Quick soda bread

I never buy bread. I can’t remember the last time I purchased a loaf. It’s partly because, up here in the Umbrian countryside, shop bread is usually dry-ish, unsalted stuff which is used almost exclusively to mop up delicious bits of left-over sauces from dinner plates: it’s functional, with nothing about it which will impinge on the flavours which it channels efficiently into your mouth.

But there’s also the fact that making bread at home allows you to produce something finer and – with some speciality bread exceptions – more delicious than you can buy.

We don’t consume much of the stuff. I make ‘proper’ bread about once every two or three weeks, kneading up a kilo of flour, turning it into four smallish loaves, freezing three then bringing them out as necessary. But when I open the freezer to find that my memory has deceived me and that there’s nothing there, it’s no great disaster: soda bread is a great, quick, stand-in.

This recipe is for a small breakfast-emergency loaf: you’ll need to multiply the quantities if you’re feeding lots of people.

Wholemeal flour – 250 g
Milk – 150 ml
Plain yoghurt – one tbsp
Baking powder – 2 tsp
Salt – large pinch
Rye flour – for dusting

Heat your oven to 200 degrees.

Mix the flour, baking powder and salt in a deep bowl and make a well in the centre. Measure the milk into a jug, add the yoghurt and beat them together until the yoghurt lumps disappear. Pour this slowly into the well in the flour, mixing the liquid in with a metal spoon or knife as you do.

The end result will be a doughy lump and lots of floury bits around it: knead the mixture in its bowl until the dough picks up all the flour, then continue kneading a bit more until the dough is smooth and elastic – this won’t take long at all.

Sprinkle a little rye flour on a kitchen surface, and roll the ball of dough in this to cover it well; rye flour adds a slightly bitter taste to the loaf so if you want to avoid this, use wholemeal flour instead. Now gently press the ball into a flat disc, about 4-5 cm thick and transfer it on to a baking sheet. With a serrated knife, cut a deep cross into the top of the loaf, side to side and going through almost to the bottom.

The loaf needs 25 or 30 minutes in the oven, until a knock on the bottom of the loaf rings hollow, after which it can be eaten almost immediately.

You can add seeds and nuts to the mixture, and/or a tablespoon of honey or treacle, but even in its simplest form, this loaf with its scone-like texture is delicious. It’s best eaten within 24 hours of baking… though in this household, it rarely lasts that long.

© Anne Hanley, 2012

Asparagus risotto

I have far too few asparagus plants in my orto. But every year asparagus planting time (late March) creeps up on me stealthily and finds me, once again, not only without a new asparagus bed dug but with no idea whatsoever of where I would put one even if I had the time to make it.

So when mine start appearing, I resort to padding them out with store-bought ones. Even when they’re cooked and served up, though, I still believe I can tell which pieces are mine and which aren’t. I don’t think I’m deluding myself…

I recommend the bright green Italian asparagus rather than the white French kind: the taste is incomparably better. If you can lay your hands on tiny skinny wild asparagus this is even better – though unless you’re very fortunate you’ll probably have to venture out into the countryside and get your hands scratched to pieces by vicious asparagus plants to procure this exquisite-tasting luxury.

And I recommend making the simplest, most classic risotto possible. You need nothing more than the flavour of asparagus.

Asparagus – large bunch, at least 1 kg but the more the better
Rice – 350 g round risotto rice: vialone nano or originario is best
Onion – 1 large, white or brown
Garlic – 1 clove
White wine – 100 ml
Parmesan – to taste
Vegetable stock
Olive oil

If you’re using pre-prepared vegetable stock, bring a litre of it to the boil; otherwise, boil a kettle. How much water/stock you’ll need depends entirely on the kind of rice you use and can vary immensely.

Peel the onion and garlic and slice then mince them finely. Put a couple of tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil in a heavy-bottomed frying pan, heat it up and gently cook the onions and garlic until they are soft but not brown. Add the rice and stir it into the onions.

When the rice is thoroughly heated through, pour in the wine. Let it sizzle over a medium heat until the wine has more or less evaporated, then add enough water/stock just to cover the rice, and keep the contents of the pan bubbling gently.

As it bubbles, prepare the asparagus. First, break off the tips – about two centimetres – and set them aside. Now, starting from the tip end, break off similar lengths from each stalk. If it breaks off cleanly and crisply, then it will be good to eat. The moment it becomes difficult to snap, you’re getting down to the woody bit of the stalk, which should be discarded if you don’t want stringy bits of asparagus getting stuck in your teeth.

All the while, keep the rice bubbling. As soon as the liquid shows signs of disappearing, add a little more. You’ll need to stir from time to time to stop the risotto sticking, but try to keep this to a minimum. After eight-ten minutes, throw in the pieces of asparagus stalk, keeping the tips aside. (If you’re using stock cubes, you can crumble one in now as well.)

Continue to add liquid, tasting the rice from time to time to see how done it is. When it’s still hard right in the middle but very close to being ready, throw in the asparagus tips too: timing is vital here, as they need to cook for about five or six minutes – any more will turn them soggy. Your last lot of liquid should go in soon after the tips: let this bubble away gently as the rice releases its last bits of starch, giving you a perfect, creamy risotto. Turn off the heat under the frying pan.

Now it’s time to add the parmesan. I generally use a double cupped handful of finely grated cheese. Add this to the rice, stir it in gently, and leave your risotto to sit for about five minutes. Called mantecando, this stage is vital if you want your risotto to be perfectly balanced and blended. You can add more parmesan later, when you serve the risotto (a good grating of black pepper goes very well too). But it’s the cheese you put in at this stage which lends the dish its real flavour, perfectly complementing the asparagus.

Serve the risotto hot, sprinkled with a little more parmesan if you wish, and with a generous amount of black pepper.

© Anne Hanley, 2012

8 April 2012

After weeks and weeks of struggling to keep myself from spending every single sun-filled waking hour outdoors, now I’m finding it tough to be anywhere but indoors. Rain – which has finally arrived – is happening or about to happen most of the time. And though my vegetable garden desperately needs me to be up there, getting things ready for major spring planting, I’m stuck inside watching the big olive tree outside the kitchen window droop under the rain. Even the non-rainy moments are uninviting after the glorious weather we’ve grown so used to.

Se piove venerdì santo, piove maggio tutto quanto. If it rains on Good Friday, it will rain all May. The real heavy stuff hit on the afternoon of Maundy Thursday: over in Palazzone there was an almighty hailstorm, I’m told; here we had about ten minutes of deluge then hours of good steady precipitation. I can’t, honestly, remember what happened on Good Friday. But I’m thinking that if it did rain, it was hardly anything and certainly not enough to merit a squelchy mess a month down the line. All May. I really do hope not.

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Work has begun on the garden I’m doing with Peter in Parioli (Rome). Monday was a long long day of standing in pre-rain dust, planting, moving, replanting, viewing from different angles and wondering whether I really had placed things correctly. But when, in the evening, a large chunk of the client-family turned up and seemed pleased, I was reassured. And Peter, too, was happy when he saw how it was going, which is even more important.

On Tuesday I shall be high up in the Umbrian hills, moving earth in my project in that strange outcrop of inexplicable houses in the middle of nowhere. The client-family will be around there too, over from Ireland on an Easter visit.

I do love that feeling of culmination that standing among workers gives you. Not, in either of these cases, that the job is anywhere near finished. (In the former, the work on the house has been dragging on for 15 years and though the garden, we hope, will be slightly swifter, I don’t see it being wrapped any time soon.) But the move from on-paper (or on-screen) to on-the-ground is such a gratifying one that it’s almost as good as actually finishing. Spring is a fine time when it comes to providing these moments.

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On Wednesday, I dropped the weeding-between-bricks I had been doing outside the kitchen door and drove like a fiend to Perugia for a hearing at a consumer arbitration tribunal. After being abandoned here in the snow for so long by Telecom Italia in February, disconnected from the rest of the world, I decided to demand €1000 in compensation – not so much for the money (though every little helps) but to give myself a chance to air my grievances. When I mentioned this the evening before to the regulars gathered in the Saltapicchio winebar in town, I received many pats on the back and shouts of encouragement: resentment against Telecom runs very deep.

Such a pity then that I turned up for the hearing precisely, to the minute, 24 hours late. I don’t know how the misunderstanding arose: I had always had the appointment marked for April 4 in my diary, while the papers they sent me had always said April 3. However it came about, I felt understandably stupid and extremely annoyed with myself.

To make things slightly less infuriating, though, my inefficiency may have saved me from a very nasty fate.

At the point when I realised it was time to dash, I had about one square metre of patio to weed. I had been at the job for a couple of hours, (unusually for me) gloveless and wearing thin cotton trousers and low gym shoes. I had been doing the work in a rather absent-minded way, sitting on the bricks. As I stood up to run upstairs and get changed, something slithered out of the remaining patch of weeds.

I’m about 99 percent certain it was a baby viper.

I stood on the kitchen step, transfixed, for a while. It just lay on the bricks in its new position, totally immobile, in that way vipers do. It was still there minutes later when I came back to look. I checked before leaving for Perugia and it had gone. Vanished. Had I continued my weeding to the end, I can’t see how I wouldn’t, at some point, have reached in and touched the thing, at which point I presume it would have bitten me.

I’ve always had this deep conviction that there is a viper out there with my name written on it. Clearly – for the moment at least – it wasn’t that particular one.

30 March 2012

    

The clocks have gone forward, the nightingales have come back. What better signs can there be that spring is here? Actually, another pretty good indication would be my peas coming up but they’re showing no sign of doing so.

Experts seem to agree that the maximum pea germination time is 36 days. When did I plant mine? January 21. How many days from then to now? Hmmm. I make that about 67. Too many, clearly. Of course, for about 21 of those days the poor little seeds were under a metre of snow. Even so. I think I may have to start again, fast. Last year I had so many peas that we were eating them for three meals a day. Processing them is so dull. Then again, each time I open the freezer and haul out another bag full of beans or courgettes, I do kind of wish that I had frozen rather than eaten my peas. At the time, though, they were very good.

My germination dilemma extends into my greenhouse. I don’t know why I sow tomatoes in December/January. They never come up until now. Why did I get it into my head that that was a good idea? It was an especially bad idea this year, with snow plunging through the disintegrated top of my plastic greenhouse and coming to rest in a thick, smooth layer on top of the poor little seed beds. Now most of those seeds are coming up. Most. Not all. And now. I might have had more success had I started the whole process off a week ago.

I have taken the plunge in my new vegetable patch and planted my potatoes (Monalisa whites and Draga reds) and my onions (again, half white and half red). The quantities won’t be immense: I divided that 10m x 1.5m strip into three equal parts, so the potatoes and onions each have just under three and a half metres to themselves; the far third is divided between cabbages and parsnips. That should relieve the pressure in my old orto. At least for a bit.

I’ve been rather too calm, I think, in my search for someone to help me in the garden. With no rain at all (still), the weeds have been slow and I have been complacent. For all that we desperately need rain, I dread the moment when everything bursts into rampant life. And it will, I know. There’s rain forecast for much of next week, and though forecasts have come to signify little or nothing in our drought-pocket, one day it has to happen. Our friends T&A sent their Sri Lankan gardener down – a sweet boy who left Galle when the tsunami swept his house away. But he’s too busy so he sent his friend. It’s funny how gardening seems to bring out national characteristics, reinforcing our silly stereotypes. Manuela was the ‘archetypal’ German, methodical and thorough but slow and unimaginative. Most Italians refuse to allow gardening to represent an affront to their manhood and will do anything you want as long as it can be done with a loud power tool in hand. Sri Lankans on the other hand say they will do anything you want, and say it with their lovely smiles; but they hate the idea of disappointing anyone and will never say “no” if they can help it. It’s taking me a while to work out when “yes” means “yes”, when it means “maybe” and when it means “not a hope in hell”. Also, the idea of timetables seems to be beyond them: they turn up whenever they feel like it, and can’t seem to get their heads around the idea of X hours a week.

I’ve been trying to work out what gardening brings out in Brits – not that I think of myself as particularly representative of that nation. My salient gardening features are frantic bursts of activity – so frantic that they’re often pretty slap-dash – interspersed with long periods of terribly good intentions but little action as everything goes to seed around me. Luckily, I accompany this with a happy capacity for not seeing what is there but framing in my mind’s eye what should be… or, as I tell myself, what will be, very soon.

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Sciatica seems to be the affliction of the moment: several of our friends are suffering from it, including lovely Maria in the agriturismo up the road who is limping between house and olive trees and chickens in the most painful way. “In the olden days,” she told L yesterday, “the contadini (peasants) use to…” At this point, obviously, L was waiting for some arcane recipe involving poultices of boiled herbs, plucked under a full moon in certain bewitched woods. “… go down to Rome,” she continued, “to a German doctor who punched a hole in their heel and drew off cupfuls of some horrible black liquid.” What a disappointment! Though with delightful overtones of complete quackery. How strange to think of the local yokels taking their back problems off to the big city. They must have been quite a sight, blinking in the bright lights as they hobbled off in their Sunday best to be drained.

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My article on the papal farm has appeared in Gourmet magazine. Thanks heavens no one say fit to use the headline “Holy Cows”. It’s always a nail-biter, this not knowing whether someone is going to take your respectable, respectful prose and turn it into a tabloid-style shocker. But no, Gourmet did me proud. Now, maybe, they’ll let me back into the gardens for pure pleasure, taking with me all those friends who have been making jealous noises ever since I went.

17 March 2012

Springy things are happening all around. But this loveliest of seasons is having its usual effect on me: wiping me out.

L contemplates another lap with the rotovator.

Of course it didn’t help my depleted energy levels that today I opted for the horribly ambitious job of making a new vegetable garden. In a spot (as I discovered as I dug) which is a rock patch. Yes, true, most of our land is a rock patch. But as the neighbour’s rotovator jumped and shuddered and lurched about not digging much, and I wondered whether we would be returning the machine bent and dented, I vaguely remembered a mountain of stones sitting there when we were restoring the house. Since when they’ve been well packed down into the earth by passing bulldozers and farm machinery. The rotovator was abandoned in favour of pickaxes and garden forks. And I began to wish, very ardently, that my new patch was not nearly so big.

I need the extra bed for all those things which occupy too much space, for too long a time, to be accommodated in my original orto: potatoes, for example, which I have never grown; and onions; and cime di rapa (turnip greens) all through the winter. That will leave the orto free for fast-moving summer crops and all those things which look so pretty and grow up rather than out, like tomatoes and beans and big leafy courgette plants.

Of course before I can put anything in the ground down there I need to get the water organised, and that depends on Francesco the fabbro (smith) getting my new tap-with-incorporated-hose-holder design made for me and that depends on… etc etc. I hope it’s not August before things fall into place.

But even when it does, the idea of using any water at all in this drought-plagued spring does cause me slight twinges of guilt. It’s as if the snow never happened. Since then, two drops have fallen on me; digging the new bed raised dust clouds of sub-Saharan proportions. If there is meltwater down at water table level, great. But it has certainly long gone from anywhere near the surface.

It’s quite uncanny. We’ve had every other meteorological phenomenon, including tramontana winds so strong last week that at times it was difficult to stand up straight, and which woke me at night as they howled and buffetted. Just no rain. In the end I shall just have to give in and re-attach the timers and get the whole thing going automatically. In mid-March. Ridiculous.

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And so to spring: daffodils are busting out everywhere. We went to Rome on Wednesday 14th and there was one wild one out down the bank towards the washing line; we came back on Thursday and they were waving everywhere (much to the annoyance of one guest who turned up for dinner shortly afterwards who doesn’t even have daffodil leaves poking through yet).

Lizards scarper from unlikely places as I pass, making me jump out of my skin, and bees and wasps are making strange metallic reverberations all over the chicken house as they search for interesting cavities to nest in. I’m still waiting, with dread in my heart, for the Invasion of the Ants.

Inside my funny little greenhouse (now slightly less ugly since the plastic cover disintegrated in the snow and I had to make it a more elegant and definitely more resistant one) things are happening: tomatoes which I had almost abandoned all hope of are pushing up tiny little leaves; ditto aubergines. I sowed a tray of camomile seeds just three days ago and already there’s something very vaguely green happening there.

In fact, more than spring, it’s already beginning to feel like summer. It was 24 degrees today.

This post is also on my website.

Orecchiette with turnip tops

At this time of year, cime di rapa (turnip tops) just keep coming. They’re a bit blowsier now, and florets form more readily, to mix with the cooked leaves. But they remain steadily delicious – so delicious in fact that if I find myself home alone and wanting something very light for lunch, I’ll prepare a huge bowlful of nothing but cime, steamed until soft then tossed briefly in a frying pan with oil with garlic and chili. Perfect.

This recipe, from the southern region of Puglia, tranforms the cime into something half way between a smooth pasta sauce and a plateful of green punctuated by little full moons of pasta. I use an above-average proportion of vegetable: I prefer the emphasis to shift away from the pasta.

Turnip tops – large bunch (at least 1.5 kg)
Orecchiette pasta – 400 g
Anchovy fillets – 10-15
Garlic – 3 cloves
Fresh chili – to taste
Olive oil

Prepare the cime di rapa by discarding any leaves which are particularly large and tough, or which have yellow patches on them. Now tear the leaf proper off the central vein of all the large- and medium-sized leaves. Some less-than-finger-thick bits of stem, from nearer the tip of the leaves, can be carefully peeled and added to the usable leaves. Smaller leaves and florets can be used whole. Bear in mind, though, that any stems which are more than about half a centimetre thick may prove very chewy and stringy, even after cooking.

The next stage of preparation makes me wince, because – as a hard-line steamer – I do hate my greens coming into contact with water. There’s no other way, however: believe, me, I’ve tried. Bring a large saucepan of water to the boil and tip the prepared turnip tops into it. Bring the water back to the boil quickly over a high heat; when it’s bubbling again, add the pasta.

I’ve tried this recipe with all kinds of pasta but none works as well as the traditional orecchiette: tiny soup-bowl shapes of egg-less pasta which hail from Puglia. Why these lend themselves in particular, I couldn’t say. Perhaps it’s all in the mind: that dreadful weight of Italian culinary tradition weighing on our perceptions.

While the pasta is cooking, chop the garlic, chili and anchovy fillets finely, heat a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in a frying pan large enough to hold the pasta, and gently cook the garlic etc until the anchovy fillets have disintegrated and the garlic is soft.

The pasta and vegetable should cook until the orecchiette have begun to soften on the outside but are still fairly crunchy inside. Getting the precise moment is an art, and even after years of practice, I can’t claim to do it right every time. But it’s important that you whisk the pasta off the heat and drain it – along with the cime, obviously – when it still has four or five minutes of cooking time to go. Before you drain it, don’t, whatever you do, forget to dip a heatproof jug into the saucepan and scoop out 300-400 ml of the cooking water. Set this aside.

When the pasta and cime have drained (no need to shake or wait because you need lots of moisture now), tip them into the frying pan with the garlic, chili and anchovy mix, and begin cooking everything over a medium heat. As you go along, slowly add the cooking water which you have set aside. You should do this in small amounts, just covering the bottom of the saucepan and gently stirring the pasta as it soaks up this liquid. When it starts getting a little dry, add more cooking water. Continue this process until the pasta is cooked perfectly, remaining al dente.

If you’ve judged everything correctly, the cime should now have turned partly into a green emulsion, with thicker, more vegetably strands running through it. Each piece of pasta should be tinged a lively green, with some of the sauce clinging to it.

According to Italian tradition, fish (in this case anchovies) and cheese never mix. And personally I prefer this dish as is. But there are those people who add grated baked ricotta – a hard, salty cheese with a bitter tang. You’ll have to make your own mind up on this one.

©Anne Hanley, 2012