A Mass of Odds and Ends

This is how the back garden looked this evening before sunset, but it is entirely different now, filled with leering pumpkin heads, candles in paper bags and teenagers dressed in black. As most of them dress in black anyway the addition of cloaks, pointy hats and matching pointy shoes are a useful hint that they’re celebrating Halloween.

This pumpkin and several others gave their all for my pies. I studied several recipes and ended up making one of my own, approved by my six testers, which cuts all corners possible whilst bearing in mind that pumpkin in tins, like mustard, lapsang souchong tea and oats is impossible to find in our local supermarkets.

Quantities for 35 hungry teenagers who will also be eating toffee apples. Produces three BIG pies.

• 600gr white flour
• 290gr butter
• 3 TBs sugar

Rub flour and sugar into butter till it forms breadcrumbs, then stir enough icy cold water to make it bind. Roll out and then line three big spring form tins (23cm) and refrigerate for an hour.

• 2,5kg raw pumpkin, baked in oven at 180°C for an hour, mashed with cinnamon to taste (I used 3TBs)
• 500gr ricotta cheese
• 300gr sugar
• 6 eggs

Beat the cheese sugar and eggs then add the pumpkin. Pour into the chilled pie cases and bake for about forty minutes at 180°C.

Whilst I was searching on the internet for pie recipes Aldo, covered in bits of grass and wielding a sythe in one hand and a strimmer in the other, asked me to look up solutions to controlling the jungle around us. I thought it would be tactless to point out that I’m already at stage four of the four stage solution. Stage one went well, finding a strong man, after which I moved onto stage two, convincing him to share my life (grass, weeds, teenagers and all), then came the unexpected stage three, diagnosis of a slipped disc (that just cannot cope with strimmers and weeding) and now I’m perfecting stage four, which involves a cup of tea or glass of wine (depending on the time of day) taken whilst enjoying the view of the beautifully tended grounds.

Conversations in Mogliano and most of Central Italy will keep returning to the same subject for the next six weeks - olives. Everyone in our local town has trees, or shares in trees, and the harvest is of intense interest to us all. Olive trees add to the sense of drama by being delightfully inconsistent - their crop is on a two year cycle, which meant that our oil production for 2007 was 15 litres, and for 2008 120 litres. But not all olive trees are on the same two year cycle, so some of our trees, just a select few, boast great thick bunches of fruit, whereas others are enthusiastically leafy, without an olive to be seen.  Producing olive oil is a process filled with indecision and discussion, so every year we all return to the same questions, when shall we start the harvest being the first. I insist that our hard work is rewarded with a delicious dinner at the end of the process so I’ll let Aldo decide the important things whilst I focus on searching for the right restaurant.

One of the treats of autumn in Le Marche is the castagnata, a town party dedicated to the chestnut, with stalls selling roast chestnuts, fresh chestnuts, chestnut jam, as well as other autumnal necessities like knitted hats and gloves. We went to our first castagnata of the season on Sunday, in the tiny mountain town of Smerillo. It’s half an hour away from us along a road which starts out winding through the countryside before spinning into a tortured switchback of hairpin bends going ever higher.  Aldo reached for his seat belt as we sailed past a carabinieri road block, me asking sotto voce who had fired the starters gun, before we parked kilometres away from the town in a long line of two thousand other cars. As we climbed the steep hill we passed a Pugliese farmer with a small lorry loaded with grapes, who begged us to bring him back a sandwich (”I’ve been here since seven this morning and not eaten a thing”) and then a Senegalese vu cumpru selling knock off winter jackets laid out on his blanket on the road side, before we arrived, gasping and panting, at the festa. Hot chestnuts and mulled wine have never tasted so good.

Whilst the countryside around us puts on a brilliant autumnal show Mogliano has started its programme of winter intellectual activities. This weekend the tiny and perfect Theatre Apollo hosted three days of words and music, and we went to Saturday night’s performance, the local jazz group with mellow versions of all time classics alternating with readings of 20th century Le Marche poetry. An intellectual gentleman fired with Roman oratory zeal introduced members of the local literary society,  expressing his joy at sharing the poetry with us all, kindly resisting the temptation to reprimand the woman in the eighth row who had her eyes shut more often than could be considered polite. The woman in row 8 came away worrying that she had made a serious error agreeing to join the literature group.  The academic year dictates a punishing timetable of early mornings and late nights so all I’ll bring to the group will be a sleepy presence, with no trace of oratory zeal.

Projects ab0und at home at the moment. Aldo has developed a sudden passion for vinegar, with a couple of bottles of red wine brewing up a “mother”, the magic ingredient that changes wine into vinegar, and Jasper is limbering up in preparation for trampling our grapes in the first stage of the process of making balsamic vinegar.

The tomato harvest is slowing down but we have made enough passata to last until Christmas. Tomato passata is literally squashed raw tomato, used as a base for most pasta sauces. It is best made with a small tomato crusher, which separates the skins and the seeds, leaving the pulp. No cooking is needed, we bottle the pulp in jars with secure lids, then put them into a largeg pan of water, making sure the lid is covered with water, and boil for forty minutes to preserve.

Fig Jam

• 1,5kg figs
• 750gr sugar (best to use jam sugar with added pectin)

Wash the figs and remove stems, then chop into small pieces. Leaving the skin in is a personal choice, we find we like it as it becomes very flavourful. Put the figs into a large stainless steel pot with the sugar, and cook on a low simmer for about an hour. Test to see if it is ready to take off the heat by putting a teaspoonful onto a plate into the fridge for five minutes. When you tilt the plate if the surface of the jam wrinkles up the jam is ready. 

Now the challenge is to find someone to eat all this jam…

It’s the same every year, as though someone somewhere pulls the plug, “enough heat for that lot” and in one day the temperature plummets ten degrees. The house takes a while to catch up; walking around from room to room you can catch hot wafts of air as the walls sigh, whilst outside the earth is creating these wonderful morning mists.