Nature's supermarket

This morning at the Belvedere the sun rose in a cocoon of autumn mist, foretelling a change in the warm and bright weather we've been having. 

It will be a wild supper in Carmine Superiore tonight.

Parasol mushroom the size of a dinner plate and weighing 250g, from Nature's Supermarket, free of charge.

Plus ça change...

Misty, drizzly and rainforest steamy. 

As I feed my sheep the fat chestnuts I've just gathered in the woods, the monsoon weather brings a memory of our little house in Zaria, northern Nigeria, during a gap between rainstorms. The guard is leaning on the gate, lazily disputing with another man in Niger French. Dauda is out back, singing to himself a faintly familiar gospel tune as he prepares lunch. And a herd of skinny white cattle is passing under the avenue of mango trees beyond the fence. 

My ram's head comes up for another handful of the pocket-warm shiny nuts and I see in my mind's eye the head of a white cow come up to steal a golden, juicy mango from a tree. 

As I make my way back to the house, there are fire salamanders on the path, and in Zaria that day I found a chameleon in the garden, shedding his skin. 

It's easy to remember my life in Zaria as a great adventure - and easy to forget that my life in Carmine, while different, is really just the same. 

Evidence?

After a couple of days of humid and hot weather it is at this moment chucking it down and rumbling ominously. Today's midday temperature was 28° but it's gone suddenly cooler...

Could there be pixies at the bottom of my Carmine garden?

Ancient lights

The night after the long-awaited storm, and the sky is extra-azzurro and there's a wild wind whipping around the Rock. 

As so often in a storm, yesterday evening was punctuated by the on-off-off-on of the electricity supply. Eventually we opted for candles to accompany the cheese and the aligoté. 

Recommended in a power cut: Domaine Michel Lafarge Bourgogne Aligoté Raisins Dorés 2009.

Garlic with ancestry

Today continues the trend of the last few days. Blue skies, a slight breeze and temperatures in the high 30s. That's around the 100°F mark. Thank God for the cooling waters of the old lavatoio, where I can lie up to my neck in fresh water straight off the mountain when things get too hot for comfort.

M. is very proud of his garlic harvest this year. He tells me he had the seed cloves from a German who had his from a German, who had his from a Russian. I just like the way they taste, and the way the flowers look:

Homegrown garlic flowers.

Carmine Superiore. 

Junk food doggie

Hot. Blue skies. In short, August at Lago Maggiore.

My dog has a cast iron stomach. He can, and will, eat anything. Bones, rubber gloves, balloons, plastic bags, used tea bags, cat food, chicken innards, wild boar testicles, many-days dead sparrows and so forth. 

Recently he lay at Carmine's small beach methodically turning the rubber ball we had been playing with into not-so small pieces and ingesting them, to the horror of the onlookers. The Carmine Telegraph flashed up the hill, and by the time I got home, I was greeted by a kind and deeply worried neighbour who gave me chapter and verse on the symptoms and dangers of blocked digestive tracts in dogs.

But regardless what he eats, Jakob, Lord of Misrule, Master of the Compost Bin, and Scourge of Children's Parties, has remained Seigneur of the Stiff Stool.

Until now.

The last two days (and nights), my hairy eating machine has had diarrhoea in great juddering spasms at about three-hourly intervals. Poor thing. 

The culprit?

A stolen portion of MacDonald's fries. 

After the rain No. 1

Looks like it will be another sunny and warm day at the lake; temperature in the mid-20s.

Time again to be bottling sunshine.

Here's the recipe.

I had a little nut tree...

Sixteen degrees at 8am. Bright sunshine. And up here on The Rock, a gentle laundry-drying breeze.

The other day in Conad Supermarket, Cannobio. Prime walnuts, price €8.95 per kilo. Price includes first class shipping by Noberasco some 11,000km from Argentina. 

Part of what's wrong with the world.

Today in Carmine Superiore. Just-fallen walnuts, price €0.00 per kilo. Price includes a breath of mountain air to pluck them from the tree, 15 minutes gathering, first class transport 300m down the hill from the prato, and a day on the windowsill drying in the autumn sun. 

Part of what's right with Carmine Superiore.

Biou!

This weekend, our friends from the House of Bava are beginning grape-picking. 

In Arbois, France, where I recently spent a very happy couple of days recharging my batteries, the grape harvest is celebrated in a very special ceremony in early September every year. The first of the grapes are used to make the Biou, an enormous bunch of grapes made up of dozens of smaller ones. The Biou is paraded in the streets to general celebration, carried by four local winemakers and accompanied by two fiddles. The Biou is then hung in the ancient parish church of St-Just as an offering to God (and I suspect as a throwback to a more pagan ritual). 

Gilles Thouyard's 1988 stained glass depiction of the Biou.

Eglise St-Just, Arbois

Good luck and buon lavoro to all our friends in the wine industry who are harvesting their grapes about now. We look forward to schlepping a few cases up the hill and popping those corks in years to come!

First fruits

Twenty degrees at 8am. Bright, warm, humid, with a breeze.

That breeze? It's bringing down the first sweet chestnuts and littering our prato with walnuts. I'm off for a bit of a forage. Beats cleaning the kitchen floor... 

What I did on my holidays No.4

Renewed my acquaintance with Grigioni's heart-expanding sky, breathed its clean air and relished the fresh produce of its wide, steep landscape.

Out-cooked ... already

A wild, windy, wet and shockingly cold day. 


I first visited Italy about - ouch - 25 years ago. We spent a month lounging about the Cinque Terre, and in our group we counted a rather erudite Dutch artist. Said Dutch artist was designated cook for the group, being the only one who could. Cook. I - the only woman - certainly couldn't. Apart from some great leaps forward in the past 10 years under the tutelage of my dear beloved, whose work may be thinking but whose life is definitely cooking, I still hold the title as the worst cook he has ever met. 

Anyway, said Dutch artist, before leaving us to meet his boyfriend in Marseille showed me how to make a caprese salad, and until now I was very proud to be able to do at least that with a little Dutch artist flair. 

Yesterday evening, I let my daughter loose with the basil, tomatoes and mozarella... I'm now reassessing my frame of reference.

Insalata caprese. By B.

Aged four.

Ciliegi nostrani

Today the sweet cherries came to shining-red, taut and juicy ripeness. 

Carmine cherries. 

No carcinogens, no hormone disruptors, no neurotoxins, no bee toxins. 

No Boscalid, no Bifenthrin, no Carbaryl, no Propiconazole. 

Just C02 and rainwater and sunlight.  

Firm, smooth cherries, straight from branch to mouth. 

My little tree-climbing monkeys didn't leave much left over for jam...

May bulletin

Twenty-eight degrees at 3pm. With a soothing breeze. We expect rain tomorrow.

Here in Carmine today all is quiet but for the tweeting of chicks in their nests, the rustling of lizards in the ivy and the slithering of snakes among the grass. The Easter visitors have for the most part gone away, and the steady stream of tourists has for now slowed to a trickle. 

My own brood of chicks are out in Palazzo Pollo, growing fast. They’ve come to the chicken equivalent of the ugly-wugly acne-greasy-hair stage common to many teenagers. They look as if they are about to expire from some nasty chicken disease, but in fact it’s just their second round of feathers coming in. This brood is particularly pleasing. They seem to have imprinted on me, and when I pay them a visit I am immediately surrounded, pecked and leapt upon. One habitually flies up to my shoulder where he pecks at my grey hairs, and the other day succeeded in stealing a pearl earring. One day I expect to find it again in a roast, like the peasant girl in The Fish and the Ring… I hope so, I had no idea of the price of decent pearls in this part of the world!

In the garden I’ve finally succeeded in planting tomatoes, aubergines, courgettes and basil, and we are already celebrating the first strawberries, cherries and red currants. The roses are a dream this year after a hard pruning in the winter. At San Gottardo their perfume, mingled with melissa and rosemary, filled the church.

Talking of perfume, I was several times at Galzignano, a thermal spa resort near Venice. (Did I mention how much I love spas? I did? Oh. Okay.) Swimming pregnant in the warm spa waters, I found myself surrounded by islands planted with flowering jasmine, and was immediately enchanted. I determined to make Carmine smell as good, and this year have finally augmented our stock of poet’s jasmine by another four plants.

If you happen to pass by while they are in flower – predicted for next week - I hope they bring the enchantment of the Arabian Nights to you too.   

A taste of honey

Overcast and cool. 


Today, we're once again bottling sunshine, an activity that signals late spring. The rubinia trees are in full bloom now. On the south side of Carmine, the woods are full of them, and on Carmine's tiny panoramic piazza, the scent of honey wafting across the valley from them is una meraviglia. This year, the elderflower mix includes a few rubinia flowers - an experiment in pleasure.

In praise of rosehips

The first overcast and misty day for what seems like yonks. Consequently, the temperature is back to being much more February than April.

Dried rosehips in an old wooden scale-pan.

One of my favourite herbal teas is rosehip. Last year in the autumn I was pretty hard pushed and failed to take off the rosehips, but they were still there this week when I went out to prune the roses, waiting patiently on the plants, ready dried. 


For a decent rosehip tea, crush the dried rosehips and add about two tablespoons to half a litre of boiling water, add honey to counteract the acidity. Some people vary the recipe with either crushed mint or hibiscus flowers.

I understand that rosehips are an excellent source of vitamin C, which I'm renaming 'the February vitamin', and a daily intake of rosehip powder from Rosa rugosa has been shown to reduce inflammation and pain in osteoarthritis. After all this week's garden labouring and dragging of books up the hill, I think I could do with some.

Dessert

Yesterday we clocked 15° at 3pm. Although this morning's early doggie-doddle-in-the-dark was somewhat chillier than of late, the temperature in the sun at midday hit 19°. 

Preventative medicine during February, the fever month. 

Delicious dessert for lunch al fresco in the winter sun.

And a good time...

...was had by all. 

The Christmas roll call was (left to right): Michel Lafarge 2007 Bourgogne Passetoutgrain; Louis Casters blanc de blanc champagne; Lafarge 2002 Bourgogne Pinot Noir; Burmester 1992 LBV Port; Lafarge 2007 Meursault; and Lafarge 1996 Vendanges Sélectionnées Volnay.  

PS After a glorious, nay, magnificent sunrise, the day is cloudy, still and frozen with the occasional sunny nanosecond.

Of men and boys

Last night's starry (shooting-starry) skies have left us minus-one shivery at eight this morning. More clear skies, and soothing sunshine. 

Saturday morning. One hour before sunrise. The ancient stones of Carmine Superiore lie silent in the winter cold. All is still. 

All but two muffled figures - one tall, one tiny - each carrying a mysterious bundle, stealing away quietly down the old pathway to the lake, keeping to the shadows and followed closely by two feline shapes. 

The village broods over the pair as they slip across the road and into a battered car. They gently pull onto the deserted statale and are soon lost amid the twists and turns of the Valle Cannobina. Soon the figure in the passenger seat is snoozing, as the driver takes the two of them expertly over the rise and into the Valle Vigezzo and beyond. 

Overhead, unseen, a meteor shower lights the sky.

As the sun rises, the pair, father and son, meet their contact at a rural farmstead lying beyond the last town, beyond the last village, beyond the last hamlet, at the very end of the valley. 


Rapidly and without too many words, the men manhandle a bodybag into the back seat and the car is once again away, this time taking the highway towards Omegna. In town, at an intersection, the driver signals discreetly to another in a stationary car, which immediately pulls out in front, leading the way. Plunging into the Omegna suburbs, they stop first at one house, then at another until at last there are six men. All carrying similar bundles. 

With each new arrival, the mood lifts until they are disgorged into a large cellar amid a festive spirit. The bag is lifted gently out of the World's Most Battered Panda, and the men start unbundling aprons and knives, opening bottles of homemade wine and starting in on the massive half-pig before them. 

In Piemonte, December is porker season - the traditional month for slaughtering pigs and making salami, sausages and other products. This particular fellow was reared free-range on an alp, and fed on the whey by-product of artisan cheese-making from the milk of the cows he shared the good life with. His death was swift and fear-free. And almost every part of him will be used. 

The sausages were made with only salt and spices - principally cinnamon - as additives, and believe me, they taste like no other pork I've ever eaten. Let's face it, they are probably the freshest I've ever eaten. There are 40 kilos of sausages hanging in the cellar right now, and I think Jakob! agrees with me on how good they are - every time he passes the cellar door, he points.

Here's to the big fellow. Here's to the kind friend who reared him, to all the guys who joined the gang last Saturday and brought their deboning knives with them. And finally to AJ, the boy who spent the day among the men and did such a great job loading up the sausage-machine.

Wild food

With Jakob! at my heels to help me find them, an angel in the kitchen to cook them, and a reliable supply of heavenly organic Alpine cream from Splügen, just the other side of the San Bernardino Pass, to accompany them, the old college term shrooming has recently taken on a completely new meaning...


[Tip: if that sentence was too long, just remember to pause at the commas and slow down at the italics - that's what they're there for.]