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jam

It’s not every day that you walk into a butcher shop and come out with a few kilos of bitter oranges aka Seville oranges or arance amare in Italian. But it’s also, I think, not every day that you find a butcher shop that has this sort of garden out the back with a sweeping view over the valley and terraces of mandarins, lemons and Seville orange trees.
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In late October I spent a week on the island of Andros, back in the same beautiful place I was in in June, charming Melisses. And can I say, late October was, unexpectedly, perhaps even more beautiful than in June? It was warm and sunny, punctuated by a few intensely windy days, but perfectly warm actually to be in summer attire on the beach (the girls thought the water was great too, though it was definitely chillier than it was in June).
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This is not a very practical recipe unless you chance upon a basket of wild plums at your local farmgate, like I did, while picking out some enormous, gnarled tomatoes, sunny zucchini flowers and purple and white eggplants the size of my fist. Or, even better, find yourself a wild plum tree that no one else (birds and bugs included) has noticed.
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When a friend tells you she has wild roses blooming everywhere, it’s not hard to imagine where the conversation headed to next… to turning them into rose petal jam, of course. My friend Simona Quirini and her family run the beautiful Canto del Maggio, a B&B, restaurant and garden, about one hour’s drive from Florence. We arrived to catch Simona with a wooden crate in her hands, already half full of blush pink flower heads, small and as fragrant as honey.
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I didn’t notice it at first, the skinny tree with dark leaves in our shared garden at our new home in Settignano, in the hills above Florence. I was too taken by the green vines hanging like a curtain over our entrance, keeping the house cool in the humid Florentine summer. But now that it’s autumn and the the leaves still left on the vines have turned a shade of rose champagne, that skinny green tree is sporting bright vermillion fruit, like fuzzy cherries or red christmas balls.
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I’ve had this cookbook sitting beside my bed for weeks, trying to decide what to cook. I’d pick it up, let a page fall open — almost like letting fate choose the recipe — and get distracted reading. It continued this way for a while. It’s my favourite way to read a cookbook. But the problem for me is that I’m indecisive.
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I’m really trying to stop lamenting about the heat — the relentless, humid, Tuscan heat — but it’s hard when it engulfs you 24 hours a day and there’s barely any relief from it aside from taking cold showers throughout the day. But I know I’ll want it all back as soon as winter comes and I’m chilled to the bone with that damp Florentine cold that is so hard to shake off and I’m yearning for long days and sunshine.
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I first found crates full of these white grapes with a scribbled sign stating “local grapes, 1 euro a kilo” at the fruit and vegetable shop down the road. Cheap grapes are a sign that we are already well into the vendemmia (grape harvest) season. Being married to a sommelier I probably should have known right away what kind of grapes they were, after all, this part of Tuscany is the only place that grows these.
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I’ve mentioned it before; I can’t say no to free produce. Especially when it comes from Marco’s cousin, Lorella, and her husband, Antonio, who have a vegetable garden large enough that it basically makes them self-sustainable. They have ducks and geese, walnut trees and vines for making their own wine. And, right next to the cubby house that my daughter thinks is paradise, is a wonderfully prolific fig tree.
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Where is home? It’s always been a complicated question for me. I never spent very long in one country when I was growing up, living back and forth between Australia and China then going off to study in the US. In fact, the longest I have ever spent living in one place, one country, at one time is Florence. Seven years.
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This is a 123 year old recipe for apricot jam. It comes from my battered and worn pocket sized edition of Pellegrino Artusi‘s Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well. I only bought it a few years ago, it’s just battered because I use it all the time. I carry it around in my bag and read it’s old fashioned Italian like a novel.
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As much as I am an advocate of simplicity in the kitchen – simple procedures, simple flavours, a handful of good ingredients and a quick, delicious result – there is also something about a process that I have always enjoyed. I find having a patience-requesting, detailed process in front of you actually quite meditative and relaxing, and when there are those rainy days when you don’t want to leave the house and have no where you need to rush off to (a bit of luxury for me these days), then making jam is just one of those things that I find a rewarding way to slow down.
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The tradition of preserving food, whether fruit, vegetables, meat or cheese is so fundamental to the cuisine of each Italian region and is one that still lies very close to the hearts of many, who cannot do without their mother’s plum jam, their nonna’s preserved mushrooms in oil or their neighbour’s own prosciutto. Preserves, the topic of this month’s Italian Table Talk, where four food bloggers discuss an aspect or tradition of Italian cuisine, is appropriate as the Italian summer is a time for collecting the season’s abundant fruit and vegetables and preserving them for the winter.
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With the autumn weather in Melbourne getting cooler and a little drizzly, I’ve been craving something sweet lately. Something innocent to nibble together with a cup of tea or a little espresso. I found the perfect thing while thumbing through one of the most treasured cookbooks I have on my bookshelf, Nonna Genia. The classic cookbook of the rolling hills of the Langhe area of Piemonte is full of the centuries old recipes collected by Luciano De Giacomi and dedicated to his grandmother, Genia.
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Waking up on the Armenian monastery of the Island of San Lazzaro, floating in the mist of the Venetian lagoon, is like waking into a dream itself. Water softly laps around the edges of the monastery and that is about all you can hear except for the occasional speed boat on its way to the Lido. I spent several weeks here over two years during my days interning as an art restorer.
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