To Market to market... Che, due marroni?

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! 

Zambian Honey

Brave Potatoes

 Aww Suz!!!

My goodness!! Look at those Patatas Bravas, but the thought of sharing them with fellow spudluvver Suzanne just puts me over the edge!

Junket Bumble

August Bank Holiday weekend is traditionally a wash-out, a ritual disappointment for campers squeezing in a trip at the end of the school holidays. Although an Azorian high pressure is well settled in, sending waves of Atlantic low-pressure fronts racing northwards, off the ocean and sweeping accross North Western Europe, the weather so far has been kind. Today was another warm breezy sunshiny day, but the cool damp wind and the brewing clouds promise a band of rain. Here before seven in the morning, it will have gone through by eleven.

Flickr Photo "Assorted Colours..." by Welshlady 

Rubus fruticosus: Blackberry: Some colloquial names:

Blackbides, Kirk, Wight; Black Blegs, Yks; Black Bowours, Berw; Black Boyds, W. Scot; Black Kites, Cumb. Black Spice,Yks; Blaggs,Yks; Brammel Kites, Dur; Bumble Kites, Hants, Yks, Cumb, N’thum; Bummel Berries, Cumb, Doctors Medicine, Som; GatterBerry, Rox; Garten-Berries, Scot; Mooches, Glos; Mulberries, Suff, Norf; Mushes, Dev. (Mabey 1975)

The odd drop of rain that hasn’t missed us by going north or south this showery week has helped the blackberries swell and ripen. The rocky piles in South-Pembrokeshire’s limestone quarries are the ideal warm toasty habitat for brambles to grow. Mum and Dad have been planting daffodil bulbs up in the field behind Penual Chapel. It’s a floury tilthe but hides outcrops of great lumpy limestone hazardous to the delicate planter. Dad’s been hauling them out as he goes and piling them in a bank… where a small quarry has been hollowed for hedges, roads and perhaps a rough building. He noticed a clump of briars there with promising stalks of plump fruit.

With the shreeks of caravanners in the camp-site adjacent I enjoyed picking a Tupperware box-full, watching the cloud-shadows skitting across the ridgeway and hearing the weekly intercity train clank down to Pembroke Dock, holiday weekend passing by all around. Back in the kitchen, earthy sweet beetroot simmering to translucence on the stove-top, I looked up Richard Mabey on Food for Free (Fontana 1975). Later on, Granny will have a delivery for making jelly, but these-first will be eaten in glorious freshness. The usual way is to put them in a crumble, or adventurously in a pie with some of the nice cooking apples from the Family Orchard. Mabey had some curiously dated thoughts on blackberrying, in those days perhaps the fruit still had a special role in the relationship between townspeople and the countryside…commons and scrubland around every big town swarming with pickers, stuffing the berries into mouths and handkerchiefs and polythene bags… reaffirming…a little of the urban dwellers myth of country life: abundance, harvest, seasonality, a sense of season and just enough discomfort to quicken the senses……… If only.

Meanwhile, Granny had turned up, and was drinking tea out on the bench with Mum. “Granny, what’s a Junket?” Her eyes light up, Mum wrinkles her nose like a fussy teenager, this priceless dynamic is explained as Granny describes the gallons of surplus milk she curdled with rennet, spiced with nutmeg and fed her family. It’s a sort of cottage cheese, without the curd being cut and synerysis separating the whey until split with a spoon and flopping in its individual ramekin. In those days, Granny pointed out, nobody had heard of yoghurt: that was something Mum found for the first time in 1970’s Israel on the Kibbutz. Mabey juices the very ripest blackberries, strains the liquid through a muslin cloth and leaves the juice in a warm room for several hours where it will naturally set to the consistency of a light junket to be eaten with cream and sweet biscuits.

Not much taken with the thin promise of a junket, our blackberry juice, iced, cosmically sweet-balanced with heady bramble honey and called a smoothie with a dash of vodka was a fine way to celebrate the holiday weekend. Who cares if it rains when you’ve planted all the bulbs?

Update (4th September) - As if by magic, Saturday's Guardian ran an article by Richard Mabey 

small is ... real

 

Tinkin' inside and outside da box 

 

GreenBean spent the best part of today with his head up a girl's skirt.

Helping out Small World Theatre with their contribution to the Cardigan River and food festival has become a more or less annual fixture. The festival takes advantage of the town's best asset.. the river. Somewhat neglected as a resource in post industrial times, the  teifi estuary has been one of this island nation's busiest ports, shipping out grain, slate, new world migrants and being mid-wales's  maritime link to bristol and liverpool. These days the quayside is crumbling or a supermarket carpark, the mill's a visitor centre or potential luxury apartments.The coal yard had a breif run at being a community arts workshop but now its begging for the land value to rise so it can be turned into a culturally functional space.

The festival itself is a post-industrial or even post-agricultural event. An august holiday focus it's timing juggled with the eistedfordd, cilgerran fair and the tide being high in the middle of the day so festival hoppers turn up and it all looks pretty. All the diversified farmers and food producers are invited along to sell their organic lamb burgers, bara brith, buffalo-milk ice cream, rare breed flesh, pastry pies and of course olives in brine and fresh (locally) ground coffee. Cambrian organics cleared up 4 years ago with their organic lamb burger, finally filling a market void, but his year i lost count of how many stalls griddling up patties. Tell me, is it true that organic wild-boar-cross burgers will fall apart without 3% rice flour? At least its gluten free. There was more than 3% flavour missing, i was dissapointed. Taste of Wales bring it all together with a flashy cardiff chef making haute pate and the like. I loved the biligual serving suggestions... 'av (sic) it either  on biscedi or fresh localbread (sic). A beautiful yet not even vaguely appetising combination of oldspeak and newspeak.

euro-Welsh food culture is not doing it for me. I think my family and freinds think i have no appetite because there is no spagetti or something, they are wrong, you can keep all that salt for as long as you like. Mum got it yesterday when she said "are you staying here for bangers and mash this evening?" and i melted. I love the fact that granny's new blueberry jam is so good, that the last jar has been hidden, rationed. Beer is at its best to think when home brewed by an expatriate german. and it almost makes me weep for subversive joy that after a year of working to facilitate cultural capital on  healthy eating  with community theatre, my pupeteering  freinds celebrate the performance with... chocolate bars and a cup of tea.

And thats the most wonderful thing about cardigan's festival. The river and the food are pretty artificial notions, sit round a table and thats what you'd come up with. The beauty is the way the the community is using the space to build cultural capital. It's the dead-pan tomo on the P.A., the lifeboat showing off its kit, the cancer research plastic duck race, the wierd guy grinding his organ. It's not cohesive, its wierd, and my little corner is with small world.

working in a small way in the big world is their speciality, they take a message and play with it in the commmunity thats trying to talk to itself. Reforestation in Sudan, Aids awareness in Uganda, telling voters what an election is in new democracies, refugee and migrant mediation in South Wales. They take an artificial, funded, campaigned, buzzed message and make it real by making it a game, acting it out... a moment of life in the suspended and astonishing disbeleif of community theatre. Stretched far and wide, in demand for their skills, Bill Hamblet and Ann Shrosbury are working close to home too.

 

They've been working on the Ridgeway project for more than a couple of years now. Greenbeen was impressed that food and it's issues are being incorporated into the project programme. This years theme for the pageant performance was healthy eating. The centre peice giant, 12ft tall puppets were a big fat ugly couch potato guy slouched in a chair, adorned with yucky teeth, bits of pizza, cans of beer, a cokroach or two and a tv remote control. His counterpart was a clear skinned beauty, jaunting down the street waving her blond hair, off to the gym with her sports bag and i-pod (loaded with greenbean, himself under her skirt holding her up and gb radio on the ipod!). The kids and families that took part had built a whole load of imaginative,  colourful and appetising individual costumes... from fresh strawberries, hats as plates of fried eggs, burgers... a chicken with real feathers... some super outfits. So we all danced off round the festival until we came to the judges. They ummed and ahhed until all the bad food went and danced around him, while sporty girl boogied on with an entourage of healthy food.