Green Bean

Ah, a nice crunchy Risotto in the making.....                                                                                                  

But, no... zees are not zee rice, zee vialone, carnaroli o zee arborio... no no no, it eez zee oats... you is avena laugh!

No no no greenbean, you have stepped over zze line.

Not bad, i gotta say.. a bit bouncy. Enough salt in the bacon and perhaps a bit of pre-soaking will soften the meal up.

For that true Atlantic Europe taste, some proper grown up lamb, some leeks... but consider the addition of some extraordinary, cliffhanging samphire. 

Fit for dragons i'd say. Found this driftwood dragon washed up on the beach at the end of a rainbow.

Bursting with green goodness, the big juicy leaves and succulent stems all cook together to a delicious vegetable.. never before seen in the United Kingdom. They're peppery and rich with a bitterish tang. The name comes from an old word for "frying" and typically in Naples they'll be sweated down in a pan with some sausages; they comliment a strong meaty taste fantastically well. In fact, one of Naples favourite pizza toppings is sausage and friarielli! That comes from the top, as they invented the pizza!

We've been eating them at home for weeks now. Dad chucked the seed in when he reseeded the bulb ground, as an experiment really. In just a few weeks they were up and thriving in the Pembrokeshire milds.

Mum says they've got a real "crave-factor", one of those things thats giving you just what you need as the winter draws in.  Yummy in  packets of  pasta.. like ravioli,  with a  strongish cheese. It would be nice in a lasagne and would be wonderful in risotto.. but just as good on its own, boiled or steamed..

The first crop is still going, but will end in a week or so. If the rain dies a bit some more will be sown for an early spring harvest.

There was a time, not so very long ago, that sticking the word Welsh on a food label was a sort of curse. An unappetising by-word for a crumbling, inefficient economy stuck primitively in the over-sheeped hills. These days, changes are afoot and the only thing that's crumbling is zingy fresh, prize-winning Caerphilly cheese.

True; Welsh food culture ran to the hills in the face of post-war industrial agriculture. The mountainous terrain, the sometimes-poor soil and the infamous climate made it difficult to compete with the hedgerow flattening agri-giants of lowland Britain. With consumers valuing food produced with integrity and character, the family farms and rural businesses are now sitting on a gastronomic treasure chest. It's that same challenging climate and rural landscape that is turning out to be the trump card. Its the intense concentration of diversity and particularity that now make eating Welsh so exciting.

The new Welsh food scene, though, as well as being embedded in its glorious natural resources and cultural history, is also an expression of a vibrant, diverse and innovative society. The Welsh delegates who came to Terra Madre in October represented a spectrum of food producers and cooks who are together cultivating a future for food in Wales. Diversification of traditional farms, notably in the livestock and dairy sector has created a wave of distinct products from Welsh-Black beef slowly raised in the Cambrian mountain pastures to lamb weaned on to the Dyfi estuary salt marsh herbs, excellent cheeses from the teifi valley and super-rich buffalo milk ice-cream from Llanon. But diversification hasn't just happened at the farm level. One of the side-effects of traditional family farms going out of business has been an influx of cross-shifting alternative thinkers. Though in the last decade organic marketing co-ops have signalled the importance of mainstream organic production, Wales has been a sort of test bed for alternative, small scale food producers for several decades. These are the people who are keeping horticulture up-to the minute in Pembrokeshire, creating extraordinary cheese from the green pasture fed herds, putting Wales on the international honey map and raising organic, free range poultry.

The result of upheaval and decades of toil perhaps, but its this dynamic which gives Wales its current vitality. Haverfordwest Farmer's Market won the national award this year. It won it because of the diversity and integrity displayed with the juxtaposition of excellent value from; let's say, traditional organic meat butchered on the farm together with innovative young talent nurturing rare tomatoes and peaches in walled gardens, shellfish from the Pembrokeshire National Park coastline alongside farmed trout, and organic cheese beside this mornings milk bottled on the farm. This story is on a roll and the cooks and chefs who cater for locals and tourists are picking up on it. Chefs like Gareth Johns from Machynlleth, and Robert Schopp from Narberth are taking full advantage of the local ingredients and adding their creative flair in their respective Italo-Cymraeg and Hispano-Cymraeg Kitchens. As food festivals like Abergavenny, Narberth, Cardigan and Aberystwyth gather popularity and Slow Food convivium events build awareness and networks of producers and co-producers, the message that Wales has a rich offering from its farms and cooks is gaining volume.

Building the network in the food community and receiving a reassuring affirmation from interacting with 6500 other delegates that Terra Madre and Slow Food really contribute to this success. As Gareth Johns said: “the great thing about coming here has been to find that we are not alone”, and you get the feeling that he meant in Wales as well as in the world. Another Welsh delegate said she will go home with so many stories, but most important is what she feels and that is after all these hard years, to be proud of being a producer.

visit the Terra Madre Blog too...

I couldn't imagine what I'd find at the market to represent the season. 2 1/2 months is a long time for crops to come and go at the end of summer.  When I left in July, A dozen types of peaches had taken the place of strawberries that had replaced cherries. Watermelons the size of planets, cheaper than bottled water and dripping ripe tomatoes  filled the market. 

But at Italy's  markets there's always something new. 

(Photo by Lensenvy)                                                                                                                          Stepping now into the  twice a week Colorno market, held in the Piazza in front of the Reggia, I am met by  the smell of  mushrooms... somewhere... i never do find them.  The colours are different, green, yellow and orange pumkins adorn displays of serious autumn vegetables; cauliflowers, cabbage and metre high bitter chicory greens. Golden Delicious from the Alpine valleys, patently sunblushed but sweet and fresh sit alongside a basket of gnarly kanker-split irregulars and a dozen varieties of pear.. so distinct and stylish they assume another name.

And out front, in rustic baskets, are chestnuts.

Wonderful, rich definitive colour... the solid deep hue of  a season sinking into winter. I thought chestnuts were chestnuts. The ladies of Colonata, many moons ago, harvesting chestnuts showed me that only some of the trees give the right type of chestnuts for making flour. Now i'm scratching my head, because the two baskets, with almost identical nuts have two different prices; 2.50 a kilo for the "castagne".. and 4.50 for the "marroni". I puzzle too long, and the stall holder comes forward... "no,no,no.. very very different!". The marroni don't have a skin that sticks to the soft yellow flesh inside. mmm, I ponder too long... "I'm looking for someone to make me this cake" she thrusts a kids comic page with a recipe for "Ciambella di Castagne" into my hands.. followed by a sack of rattle-clacking chestnuts. "you can have the chestnuts.. I just don't have time to bake, you see". The crowd is giggling... I'm being duped! "Come back on Friday, we'll be waiting to taste the Torta!"

Welcome home to Italy... something I wasn't sure I'd feel last week.

On past the autumn fruit; piles of muscat grapes, crates of cotton-downy quinces  and trays of translucent persimmons.  And... oh! this stall has an exclusive! Citrus! the first of the year, a mixed bin of clementines and mandarins. Again I'm puzzled and stare at the lime-green fruit, leaves as fresh as lettuce. The frantic bustle of the market leaves me behind... "but are they ripe?"  The young woman behind the stall stretches back to take a cut fruit from a colleague.. "yes, yes.. they're rose inside... look", and I'm stunned as she says "It's their quality".

For the first time in a year I'm not wearied by the Q word.

She's saying that these early varieties are ok to eat green... they're ripe inside.. it's their particular characteristic  to be green.  I'm refreshed by the completely direct and clear way that she uses the word quality. It's a word overused, abused and made meaningless as the giants of the food world take their stances in the war over what is good food. Exercised as a type of propaganda; high quality, quality control, quality control... da da da none of it means a great deal without the specifics... and then we can make our own minds up.

I buy a kilo and relish the first spray of citric oil to spray out as i peel back the paper-thin skin. They are just sweet, crisp and juicy, the segments snapping apart. Wonderful! 

Dr Porcu lives in a granite Sardinian hilltop town called Berchideddu. A friendly bar-tender, giving directions, jokes that being the community’s doctor is only a hobby really. His preoccupation is keeping 400 colonies of bees and making honey.

The road to Berchideddu climbs steeply up out of Olbia through a boulder strewn Mediterranean maquis. On New Year’s Eve the foliage is luxuriant and green, greedily sucking up the mid winter rains. But the plants here have to be incredibly resilient to the soaring, earth baking summer heat; this landscape is about survival: store and protect. There are abundant strategies; oily leaves and intense fruits like myrtle and juniper, thick fire-resistant bark on the cork-oak, long periods of dormancy for orchids and asphodels, thorns and spikes and fleshy leaves on Indian fig and agave. Beekeeping in this habitat is also strategic, tapping the rich nectar flow as the flowers come and go. The incredible range of distinctive honeys it produces is a quintessential expression of this community of plants and people.

The doctor grew up here. He studied on the continent and although he’s always on call to care for the little town’s health, his training has also helped breath new life into beekeeping for Sardinia. Keeping bees and eating honey has a long history and his combination of science and tradition gives it a future. I find him and his sons are in the honey room, the scene of a lot of recent activity as this year’s crop of Strawberry Tree or Corbezzolo honey has just been extracted from the comb. As the already fine-crystalled honey is being decanted into deep tanks, they tell me that the mild autumn meant that this is the best harvest in a generation.

Exciting news as this remarkable honey is prized for its coffee like bitterness and rarity. Sardinia has been famous for its bitter-sweet honey since ancient-Greek traders visited the shores. It’s difficult to produce, only the strongest colonies will manage to gather any quantity. Now, the bees have gone down into hibernation, but it won’t be long, a month or two, until the spring sunshine will entice them out just as the rosemary comes into flower. If they are lucky, they may get a small amount of pale, herby Rosemary honey. Having worked his bees hard on the Corbezzolo, the Dr is more keen to get them back to strength in time for the spring flowering.

Honey tells the story of a passing season. Capturing for ever in a jar the nectar of a million flowers and the extraordinary cooperation between the apiarist and his bees. A careful beekeeper like Dr Porcu will watch the season as carefully as his bees and harvest honey between phases of flowering. Concentrating on mono-floral honeys is the equivalent to the wine world’s cru. The terroir is the land with its spectrum of flora and it reveals itself in a variety of colours and textures, aromas and flavours.

Some colonies will be kept up in the scrubby maquis where the bees will be able to visit tree heather producing a creamy, nutty, caramel honey. Others will be transported, by night, down to pastures for asphodel and then cardoon. Both plants occupy a niche created by centuries of Sardinian sheep-herding and it is perhaps these two honeys that are the most unique expression of beekeeping in Sardinia. The Asphodel, a beautiful star-like flower enjoys the poor soils of ancient pasture and gives a wonderful, sparkling yellow, delicate floral honey. The Cardoon, an invasive thistle would perhaps be discouraged by shepherds in other countries. Here the dried flower heads served a vital role as an alternative to animal rennet for making pecorino cheese. Letting them grow and picking them as they tended the flock, the cardoon is so extensive that it yields a good crop of a rich spicy honey. It’s an island favourite with roast lamb or the tangy lemon and ricotta fried sabeda pastries.

Until relatively recently, beekeeping and shepherding went hand in hand. Shepherds kept bees in cylindrical hives of cork bark. This ancient practice came to an abrupt end in the 1980’s with the arrival of varroa, a parasite that decimated the wild swarms that occupied the bark hives. Beekeeping had to be re-invented in Sardinia. From that time on, keeping bees, managing them in rational frame hives, became a full time occupation. Before, it had been a supplement to a shepherd family’s food supply and income. Sardinia had gone global, bringing travellers and honey customers, spreading stories of the magical island but bringing modern threats too, like the varroa. Thanks to a handful of older beekeepers that rallied a younger generation to get to grips with commercial beekeeping, the industry is alive and well. Dr Porcu’s knowledge of human health wasn’t wasted on the bees and he’s had an important part to play in helping the new beekeeping community adapt to its modern challenges.

I’m enchanted as Dr Porcu tells me a hundred stories, taking me through the year tasting a dozen delightful honeys. On this winter day, opening the cold glass jars takes me to another season; refreshing, perfumed Acacia, as sweet as the spring air, glorious fruity full bodied Thyme… There’s a whole world here. This is a man who combines two careers but lives a tradition bringing it into the 21^st century. His sons are studying on the continent now too but can be sure that a healthy opportunity awaits them at home to be part of a wonderfully connected and productive relationship with their territory.