Olive oil time!

You could be forgiven for thinking this is another one of my homemade liquors, but no, it is in fact olive oil pressed less than 24 hours earlier, at one of the best restaurants in our Area. Beautiful peppery flavour mopped up with crusty Italian bread - and that was before the meal! And yes, that is, of course, a glass of local Montepulciano d'Abruzzo sneaking in in the background.

The food at Il Torchio in Pettorano sul Gizio is really good, the wine is good and the price is good, what more can you ask for...our own little bit of Abruzzoheaven!

The Coriander movement!

As coriander is really difficult to find here and I love to cook Asian food, I was sooo pleased when all my plants flourished (thank you Donna for the seeds...I have finally used them!)

We had fresh leaves for a couple of months to use in Chinese, Indian and more recently some Guacamole then I allowed them to set seed with the intention of collecting them to grind.


So, I managed to collect one full jar of seeds, but just as the rest of the seed dried out, I hadn't quite got round to collecting them we had a MASSIVE thunderstorm. Result: all the coriander seeds were blown off the plants. I came out in the morning to see my cherished plants stripped bare - I was not a happy lady.

Now though, I can happily say I have several randomly placed coriander plants sprouting up in the garden!! And you never know, from the amount of seed that blew away, if all the seeds germinate I might be starting up my own coriander market here in central Abruzzo!!

The Boys' Veg Patch

Back in February I blogged about Getting Going in the Garden. Looking back now at all the things I enthusiastically wrote about, we have achieved a huge amount, and yet not really many of the things we wanted to concentrate our time on back then!

The area designated for the pizza oven became reassigned as the boys veg patch because we were finding it difficult deciding how to organise the space. It was 'temporarily' planted out with lettuce, rocket, spinach, watercress, melons, tomatoes, courgettes and coriander.







The boys helped us plant the seeds in only the way a four and six year old can. Throw a handful of seeds in my nicely made rows and then announce 'We're bored now' leaving mum and dad to finish all the work!

Everything but the watercress was a resounding success (not enough water I think), we have been creative with courgette salads and I am loving the courgette crisps (recipe here for anyone who wants it). Scroll down for the photos.

Doing it like the locals: Making Passata Pomodoro.

Italy - synonomous with tomatoes bursting with flavour.

So, with our 102 tomato plants (yes 102!) that we have tended since Spring it would just be rude not to store them for use over the winter. You cannot claim to be a local here if you do not grow, harvest and make passata pomodoro from your tomatoes...by the gallon.

 Of course, it meant buying more kit (everything seems to mean buying more kit at the moment) but with a bit of advice from our friend Giuseppe we have a machine that should last us a lifetime. We even got our apartment guests involved in chopping and pulping, much to their delight (I think!).

So we chopped, and we pulped, and we re-pulped, to make sure we got every drop, and we bottled and we boiled and now? ...Now we just have to sit back and enjoy the fruits of our labour.

With passata fresh from our home grown, organic tomatoes pasta pomodoro will never quite taste the same again! Bellissimo!

Limoncello update

The official verdict is - that stuff is GOOD!

Making Limoncello...yum!

Inspired by my host country (they haven't kicked me out yet!) and my friend Katy, I have tonight been making Limoncello. Vodka, Lemons, Sugar and Water...it just sounds right, doesn't it?!

Here are the wonderful ingredients...

Zest your lemons (this is one of 6 large ones)...

Tip into the sugar, water and vodka mix...

Give it a good stir...

... and bottle.

Leave for a minimum of 24 hours or up to three months (yeah right!)

Sieve, put in the freezer and then drink, freezer cold.

I'll let you know what it tastes like tomorrow then!!









I used Lorraine Pascale's recipe, but there are plenty of them out there on the internet if you want to give it a try. And on Friday, with the juice of the lemons that are left behind I will be making homemade lemonade for our secret seven meeting in the shed...I did promise Jake after all!!

From barrel to bottle

One night, after a few glasses of the good stuff, a new project was born. In 2012 we harvested our own vineyard for the first time and made our own wine...that in itself is a bit of an achievement for two novices. So, why stop there we thought?

So enthused (carried away?) were we with the whole wine making thing -or was it the wine?! - before we had even harvested our first grapes we had the genius idea that, instead of bottling our wine in the standard green litre bottles with beer bottle type metal caps as do most folk round here, we would go all out and bottle and label our wine to make it look like the real deal. During a conversation with our lovely guests, the Sharmans, last summer, whilst sitting on the terrace, under the stars, Adrian mentioned that he might be interested in using his  graphic design expertise...which started the cogs working!

After some careful thought and a suggestion from Adrian, we decided that we wanted a label that would tell a story, a label that would develop with us, as our knowledge of the wine making process grows. Adrian translated our ideas and our wording into our first year's label.


From then on there was no going back. We ordered the labels, bought the bottles and corks from our fabulous local vineyard Pietrantonj at Vittorito, run by two superbly dynamic sisters, who are the eighth generation of winemakers in their family, we bought a corking machine and a bottle drying rack, and set to with our Ikea funnels and Robert Dyas plastic jug - nothing but the latest techniques and most advanced technology is used in our bottling plant!

So now, all that is left is to sit back and enjoy our 2012 vintage, whilst pondering our label for the next harvest. Watch this space...!!