Nettle pesto

A couple of days ago, I noticed the nettles bursting through in the garden - a real sign of spring. A weed, but welcome, because the butterflies love them. And because they taste so good, at least while they are young.

Here's a quick recipe for a homemade convenience food that will sit happily in your fridge for most of the week. This nettle mess works both as an green sauce / salsa verde AND as a pesto. It's a thrifty recipe, as it uses breadcrumbs to cut down on the nuts and cheese. It's delicious too. We ate it with vegetables at the beginning of the week, and finished it today on pasta, thinned down with a little of the cooking water.

Nettle pesto

Nettles
Mint (if you've got it, or other herbs, or none)
Garlic
Wholemeal bread
Cheddar
Oil

Pick a colander full of young nettle tops (you'll need gloves). Rinse them, then plunge them into boiling water for one minute to blanch them and take the sting out of them. As soon as the minute's up, tip them back into the colander (keep the water, it's full of goodness and can be drunk like a tisane) and run under the cold tap to stop them cooking. When they're cold, squeeze out the water.

Put a slice of wholemeal bread into the food processor. Add a chunk of cheese, a peeled clove of garlic and the nettles and a little mint. Blitz, then add oil in a stream. I used rapeseed oil. Keep tasting, adjusting the amounts. Hard to say how much oil, as it depends on what you are going to do with the sauce.


Links to related posts

Nettle soup
Nettle tea
Nettle beer
Ground elder salad

Home-made egg pasta

I'm tidying up, so I'm using my blog for its original purpose, which is as a 21st century manuscript cookery book. This is a reminder for a quick pasta. I've written it down twice while watching re-runs of Jamie Oliver cooking in a very up-market garden shed.

Mix 1 egg and 100g OO flour per person. Draw together in a ball. On the pasta machine's widest setting, roll and fold four or five times till it's silky. Then push it through until it's as thin as you'd like. Fold loosely, cut to tagliatelli. This takes 45-60 seconds to cook in boiling water.

I'd be grateful for any tips which would improve on this. I never find it quite as easy as Jamie makes out ;)

Two families & their pasta

My boys are very keen on four-cheese pasta, just about the only ready-made food I still buy: tortelloni with a mixture of cheeses. Waitrose has sold an own-brand version for years, and that is what I've always bought them. Until this week, when it had vanished from the shelves, in its place a branded version made by Del'Ugo.

On the back of the unfamiliar new pack I found a letter from the owner of the business, Paul Ugo, about its history. And I realised that Paul's grandfather was the man my grandfather bought pasta from for three decades. Let me re-wind a little here.

My grandparents met in 1915 in Italy, both members of a Red Cross unit led by the historian GM Trevelyan which served the Italian armies fighting the vicious mountaineering war on the Isonzo front. My grandmother was a VAD nurse, my grandfather the unit administrator. Amongst other legacies of that terrible time, my grandparents were left with a lifelong love of Italy and Italian food (also the ability to talk in fast and fluent Italian when they didn't want us to know what they were saying).

Luigi Ugo arrived in London in 1921 aged 14, and began making fresh pasta by hand for restaurants. He opened a shop in Gerrard Street in 1929, which soon expanded so that he was able to import machinery from Italy to establish a small fresh pasta factory.

And so on Saturdays, my grandfather, on his way home from work at the British Museum, where he was Keeper of Incunabula, would walk to Soho to Luigi Ugo's shop to buy fresh pasta. When they moved to Oxford, they missed Luigi's shop - I remember them pining for it. Instead, they befriended the Italian proprietors of the Luna Caprese in North Parade - but that's another story of family connections, discovered at the school gate when my younger daughter was five years old.


PS the photograph shows my grandfather arriving at our wedding on the arm of my uncle, who is now about the same age as my grandfather was when the picture was taken

Quick mushroom sauce for pasta

When I chop vegetables, I go for speed. When Lettice chops them, she takes enough care to end up with uniformly small cubes. Her Caprese salad ends up almost like a salsa, little cubes of cheese and avocado with finely diced tomato. It's good; it may not be the slices you expected, but it's good.

This is the pasta sauce she made for lunch: utterly delicious - the pieces were so small they barely needed cooking, which gave everything a fresh taste. Mine would have been chunky and clunky (and taken longer to cook).

Lettice's mushroom sauce

Finely dice onion, sweat it in a little olive oil. Meanwhile, get to work on some tomatoes and some mushrooms. When the onions are soft, add the vegetables, plus a splash of Marsala and a splash of balsamic vinegar. Cook briefly - certainly no longer than it takes to cook the pasta. Adjust the seasoning and stir into the drained pasta.

Pasta con le sarde revisited

One of the most visited pages on this blog is my recipe for pasta con le sarde made with tinned sardines. Yesterday, I had the chance to buy fresh sardine fillets. I can now tell you that the tinned version is not only cheaper and quicker, it's also much much more delicious - softer and sweeter.

Pasta con le sarde is one of those lovely dishes you can make from spring to autumn, full of the omega-3 goodness of oily fish and the herby freshness of the three types of fennel used: bulb, seeds and wavy fronds. Actually, you can make it in winter too, only then there's only one hit of fennel, the seeds. It's a Sicilian dish, so it has that tasty agro-dolce thing with the sultanas and anchovies. Well worth a try, if you don't know it. It's my entry for Weekend Herb Blogging, hosted this week by Susan at The Well Seasoned Cook.

Fennel has a faint taste of aniseed. Thomas Jefferson was sent seeds by the American consul in Livorno in 1824; he didn't know the plant, but, once he harvested them at his garden at Montecello, Virginia, he was a convert: Fennel is beyond every other vegetable, delicious, perfectly white. No vegetable equals it in flavour.

This recipe is a simplified version of the one found in Tamasin's Kitchen Bible, which, in turn, derives from Anna del Conte.

Pasta con le sarde
for 4

a handful of sultanas
a handful of pinenuts
2 medium onions
olive oil
1 head of fennel
2 anchovies
4-6 sardine fillets, chopped
1 tsp fennel seeds

400g pasta

Soak the sultanas in a little hot water. Peel and finely slice the onion into rings. Put into a wide saucepan with plenty of olive oil and gently stew. Toast the pinenuts in a dry frying pan. Dice the fennel and blanch in water for one minute; save the cooking water. Add all these ingredients (but not the water) to the onions, and continue to cook for at least 15 minutes until everything is getting soft.

Put on a large pan of cold water. Add the fennel seeds and the anchovies to your sauce (no need to chop them, they'll cook down in no time). When the water comes to the boil, add the pasta. Then add the sardines to the sauce.

If at any point the sauce gets too dry, add a little of the blanching water.

Everything will be ready at the same time. Drain the pasta and gently stir in the sauce. Garnish with the chopped whispy bits from the fennel.


Related posts

Pasta con sarde
White pizza with fennel seeds
Braised fennel

Quick roasted pepper pasta

Yesterday's lunch was the direct result of a blog event, Taste and Create. You're paired with another blog, you cook something from that blog. My pair is Bombay Foodie. Horatio thought he was going to get something spicy for his lunch. But no: Simran does a lot of baking (which I hardly ever do these days), and is using lots of soft fruit, which I can't here at this time of year, so despite lots of yummy things on this fairly new blog, in the end my choice was limited (but that's down to me, not Simran).

And so I made quick roasted pepper pasta - even quicker than Simran, because, as this is a summer dish, I didn't have any fresh peppers in the house. Simran posts useful information about peeling fresh peppers; I used roasted peppers in oil bought last year in Waitrose. And tinned tomatoes. And some leftover roasted onions. Quick and easy, an early taste of summer. And more interesting than the sum of its parts.

Incidentally, Simran made the Mount Athos chickpea patties I've been banging on about - here's her version.

Quick roasted pepper pasta
for 3

Half a jar of roasted peppers in oil
Half a tin of tomatoes
one or two onions
plenty of chopped parsley, or other herbs
pasta

Put the water on for the pasta. Meanwhile, sweat the sliced onions slowly in a little oil (unless you've got some leftover roasted sliced onions - I always make more than we need, because it saves time later). When the water is boiling, add the pasta; by this time, the onions will be soft, perhaps a little golden, add two or three tomatoes from the tin (or home-roasted, if you have such a thing - see below), but no juice. Then add peppers. Warm through.

Drain the pasta, leaving a little water to amalgamate everything, then coat with the sauce. Add plenty of chopped herbs.

You could serve this with grated parmesan, and that's what H ate. I sprinkled it with some of the anchovy breadcrumbs leftover from the cauliflower gratin we ate for dinner earlier this week. It's a new twist on an old idea from European peasant cookery - it's thrifty, it's heart-healthy. And it's delicious with this quick sauce.

Thanks Simran.

Related links

Roasting tomatoes
Mount Athos diet / chickpea patties
Mount Athos chickpea patties, an update
Chickpea mash
Nohutlu pilav
Mount Athos artichoke and potato

Pasta with braised lentils

This earthy pulse dish, just made for winter, had my lentil-hating husband reaching for more. It's richly flavoured, easy, fairly quick (no soaking involved), cheap - a dish you can make with tinned tomatoes, or, if you roasted some tomatoes in the glut months, this is the perfect use for them. It uses two of the few herbs which thrive at this time of year - rosemary and sage. And it's the very first lentil dish Lucius really likes.

Your kitchen will fill with the heady scent of rosemary as this cooks. And the water will turn black as squid ink - which, in turn, will colour the pasta brown as wholemeal.

It's based on a recipe by Antonio Carlucci, although I think it is Umbrian cucina povera. This may seem like a small amount for three, but the lentils are filling, and you could feed four with this much, providing you had a salad, or perhaps a pud.

Braised lentils and pasta
for 2 or 3

150g Puy lentils (or ones which hold their shape when cooked)
1 medium onion, cut in half
6 fresh sage leaves
a sprig of rosemary
250g pasta
2 tomatoes, either tinned or slow-roasted (from the summer)
1 clove of garlic, finely chopped
4 tbsp olive oil

Put the lentils into a large pan with the onion and herbs. Cover with two litres of cold water. Bring to the boil, then simmer gently until the lentils are just done, which will take around 15-20 minutes. Add the pasta and cook until done.

Meanwhile, chop the tomatoes and garlic, and heat in olive oil until they are soft. (You need to use a pan which is big enough to take all the pasta and lentils.) It won't take more than a couple of minutes: whichever type of tomato you choose, they are essentially already cooked, and you don't want to burn the garlic otherwise the dish will taste acrid, when what you're looking for is the soft sweetness of gently melted garlic.

Drain the pasta, fish out the onion and the bare stick of rosemary (the needles will have melted into the dish). Add this to the tomato mess, toss, and serve with a little grated parmesan.

Cheesy peasy pasta

Last month, at the Edinburgh Festival, we had lunch one day in the little cafe at the back of Valvona and Crolla, the great Italian deli. Pizza and pasta all round. The photo shows a delicious pea pasta dish which I ordered, because I love vegetarian pasta. This half-remembered dish was the inspiration for lunch on Saturday. Heart-healthy, quick, easy, suitable for one to - well, how big is your pan?

Cheesy peasy pasta for 2

2 handfuls of pasta
100g light Philadelphia
a little skimmed milk
2 cloves of garlic, chopped finely
a handful of peas
pepper
a little finely-grated parmesan

Start by boiling the water for your pasta (I used shells). Then, on a very low heat, melt the Philly with a little skimmed milk, enough to make the sauce liquid, together with the garlic. Put the peas on when you start cooking the pasta. Drain the cooked peas and add to your sauce; grate in a little parmesan for seasoning. Mix this into the drained pasta (you can use some of the cooking water to loosen the sauce if you weren't bold enough with the milk!). You could chop in a little mint, but it isn't necessary.

Horatio's bolognaise sauce with milk

Lucius and I went out to supper on Monday night, so Horatio was left to his own cooking devices. He bought mince for a bolognaise, something he often makes with Alfred. They usually follow a Mary Berry recipe in the Aga Cookbook (you can tell, because of all the tomato and grease on the pages!). I don't know whether he couldn't find the book or whether he wanted a change, but this time he used a different recipe, something more authentically Italian, which specifies using milk. Lettice couldn't believe it: "bizarre" she said. I've never made a ragu with milk, although I've often thought I should - but it's so easy to keep on doing the same old thing. Now I think I will always use milk, because it was delicious - sweet (too sweet, said Horatio), thick, rich, smooth.

The book he used was Pasta, by Eric Treuille and Anna del Conte, but he simplified the recipe according to his taste, and what he didn't find in the fridge. Bacon? Nah. Bay leaf? Don't need one of them. Garlic? Of course. Nutmeg? He didn't bother to answer, just gave me one of those "are you mad?" looks that teenagers do so well. Full fat milk? Is there any other kind?

Obviously this is a recipe I'd have to adapt further - take out the butter, use lower fat milk, make sure the mince was extra lean. And I would use the flavourings - nutmeg is particularly good with red meats, although I'm never quite sure whether I can taste bayleaf unless it's in a fish pie.

Horatio's slightly simplified classic ragu bolognese

Fry a couple of onions in a mixture of butter and olive oil (60g & 2 tablespoons). When they're nearly cooked, add a finely chopped garlic clove. Tip in 500g mince, and brown it. Here Horatio, a cook after my own heart, added his own embellishment, some chopped chorizo (he had left out the 60g bacon specified in the original recipe). Then add 2 tbsp tomato puree, 150ml red wine, 150 ml stock. Bring to the boil, and simmer gently for two hours. While it cooks, add milk. You need to add 150 ml in total, two tablespoons at a time at 20-30 minute intervals. You'll know when it's ready - it's a lovely thick, rich sauce.

He ate this with pasta shells. I'd serve it with spaghetti. Delicious. I know because we ate the leftovers for lunch.

Pesto

Look, I know you all know how to make pesto, but when I began this blog, it was so that I could easily find the recipes I use all the time - so this post is for me. Except there's one thing - can those of you that have been making pesto longer than I have tell me whether it freezes well?

I ordered a 200g bag of basil from my organic box this week, and it came yesterday - a huge bag of fragrant leaves. The recipe was on the bag ... only what blogger do you know follows a recipe exactly? This is not quite what was on the bag - quick, delicious, and in my fridge, because I don't want to waste it if it doesn't freeze well.

6 cloves garlic
200g pine kernels
200g freshly grated parmesan
200g basil
olive oil - a good lot
salt and pepper (at the end)

Whizz everything except the salt, adding the oil in a drizzle until you get a smooth creamy liquid. Add the salt and pepper when you've got the consistency you want.

You could do this in a mortar, if you wanted to spend a little time pounding ... a job for sitting in the sun, I think.

Mine's in a lovely jar, and I covered it with a little oil to stop it discolouring.



PS We ate some for supper, the little bit I couldn't fit into the jar, neat, to accompany our vegetables. Alfred thought it was slightly too cheesy, Lucius and Lettice said it was perfect. I thought it was a beautiful shade of green, and that made Alfred laugh.

Mushroom and tarragon sauce for pasta

Lunch today was pasta with a mushroom and tarragon sauce. I wasn't quite sure about using tarragon, it's more usually paired with fish and chicken, and other people put it in bearnaise sauce (I keep meaning to experiment with a no-saturates tarragon sauce, but somehow never get round to it). I used it anyway, because the tarragon plants will run to seed if I don't pinch them out pretty thoroughly - at least, I suppose they will.

I'm not sure if our plants are French or Russian tarragon - the French are supposed to be more desirable from a taste point of view, the Russian is tougher and more likely to survive cold winters or neglect by gardener. As both cold and neglect are likely here, I rather hope that ours are Russian.

I went out to pick some, a great big handful, and then started wondering about which plants we have. I looked them up ... no help at all. But I did find a story that said Henry VIII divorced Katherine of Aragon because she was too free with the tarragon in her cooking ... so I chopped only about a quarter of the leaves I'd brought in. Then common sense reasserted itself - Henry VIII divorced poor K of A because after 24 years she hadn't produced him a male heir (& now forensic historians have found that it was all his fault). All the same, I didn't take any chances.

There was one useful thing I did glean from the books - tarragon is quite short-lived, and needs replacing every two or three years. Dividing in the spring is probably the easiest, but I'm likely to forget since it's 10 months away. In the summer, you can take cuttings of the growing tips, which sounds not too difficult.

Quick mushroom pasta















Chop an onion, and sweat it in olive oil. When it's soft, add chopped mushrooms (I used a small box - sorry, I don't know the weight). Keep stirring these until they are soft. They'll exude their own liquid, which will evaporate, so that the end result is fairly dry. If you want to leave them to their own devices for the five or so minutes they will take to cook, then add a tiny bit of stock or water or wine, which will stop the whole thing burning before the mushrooms start to weep. Once they are cooked, add some chopped herbs - perhaps thyme, or oregano, or parsley, or chives, whatever you've got, really - and some finely grated lemon zest. Serve with pasta and a dollop of 0% Greek yoghurt.

This is an entry for Heart of the Matter 3 - heart-healthy pasta dishes, hosted this month by Ilva at Lucullian Delights, send her your entries by Tuesday.

PS improved superquick noodles

Just to update on the noodles ... we've eaten them a lot this month, and the recipe is better now than it was when I first posted - and still just as quick.

Cook the noodles (the quantities given here are enough for 3-4 little bundles of dried noodles). Toss them in olive oil. Then make a dressing with 1 tbsp peanut butter, 1 tbsp soya sauce, 1 tbsp chilli jam, and 3 tbsp olive oil. This makes a lighter dressing than before. Toss the noodles thoroughly in the dressing. Leave to cool. Then add salad veg: matchsticks of cucumber, shavings of carrot, shards of spring onion, peas, cooked mushrooms, a little leftover asparagus, if you have such a thing - whatever comes to hand. It's fabulous, it's easy, it's quick.

This week alone, I've eaten a version of it at home for lunch on my own; with my friend Rosemary in the foyer of the theatre during the first interval of Tosca; and, from a communal bowl with my friend Rosie, godson Edmond, and my daughter Lettice, at an open-air concert celebrating 1,000 years since the founding of Oxfordshire (in which my husband was singing Balshazzar's Feast by Walton, wonderful rousing music, 700 musicians). Better by far than sandwiches, quicker to make too.

Char-sui and noodles

The recipe that follows is char sui-ishier than anything in Nigella's book, although that's what was open when I put the marinade together. A couple of pork tenderloins (aka pork fillet, why DO supermarkets like to re-name everything?) are sitting in their marinade in the fridge waiting to be cooked tomorrow night - when I'll be in a hurry and won't feel like starting from scratch.

In How to Eat, Nigella gives two recipes for char sui, one which is fairly Chinese, the other with what was in her fridge on the night. Well, what was in my fridge tonight didn't quite do her first recipe, so this is what I used for two fillets:

4 tbsp light soy sauce
2 tbsp tomato ketchup
3 tbsp hoisin sauce
2 tbsp Madeira (no ginger wine or sweet sherry - EVER!)
2 tbsp runny honey
2 tbsp soft brown sugar

Tomorrow, I'll cook the meat (drained from its marinade) in a hot oven (220C) for 15 minutes, then turn it down to 160C until it's cooked (20-30 minutes, in my case both, because one is bigger than the other!). It needs basting with the sauce. When it's done, put the meat to one side, pour in the rest of the marinade, perhaps with a little water, and cook it through.

The resulting char sui is good hot or cold, cut into thin slices or little cubes (the meat you find in takeaway special fried rice). We're going to eat it with the noodles I made for lunch this week, and pak choi (from Riverford) dressed with oyster sauce.

Superquick noodles for lunch

Not even an attempt at authenticity, just a need for a quick, filling lunch that would involve vegetables and some of the leftover chicken sitting in my fridge.

Mix equal quantities (by eye, no need to obsess) of peanut butter, oil, soya sauce and chilli jam. This will take quite a long time if, like me, you've given up on ordinary peanut butter (full of palm oil, don't even think about it, it's the saturated fat as well as the orang utangs) and are finishing up a jar of the old-fashioned sort that separates like it used to when we were children. Boil the noodles. Mix. Add whatever you've got: today it was chopped chicken, spring onion and thin slices of red pepper. Next time it could easily involve cucumber. Or lightly cooked slices of pak choi. etc.

But some of you will have noticed from the paragraph above that I do obsess - it took me ages, and a lot of reading the small print on labels, to find a peanut butter that we can eat (in small quantities, it's still 50% fat, albeit mostly "good" ones): Organic Meridian Crunchy Peanut Butter.

If there was no chilli jam in the house, which sometimes happens, then I'd put in some ginger, garlic, perhaps a little nam pla. And it occurs to me that this sauce would be very good to pep up a bit of chicken, made in the morning and marinaded until it was time to start cooking supper.

I'm going to try the noodles out on the family at the weekend, with some home-made Char siu, along the lines Nigella calls char sui-ish ... in other words, I'm not going to consult a Chinese cookery book!


PS this is my entry for Heart of the Matter round three. It's pasta dishes this time - I didn't think Chinese noodles would count as pasta, but Ilva, who is hosting this round over at Lucullian Delights, says that it does ...

Pasta con sarde

Now then, this is not what you'd call an "authentic" dish, but I'm a little suspicious of that term, because it seems to me somewhat meaningless, or even an excuse for self-regarding chefs to lecture the rest of us. No two dishes are ever exactly the same, so authenticity should only be applied to the method, rather than exact quantities of ingredients. Dishes which are labelled "authentic" are ones which have been handed down through the generations, and it is only very recently that cooks have been able to get the ingredients that they wanted when they wanted them any day of the year - which means that cooks have traditionally used what is to hand.

So when I decided on the way home from work that what I wanted to eat more than anything was pasta with sardine sauce, I knew there was no question of making it with fresh sardines, or even salted ones, neither of these being in the larder. I used what was to hand: tinned sardines (in olive oil, well worth the few extra pennies). And I used the "authentic" method. It's nicer when you use fresh sardines, but this is better than not at all, and certainly better than with the tired-looking sardines that are all I can get locally at the moment.

Sardines are amongst the highest in omega-3 fatty acids, which reduce the risk of cardio-vascular disease in a number of different ways. Even canned sardines retain this advantage (canned tuna fish doesn't, sadly for those who like a tuna sandwich for their lunch). This recipe is for people who wouldn't normally choose to eat sardines, as the result is a very mild, though tasty sauce. I know that doesn't seem to make much sense - so give it a try! (Sorry, no photograph - partly because it's not very beautiful, and partly because we ate it up double quick!)


spaghetti or linguine
3 medium onions
4 tablespoons pinenuts
2 tablespoons sultanas
1 chilli
1 teaspoon fennel seeds
white wine
a lemon
one or two tins of sardines, depending on how much you like them!

Peel and chop the onions, then sweat gently in a little olive oil for 15-20 minutes without browning. Add the pinenuts and sultanas, the fennel seeds and the finely chopped chilli (I had to use a tablespoon or two of chilli jam, because there wasn't any fresh chilli either). Stir all this about for a few minutes, then add the sardines and a glass of wine. Cook this down for about 20 minutes, stirring every so often.

Meanwhile, cook the pasta (put the pan of water on after you've added the fish to the sauce). When all is ready, zest the lemon, squeeze the juice into the sauce, then mix the sauce carefully into the drained pasta. Sprinkle with lemon zest, and some chopped herbs if you have them.

These quantities will sauce enough pasta for 3 or 4, depending on appetite. If you make too much, it's good on a pizza, in a sandwich, on its own.

This is an entry for Heart of the Matter 3, which is hosted this month by Ilva at Lucullian Delights. The theme for May is heart-healthy pasta, something most of us know about without really thinking: lots of vegetables, not much meat, no cream or butter, and preferably not much cheese either. Ilva and I would really love to hear your ideas, which we'll post on the HotM website (linked back to your blog), where together we are building up a resource of heart-healthy recipes for everyone to share. Send the link to your entry to i_beretta AT yahoo DOT it, by 22 May.

The secret of cooking is the release of fragrance ...

"The secret of cooking is the release of fragrance and the art of imparting it. Fragrance: the bay laurel, Laurus nobilis, a sacred tree, how brightly, how fiercely it burns. Gather its dark-leaved branches in summer if you can. Sweet the influence of rosemary, its ungainly shrubby stems bursting with pale lilac flowers. Pungent the mint trodden underfoot on the way to the orchard. Peppery and sweet the scent of wild marjoram, origano, self-drying in July on droughty limestone hillsides; lemon-scented the clumps of wild savory, poor man's pepper, producing its minute snapdragon flowers in August, picked by quarrymen on their way down from the quarry. Irresistible the bunches of herbs sold in the market place by an old man who bothers to gather them, shrubby sprigs of thyme nibbled by hares in high pastures and green-leaved sage, and clary. Holy the Byzantine perfume of coriander leaves and seeds, recalling the smell of incense burning in a Greek chapel perched on the spine of a bare mountain. Passer-by, grasp the invitation proffered by fennel flowers and seeds on brittle stalks leaning out from the hillside. Savour the strange sweet taste of juniper berries, blue-black, picked in September on a chalk down where nothing much else will grow. Wander through the maquis in spring when shrubby sages, thyme, rosemary, cistus, lentisk and myrtle are in flower. Inhale the fragrance of the wilderness.

"I would like to transport you to the house of Maurin Bacciagulupo, the guardian of the temple of Diana at Luni. In front of his door on the plain of Luni stands the skeleton of the Roman temple. Maurin's threshing floor is divided from it only by the twisted branches of an immeasurably old vine. Looking west you see the great extent of Tyrrhenian Sea at a distance and the long line of hills which terminates in the promontory, the Punta Bianca. Looking eastwards, are the high Apuanian mountains, in springtime still capped with snow, behind which barrier lurk the mysterious backlands of the Lunigiana. On the lower slopes the mountain villages adhere to their mountain background like lumps of coral.

"Maurin used to keep seven bulls. He was a bachelor as befits the guardian of this temple. In his house was a spacious kitchen with red brick floor, the high ceiling made of beams, whitewashed. There was a big hearth, a bottle gas stove, a table, chairs, a settle. Behind the settle was an array of copper and aluminium pans suspended from a wooden framework on the wall. At the window was a stone sink, the drinking water kept in a large terracotta Tuscan bowl with a glaze of green marbling inside. The water was drawn from the well outside. The cheese was kept in the kitchen drawer out of the way of the cats, and the bread in the bread chest. The cantina across the passage was well stocked with wine, both white and red.

"This man had always lived on the farm within sight of the sea and in touch with the sea breeze. The house was exposed to the moon's rise and the sun's set. He had the lilting speech of the Genoese. He had reduced his diet to a very few things because he refused to touch anything that was not genuine. This eliminated bread baked in an electric oven, industrially confected sausages and salami, cheese which had been artifically matured, wine which had been tampered with.

"He prepared the meal with deliberate movements and a certain solemnity. The pasta was cooked in an enormous aluminium cauldron in a great quantity of boiling water, salted of course with sea salt. When it was al dente he strained it through an impressive colander at the sink, and then placing an ample white china bowl on the kitchen table, at which we were already sipping his delicious white wine, he poured in the pasta, then the sauce, and with great deliberation, turned the spaghetti about with two forks to distribute the sauce. The fragrance of this sauce, whether it was a pesto or made of fresh tomatoes slowly simmered with garlic and herbs, was not only communicated to the pasta but to his guests. Beato te! Maurin."

This is taken from Honey from a Weed, an extraordinary book I am reading at the moment, by Patience Gray. It was published in 1986, and describes her life and the food she cooked and ate in various Mediterranean locations from the early 1960s. I was originally going to give you only the first paragraph, but this passage is so entirely whole, so closely argued, that I wanted to share the whole chapter with you. Food for thought, and of the highest quality. No wonder it's never been out of print.

Mushroom sauce for pasta

Holiday time, and the children want lunch. Not leftovers, my staple, but lunch cooked from scratch. Mostly it's pasta, sometimes it's a pizza, if I remember to make the dough in the morning. Today we had linguini with mushroom sauce. It's cooked slowly to extract the maximum flavour, which makes it a good way to give those slightly dull supermarket mushrooms some taste.

Chop a couple of onions and sweat them slowly in a little olive oil. When they're soft but not brown, add some chopped parsley (and some garlic if you've got it; I ran out last night, and haven't been to the shops today). Stir, and then add in a little flour. When that's amalgamated, add chopped mushrooms - I used four large field mushrooms, one per person. Cook slowly for about 15-20 minutes. The liquid from the mushrooms should be enough to make a sauce, but if you overdid the flour (and I did), then loosen the sauce with a little stock or water.















Overall, it took about half an hour, with three bursts of activity of about two minutes each.

This would also be a good basis for a meat casserole, or you could turn it into a cream sauce with a dollop of creme fraiche. There's a little left over, and I'll chop fresh herbs into it and spread it on little toasts or biscuits as a starter. In the autumn you could use wild mushrooms from the countryside.

This is my entry for weekend herb blogging, hosted this week by Anh of Food Lover's Journey

Lettice's mushroom sauce for pasta

Lettice made lunch yesterday, a delicious new pasta sauce adapted from Antonio Carluccio's Italian Feast, which she bought with her Christmas money a couple of years ago. It's the first time she's used it - but then, on Christmas Eve, Lucius finally let off the rocket he was given by Eleanor for Christmas 2005 (and, yes, it was worth the wait - it made a satisfyingly loud whoosh and went very high, and it is said to have taken an aerial photograph, but this has not yet been processed). This sauce is thickened with ground almonds, rather than cream or yoghurt.

Soak 10g dried mushrooms (porcini for choice) in 150ml water. After a quarter of an hour, squeeze them dry, and keep the liquid.

Fry a small chopped onion in a little olive oil until it is soft, but not browned. Add 300g sliced mushrooms (wild if possible, otherwise as interesting a mixture as you can buy). Fry for a couple of minutes, then stir in the soaking liquid, 6 tablespoons of milk, 25g ground almonds and a tablespoon of finely chopped parsley.

Add the sauce to pasta. AC's suggestion is open ravioli, using home-made pasta; we plan to do this one day soon, because making pasta is such fun, but in the meantime, we used this to dress bought pasta - those curly tubes, I think. Alfred refused to eat it. All the more for the rest of us.

Quick post about a quick lunch

All the children have gone back to their various colleges and schools, so today is the first quiet day of the year. I normally don't bother to make lunch when it's just me (there's nearly always something left over in the fridge, or fruit, or salad), but I've got a cold, and hanker after carbohydrate. I cooked a bowl of spaghetti, coated it in olive oil and the juice of half a lime, added some finely chopped coriander, then some of the fried anchovy crumbs which are now a permanent feature of my fridge, together with a little pinch of dried chilli seeds. Delicious. The key to fast food is a little preparation, carried out when you've got time and/or feel like cooking.

Vegetables for lunch

The BBC website has a story today that new research at Imperial College London shows that eating lots of veg cuts blood pressure. Researchers studied 4,680 middle-aged people, and found significant benefits to eating vegetable protein. On the other hand, they didn't find evidence that eating lots of meat was linked to high blood pressure. So - plenty of veg, including lots of beans for the protein, some meat (with the visible fat removed), along with regular portions of oily fish. Puddings to be fruit-based where possible. More or less what we're doing.

Yesterday, for lunch, I had noodle soup. Just one of those small cheap blocks of 3-minute noodles. But it couldn't have been further from the salty, monosodium-glutamatey taste the manufacturers had prepared in a sachet to go with them. First I chopped and stir fried some spring greens with a little chopped garlic. Then I added some home-made stock I had in the fridge which I made at the weekend after we had roast chicken for supper. When the noodles were cooked, I stirred in some crabmeat which I couldn't resist when I went shopping in the morning. A squeeze of lemon, some pepper. Delicious. And it only took about a minute longer than opening the sachet over the noodles. Afterwards I thought that it would be one dish where tinned crabmeat would be perfectly acceptable.

Today, I had a stir-fry of more spring greens, lots of them, with some chopped garlic. When they were done, I stirred in a teaspoon of the chilli jam I made in the autumn, and sprinkled them with some re-fried anchovy breadcrumbs lurking in the back of the fridge, then squirted the juice of half a lime which has been sitting around on the worktop for several days. Really good, lots of flavours.

There were three key ingredients which made these meals quick and easy to prepare, all of them home-made, but none of them particularly time-consuming:

Stock is something I make automatically after we have roast chicken; it doesn't take long, I feel thrifty, the ingredients are all to hand, and it means there's no temptation to use expensive stock which comes in not very bio-degradable plastic pots (I don't use stock cubes any more, because even the best-quality ones have ingredients which I either don't understand or know I don't want to eat). To make stock, I remove any meat left which can be used for another meal; I put the bones in a large pan with any leftover veg (but not potato, because the starch clouds the stock). I put in some fresh veg if I have it - celery, carrots, parsley stalks - and a few whole peppercorns (mine are multi-coloured), occasionally, for a change, a couple of cloves. I cover this with water, put the pot on to simmer, covered, for a couple of hours. Or more if I forget it. Then I strain it, cool it, put it in the fridge, and when I start to run out of it, I go out and buy another chicken for dinner. The main thing is not to get hung up on quantities or even timing, just to do it, and then do it again better - which is to say, how you like it. Recipe books often tell you to reduce it; I don't bother, because it steams up the kitchen, and you quite often have to add more water when it's concentrated (especiallly if you're making risotto). Sometimes I'll reduce a little for a specific dish, and that saves a lot of trouble.

I've written about the anchovy crumbs before (you just blitz some bread, add a tin of anchovies, blitz again, then fry them up, and use them instead of cheese on pasta, in soup, as a crispy topping for tuna bake, or - well, with whatever could do with a little crunch and zip). Now I have discovered that anchovy crumbs keep very well in the fridge, and can be used either straight from the fridge, or refried. I shall start making them in bulk and keeping them in an airtight box (at the moment, storage is haphazard, although they don't seem to suffer).

The chilli jam was something I made in November, when I felt like cooking one afternoon; there wasn't much work involved, although I had to be around to watch it while it cooked down. I've just sent the last bottle to a fellow food blogger, so I'll have to make some more in the next couple of weeks, as I now can't imagine life without it for pepping things up. As I said earlier, I have stopped using stock cubes, so I sometimes need strong tastes to stir in to sauces - chilli jam makes a change from, say, Worcester sauce or Marmite, or even stock. I'm not techie enough to give you a link to the original recipe, so I'm reproducing it here:

"This is terrific chilli jam, better than any I've made before. It takes moments to prepare, and then not quite an hour and a half to simmer before bottling. This is enough for nearly three Bonne Maman jars.

"Blend 400g whole tomatoes, four chillies (seeds and all), six cloves of garlic, two small knobs of ginger (don't bother to peel them), & half a little bottle of Thai fish sauce. Put this in a saucepan with 450g ordinary sugar, and 8 tbsp red wine vinegar. Bring to a simmer. Meanwhile, finely chop another 400g tomatoes. Add them to the pan, and gently simmer for at least an hour, stirring occasionally. You have to judge for yourself when it's cooked, and it may well take longer than an hour to reach a set (it will set without trouble, because tomatoes are full of pectin)."