers can grow out of narrow gaps between the rocks.  

We went to the caper bush several times this summer, because when we had our fancy lunch in Monte Carlo, I tasted for the first time a delicious caper and olive based French dip that I can't wait to make soon: tapanade.  Have you tried tapanade, or used capers in your cooking?