It's been a while!

It's been a while;  a full season, many guests, countless breakfasts, cakes and suppers, great snow, bitter cold weeks when your breath freezes, sunny blue sky days, powder days, whiteouts, birthday celebrations, anniversaries, husky races, learn to cross country ski, find new friends, meet up with old ones, bounce with energy, drop with exhaustion!

 !

It should be spring, the resort should have closed but instead the trees are heavy with snow and the mountains are shrouded.  The lifts are running, the slopes are empty, we should be up there reclaiming the pistes now that all the guests have gone.  But I can't see further than the first chair on the lift, a great, grey expanse of mingled snow and sky, no fun to inch your way down, feeling for dips and bumps, searching for the shadow of another person, such a pity! This was to be our chance to play after one of the best seasons for years. So I'm off to check out the end of season bargains, some new skis maybe?

But then on the 22 April the weather cleared and we hit the slopes, if you know the Flaine bowl it's not so often you get to see it pristine like this with a good 50cms fresh powder and only us locals to enjoy it. A great way to end the season. And those new skis? Yes I got them!

pudding time

There is an old, tattered recipe I have, saved from a newspaper many years back, and as usual I have to hunt for it every year, about this time. Christmas pudding! I feel it is worth making, it's not too complicated more a case of assembly really; no fat, no flour, no sugar but full of fruit and nuts, and a good sloshing of port and orange liqueur this year (which is what I found in the cupboard), held together with breadcrumbs and eggs. I like the chopping part of it, and the stirring, then it's a slow steam for a few hours, wrap it up and pack it away until Christmas day.

Brandy butter usually, and cold cream to go with it, and a nice glass of pudding wine.  And then we can eat what is left the next day, a bit like curries it seems to taste even better second time round. Christmas pudding ice cream is supposed to be pretty tasty, so if there's some left.......

Green gold

As we swing through the gates into the driveway, the door opens ‘Madonna!’ cries Mara,’ I thought you were coming tomorrow, come in, come in’.  The kitchen is full of activity and before long we are sitting down to our first supper at Venturi Mulini, restored water mill in the foothills of Emilia Romagna, tucking into homemade flat bread, steamed spinach greens and some vegetarian confection, and several glasses of wine we have brought in from the car.

Adam, Nadja, Mara and Robert at work

Adam and Nadja are our new companions, travelling from Austria through Italy, harvesting grapes, olives, saffron all in a days’ work as WWOOFers (http://www.wwoof.org.uk/).  We are here for the olive harvest, all 263 trees grown, husbanded, cherished by Mara, Mara who shrieks with laughter, erupts with crazy insults in both English and Italian, drives the tractor, bakes the bread, sings to the trees, and gathers accolades for her litres of green, organic, olive oil.

‘Mara tell me about the olives, how do they grow?’

‘So we plant the two year old saplings, two main crop varieties frantoio and leccino usually and then we add a mix of pollinators and other varieties, they bring in, you know, those fresh, grassy flavours, look the little cherry size, apple green and red ones over there for example.’

‘And these ones here, with the darker green olives are weeping trees, ‘pendolino’ we call them, look under their 'skirts', and you find the long tassels just full of olives, easy to comb off!

‘And how long does it take to get a decent crop?

‘Oh about 8 to 10 years, I started to plant this orchard about 15 years ago.’

‘You take them to the new, modern press don't you, and not the old traditional olive mill, why's that?’

Oh why would I want to spoil the fresh taste with those old mill stones that heat up the oil and destroy the flavours, no, clean, modern is best!  And no filtering either, all those enzymes are good; they mean the oil continues to develop.

‘Good crop this year Mara?’

‘Fantastic, really good, and the best picking team too! We got a total of 2177 kilos of olives which gave 377 litres of fabulous oil, average yield of 17%, I'm really, really delighted, veramente!’

 First tasting at the press

And I’m delighted to have brought some back to the chalet where you might get to enjoy a taste.

The huge heap of steaming manure that arrived in the spring, (Gardener’s Gold May 2011) simmered on the edge of the garden, ugly and useless until I did what everyone else round here seems to do; used it as a fertile, warm bed for a clutch of greedy pumpkin plants which then magically transformed it into a green mound of rasping tendrils, inching daily, hourly almost, over the heap, and across the lawn.

Underneath, as the summer moved through heat and downpour, the little orange and green knobs became swollen cricket balls, footballs, rugby balls, and finally a couple of weeks ago I cut them loose and piled them up and left them in the sun to ripen. Aren’t they beautiful?

And now what to do with them all? Half to give away still leaves a lot, time to get cooking!

Pumpkin soup? A bit bland to my mind, better with some added tomato and red pepper puree, and maybe a smattering of dried red chilli

Pumpkin pie?  No, personally I don’t much like it

Pumpkin in a Thai green curry sauce, yes, what’s not to like, add some prawns, or some water chestnuts for crunch, don’t overcook though, soggy, disintegrating pumpkin is not so appetising.

Pumpkin and potato gratin – yes, layers of sliced potato and pumpkin, slip some sage leaves in between, top with cream and cheese, delicious!

And last suggestion, not that I have ever made it myself, but I have eaten them and loved the dish, pumpkin and ricotta ravioli with sage butter.

Summers' end

It's been a while, a summers’ interlude, the garden has grown and flourished, the pumpkins lie swollen and bloated on the manure heap, the guests have come and gone, many and varied, the snow fell and capped the mountain tops in July and again in September, in August the temperature held steady around 30C and still the sun shines as the days shorten. 

Spring guests arrived as soon as the ski season finished in April, held back in May and returned in June. July and August brought summer holiday visitors, the pool filled, and we had to decamp. A troupe, a legion, a bevy (is there a collective noun for a dozen octogenarians?) out talked, out ate and out drank us in September leaving us feeling pretty ancient and decrepit ourselves. 

These delicious little fancies were brought by some friends, and gobbled up pretty quickly.

For those who like to hear about the activity side of things we walked and climbed a fair amount locally, and further afield followed lots of sheep’s bottoms, some 250 of them, up through deserted Italian villages to the alpine pastures at 2000m, eating a huge amount of sheep’s cheese along the way, but we didn't make the summit of Mont Blanc, although we did practice Afghan breathing (you might well ask) and some parapenting and I learnt to ride a mountain bike.

  

In early summer the rodeo came to town with cowboys and line dancing, in July there were fireworks (and since the French really like their fireworks all throughout the summer), and in August a choir of 400 singers filled the square and everyone sung the songs of the French sixties and seventies late into the evening,  mountain bikes came flying down 1600m of descent and a dozen drummers from Burkina Faso pounded away and got the audience dancing . The Mont Blanc car rally brought the summer to a grand finale and left us marooned all day behind officials and red tape as cars hurtled around us on all sides. The marshals sat down to lunch with two young ladies who had  positioned their chairs for a ringside view and laden the table with good things and bottles, the French loyalty to their lunch and their laissez faire approach to health and safety still reigns.

Now it's time to think of putting the garden to bed, harvesting, making pumpkin soup, leek soup, courgette pickle, raspberry jam, plum chutney, and gathering the fallen walnuts which drop with a muffled clang onto the corrugated iron roof next door – throughout the night.

 



And soon the snow will come again....

Gardener's gold

The pong of manure is all around, hovering over the fields as the farmers rush to spread it before the grass begins to grow in earnest, relays of tractors loading up from the large, dark pile that has slowly grown and matured since last year. And every self respecting garden around has its own heap of crumbly, chocolate coloured, rich farmyard manure, gardeners gold! That is, all except mine.  I have been looking with longing at these heaps for the last two summers and making do with the small, green plastic compost bin that was handed out by the town council which is working well enough, but really can’t compare.

So I pluck up courage and approach the farmer in his tractor cab, unfiltered cigarette hanging from his lips, he shakes my hand and says ‘bien sur’, I can help myself, there is both fresh and old, ‘old is what I would like’ I say. ‘No problem.’  I rush back, really pleased with myself, ‘we can take the trailer down and help ourselves’ I say, but surprisingly, this does not meet with much immediate enthusiasm.

Several days later, with an extra pair of hands on board we hitch up the trailer, load both wheelbarrows and assorted forks, and bounce down the lane towards the rapidly diminishing pile. Just in time I think. The farmhand grins at us as he swings the scoop of his digger in and out.

‘We're in luck’ says Robert, ‘ask him to dump a load in the trailer, save us all that hard work.’

So I do, and the digger advances towards the trailer and tips a very large load of still steaming, fresh from yesterday, manure into the back. This isn’t what I wanted!

Once again I am resigned to envious glances at my neighbours’ rich soil, while our very pongy heap in the corner of the garden slowly, slowly turns into that crumbly magic.

Tipping into Spring

Listen!

I stop on the path,

The crickets, can you hear them?

It is the 12th of April, warm and sunny, with deep blue skies and snow still on the peaks above. The path we are following emerges out of the woods and across the meadows where already the grasses are a foot high. Rivulets of dandelions stream down the hillside.                No
No... you mean you can’t hear them?
No, I mean it's not crickets, it's birds singing, too early for crickets, Robert insists.
I hear crickets and birds, blackbirds, mistle thrushes, chaffinches.

We climb on and up, past the wayside shrine, brushing aside the heavy branches of a glowing japonica that overhangs the path, absorbing the heat of the sun on the south facing side of an old farm chalet. Primroses still linger in the shade, cow parsley flutters, the strong scent of nettles and wild garlic mingle.

The young cows are out for the first time since the autumn, their mini size bells clanging fitfully as they try them out for size. We stumble on up the tree lined and rutted pathway, steep and straight, with rimmed sides a reminder of the old cart routes, and out into pasture. On all sides the thrum of crickets rises from the grass.

Crickets?  Oh yes, I can hear them now

 
Sightings:
Two herds of cows, mums and daughters
A flock of sheep with lambs
A lama, yes really!
Two wheeling buzzards
Cats hunting in the grass

Growing:
Primroses, oxslips and cowslips
Wood anemones
Violets and violas
Wild garlic
Lady's mantle
Wild strawberries