I make olive oil. I know every single step of the process inside out, from sapling to mature tree, from the plucking of the fruit to the winding of the press. I also know how much all this labour of love costs. That’s part of my job too – watching every penny and dime we spend, but making sure we never cut corners. So when I go into a supermarket and see a half litre/17 fl oz bottle of ‘Italian extra virgin olive oil’ for £3 ($6), I know that it can’t be true. Extremely unlikely that it is extra virgin, highly unfeasible that it is Italian and totally conceivable that it isn’t even olive oil!

Let’s look at the maths. Each of our olive trees produces about two litres of olive oil a year. One year, one tree, one harvest, two litres. Each tree costs about €5 to prune. We cut the grass twice a year (sounds easy, but across 21 acres it becomes a little trickier) which works out as €2 per tree . Then the other major expenses are the harvesting by hand, costing about €4 a tree, organic fertiliser at €1 a tree and using the communal press to squash the beauties, coming out at $1.5 for every litre. So we are already up to around €7.50 a litre without including any of the farm overheads, taxes, marketing, organic certification, or big pasta lunches. We are however including the fact that we are paying decent living wages, we are not working people into the ground nor are we employing children.

But just considering the basic cost of product and we still need to add at least another €2.50 a litre for bottling, packaging and transport.  So we’re now up to €10 a litre. With no profit taken by us a shop would typically want to sell this for €20 a litre. This is a long way from our cheap, supermarket extra virgin olive oil. Sure there are economy of scales, and no doubt I could get the harvesters (who include myself incidentally), to work that bit faster, but it’s not going to reduce the costs by an order of magnitude is it?

So it comes as no surprise to me that 4 out of 5 bottles of Italian extra virgin olive oil sold in the UK, USA and China don’t have inside what they say they have on the bottle. Which begs the question, what do they have inside? Well in his brilliant new book ‘Extra Virginity: the sublime and scandalous world of olive oil’, Thomas Mueller offers numerous shocking examples where this ‘italian extra virgin olive oil’ turns out to be mixes of chemically extracted olive oils, cut with nut or sunflower oil or both and it’s likely provenance is Spain, North Africa or Turkey. And I repeat, we are talking about 4 out of every 5 bottles here folks.

I’ve never personally seen evidence of any such shenanigans, but I have visited olive groves around Liguria where nets are left under the trees for the olives to fall into them. The windfall is collected every few weeks for processing – to be extra virgin the olives need to be pressed within 24 hours (not three weeks). Locals openly told me the subsequent oil was refined (to remove the rancid taste) and mixed with fruity foreign oil in a specific ratio so the resulting bottle of oil can still be called “Ligurian”.

So the moral of the story is that you get what you pay for. Don’t take your olive oil for granted. Ask questions about its origins. And heck, you can even go crazy and adopt your very own 100% Italian 100% olive 100% tree.

According to a recent report by Confesercenti (a federation of small businesses in Italy) there is one part of the Italian economy that’s booming despite the grim economic times: the Mafia. With £100bn annual profits (to put it another way, 7% of GDP) the Mafia seem to be the only business currently skating on liquidity.

For the majority of the Italian public, times are tough and set to get tougher, even without the onerous bills for state funded Presidential orgies (and on that note, can we please take a moment to celebrate, despite the gloomy times, the fact that the country no longer suffers a president who ‘jokes’ about Obama’s being ‘suntanned’ or threatents to ‘dust off his Playboy charms’ to win over the (female) Finnish Prime Minister. A big hoorah for the passing).

All this feels a far cry from Le Marche, a predominantly agricultural region made up of small family businesses. In Italy there are 2.6 million farms, the vast majority (94.7%) of which are family-operated and small – averaging only 5 hectares in size. These are just the sort of farms that together form the Nudo olive grove co-operative. There’s no pretending times aren’t difficult. Economic pressure as well as all the usual worries of weather and bugs and mosca and all don’t add up to carefree evenings. But at least we can guarantee, through our adoption programme, that they will sell their entire olive oil harvest.

With that, and no Silvio, surely there is reason to be cheerful. Happy 2012.

In the olden days, recycling meant re-using – like actual reusing – by us. Shoeboxes would become document storage systems, shoelaces would have a second life in beaded necklaces and so on. Today it’s much more indirect, involving special bags and weekly schedules and, on a more personal level, no more than a vague pride that your tin of baked beans might once have been the tail fin ofConcord. And it seems so much less efficient. With this in mind, we have been fretting over the fate of our olive oil tins. Apart from anything, they’re just too pretty to be chucked in the recycling bin with last week’s copy of the Radio Times. So we have come up with some easy ways of breathing second life into your Nudo tin, once the oil’s gone of course.

1. Pen holder/desk tidy
Get a can opener. Carefully cut the top off (don’t start near the seam, you need a run up to this), being really careful not to cut yourself as the blood will really spoil the craft look. Carefully dry the inside of the tin. Cover the sharp edge with something you fancy – we used PVC trimming from a car parts shop, but there’s no reason not to go a bit gaga and add fur trim or tinsel.

2. Plant pot.

Do exactly the same as above, but before you pot your plant make a small hole at the bottom of the tin at the back. This will prevent you being woken in the middle of the night to the sound of your plant screaming ‘Help! Help! I’m drowning!’

Have fun, play safe and do send us pics of your creations.

How to make naturally flavored lemon olive oil. See the Nudo photo album here.

x

I’d never heard of ‘supper clubs’. I’d heard of guerrilla dining, and, of course, pop-up restaurants. (In just how many new ways can eating be spun?) I was sceptical. Were ‘supper clubs’ simply another marketing gimmmick or were they actually a new thing? And more importantly, were they a new thing that was any good?

Having now enjoyed the considerable hospitality of the marvellously moustached Arno, I have to declare them a triumph. Joyous and lovely and – yes – rather new and extraordinary. On my thoroughly scientific sample of one, they are a keeper.

The Saltoun supper club is a place (Arno’s house on Saltoun Road), it is a time (Wednesday and Thursday evenings) and it is a philosophy: Arno’s desire to share his wonderful cooking and his home with total strangers.

Arno is one of those people who is happy to live his life inside out. Not in a narcissistic, sharing every burp on Facebook sort of way, but in a confidently old-fashioned sort of way, an ‘I have spent my life collecting interesting things and I’d like you all to enjoy them’ way, an ‘I went to the market this morning and bought the food that excited me to cook for you’ sort of a way.

Dinner was delicious. Simple and sublime, Arno’s cooking poured adjectives onto every edible noun – from his buoyant scallops to his bathic chocolate, his sensual white lasagne to his polyphonic bread. The company of strangers was thrilling and exotic, the comforts of another’s home movingly generous.

You can see more photo’s of the evening, the guests and the wonderful 6-course meal here.

There are three things guaranteed to put me in the Christmas mood. The first is the smell of pine trees. The second is the first December airing of Jason’s copy of Phil Spector’s ‘Sounds of Christmas’ CD. And the third is the sight of someone carrying a preposterously prettily-packaged panettone. I absolutely love panettone and as far as I’m concerned it was one of the loveliest things you can give or receive. It’s a big fat show off of a gift and as delicious outside as in.

So we were very excited at the prospect of creating our very own Nudo panettone. We got talking to several panettone makers about the idea of experimenting with olive oil (it is traditionally made using only butter) and eventually decided on the Signor Scarpato bakery. They made some panettone using our mandarin olive oil and others with the lemon, but in the end the one we liked best (and a special thank you to our Nudo customer tasters) was the one they made with our plain Nudo olive oil. We then discovered that we couldn’t actually call our ‘panettone’ ‘panettone’ in Italy as the strict protection of this Milanese classic dictates that to be a ‘panettone’ it must be 100% butter (ours is half butter and half olive oil). We still secretly call it panettone amongst ourselves, please don’t dob us in to the Italian food special ops.

Anyway, our first panettone-esque-large-cakes-of-delicious-airy-dough-and-dried-fruit was featured in no less a publication that the New York Times’ Dining Section, so we must have done something right. Better clear your larders in anticipation – and get your order in before it’s all gone. Nearly time to dig out that CD…

Luisa is a lady who knows how to cook. She knows how to cook so well that she doesn’t even think she is a good cook – it is just a thing she does. Telling her she is a good cook is like telling someone else they are good at breathing – wow, man, you really know how to take in those lungfuls of air, hold them in for just the right amount of time, and then – respect – let them right out again, awesome stuff….

Luisa cooks things like rabbit stew like the rest of us cook a piece of toast. I was recently let into a rather lovely Luisa secret – and I warned her, I wasn’t going to keep it secret for long…

Every year, the day after Ferragosto, Luisa and her friend Maria spend the whole day cooking. The whole day is dedicated to preparing their own special ‘taste sensation’ stock mix that will last them both the whole year long. They gather bunches and bunches of all the herbs they can find – fresh rosemary, oregano, thyme, mint, marjoram, parsley, basil, sage as well as fresh garlic, onion and celery and the just-in-season chillis until the kitchen is overflowing with colour and heady with perfume.

Each ingredient has to be washed, pummelled and then slow baked in the oven – everything has to be properly dried out so that the stock is naturally preserved. It is painstaking because only small batches can be done at a time – just a layerful on each tray – hence the whole day’s labour.

Then all the elements are mixed together and ground, using the weight of fine womanly arm muscles, to a fine powder. This powder will flavour stews, soups, casseroles, brodo for the whole year ahead, bringing understated and probably underappreciated joy to husbands, friends, children and visitors.

When they’ve batched all the powder up and stuck labels on, Luisa and pal allow themselves a cheeky little glass of vino cotto. And therein lies all you need to know about how, although men still dominate headlines and boardrooms, women really make the world work.

We recently, along with some journalists from Canada, the US and the UK, had an olive oil tasting lesson from the best in the business: member of the elite IOCC and all round wonderful human being Barbara Alfei. We thought you might enjoy some of her tasting titbits.

Take the olive oil in question and pour a decent sized gloop into a non-taste-corrupting receptacle. Unaesthetically enough, a small plastic cup is the best sort of thing (a metal spoon affects flavour too much).

Firstly look at the oil. In all honesty the look won’t tell you much (you can get that prized greenish glow by chucking a few green and verdant olive leaves into the press) so show your stature by knowing this. The only thing the inspection will tell you is whether the oil is filtered or not (pretty easy: cloudy with bits in = unfiltered) but importantly the golden amber glint will get you in the mood for phase two, the smell test.

A proficient olive oil taster can tell you whether an oil is fresh or not (ie whether it was made in the most recent harvest) by smell alone. Don’t be half-hearted about smelling, you need to get your nose right in there and inhale deeply. You should also be able to sniff out rancidness, which can come either from the olives being kept too long before pressing or through some contamination during the pressing process (as lovely as the old fashioned pile-of-mats presses are, they are a devil to clean properly). The smell will also give you your first whiff of other non-olive flavours in the oil (of which more later).

Next you are on to the full-on taste.

So now let the olive oil spill over your tongue, ideally with your mouth slightly open so that air can circulate. Try not to be self conscious, despite the erotic connotations of the pose. Tasting olive oil is about letting your feelings mutate into words – something deep and earthy might emerge and gradually announce itself as artichoke, something springy and fresh will bounce in and we-hey, it’s avocado.

Olive oil has no sugars and no salt, and such low acidity that there is virtually no sourness – so the only one of the basic taste senses that comes into play is bitterness. Although bitterness isn’t always seen as an asset, with olive oil, it definitely is – since the bitter taste is accentuated when there is a high concentration of polyphenols – which are the bits that are really good for you.

Once the taste has settled out in your mouth, which might take anything up to ten seconds (longer than you think with that suggestive expression), it’s time to swallow. Just to reiterate, to swallow. Not to spit, that’s only for those vulgar wine tasters.

You might cough, because this is where the oil’s pepperiness might reveal itself. After you’ve swallowed it’s time to reflect once again. What new flavours are creeping into your consciousness? How do you feel? Is the world a better place?

Olive oil tasters allow themselves a good deal of leeway in flavours they will attribute – pears, asparagus, limes – anything that grows in god’s holy earth can be deemed to be discernible. But don’t overdo it. ‘Grassy’, ‘fresh’, ‘buttery’, ‘peppery’ do fine for most of us. The oil should be viscous; a mean, thin olive oil is rarely a good thing. And it really should make you feel you’ve sampled a little piece of heaven (with a waft of kiwi). View more photos of the evening on our Facebook page.

Happy tasting – and enormous thanks to Barbara.

In the olive grove, the plus – and simultaneously the minus – is that you leave the watering responsibilities to Mother Nature. All very labour- saving but the trouble is she doesn’t always get it right. This year, while everyone else was enjoying the summer sun, we were fretting about the lack of rain. In fact we reckon we were only a couple of weeks away from losing the whole crop – if it gets too dry, the fruit can start to fall from the trees before it is ripe – and before we’ve put the nets down!

Thankfully, the skies opened in September and gave us all a life-saving soaking and a huge sense of relief. Phew. Now we are just getting ready to roll up our sleeves, and roll out the nets for this year’s harvest. Happy days.

While we were preparing the autumn packages this year it dawned on us what an amazing network of people around the world are part of the programme. So this year we chose a typical olive grove ‘street’ (one row of trees in the Rosalio grove) and asked the adopters if they’d mind ‘coming out’ to their neighbours. They were all happy to do so – thank you Rosalio row! Here are some of their comments.

RO295 - Chris, Delaware USA
‘We have used the olive oil several times and it is fantastic. We love olive oil and this is one of the best by far  that I have tasted. We are taking some with us on vacation this week for other family and friends to try!!’

RO285 - Greg, New Mexico USA
‘Great gift.’

RO279 - Larry, Massachusetts USA
‘The olive adoption was given to me as a birthday gift and yes I was very surprised, my wife has a hard time finding gifts that I really use. This is a great gift that I have already used, even on Cape Cod I can sit outside with wine, baguette and my own olive oil for dipping add a little herb from the garden. It does not get any better than that.’

RO300 - Helenmarie, Pennsylvania USA
‘This past Christmas my daughter, her husband and my son planned my present on everything Italian. I received pasta and biscotti and sauce all imported from Italy. I was thrilled when I opened the part of the present that told me they had adopted an olive tree in my name. I began to cry (hey I’m a tough northern girl this rarely happens) and I kept crying. I was so moved by this idea that I had this little part of a country I have only dreamed about visiting for years! What a tender idea! Just writing to you now fills me up again (eegads, I could be getting soft).

Before this goes any further let me blame it on Rosey! I know her formal name is Rosa 300 but she’ll always be Rosey to me and I’m sure her delightful olive oil has warmed my northern heart. The day her oil arrived we tore into some crusty bread and did some comparison dipping and tasting. You know Rosey won! Bravo! Bravo! Bella Rosa!

Our summers are wonderful here warm days and cool mountain nights. My neighbor brought me fresh lettuce and green beans from her garden last night. I drizzled them with Rosey oil, poured a glass of red wine and Wow! Closed my eyes…Italy!’

RO304 - Dominic, London UK
‘It was my gorgeous sister, Philippa who gave this to me as a an amazing gift (she has an amazing nose for hunting out new, interesting, unusual and trend setting things). Firstly it’s a delight and real occasion when the oil is delivered, the oil is bloody lovely and the best I’ve tasted and I love ‘owning an olive oil grove in Italy’ (maybe a little exaggeration there). I’ve loved it so much that its the first present that I’ve asked for again and again. So thank-you and thank-you Philippa for that.’

We asked some of our olive grove owners to tell the story of how their relationship with Nudo began. These are some of their answers. Un caro saluto a tutti voi!

From Paolo, Fiorano

“The first we heard of the Nudo project was when we first met Jason and Cathy. We didn’t immediately understand all the benefits of the idea but we were won over by their enthusiasm and sincerity.

Now after three seasons, I find the idea ever more relevant, both economically (it is wonderful when tree adopters come to visit their tree and we are able to host them in our agriturismo) and in terms of the image of the province of Ascoli Piceno and the whole of Le Marche. All the visitors we have had have been so enthusiastic about the area as well as about their tree – and about getting to know us, their tree’s ‘carers’. The first couple to visit their tree were a young English couple who drank a glass of fantastic wine (Fiorano, naturally) under their tree at sunset with smiles covering their faces. At times like this, we can help to realise someone’s dream!”

From Caterina, La Morla

“From a local newspaper, I heard of an English couple  who were in search of organic olive groves, for adoption. I immediately liked the idea; I knew it would be great for my olive trees to have someone with a more personal relationship, who would think the world of them.

The adoption programme is a perfect way to recognize all the quality work that goes on year round in an olive grove, to care for the trees and make the olive oil. I think that much of the passion that people have for olive trees and their products comes from the allure of a plant that lasts for centuries. When a visitor looks at the 800-year-old olive trees around our house, they wonder about the other world it knew in the 15th century, and the world it will see in the 30th century.

Of our tree visitors, some have become real friends. We had some fromAustralia(we found them in the garden, they didn’t even ask for directions!) who will come back next year, by now our very dear friends. I think it was their appreciation for their beautiful olive tree that helped encourage our mutual friendship.”

From Alduino, Il Professore

“In 2008 I read an article in a local newspaper, about the Nudo proposal. The article said that they were searching for olive trees to adopt, that would produce high quality olive oil for the adoptive parents. It was so totally new that I was immediately very curious, and soon had the pleasure of meeting Jason. He visited my olive grove, and liked what he saw–and so we started our business relationship, which has since grown to give mutual satisfaction.

I am a qualified agronomist, and have always had a passion for olive cultivation bred in me. However, now that my olive oil reaches hundreds of worldwide customers, who have demonstrated an appreciation for high quality, I have been spurred to improve my olive oil even more. I also pay close attention to the new techniques developing, for harvesting and processing, that preserve the oil so that it can arrive with the adoptive parents in the same delicious condition in which it left Italy.”

Over the seasons, we’ve ruminated about rosemary, pondered porcini and waxed lyrical over lime. But the two new flavours in our laboratory this harvest time are….drum roll…. truffle oil and mint oil. Truffle olive oil is already a classic, but we’ve discovered that none of it is made naturally. Apparently the flavour compounds in the truffle are so delicate and volatile, that if you crush them above 6oC they all evaporate – so all existing truffle oils add a chemical version of the truffle flavour instead. That perfectly positioned slice of black truffle at the bottom of your rather costly truffle oil? It does nothing except make you feel it was worth the ticket price! So we are going to go where others have feared to tread and make our truffle oil the pure way – just crushing the truffle together with the olives. If it works, you’ll be the first to hear about it.

As for the olive oil with mint, well I have to say we were sceptical at first. And we also have to give due credit to another excellent olive oil producer O&Co, whose mint olive oil turned us around. We are now converts; it pairs so well  with so many things – from couscous to lamb to crunchy salads. It’ll mean we have a bit less mint for our mojitos but we hope it’ll be a price worth paying.

People often ask us if it’s hard work making olive oil. The truth, at least at this time of year, is that it really isn’t. We just leave it to the heat of the sun to turn our olives from green to black (all olives start green and then turn black – a surprisingly rewarding dinner party info-nugget). The last major effort in the grove was in the spring – when the trees got their annual haircut, the trimmings were chipped and the grass was cut. And really that’s it for about three months.

So while Mother Nature is taking care of the grove, we can turn our hands to other things like stealing a march on packing up the autumn/fall packages. We’ve also been putting together a nice little recipe book with lots of pictures and ideas, which all current adopters will receive along with their flavoured oils. Please let us know what you think.

Next on the olive grove ‘to do’ list is another trim of the grass, before we start the harvest in mid October. But that’s a long way off. Far more pressing now is applying the most important lesson of the many we have learned from our Italian friends: taking a nice long break in the summer. Happy holidays!

Brian

[from Monty Python’s ‘The Life of Brian’]

At a party the other day, Jason got talking to an old friend. He’d recently taken some time off work to have a mini-sabbatical / adventure. He’d decided to go on a bike trip and follow a very exotic route through France, a route he’d found in an obscure cycle guide, chanced upon in a second hand bookshop. Soon after getting off the boat in France he noticed a couple, also on bikes. They set off in the same direction as him and over the next few days, kept popping up wherever he went. It became clear that they were following the same unusual route as his, the route he had chosen, his unique route. He had two choices – either embrace the couple and enjoy the coincidence, or resent them for making him less unique, less special, less interesting.

This conversation struck a chord with Jason. This was a bit like our experience in Italy. We loved the feeling of inventing things ourselves, and always felt a mild disappointment when we’d meet other Brits who had made a similar life change. Then we’d feel stupid for feeling upset about it and foolish for not pursuing a friendship – clearly we would automatically have a lot in common.

It’s the same with music. You’ve ‘discovered’ a new band, maybe even seen them is some tiny dingy venue. You told everyone how great they were but no-one was interested. Now they’re huge and everyone loves them. And somehow you don’t quite as much. They were yours, they were special, now they are everyone’s.

I’ve decided to try and change. To be a bit more generous, a bit less neurotic. To try harder to embrace a shared experience rather than prize uniqueness at all costs.

But if I find anyone else having a cheese and marmite sandwich stop on their walk up an Icelandic volcano this summer, I might be narked.

In fact the only thing to disrupt this perfect feast of the senses is the sound of Jason’s pencil, as he sees a branch that needs tidying, a baby tree that needs tending or some other chore, scribbling things on his ‘to do’ list.

Sorelle

Gabriella and Elisabetta say, “This year’s harvest is lightly fruity and sweet, with a peppery finish. There are hints of almond, apple, and grass. The oil is green, with golden highlights.”

Tasting notes: Fruity with a lightly spicy finish.

Acidity: Less than 0.2%

Fiorano

Paolo says, “This year, we’ve been busy planting an acre of three different varities of new olive trees. The golden green oil from this harvest is intense and fruity, with a lightly spicy finish.”

Tasting notes: Fruity with hints of almond, green tomato, and fresh cut grass.

Acidity: Less than 0.11%

La Morla

Caterina says, “This year’s harvest is fruity and lightly sweet, with hints of artichoke and dried fruit. It has a delicate flavour that won’t overwhelm even your most subtle dishes. The colour is greeny golden.”

Tasting notes:  Sweet and mild, with subtle tones of fruit and artichoke.

Acidity: Less than 0.2%

Fonte Carella

Gugliemo says, “Our harvest this year is intensely fruity, with a peppery, almost spicy finish. This delicious olive variety, Piantone di Mogliano, is only found here in our small region of Italy. The oil is an emerald sparkling green.”

Tasting notes: Prominent fruity flavour, with a spicy finish.

Acidity: Less than 0.2%

Ammuri

Bruno says, “This year’s harvest is lightly sweet, but with a spicy finish. There are even hints of almond, green tomato, fresh cut grass, and artichoke. The oil is liquid gold with a green hue.”

Tasting notes: This oil starts sweet and mild, but finishes with a peppery spice.

Acidity: Less than 0.27%

Serena

Massimo says, “This year’s harvest is light and fruity, with scents of freshly cut grass. You might taste a slighty nuttiness like almond and fresh green tomato. The colour is a rich golden green.”

Tasting notes: Mild and fruity, with hints of green tomato and almond.

Acidity: Less than 0.11%

Tre Donne

Elena says, “This year’s harvest is moderately fruity, with hints of artichoke. The oil is green, with golden highlights, and there’s a taste of fresh cut grass.”

Tasting notes: Fresh and fruity, with artichoke tones.

Acidity: Less than 0.2%

Il Professore

Alduino says, “This year’s harvest is fruity and sweet, but with a peppery, spicy finish. The oil is a rich dark gold colour and has a subtle almond scent.”

Tasting notes: Fruity and peppery

Acidity: Less than 0.09%

Il Taccolito

Rita says, “This year’s harvest has a light, buttery taste, with a peppery finish. The oil is green, with golden highlights.”

Tasting notes:  Buttery and peppery.

Acidity: 0.2%

Aleandri

Tiziano says, “This year’s harvest is bright and peppery, with flavours of grass and herbs. The oil is a rich golden green.”

Tasting notes: Grass and herbs, with a peppery finish

Acidity: 0.2%

Lina

Lina says, “This year’s harvest is buttery, with sweet tones of almond. This delicious olive variety, Piantone di Mogliano, is only found here in our small region of Italy. The oil is green, with golden highlights.”

Tasting notes: Buttery and lightly sweet

Acidity: 0.2%

Rosalio

Jason says, “This year’s harvest is peppery, with flavours of grass and citrus fruits. The oil is dark gold with a hint of green.”

Tasting notes: Peppery and grassy

Acidity: 0.2%

Dell’Orso

Cesare & Paola say, “This year’s harvest has the distinct aroma of freshly cut grass. The golden green oil is intense and fruity, with a lightly spicy finish.”

Tasting notes: Fruity with hints of almond and freshly cut grass.

Acidity: Less than 0.11% (0.8% typical)

Ardelio

Ardelio says, “This year’s harvest is buttery, with sweet tones of almond. This delicious olive variety, Piantone di Mogliano, is only found here in our small region of Italy. The oil is green, with golden highlights.”

Tasting notes: Peppery and grassy

Acidity: 0.2%

Do let us know what you think – we love your tasting notes best of all.

After the initial excitement of the call, we realised there was a problem: Breakfast? Olive oil? How were we going to square that circle?

Inspiration struck with the creation of our now rather popular mandarin breakfast cake, made with mandarin olive oil in place of butter. We baked and practised and refined and perfected the cake for the tasting.

The event didn’t happen. Can’t even remember exactly why now – but we dusted ourselves off and thought little more of it. Until this year, when we got another call to say the event was to be resurrected. Hooray anew. The only hiccough was that this time it was to be held in San Francisco – so the challenge now was how to get a freshly baked cake across the Atlantic.

As so often in life, a lovely lady came to the rescue. Jessica Boncutter, a wonderful chef with a restaurant called Bar Jules in San Francisco agreed to make and deliver the cake on our behalf. We sent over a batch of mandarin olive oil and she got baking. The cake was duly delivered to the buying team, along with the full range of Nudo goodies.

The cake did its job. And to cut a long story short, we are extremely delighted to relate that as from this Autumn, Nudo products will be available in Williams-Sonoma stores. This Sunday (my birthday) I will be making homemade pancakes on Sunday to celebrate. I might even sport a pinny.

First of all he is a ‘man’s man’ – football coach, handy with a wrench and even handier with a 20 tonne cement mixer. On the other hand he still lives with his Mum whom he adores, he tends chickens, he happily puts his arm round me, he makes 5 different types of cheese, and most recently he’s added making his own beer to his skillset. I guess the beer thing has a foot in both camps. And whilst I mention it there are two types, a scuro and a bionda – a dark and a blond. So really quite macho actually. Anyway, they are both great, fizzy, sharp and as well balanced as my mate Giancarlo. (Oh and he looks a bit like Jesus Christ.)

I offer ‘fruit service’ to my family. I usually first ask if anyone would like some fruit – a pear? An orange? Some apple? A bit of melon? ‘No thanks,’ they all say. ‘Nothing thanks’. Then I take a plate, or two, and a piece of fruit, or two, and a sharp knife. And I prep the fruit. Peel it, take seeds out, de-pith, cut it into bite sized chunks. No sooner is it prepped than it is eaten. Absolutely without fail. ‘But you said you didn’t want any fruit’ I occasionally say. They just smile. ‘So what?’ they reply, juicily.

I shouldn’t present this as a great surprise. I recently saw in a sandwich shop a tiny, hermetically sealed pot of assorted fruit selling for £2.99. £2.99! I mean seriously, this constitutes a mark-up of at least 400%. I saw a lady reach up to take one, to actually buy one. I was seriously THIS CLOSE to inviting her home to borrow my sharp knife instead.

We’ve been having some beautiful sunny days the past week, a trend that seems to be rolling out all over Europe. Perfect inspiration for a bit of day-dreaming about things to do in the warmer times, eating gelato on the beach and watching Rosie chow down on an unfeasibly enormous platter of spaghetti vongole with salt in her hair.

On that front, we are counting down to our next full family trip to Le Marche. April is proving very kind this year holiday wise (thank you William and Kate – a day off in exchange for all those tax millions, seems only right) and we’re taking off to Italy for a chunk. I’m probably making the mistake I make every year -picturing balmy evenings and t-shirt sleeves by day, when the reality is that Le Marche in April is very much akin to London in April, namely completely unpredictable. It could be fog, it could be rain, it could even be snow though that would be peculiarly cruel. That’s the thing about places that are lush and verdant. You don’t get there through sun alone.

Anyway, for now, my fantasy is a flush of sun, a passeggiata in late afternoon as it squintingly descends and a pasta supper overlooking a sea readying itself for some enthusiastic dipping, in a while.

Driving round the foothills of the Sibillini mountains collecting oil from our friends might sound like a charmed life, but really it’s much better than that. We’re talking about Italy here, so clearly no such transaction can take place without accompanying coffee, a range of aperitivi and more often than not, a large pasta meal. Two weeks of prior dieting is the only essential preparation.

Now that we’re familiar with the set up, we can enjoy the ritual fully. The ‘boring business bit’ (you know, paying and wotnot) is hustled out of the way as quickly as possible so that the table can be cleared of papers. Then come the host’s musical words ‘Right it’s time to eat’ and food and plates and condiments and glasses and wine are clattered noisily into position. Finally it’s time to get down to the real business of the day, as the host opens the conversation, ‘Now tell me, how is your family?’

And this, after all, is what Nudo is all about.

It began in the house we shared in Beachwood Canyon in Los Angeles, a teensy orangey-pink cottage, stuck, as all those canyon places are, half-way up a hill, semi-wedged into a gulch. We woke up on February 14^th, a day like any other. I hadn’t bought a card, never mind a present and quite probably muttered something about the evils of commercialisation. Jason crept from the covers. There was a little vague rustling from downstairs then he reappeared with cups of tea. One eye was finally coaxed open. Come downstairs he said.

Standing on the wooden floor of our little wooden living room was another little wooden thing: a baby olive tree in a pot, with an ‘I love you’ balloon tied to a sprig. My heart missed a beat.

That little tree signalled the start of our olive grove plans and the start of our ‘proper’ relationship. The olive grove is still going strong, the relationship is still going strong. And I really really hope (‘though am a little afraid to find out) that outside the garden of 6134 Glen Holly, planted in a tiny garden, there is still a little olive tree going strong too.

*The mention of god means I have now to pass on a story told by the brilliant Ken Robinson in his highly recommended TED talk. A young girl is drawing a picture. Her teacher asks her what she is drawing. ‘I am drawing a picture of god,’ she says. The teacher says, ‘Well no-one really knows what god looks like.’ The little girl says, ‘Well they will soon.’

There are many things I will never understand about estate agents and their strange opinions. Why are places high up in tall buildings (like the famous New York ‘walk up’) cheaper than an equivalent place lower down? Clearly being high is best. What is so darned great about having ‘your own front door’ (what’s their problem with hallways?). Then there’s that sheepish look they have when they have to tell you that the flat you’re interested in is, oh grievous sins, above a shop.

Well in Rome we lived above a gelateria and it is the best place we ever lived. Gelato, which previously in my mind, was sort of mid afternoon thing, effortlessly became a morning thing, a midnight snack thing, a liquid lunch thing, a flexible friend. Jason once purchased in his pyjamas and I frequently purchased in order to breastfeed on the parkbench opposite. In fact there was something pleasingly Heath Robinson like about pouring gelato into me so that I could in turn pour milk into Sorrel.

That’s all really. Gelato is about action not words. If you are ever lucky enough to chance upon a gelateria that does real pink grapefruit, rent the flat upstairs.

The brilliant thing about small family businesses is how everyone finds their place. The pictures of Rosie helping with the harvest last year remind me how, even with our very first harvest, when she was a year and a half, she was able to ‘help’. Her job was to sort the olives, in theory by colour, but actually by some mysterious internal rule, but it didn’t matter. It meant that as we lay down nets, stripped branches, carted around crates and generally made busy, she too had her job, her place in the order of things.

At the other end of the age scale, is the typical scene in the market near our home in Testaccio. It’s a fantastic daily produce market with maybe a hundred separate stalls. The scene is this – front of house is the person selling you produce, typically a man or woman in their 50s or 60s. Behind them, seated, is their mother / father / aunt / uncle / elderly friend who spend their day doing simple repetitive tasks. One might be prepping artichokes (a prepped artichoke heart might sell for twice the amount of a whole one), another might be slicing puntarelle (these exquisite untranslatable ends of a plant related to celery that are much more delicious than that sounded). And many would be compiling bags of ‘minestrone mix’ – the most genius purchase you can make for lunch, basically a small bag with a mix of borlotti or cannellini beans, and cut up bits of carrot, celery, zucchini and greens. It’s the world’s best ready meal – all you do is take it home, throw it in a pot, add water and boil for an hour to make the most delectable and healthy soup. The wrinkled relatives have done all the work for you, you pay a little extra for the work and everyone’s a winner.

The other day Jason came home with a hundred or so flatpack boxes and lids which needed to be transformed into our little chocolate boxes. They are a right old fiddle and for the first few, I grumpled and moaned. Then I relaxed, learned the tricks of the folds and bends and by box lid five I was in the groove. And lo, what would have been an evening watching TV was instead an evening of productivity and satisfaction.

I don’t know what this all means. But I do know lots of people who spend lots of time naval-gazing, wondering about the meaning and purpose of their life. And I wonder if the answer isn’t sometimes just to enjoy chopping an onion.

Thanks to the brilliant response from around the world we’ll be able to bring even more olive groves in to our adoption programme this year. This is great news because the programme offers a solution to the increasing problems faced by traditional, small scale olive oil producers all over Italy.

Take the Gabrielloni sisters. Elisabetta and Gabriella inherited their olive grove from their grandfather and vowed to stay true to his tradition – they pick the olives by hand and press them within hours in their own press. The excellent quality of their oil has won them accolades around the world, including being five times gold medal winners at the LA county fair.

But these sisters struggle to make a living from their exquisite olive oil.

The problems are manifold. Firstly, the sisters are competing in a market where much of the olive oil that says it’s Italian on the bottle isn’t Italian inside. To say ‘Made in Italy’, oil needs only to have been bottled in Italy; inside could be old, poor quality, badly harvested olives. The one thing for sure is that it’s cheap!

Secondly, the big producers don’t help. Italian olive farmers recently went on strike because they were being offered 30 euros per quintale for oil that was costing them 70 euros a quintale to produce. Clearly the sums don’t add up but it’s almost impossible for small producers to get a foothold in the market on their own.

Thirdly, there’s confusion about olive oil terminology amongst customers. All Nudo olive oil is first cold press, extra virgin olive oil. First cold press is the freshest oil – the first and only time the olives are pressed. We don’t use heat to extract more oil because that would impair the quality, as do second and third pressings. Extra virgin means an acidity of less than 0.8% which equates to the highest level of polyphenols (the healthy bits) and the best, most complex flavour. All the best olive oil is first cold press extra virgin. It is also the most expensive to produce.

At Nudo we believe the answer to these troubles is pretty simple: find olive producers who are passionate about making the best olive oil, pay them a fair price for it and help customers internationally learn to appreciate the value and joys of the best olive oil.

Thank you for already being part of our mission.

Apologies that it’s been a while since our last blog. This thing happened. A good thing, a delightful thing, but a thing that has meant we have been running around like headless chickens. Do chickens really do that?

The thing is called orders! The world has suddenly gone krazy with a k about adopting olive trees and we thank you. We are a little bit stunned to be honest. We are even dusting off our document of wild ideas (filed in an orderly manner in the krazy kabinet) and re-reading the section entitled ‘How about we try to get all the olive trees in the world adopted?’.

Then this other thing happened. Jason and Roelof went to San Francisco for a week to do Nudo’s first ever American trade show. A week for them of too many pancakes, learning to say the word ‘water’ so it translates and constant reminders of what teensy teensy little silverfish we are in the huge pond of the world olive oil trade. Almost enough to convince us to put the wild ideas document back in the cabinet.

So by last week, we were the kids who’d had a huge Christmas balloon, the biggest and prettiest balloon we ever did see, then some kid started running towards it holding a big fat pin.

So that’s why we’ve been gone a while. I suppose a ‘period of reflection’ is the way you’d describe it. But now we’re back and figuring out how we go and trip up that kid with the pin.

I planned a modest gathering, with four guests (two couples) invited over to my very small flat to enjoy a full American feast. I decided to go for goose as turkeys are a bit huge and a bit hard to come by in November in London. In terms of other ingredients, I knew pumpkin was de rigeur and someone had told me about a vegetable dish involving sweet potatoes and marshmallows which sounded pretty revolting to be honest but when in Rome…

I googled “Pumpkin pie” (this was in the days before Google had been sanctified as a verb) and even in those days got about 200 million different offers. Armed with a selection, I went to a shop called Partridges, famous for its astronomic prices and availability of global exotica. Sure enough, they stocked a tin of the lumpen mass of fluorescent orange stodge which apparently started life as a gourd. I proceeded to transform it (ie put it into a pie crust) into a bona fide (if bona fide means foodus artificialis) pumpkin pie.

At about 5pm as I was trying to sneak off work early to get ready, I got a phone call from guest couple A who’d had a family emergency and were having to get the night train to Scotland. They were so sorry to miss the Thanksgiving feast. Slightly down-hearted, I carried on regardless and went home to butter and baste and chop. The goose was in and I was contemplating the marshmallow veg enterprise when the phone rang. Couple B. They’d just set out to come when Jackie had started vomiting her guts up, food poisoning from lunchtime they thought. They were calling from a lay-by and I could hear the sound of fullsome heaving in the background. They were terribly sorry but she had to go home to bed.

So then we were one. The goose gave off so much fat (who knew? It was my first time) that it overflowed in the baking tray and made a fatty swimming pool of the oven which took about two hours to clean.

But it was ok because I had a lovely dinner of a whole pack of marshmallows.

May yours be even more fine! Happy Thanksgiving.

There are such things as parallel universes. We discovered one recently on a barge in Wales, where the winding canals, green banks and grazing cows were simultaneously 100 metres and a million miles from the mini-roundabouts, A roads and Little Chefs in the ‘above canal’ world. We discovered another one last weekend on a fungal foray.

I’d organised the trip as a birthday present for Jason. He is reasonably obsessive about mushrooms, though he is inevitably seen as a mushroom dilettante by his properly obsessive Italian counterparts some of whom will go to any lengths (up to and including death) to snag the perfect porcino.

There’s a way of wandering around a forest that’s called ‘going on a walk’ and there’s another way of wandering around a forest that can only really be described as ‘snuffling like a pig’. The snuffle wander involves a stooping gait, a furrowed brow and a line of vision immune to the leafy beauty of the trees, the chinks of shimmering blue sky and the corruscating twinkles of light twixt the branches. Instead the snuffle walker’s gaze is focused on the browns – the fallen leaves, the muddy roots, the dank undergrowth and, mushroom-god willing, the cryptic outline of a eukaryote.

When one is spotted, the fun really begins. A single pigeon step along the pantone colour chart from one hue to the next heralds the difference between epicurean heaven and potential death by kidney melting. (Our guide dwelt quite a bit on the kidney melting). On our foray, someone found a huge porcino the size of a large melon (probably worth more than my mother’s wedding ring) and someone else found a ‘death cap’ which is literally (this great phrase that whisks me straight back to that childhood lust for danger) DEADLY POISONOUS. They reckon it was a death cap wot did it for Claudius, and he was no girl’s blouse. And the only thing that marks this killer out is a vaguely yellow tinge on the cap and a sort of baggy white sock at the base (which you’ll only even see if you remembered to be a good forager and excise the whole thing). We are talking proper heaven and proper hell, a mere few feet apart in the snug of a root.

I have a new found respect for pigs.

Then we found little Carlo and a radio and suddenly everything was ok.

Little Carlo* is a bona fide stalwart. The sort of person who might saw off his finger but not mention it until he’s made sure he’s put the chain saw safely out of reach of the children. On the (unbeatable) recommendation of Antonio, he came to help us with that first harvest and has been our friend and comrade ever since.

What got us through those tough days out in the grove were two things – coffee and songs. There are two songs which were the particular earworms of that time and if I hear either now I’m instantly transported.

One was Mattafix’s ‘Big city life’ a somewhat  innapropriate sounding song for our nascent rural adventure but never off the playlist and actually in the end quite apt (it’s all about struggling to survive in the city and what’s it all about anyway innit?). The other was the first contemporary Italian pop song we fell in love with. ‘Mi fido di te’ by Jovanotti who is a sort of ageing rapper / popstar (you know, 40 something in a hoodie) who has written some terrific songs. This one was on the radio playlist through the many weeks of that first harvest, and gradually day by day and line by line, with the help of little Carlo, all the words.

This year, little Carlo is leading a team of about a dozen harvest helpers, armed with a tractor, huge nets and all the coffee he can drink. And of course the same battered old radio.

*Little Carlo is so called to differentiate him from normal Carlo who stands approximately 1cm taller.

I’m very excited because I’m about to start a life drawing course. The excitement is strange because I am an absolutely terrible artist. What am I even saying? ‘I am a terrible artist’ suggests I am an artist who isn’t very good. But I’m not even on the starter blocks. I am a non artist, not even on the scale. My school reports (which were generally pretty good) got to the art bit and then said things like ‘Catherine tries hard but has made little progress’  and the head teacher summing-up bit at the end would say something like ‘Well at least there’s something Catherine can’t do.’

In fact there are many things. I can’t draw, I can’t paint, I can’t do perspective, I can’t make things, I can’t sketch, my colouring-in is ropey.

Does that mean signing up for an art class is the most obvious thing in the world or the strangest?! Part of the appeal is certainly in doing something for which there is zero expectation of success. The barrier to triumph is ground level. If I come back from my first class with my first life drawing and Rosie says ‘It’s a person’ rather than ‘It’s a horse’ I will be a winner.

Another part is simply that I would like to learn how to do a recognisable sketch. Jason always says I’m a sucker for a sketch and it’s true. If he ever wants to persuade me of the need to knock down a wall or customise a trouser, he need only sketch out its future look and I will be sold.

Then there’s the hopeful part. The bit  (just like when, as a confused teenager, you went to see the school careers adviser and secretly hoped she would leap from her chair as soon as you walked in and say ‘Stop. Don’t even say a word. I know EXACTLY what it is you should do with your life…’) that hopes I will have somehow, in the learner slopes of middle age, found innate talent.

If you don’t hear from me next week, try the Uffizi.

The day Joni Starr and Bill Bock tied the knot they got a bit more commitment than they were expecting. Little did they know that they were about to become instant Adoptive parents to a not-so-little olive tree in Nudo’s Il Taccolito grove.  As good parents do, they decided to visit their arbor of joy upon taking their honeymoon in Italy. Here is Joni’s account of their visit.

“My husband and I received an adopted olive tree for a wedding gift last June and we were thrilled to learn we could visit it on our honeymoon one year later. We drove to Le Marche to the Il Taccolito agriturismo in San Severino where we met our lovey tree! Alfio led us up the hill to the grove to introduce us to our tree and take some photos with it. He then showed us their farm animals (including cows Margarita and Phillipe!) and introduced us to his mother and father, Rita and Massimo, who were so very proud of their work and welcomed us with open arms. Rita made a fabulous Italian lunch for us and since the family speaks very little English and we speak very little Italian, they had invited some of their son’s friends who speak English over to have lunch with us. Before we left, Rita gave us a gift which was a book about the olives grown in their region. It was such a wonderful experience! Thanks to Rita, Massimo and Alfio for the wonderful hospitality! Thanks, also to Marco and Assunta for arranging our visit.”

- Joni Starr and Bill Bock (Minneapolis, USA).

If you would like to visit your Adoptive olive tree, please contact Assunta at adopt@nudo-italia.com to arrange your day.

I’ve never done a film review – or actually this is going to be more like a film advert – before, but this is a very special film. It’s Italian and it’s called ‘Pranzo di Ferragosto’. The English version is released as ‘A mid-August lunch’ which is a bit like translating Christmas Day as ‘A turkey meal in December’.

Ferragosto, 15^th August, is a very special day in Italy. It is the one day when no-one, but no-one, is at work if they can possibly help it. It is not a good day to fall out of a ladder. August is holiday month in Italy and Ferragosto, being nestled safely in the centre of it, is like holidayissimo, ultra holiday. Countryside villages, towns and cities alike all burst into life with feasts, Nutella festivals, outdoor plays and concerts, dances in the piazza and all manner of merriment and consumption. It is the most wonderful joyous day of the year once you know about it, and the worst possible day to arrive unknowing for your holiday, wondering why everything is closed and there’s nowhere to buy milk for your morning tea.

Anyway, the film. It tells a very simple story of a middle-aged man who lives at home caring for his wonderfully observant, highly demanding elderly mother. Already a very Italian tale. He is called upon at the last minute by a variety of friends and colleagues to add to his coterie of charges; they are leaving town to party / eat / have affairs and want to leave their elderly aunts / mothers in his care. Just for a night you understand. What begins with the potentially terrifying prospect of managing an unplanned pop up old people’s home turns into a life-affirming adventure exploring love, food and the art of celebration. That rare combination of feelgood and profound, the film works because of the brilliantly spontaneous performances of the elderly lady leads – all of whom were new to acting – and the quiet charmed bewilderment of Gianni Di Gregorio who keeps the whole unlikely gaggle, and the whole unlikely film, on track.

Watch it! Better still, watch it on August 15^th while eating a lovingly prepared baked pasta lunch.

Buon Ferragosto!

The idea is very simple: the book is essentially a visual survey of the eating habits of the world. I don’t think it pretends to be particularly scientific, rather it gives you the gist with beautiful simple pictures. Each one is just a photograph of a family, standing in their kitchen (or other eating place) –and laid out in front of them is all the food they eat in a week. The words are kept to a minimum – just where they live, how much that week’s food costs and what their favourite dish is.

It works on so many levels – an insight into what constitutes ‘a family’ around the world, the merest glimpse of that family’s power structure, a glance of interior decor, and of course the fascination of seeing laid bare what other people consume. Half an eviscerated sheep in Mongolia, a whole load of pizza in the US, a whole lot of not very much in Chad.

At the micro level, these photographs are endlessly fascinating too. The wonders of those mysterious packets daubed in delicate graphics, the different colour schemes of different countries – the delicate aqua hues of the Japanese in contrast with the vibrant primaries of China. The vast variation in the sense of ceremony of eating – from the functionality of the German table to the passion of Bhutan.

And then there are those brands, those logos, which leak across continents and social borders, creep into every corner. It reminds me of that famous Andy Warhol quote – that what is great about America is that it’s the place where everyone ‘from the President to the bum on the street’ drinks the same Coca Cola. All the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good.

Discuss.

A short while  and rather fewer soap suds later, we decided to call in the professionals. Searching online, we found a plethora of Italian soap producers and e-mailed all of them (about 25) in faltering Italian. After a week I had received just two replies – one from a mad hippy asking me about my star sign, the other from a lady from Umbria called Simona. It was the start of a wonderfully joyous soapy collaboration. (And no I don’t mean with the hippy).

Ladies and gentlemen, please allow me to introduce the wonderful Simona Fabrizio (whose English is annoyingly good)….

From Simona:

“I thought to share with you  this recipe to introduce myself.  Homemade pasta, especially ravioli is one of my passions. I thought to use  Baccalà for the  filling. Baccalà is  salted cod, which in Italy is  used in many recipes because it has a wonderful flavor and is not  expensive.  I also decided to use  cherry tomatoes  which  dressed  with a good Extra Virgin Olive oil,  are a perfect combination for this dish. So here’s the recipe.”

HOME MADE PASTA

How it  works:

Place the flour on a board . Make a well in the centre and crack the eggs into it. Add olive oil and a pinch of salt. With a fork, first mix the ingredients in the hollow together and start to mix in the flour from the edge.

Gradually incorporate more of the flour until a viscous paste begins to form. Put the fork to one side and, using both hands, heap the remaining flour from the outside over the pasta in the middle. Work the flour in to the paste. If the paste does not absorb all the flour, and if the ingredients cannot be easily worked, add a little water.

Push out the dough with the heels of the hands, then form in into a ball again. Repeat this kneading action until the dough has a firm but slightly elastic consistency and no longer changes shape when you remove your hands.

By machine:

Put the strip of dough through the machine’s smooth rollers several times, narrowing the setting each time, until the desired thickness is achieved.

Start at 6 and finish at 2 for: Ravioli

INGREDIENTS FOR THE RAVIOLI FILLING AND FINAL DISH.

Ingredients (serves 6)
200 grams of cod
500 grams cherry tomatoes
Extra virgin olive oil
1 clove garlic
Salt and pepper
Chopped parsley

-
How it works:
After soaking the Baccalà over night, boil the Baccalà. When cooked, with a fork, mash it with a handful of chopped parsley. Place the Baccala in tea spoon portions onto a sheet of the pasta you all ready prepared. Cover the Baccala with another sheet of pasta and cut into the ravioli shapes. In the oven for 15 minutes grill the tomatoes, half of them cut in half and the rest left whole. Season with plenty of EVO  oil, 1 clove of garlic ,salt and pepper. Cook the ravioli, drain the pasta and serve with the grilled tomatoes. Sprinkle with fresh parsley.

I didn’t get up when the alarm went off, it was a preposterous idea. Instead I dozed and had weird dreams (quite nice). Then I got up, not very early in the end, though just early enough, it turned out, to make mandarin cake for breakfast.

Finding the recipe was not easy. Ironic given that it was a recipe we had actually made up. I knew it was in our book but it turned out we don’t have a single copy of our book in the whole house. Not even the one that sometimes props up the wonky table was there. So I looked on the internet (reluctantly – computers before dawn?) assuming that Jason must have recipe blogged it. But no! I had ingredients, a hot oven, the tools at hand and above all an early morning hunger to produce. I could not let it go. I looked again online and eventually found it, on pages further down on the google search than I’ve ever delved, on an old Nudo shop brochure that someone must have scanned or copied or some other miracle, just for me. (Thank you person or robot that you are).

It was very pleasing to be making cake before getting dressed. Especially as people started to emerge to the unusual smell. First Jason, ‘Cake?!’ he said, surprised and pleased. Next Rosie, ‘Mummy?….have you made cake?’ pleased but slightly indignant. And finally Sorrel, who was more direct. ‘Cake’ she stated, ‘Sorrel’s cake.’

And so it was that we all ate mandarin cake for breakfast.

The first case is the easiest to deal with and I would recommend the following technique: commandeer another child, let’s call that child, child Beta; the ideal candidate will be young enough not to understand the copying game but old enough to understand the fun of physcial violence. When the imitating child, let’s call her Child Alpha, starts imitating you, play along for a bit, then throw in a sentence like ‘Oi, Beta, please will you kick me very hard on the bum?’ Child Alpha will repeat this in a loud crowing voice, Child Beta will kick Child Alpha very hard on the bum, Child Alpha will yelp and retaliate, all hell will ensue and you will have to wade in to stop warfare – but you will  have broken the spell of the now long-forgotten game.

The second case is trickier and to be honest, we would like some advice. We have been alerted (thank you, Nudo supporters out there, we owe you) to several cases of the most astonishingly blatant Nudo rip-offs. The olive tree adoption idea has of course, been multiply copied – but that’s to be expected – and we obviously didn’t invent the concept of adoption itself. But whole swathes of our text copied word for word from our website to another site selling olive oil, or our Nudo olive tree (lovingly created over many hours of painstaking labour by my sister) copied pixel for pixel to someone else’s olive oil bottle label! I mean that’s not on is it?

So this is a plea. Firstly, to your copycats out there, if you’re reading this and scouring for future ideas, please don’t do it! If you want our help, ask us, we will almost certainly give it. But not this way. The second is to you Nudo-ites out there: what is the solution for business copiers equivalent to the one for dealing with children above? Elegant, not pious, simple, not too precious, a bit messy and utterly successful?

Over to y’all.

The first people they have offended is you, loyal Nudo customers.  Why?  Because our special World Cup offer promised free shipping for as long as Italy stayed in the World Cup. We thought we were being generous! We thought that would mean weeks and weeks!  We barely had time to announce it before the team were out, slaughtered on the pitch by a game crew of highly deserving Eastern European first-timers.

The Corriere della Sera, one of Italy’s leading newspapers had the one word headline ‘VERGOGNA!’ (‘SHAME!’) today and there are no punches being pulled in describing the team’s sickeningly poor performance. One of the more succinct descriptions came yesterday from the team’s midfielder Gattuso (who played with the winning team in 2006); ‘Four years ago we were heroes. Today, we are bollocks.’

As La Repubblica put it, ‘It is the end of a generation, the end of an illusion…now the world is laughing at us.’

Tip to anyone holidaying in Italy this year: don’t joke about this.

[PS - we've changed the offer to Free Shipping on gift sets in USA & UK for the duration of the 2010 World Cup - Ed.]

The 2006 world cup was my first insider insight into how Italy play football. As with many other things – lingerie, gelato, embroidered jackets, opera, the Catholic church – it made a different sort of sense when seen through Italian eyes. England’s first game – I can’t even remember who it was against  – made me feel itchy. It was disorderly, chaotic, stoppy-starty, inconsistent, just annoying viewing. Then I watched Italy’s first game and it was like watching a different sport. It really did resemble ballet! There was fluidity in the movement, the team worked together, the ball invisibly joined between adjacent feet, it was smooth, calm feeling, almost like slow motion. It didn’t make me feel itchy at all. It actually made me think I could learn to love football. And it certainly made me love Italy even more.

Then their second game was a bloodbath – that awful match against USA which ended with mutiple sendings off and bleeding heads and I felt that everything that was magical a few days earlier had been betrayed. This was brutality – cheating, faking, diving and barbaric desperate clawing for control. I hated football again.

But I couldn’t quite forget that first game. And in Italy the possibility of being allowed to miss a match was – well it wasn’t possible. And then Italy got through and through. And even though there was never again the splendour, at least there was no more blood.

And then it was the final. Italy against France. A rivalry which conjures in Italians feelings every bit as strong (and in some ways deeper rooted) as England vs Germany. We went early with friends to get a seat in front of the massive outdoor screen erected in the piazza in Mogliano. The screen and chairs (plus motley other furniture brought out from bars and homes) filled every paved inch of this tiny medieval quadrant. The atmosphere was unbelievable, fury at the French palpable in every touch of the ball – and all this fury frothing up into an explosion at the infamous moment when Zidane headbutted Materazzi and was sent off. The bloodlust for his departure would have been more appropriate for a hanging.

Full time. It was 1-1. Extra time. Still 1-1. Penalties. The word that inspires terror in the hearts of the hard. The injustice! The inelegance! The make or break of a reputation. For proper football fans, torture. For me, the best bit. The drama of the penalty shoot out is unrivalled. It is immense. And breathing it with a couple of thousand wired Italians squeezed into a too small outdoor living room was one of the most thrilling moments of pure pleasure I’ve ever shared.

The moment of victory was, for a micro-second, a disappointment. The life-affirming tension was over. But then the celebrations began. From nowhere, cars and little 3-wheeled apes and scooters and people were everywhere, saturated in red white and green, tearing around, making as much noise and mess and movement as was possible. The partying went on all night.

My sister is a reasonably obsessive supporter of niche passions – be it the Brighton procession of outlandish facial hair or the annual air guitar championship. She has a love of things that other people go to a lot of trouble to love. Asparagus love was a new one on her.

We were all in a bit of a spin and decided to prepare for the big day by, well, by eating lots of asparagus. Is there any food which passes so extraordinarily quickly through the nephrons of the kidney? One has barely swallowed…

The big day dawned and we headed down to the village, expecting to see people dressed as giant asparaguses and legion floats boasting different asparagus-based delectables. And of course bunches and bunches of that heavenly stem-thin asparagus that those in the know gather from secret spots in the wild.

There was none of this. What there was, was a strange exhibition of photos of plants as well as the plants themselves – none of them asparagus – which my sister described as an ‘earnest exhibition of weeds’. There was also a tractor, with trailer attached, carrying happy children in unambitious circles around the car park.

This remains one of the more mysterious days of our time in Italy. Other festivals – celebrating everything from artichokes to Nutella – have over-delivered. The strange lack of appearance of a single stem of asparagus at the annual asparagus festival is a puzzle up there, for us, and on a level with the continued popularity of Berlusconi. Perhaps the real asparagus devotees, having cunningly diverted all the local asparagus dilettantes, were out gathering those tasty stems from a local hill.

Next morning, same scenario, nothing doing.

Third morning, a glimpse of sun! An excited call! ‘Arriviamo’ says Antonio. ‘We’re coming.’

An hour later, four cars carrying an array of overalled men skid and bump their way down our terrible driveway. Ardelio arrives with his tractor. Then Enzo with the compressor and a tangle of wires attached to supersonic (well ok air-powered) seccateurs. The eleven men, whose even average age must be post-pensionable, head down into the grove with Jason, barbers on a mission to cut.

Louisa arrives a while later with half a coop’s worth of dismembered chickens. To satiate the appetites of all these workers , we have recruited her help and boy we are glad we have. Born and raised in Le Marche, she instinctively knows what and how much food will be required and she is unphased by the thought of producing it all to a strict timetable. Watching her fling pans and chicken thighs and linguini and spinach around is as thrilling as (and somewhat reminiscent of) the first time I saw the circus group Archaos juggling turned-on chainsaws.

At 12 on the dot, eleven hungry mouths, loosely attached to eleven tired bodies, appear. By 1 on the dot, they are all fed, watered, wined, varnellied, coffeed and ready for the afternoon session.

I think that a day such as this is what people dream  of when they dream of life in the Italian countryside and the honest rewarding labour of tending an olive grove. And they are right to dream. It is a perfect day.

For all our adoptive tree parents, this time of year is one of great anticipation, as the due date for the precious new arrival approaches. Any day now, a stork will arrive carrying your bespoke bonnie bundle – a package of divine extra virgin olive oil from your very own Italian olive tree.

There are a few things you should know about the new addition to your family. Just as with grapes, there are hundreds of varieties of olives, each producing a different tasting oil. In addition, the olive oil from a leccino olive grove in Umbria will taste quite different from leccino oil from a Le Marche grove. Even adjacent groves can produce very different tasting oils, depending on the terrain, the care of the trees and how quickly after picking the olives are pressed. The differences are so great, in fact, that even within our Nudo family of producers, there is more than a generous drizzle of competitiveness. Naturally, every grove owner believes their olive oil is the best. But who is right? Along with your olive oil you will find a tasting card, which you can send back to us, or fill in the online tasting card at http://bit.ly/96KRa0 and we will announce which grove wins the popular vote.

To help get you going, we’ve compiled some tasting notes of our own.

Aleandri

This year the oil taste profile was affected by the dry summer. The oil is medium fruity, with a herbaceous leaning and the smell of almonds and artichoke. Overall it’s very well balanced with a leaning towards the sweet end of the scale. The taste profile diagram is shown above. Around the edges, clockwise from the top are the different internationally recognised type of flavours you find in olive oils – fruity, green, bitter, peppery, sweet, almonds and artichoke

Ardelio

This oil has a delicate golden yellow colour. It has a light flavouring and sometimes a peppery after-kick, which is indicative of a high concentration of polyphenolic antioxidants and freshness. It has an acidity level of less than 0.5% (it needs to be under 0.8% to be classed as extra virgin).

Dell’Orso

This is a very high quality oil (though not quite as good as the exceptional 2008 pressing) from an organic grove. All the groves in the region were affected by ‘mosca’, an olive fly this year; what this means, is that the olives have to be picked as early as possible which has the effect of producing an oil that is slightly more peppery. This year, the oil is green with a golden hue. The smell is fruity with a hint of cut grass and the flavour is fruity with a slight bitterness and a spicy tip. The acidity is 0.5 (it needs to be under 0.8% to be classed as extra virgin) and it hits 6.8 on the peroxide scale.

Fiorano

This year the oil is light to medium on the fruity scale. Although the colour isn’t a reflection of quality the oil this year is yellow with a hint of green. The ‘nose’ is strong with hints of almonds, leaves and artichokes. The acidity 0.16 (it needs to be under 0.8% to be classed as extra virgin, so this is really low). Overall the quality is high and this years oil is sweeter and less peppery than from the previous harvest.

Fonte Carella

The colour of the oil is straw-like with a tendency towards green. The aroma is intense and fruity with hints of freshly cut grass. The taste is peppery and spicy due to the early harvesting of the olives by hand (the longer you leave the olive on the tree the milder the oil is, but the higher the oil content is – so it a balance of quality versus quantity and we go for quality). It is one of the best years for oil from Fonte Carella because the trees didn’t produce great quantities, and so a tonne of quality was pumped into each and every fruit.

Il Professore

Again, a great year, though not as great as last years. The acidity is pretty low 0.34  (it needs to be under 0.8% to be classed as extra virgin) and the peroxide level is 7, which means that the olives were in a good condition when they were pressed. It is a medium fruity oil with a green nature and almond flavour. The oil is overall sweet, with a peppery note and a medium intensity of bitterness. There is also an aftertaste of almonds. It has a beautiful yellow colour. The polyphenol level is around 500 (these are the cardioprotective compounds in the oil, so the more the better).

Il Taccolito

As Rita says, this delicate oil should be treated gently, like you should treat a women. It is well balance, medium fruity, with a very low acidity (i.e. very high quality) of 0.02% (it needs to be under 0.8% to be classed as extra virgin). It has a grassy nose (i.e. smell) with hints of grass and tomatoes. And it has a almond flavour with slight peppery aftertaste. At pressing the oil was rather green, but we have noticed it is becoming more yellow.

La Morla

This oil is very well balanced. Its colour is yellow with a green hue. Its nose is medium fruity with hints of almonds and artichokes, whilst its taste is again well balanced with a hint of bitterness and a medium intensity of pepperyness. All topped off with an aftertaste of almonds. Yum. It’s polyphenol count hits the highs at 445 (these are the cardioprotective compounds in the oil, so the more the better).

Lina

This is a light subtle oil with a fresh fragrance of artichoke, tomatoes and green apple. There is a peppery after-kick which you should watch out for, which is a sign of the healthy antioxidants in the oil. The acidity level is less than 0.3% and the colour is a lovely golden yellow.

Rosalio

The oil has a beautiful golden green glow. The smell of this oil is evocative of freshly cut grass and a hint of artichoke. In taste oil is well balanced but milder and more delicate than in previous years. It has a buttery textures followed by a herbaceous, cut-grass flavour. This oil is at it’s prime now, so drizzle with impunity.

DO you want to adopt your own olive tree in Italy? Click here to become an adoptive parent today.

There was one person, though, whose eyes positively lit up at the challenge: Ardelio (who has since become much more involved with Nudo, and whose groves now form a part of the Nudo collective). He drove his tractor up and down and in and out of the trees and up and down the hills with the gay abandon of a three year old let loose on his trike. We could only stand and gawp, delighted that we had found our man.

And then we found our woman. Lina, Ardelio’s wife, not only drives the family tractors with a force and zeal that make Ardelio seem restrained, but she produces the most incredible mouth-watering lunches of salami (home made, with meat from the family pigs), cheese (ditto, but from the sheep’s milk) and bread (flour milled from their wheatfields). She smiles calmly, modestly, never breaks into a sweat and even in overalls and covered in dirt, is all woman. The simple fact that Lina exists gives one cause for optimism about the future of humanity.

Lina and Ardelio we salute you!

This week, the sun coyly coughed and let us know it was standing behind the door in its dressing gown. Just checking things out, the lie of the land. I was instantly fooled. Crocuses out, tights off! Let’s go! And now let’s get back inside and put that thermal vest on.

Best approach this time of year is to get planning your summer holidays. We’re feeling the allure of a barge or possibly a tent. Somewhere that your brain tells you is wet and grey 97% of the year but which your heart still believes will produce unremitting sunshine for the two weeks you’re there. The beauty of the imagination. If you don’t share a desire to be in a queue at a lock in the rain in Wales, then why not give Le Marche a try. We have lots of great recommendations for places to stay and the chances of warmth are, well, we can’t make promises, but if it’s not warmer than Llangollen I’ll eat my galoshes.

We love Dean & Lesley of Caserma Carina and Bob & Ian of Casal dei Fichi – both offering a luxurious, comfortable stay close to the Nudo olive grove in Le Marche.

Earl’s Court exhibition centre is one of those places I must have walked past or driven past or gone past in the bus a hundred times. Not once did it cross my mind that I would ever go in, let alone wearing a badge saying ‘Exhibitor’.

Like most new things, there was a whole new language to master. Even the simplest thing (such as, embarrassingly, the difference between a trade show and a consumer show), was an eye-opener. But the real revelation was seeing the huge industry which exists around these shows.

Here’s the basics of how it works: you pay a (usually exorbitant) fixed sum of money to rent a tiny square of to-be-carpeted space on the floor of a giant hall. For first timers, this usually means the minimum rentable area, which is 2 metres by 2 metres – the definition of a space just too small to swing a cat. First timers assume that said exorbitant sum covers everything you will need in this tiny handkerchief of space, but how wrong they (we) are. The sum does not include, say, a table to put your things on, a light to show people your things, a fridge to keep your things cool or a sink to wash them up. It does not even include a chair, a shelf or a leaning post for when you’re too tired to stand. By the time you’ve got all that little lot, you need to sell your personal lifetime best in order even to break even at the show.

Luckily it’s all worth it because you get to meet your customers face to face and remember what all this is about.

So please do come and visit our stand F32 at the La Dolce Vita Event at the Business Design Centre in Islington, London. It’s on all this weekend 11-14 March 2010.

The following is an extract from our book ‘The Dolce Vita Diaries’

‘But when Jason tried the first sticker it didn’t quite fit. Not quite fitting is a bad thing as it means the edge either creeps up over the rim of the tin or, worse, that it doesn’t quite cover all the metal the other end. All the stickers seemed to be just a tiny bit too big. If you were lucky and happened to find the middle way, you could get an acceptable fit, but it was mere chance really. At 10.30pm on the eve of our van departure, though, I was prepared to go with it. “We’ll send the ugly ones to people with double-barrelled surnames,” I said, only half joking.

“I can’t bear it” said Jason. And he went into the office to get what I knew was going to be the guillotine. “If I cut down each one and you stick, we’ll be able to get them just right and I think we can still do them in time.”

“Oh my god, are you serious?”  I said. Cutting them would mean a painstaking shaving off of maybe three millimetres on each side of the sticker at slightly tapering angles.

I knew that protest was useless.

And so we spent the whole night, well until 4am, deliriously slicing and sticking the last 500 stickers on to the tins and leaving them in neat piles to be packed up the next day. When we closed our eyes, we had repeating green olives etched on the inside of our eyelids.”

Enjoy your spring packages!

“The Dolce Vita Diaries: Stories and recipes from an Italian olive grove” is now available from Amazon.co.uk.  The paperback version can be pre-ordered for April 2010.

The bigger the bow the greater the proof that it really is the thought that counts.

A very lovely friend used to do this every year. She would take (or have someone take) a great photograph which she would turn into a great card which she’d mail out to friends all over the world. They were always beautifully done which meant that the recipients invariably kept them on display for ages – so sometimes you’d go to someone else’s house and see one just like the one that you had received. Far from minding that the card was replicated, this would instantly induce a moment of exquisite and profound bonding.

So get to it. It’ll be even better now. At a time when we all type instead of write and have digital prints by the shedload, how much more magical to receive a real physical card in the post on a day when only the dead-hearted can completely deny a glimmer of hope of a mysterious love surprise.

I have never been a gym goer (except for a few years in LA, it’s actually a civil offence there not to and I didn’t fancy another run-in with the LAPD) and much prefer exercise that is part of rather than an addition to normal life. Cycling to work, harvesting olives, mowing the lawn – these are all good examples of exercise. Spin classes, jogging on the spot these are not.

And I have a theory about winter exercise. With winter exercise, a little goes a lot further. Just think how much extra effort your body is making just to keep a normal temperature when the world outside is freezing its ass off; you’re practically exercising by just getting out of bed. Shivering – that’s high velocity muscle pumping. Chattering teeth? A full workout for craniofacial ligaments. Those old people noises that arrive unbidden when you stand up? Meditation with vocal enhancement.

So go for a nice brisk bracing walk, knowing that you’re practically running a half marathon of effort, enjoy a nice cup of tea with a fully earned piece of cake at the end of it, and leave your resolutions where they should have stayed in the first place, in the bin with the party popper carcasses.

My sister’s taste sensations were much more sophisticated and befitting of the fully modern lady she is. They involved no cheese nor pineapple, but fresh anchovies, pickled baby chillis and green olives, all clinging to their 70s heritage through the DNA of the cocktail stick. Delicious (not the stick).

At this time of year, taste sensations – small surprises for the mouth that almost make you say ‘oh’ – are great for keeping all that winter warming cooking alive and bristling. I don’t mean you have to ram fresh anchovies into your shepherds pie – the very thought – but little moments of extreme pleasure can really help puncture the winter gloom. This is the time to look to jars of baby gherkins, olives, capers, anchovies, strong parmesan, smoked bacon, pickled onions, sun dried tomatoes, dried apricots and dried fruit of all kinds. Intense flavours, concentrated hits. It’s all going to be ok.

In fact this is the perfect time of year to while away a few hours helping making some astronomical facts. There’s this wonderful site called Galaxyzoo http://www.galaxyzoo.org/ where you can sit and categorise galaxies. The data is all pooled into a giant information resource about the stars all around us. So the project is no less than a crowd sourced classification of the universe, wee humans tapping away, sorting millions of galaxies squillions of lightyears away into different boxes. How fabulous is that? It’s the perfect winter project.

Not only that, but the worst is over. You see? You’d forgotten already.

The feast was stupendous, involving no less than 8 different spins on the langoustine (not great for Jason the vegetarian though the spectacle was at least a feast for the eyes). After the eating was done (well it was never really done, as courses just pushing their way through, but after the main assault) Rosie and Louis had both passed out in pushchairs and Frazer unilaterally decided it was time to kick the dance floor into life. As if by magic, Billie Jean beat into action and before anyone had the chance to object, Frazer was engaged in a full-on crotch-grabbing routine to the mystification of the assembled Italian mammas.

Shortly afterwards people headed off outside to get a breath of fresh air and calm themselves by handing homemade fireworks to the under 5s. And at about 5 in the morning everyone disbanded to drive home sozzled and happy.

Being introduced to Christmas Day Italian style has made me realise another plus of midnight mass attendance. It really helps you work up a hunger man enough for the task of surviving Italian Christmas feasting. The trick is to not stagger home and indulge in a midnight feast; do that and you’re doomed. You need to keep the hunger, and you need to keep it right through Christmas day morning without succumbing to temptation. ‘Feel the burn’ as Jane Fonda used to say, in exercise instruction tapes so old school now that they were actually only released in cassette form.

Those of you who are thinking you’ve experienced any challenge of quantity that Christmas fayre has to offer, I give you this single thought. In Italy, it is traditional to make a huge homemade baked pasta dish for the Christmas meal – a richly layered lasagne, a deeply stuffed cannelloni. This rich, filling pasta dish is, literally, your STARTER. With your belly filled with ladlefuls of rich gooey pasta and vats of sauce, you are ready to move on to Christmas dinner proper.

Food for thought eh? Sing heartily, sing loud.

Anyway, it’s up and it really is a thing of beauty. That warm Christmassy feeling in electrical form. The only niggle is that the F is not properly committed to the cause and usually remains un-illuminated. So its ‘Buone este’ round our place. Este means east in Italian. Could we be looking at an act of international sabotage by the apparently charming staff at the Chinese pound shop?

Buone este one and all.

Those message cards nowadays teleport me to Nudo’s very first Christmas. The company had only been going for a few months and we had just, rather ineffectively, done our first olive harvest. I think the total number of trees we’d adopted stood at around 14 and we knew the names, and birthdays, of all the foster parents. Friends and family are the saviours of early hopes in a new business. Anyway we were approaching Christmas and somehow hoped that ‘real’ customers might somehow, magically start emerging in force. But how would anyone find us? How would anyone in the ‘real world’ even know we existed? Is this something Father Christmas asks himself?

The answer, at least as we saw it, was Christmas gift guides- you know those lists in newspapers (so old school!) that give you great ideas for last minute presents? We were prepared to do anything, including as it turned out, selling our children, to get in one. I exaggerate of course. But I do remember in our desperation, sending a photograph of one year old Rosie with a sorry expression and the words ‘What kind of Christmas?’ with the press release that we sent to friends to scatter to anyone they knew who’d ever even had a paper round.

Emotional blackmail is a very effective tool (a fact soon to be confirmed, were confirmation needed, by spending Christmas in the company of Italian mammas). By the miracle of modern communication, that press release made it into the hands of someone who knew someone who knew someone who was compiling no less an opus than the Independent’s guide to ‘Great Christmas presents for men’ in the Independent. Those Christmas gift guides really do make a difference. People knew we existed. People adopted our olive trees. And Rosie had a lovely first Nudo Christmas.

In Italy, my favourite is Tutti Santi, All Saints day. It’s basically the hoover up day for all the second division saints who don’t get a proper day of their own. It’s the potluck saints dinner of holidays. There isn’t a particular celebration (I mean obviously if you are spire or mass inclined, you won’t be disappointed) but what’s nice for us is that this day always manages to take us completely by surprise, often even on the very morning of it, cropping up as it does at some random moment in godless November. It’s a roll of the dice day of holiday thrown in without warning. That can be a bad thing – and at first all that its arrival really heralded for us was not having any milk for the day – but now we have embraced it as a sort of ‘surprise surprise’ of holidays. Imagine it – you wake up in the morning thinking it’s just another day of work and wey-hey, everyone’s down in Approdo (our local cafe) having languid cappuccino breakfasts! No work with no warning. Like being off sick but you feel great. Marvellous.

Tip to anyone with ambitions for public office: chuck in a surprise day off. Only let people know on the day. Ensure yourself an agenda-less, live-in-the-moment-full day of celebration. Even name it after yourself. If you can’t get in on that card, you might as well give up now.

Cut to 2009. We have a land rover. We have expert olive harvesters. We have a machine with automated wiggly fingers. A team. No travel cots. No favours from sisters. And Corrado doesn’t laugh at us any more, sometimes he even, almost admits to being quite impressed with our output.

And it’s funny getting better at things. In one way, it is surely one of life’s great satisfactions to improve, to realise that one can learn and become more effective and more efficient. But on the other it is hard not to hold out a bit of nostalgia for those innocent, inefficient days that are the nursery slopes of any new activity. So when Jason phoned last week to say that the Landrover was stuck down in the grove, unable to get up the slippery mud-slide, and he and team were hoiking the crates up one by one, I couldn’t help feeling a little bit fond, a little bit proud even. It’s good to keep a hand in with your past.

I don’t think it’s that they’re greedy, or that I am really Jack Sprat-mean, I just think we see these things in a different way. It’s as if (and some physiologist somewhere has probably looked into this) they feel that to make an impression on the body, one needs to provide above a certain quite high base level; 20 beans and you might as well not bother. Five a day? More like five kilos a day. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten more than one orange in a sitting. I’ve seen Italians eat five! Because today is orange day. So let’s make it count.

Apply this same approach to gelato or chocolate and you’ll have found just one of the many reasons Italy is such a lovely place to go on holiday.

The daily shop, and even more so, the market shop, is the answer. It works on a much more human scale in every way. You can carry everything without breaking your arms. You know what you feel like because you are dealing with the present tense not some speculative future. You can fit it in as a little break between other jobs. You can see what is fresh and there.  You know how much you need because you know how many you’re catering for and how hungry you are. And you can spy on other people’s purchases to get ideas.

In a tiny village like Loro Piceno the spying element is not to be underestimated. Everyone shops in the same place (there’s only one food shop in the centre), so everyone can see exactly what everyone else is buying. There is undoubtedly a sense of cooking competitiveness. If there’s a particularly choice cut at the meat counter, there will be a rabble elbowing each other out of the way to get it. There’ll be a run on artichokes if an influential local figure declares them to be fine. There will be disdain for anyone with too much prepackaged food in their basket. Market day on a Monday would make a fascinating study in group psychology, as people queue for ages to get zucchini from stall A, even though there is no queue at all for the seemingly identical offerings at stall B.

And now the Brits are slowly coming around to the ‘small and often’ philosophy of shopping. It’s not that they’re turning from the supermarkets – far from it – but they are using them with a bit more sense of the market (with its associations of fresh produce, recently plucked from a supplier and soon to be sent towards stomach) and a bit less sense of super (the idea that everything has to be scaled up). And hooray for that.

It might be time to shatter a few illusions. Perhaps you imagined, as I did until a few years ago, that an olive harvest went hand in hand with sunshine, artisanal wicker baskets and long languid lunches. Wrong on all counts. Our first harvest in Loro Piceno several years ago, we enjoyed consistently grey skies, freezing weather and one day it actually snowed. Not even that whispy pretty snow-on-a-sunny-day kind, the grey, drizzly stuttering kind that makes you feel vaguely melancholy. Of course we had to stop harvesting. When it comes to harvesting attire, I’d always pictured people in vests and shorts – insane! Not just because of the cold (that first year, we wore most clothes we owned, elegantly layered, as if we’d been caught in a suitcase-contents blizzard) but also for protection; if you are up in the innards of a Piantone di Mogliano tree, foraging away with your harvesting comb, any bare skin is going to going to come away mucho scathed.

Then the basket thing? Well that image comes from ‘olive oil as hobby’ land. If you have a handful of trees to harvest to make oil solely for home use, then the basket might well come in to play. You can tootle out after lunch, pick a couple of basketfuls and throw them into the communal press for your share of oil. And good luck to you. For us, things are scaled up and deromanticised quite a bit. Huge nets ten metres square and a set of massive tent pegs to keep the bottom end up and the olives from tumbling down the hill, large plastic crates which, when full, weigh around 20kg and a team of earnest workers. It’s a different kind of fun.

The long languid lunch. Hmm. Bear in mind that harvest season generally happens close to the shortest day of the year. Every hour of daylight is a precious thing and the notion that you might waste any more than the very bare minimum on something as decadent as eating is quite wide off the mark. Lunch is necessary (harvesting is proper physical work) but also necessarily speedy – if you’re lucky it’s a quick plate of pasta hurriedly put together by one of the team, if you’re less so it’s a ciabatta sandwich on the run.

So with sentiment cast aside, we can now turn to the real romance of the harvest. Because despite the fact that you don’t look a pretty sight and your belly might ache, the real romance lies in the olives themselves. The romance lies in the miracle that converts these oleaginous orbs into one of the most wonderful products humans have ever chanced upon. And when at the end of a long day’s harvest, you see yours, first a drip then a steady flow, coming out of the olive press, baskets and sunshine and any other fancies, really do pale into insignificance.

Buona raccolta!

The good news is that this year there are olives aplenty. The only scary story was from Rita, of the Il Taccolito grove, who told me that she would have lost her crop of Piantone di Mogliano if it hadn’t rained in the last week of August – a long dry summer had stressed the trees so much. Anyway, it rained and the harvest survived.

Once I’ve eyeballed the trees we usually get onto the topic of when to harvest, which usually starts around the end of October in Marche. Knowing precisely when to start picking is a bit of an art.  As time passes the quantity of oil within in fruit goes up, but at a certain point the quality of the oil starts to drop. So to get an oil that is top quality, and abundant, you need to catch the olive at just the right time. Plus there are a ton of other things to consider. For example the olive groves near the coast, like Fiorano and Dell’Orso, will be ready to harvest sooner than those nearer the cooler mountains, such as Il Professore. In our grove, Rosalio, the trees at the bottom of the grove will be ready to harvest a good 5 days before those at the top.

The next time I’ll do the whistle-stop tour will be in January when I go to pick up the containers, this time full of beautiful, extra-virgin olive oil.

Friends who come to stay with us in Italy often wonder, after a week of sensational and gluttonous eating, how all Italians aren’t hideously overweight. We did too until we realised there is a knack to eating like a local. By way of intro, here’s what we’ve learned about the famous Italian three hour lunch…

The first important thing is not to eat breakfast. Most Italians don’t anyway, unless you count a couple of strong espressos and a stale nutella-ed wafer. If you have been up since the crack of dawn and eaten nothing by the time it gets to 12.30, you are ravenous.

This explains the antipasti – usually a simple and – crucially – immediate, plate of local speciality meats and cheeses. It is something delicious but not over-calorific to quell the panic of a stomach which hasn’t been fed since what feels like Roman times – though more accurately is the night before. With crisis averted, it’s then time to move on to the ‘primo’ (ie what foreigners refer to as the ‘pasta course’). This is your carb course. It is the Yorkshire pudding of Italy, whose job it is to put some fullness in the belly. In content terms it could mean pasta, risotto, orzo or even a thick pulse soup. The key thing to bear in mind here is sharing. Only foreigners will go into a restaurant and order a primo each – and each one different (imagine the havoc in the kitchen, each separate pasta pot, each separate sauce pot – expect raised eyebrows from your waiter). Italians, by contrast, will generally agree on a single choice for the whole table and then order, for example, ‘cinque in otto’ – 5 portions to share between eight people.

With the primo finished, there is rarely ‘hunger’ in any true sense, but the body still has a desire for other types of food – protein and fibre in particular. Here’s where your ‘secondo’ comes in – a few simple lamb chops, grilled over open flames, or a piece of chicken in a simple olive and tomato sauce. The simple flavours are delivered by the meat rather than created by the additions of the chef. Obviously to follow and to complete the nutritional family, something vegetable-ish is called for. Again this is generally very simple, a plate of braised chicory or some simply roasted herby potatoes.

All of this is being washed down with water which (as in America but still irritatingly often not in England), is brought as a matter of course. And naturally a small jug of local cheap wine (the cost is usually about equal to the cost of the water; if it’s not, you’re probably getting tourist rates).

The stomach has been filled and rounded. But there is still just a corner for a touch of something sweet, a piece of fruit or a small dessert. And with that, you’re done, balanced and not bloated and pretty textbook in terms of a beautifully balanced diet.

All that remains is the tiniest espresso (never, ever a cappuccino – of all the sins we foreigners commit in the eyes of Italians, this is the most incomprehensible, insulting even). The espresso cuts through all this food and wine with just enough of a jolt to propel you back into what is left of the day.

Buon appetito.

Luisa wasn’t sure what to do about the bees so she called us. We weren’t sure what to do about the bees so we called Guida. Guida is always sure about what to do so she called her friend the bee keeper. Within a day, the bee man had been and bee-ed. Sadly we weren’t there to see it (who doesn’t love all that spaceman bee-keeping regalia). But happily we did see two beautiful things when we arrived at the house a few days later. The first was the amazing site of the now empty hive and stickier-than-superglue honeycomb trails which decorated our bathroom window. The second was our very own honey left on the porch for us in one the friendly bee keeper’s miele jars. Now that’s what I call homemade.

Every now and then we come across a new olive oil evangelist with enough know-how to join the Nudo family and adoption scheme. Caterina Costantini is one of those people who have an infective enthusiasm for what they’re doing. A few years ago Caterina married her lawyer husband, and so now has the backing to follow her obsession and make organic olive oil. Not only that but she has her husband’s beautiful family farm to play with. So for the last few years Caterina together with her fellow olive obsessive, father-in-law Claudio, they’ve been busily experimenting with growng different olive varieties (known as cultivars) to blend them for the perfect flavour. These experiments aren’t for the impatient: each one is up to 10 years in the making.

In the meantime they are winning accolades with their monovarietal oils, which have the oil from just one olive cultivar. So should they want to rest on a teensy bit of their laurels, their Leccino oil has been quietly snaffling every olive oil prize up for grabs. Caterina’s grove is called La Morla. She is also making a balsamic vinegar from the family’s grapes, but that won’t be ready for a mere 8 years.

You can now Adopt an olive tree in Caterina’s La Morla grove by clicking here.

Jason tells me the clear water isn’t necessarily a good sign. (He has a way of puncturing romantic notions about the sea.) Apparently the Mediterranean is actually one of the most nutrient-poor seas in the world – and the consequent lack of life further up the food chain is the main reason for the clarity of the water. Personally I don’t get it – there seemed some perfectly delicious looking seaweed around in reasonable abundance, so I don’t know why the grill or whatever those bitty fish things are called are so choosy.

Sardegnans, we were told by Guido and Claudia, have a history of being terrified of the sea. The Sardegnan people, in contrast to most islanders, are typically shepherds rather than fishermen – and the island famously has more sheep than people. Everywhere you go inland, you hear the pastoral tinkling of a passing goat or sheep and some of the finest food finds like their potato, mint and pecorino filled pasta called culurgiones have nothing to do with seafood. Most people still live in towns perched on hilltops inland and the courage to set up shop on the coast is a very recent phenomenon, inspired mainly by the need to service tourists.

We were lucky enough to be there with friends who have a sailing boat, so we had some gorgeous trips up and down the coast exploring hard to reach beaches and coves. Four children under the age of five in a space as confined as a prison cell meant the joy when we could anchor down and swim out was unbridled on all our parts.

Sardegna is one of the very most fragrant places I’ve ever been. Everywhere are amazing smells – of juniper, rosemary, mint and the local herb called ‘mirto’ (which I suppose is myrtle) growing in huge wild bushes. In great Italian (and maybe world) tradition, mirto is most used culinarily to make the delicious post prandial headache-inducer of the same name. It’s evilly good.

If you are thinking of going there, I’d recommend the less-trammelled parts on the South and east of the island rather than the Prada-store filled North (where Berlusconi and cronies hang out). But of course it depends what you’re looking for. Luckily, you can get mirto wherever you go. So that’s alright.

He advised calling out someone from Enel, the electricity people. We did. Someone came. He wasn’t so young, which was good. He looked at the same boxes and his eyebrows went squiffy but it was before lunch so not the grappa. He said ‘Beh’, which means ‘Well …’ He said ‘Beh’ again. Which still meant ‘Well …’ but slightly more emphatically. I gave him a look and a bit of noise which started life as ‘dunque’ (which means ‘so …’) but then got embarrassed – too big a word for too small a thing, so it ended up more as a ‘duh’ coupled with a puzzled expression. The international language of communication told him that I wanted answers. But instead of answers, he started reciting a poem! The village was old. The line was long. The hill was steep. The hill went down. The hill came up. We were at the end of it. The electricity leached out along the way. Oh hang on, not a poem. This was our life. There was nothing he could do. They themselves wanted to upgrade the line because every winter it breaks (oh great) but they can’t because lots of the people whose land the lines go through won’t let them in. Really? At the very least a novel excuse. Was there nothing else we could do? ‘Get a generator,’ he said.

This, it seemed, was to be our electricity fate.”

You can get your copy of The Dolce Vita Diaries from Amazon.  Or find out more about Nudo here.

So anyway, there is this fact that Italians make the best coffee. On average, that is. If you were to take all the coffee-making Italians and all the coffee-makers of all the other countries in the world, add them all up and divide by their number – the Italians would surely win. I’m sure this experiment has been done. But to reach an average, or a ‘mean’ value if we are being pedantic which we clearly are – there will be several people who really excel, who reach beyond the average ‘quality’ number. And there will be others who fall somewhere behind. Sometimes very far behind.

On holiday in Sardegna (lovely, beautiful place, delicious food, crystal sea, charming company, thanks for asking) we met one of those very far behind coffee-makers. We have photographic evidence of their crimes. I am not going to name names but suffice, I hope, to say, that a cappuccino does not have a smiley face daubed on it in red and brown chocolate sauce. That, my friend, is not a cappuccino, it is an affront to all that is Italian. So publish and shame, that’s our simple aim.

This whole cappuccino business is sensitive because the time of day when one is most in need of correct coffee satiation is the morning, a sensitive time for most of us. When we lived in Rome, we spent days researching the best possible cappuccino amongst the dozen or so bars and cafes within a 100metre radius of our flat. There was a clear winner, a cafe on the corner we dubbed ‘The Brothers’ because all of the three or four baristas who worked there had the same nose. We became loyal supporters, going there every day for our perfect cappuccino, perfectly foamed with bubbles so tiny the smoothness competed with a bambino’s derriere, perfectly roasted coffee, perfectly strong, nothing added. That cappuccino made every day that bit better.

Then one day a dreadful thing happened. I went in alone, we’d been away so hadn’t been in for a while. By way of celebrating my return, brother number 2 made a ‘special’ cappuccino. It had a cobweb lattice crafted on top, of caramel and chocolate interlaced sauces. I could have cried. It was worse than the day my brother ripped up my Leif Garrett poster. In my shock and horror all could say was ‘Wow…. grazie mille’ or something of that ilk. The cappuccino was ruined, all its delicacy decimated by this vulgar sickly snail trail. Brother 2 looked at me, all eager and pleased and I wanted to be Italian and upfront and honest and tell-it-like-it-is. What I said was ‘Mmm delizioso’ and as it came out of my mouth it sounded horribly convincing.

I tried again the next day hoping it was an aberration. But brother 3 gave brother 2 a knowing nod that said as clearly as if he’d graffiti-ed it on the Colosseum ‘Remember what our nice lady friend enjoyed so much yesterday.’ The same perfect cappuccino was presented, again devastated by vile gelatinous confection. I smiled, drank it, said ‘Ciao’ to the brothers with a sad heart and knew that I could never go there again.

So what the heck is this vino cotto that makes it worth such a party? I mean even Martin Luther King only gets one day. What can be three times as good as he? The answer is a strange kind of medieval homebrew which tastes somewhere between fine sherry, fine port and paint stripper depending on who you are talking to. It is made by taking freshly crushed grapes and boiling the juice down over a period of several days, very very carefully, then ageing it for years (or longer if you forget, which apparently quite often happens, the task often falling to the more ancient members of the family) and eventually daring to drink it.

Jason and I have come round on it. And like anything of course it depends on the quality; there is undoubtedly the paintstripper end of the spectrum. But at the good end there is some pretty fine rustic stuff. It is sweet and heady and tastes pleasingly, er, can I say continental? It is just not a drink that would be made in Britain. And it is the local speciality of Loro Piceno, dating back you know the usual centuries. Which is enough reason to celebrate.

The Loro Piceno Vino Cotto festival happens in August every year, around the time of Ferragosto, one of Italy’s most important national holidays, on 15th August. There are local vendors selling artisanal goods from socks to honey and unlikely bands playing on the unfeasibly large stage set up in the village centre. One year we saw cheerleaders from Idaho, another a procession of brass brands from I think it was Ukraine. It is a wonder well worth beholding. And of course secreted down small alleys, and in the newly enshrined ‘vino cotto’ museum, are old timers and young bucks comparing stories and secrets about how to turn out the best cooked wine Loro Piceno has ever known.

The wedding was a truly delicious event and, as ever with Italian social occasions, held some lessons for us Brits.

The guests all gathered in the evening around the beautiful church standing tall in the piazza of San Elpidio al Mare. The group was fantastically diverse in dress choice alone – from Miami Vice white suits to the latest designer confections, from edgily modern to charmingly old-fashioned, from spent a week getting ready to just popped out. Walter was amongst the waiting guests, excitedly chattering to all and sundry. Everything was literally and metaphorically out in the open. There was no hiding away the precious couple ready for a big Hollywood reveal: when Desiree arrived (late! She always is!) and stepped out of the car, everyone cheered and chatted at a greater pace. She and the rest of the guests all walked in to the church together. Lovely. Whenever I have spoken to girlfriends who have been through the wedding ‘thing’ (Jason and I, despite a five year long engagement and two children haven’t quite got round to it) about that moment where they have to appear in the church, wrapped up like fragile parcels and gawped at like beautiful mute swans, as somewhere on a line between nerve-racking and horrific. There was none of that here – the occasion was still special and all about the couple, but the more so for their being allowed to be a part of things not apart from things.

And so it continued. The priest had doubled as a maths teacher in younger life so knew both Desiree and Walter from their childhoods; this leant an intimacy to the proceedings which also felt new. It was quite a long service – much less the ‘wedding ceremony’ complete with music full of pomp and circumstance of Britain and much more a sort of ‘wedding flavoured service’. People wandered in and out, sat down, stood up, were relaxed in a way that is impossible for most of the heathens forced awkwardly into churches for their once a year wedding shot. And the bit that always jumps out in the UK version – when friends and family are called upon for an underpowered ‘we do’ to support the couple through thick and thin – was writ large large large here. We really were all in it together. For them.

The reception was in the grounds – the driveway, the pool, every bit of surround  – of Walter’s parents’ lovely nearby home. Thank God we know enough about Italian eating now to know that the twenty five tables laid out with every imaginable delicious morsel, not to mention the twenty waiters circulating with trays – were only the antipasti! The sit down meal that followed lasted for the next  3 or 4 hours, throughout which time Walter and Desiree bustled around, together and separately chatting and joking around with guests. How refreshing. It’s another British wedding bugbear that you often only get to say a quick hello to the bride and groom as somehow they are too busy! Doing what?! Only once everyone is drunk and they hit the dancefloor are normal human relations allowed to be restored. Here there was the high table – the highest ever in fact, perched up above the swimming pool, setting the guests off against the sky like a crazed Di Chirico painting. But no-one was stuck up there, they came down from haven and amongst their fellow men.

The speech situation presented another interesting difference. Every time Walter appeared, someone would start shouting ‘Speech! Speech!’ but as soon as he’d start saying anything they’d shout ‘Basta! Basta!’ ‘Enough!’ There was no pomp allowed. It was just a great party. We left around 3am and we were among the early ones. Thank you Desiree and Walter and we wish you the happiest life together.

I can’t wait. I’ve never been to Sardinia before but everyone says it’s beautiful. The picture I have in mind is a hybrid of images of Sicily – a staggeringly gorgeous island imbued with vertiginous ancientness – and pictures from a magazine article about Berlusconi’s Sardinian getaway. His few mega-hectares there are his very own Neverland with ten swimming pools and a runway and concert hall and heaven knows what else besides. I think it’s where he takes his trainee cabinet ministers for executive summits if you know what I mean. Maybe we’ll anchor off one of his beaches and send him a black spot in a bottle or something.

We haven’t managed to adopt the correct Italian summer holiday posture. While we are going on holiday for a very conservative two weeks, Guido and Claudia, by the time we join them, will already have been in Sardegna for a month! How very white and creamy we are going to look. And how greenly envious. Yet sadly I don’t think the 2-3 month summer holiday is something we are ever going to be able fully to embrace. We pretend it’s because we have our own business which is impossible to leave for that long, but truly I think we are genetically incapable. If I have even a two week holiday, the first week is winding down and the second week an existential crisis. I don’t know if I have the courage to peer over the abyss of the deeper beyond.

Anyway, for now two weeks seem like heaven. Hopefully next time we report, it will be about some newly scouted Sardinian food delicacies. Sardines even, maybe.  Happy holidays!

When we got to the front of the queue, we realized we were in more-or-less the same illiterate boat as the rest of them. First of all we got in a muddle trying to explain that we didn’t have a phone number – one of those situations where I always say too much. Where ‘non telefono’ would probably have got the message across, instead I decided to try to explain that we were redoing our house and still waiting for a phone line to be put in; what came out was something like ‘The house, yours, is being reseeded and we are late for the string.’

Then we got in a pickle about where to put our first names and where our surnames, and also whether we needed to put Rosie down (London habits making us think that this list might also serve as a checklist should the place be bombed). In the end I put Cathy where I should have put Rogers and Jason where I should have put Gibb – with everything leftover going in the column for first names. The result was that for that evening and for the duration of the course, Jason would be known as ‘oceantelfordgibb’ and I as ‘androsierogers’.

One night, we decided that it would be fun to take some photos and we were feeling creative. I dug out a book of Da Vinci paintings and we decided to have a go at recreating his famous Last Supper. We were a few disciples short of a following but such details weren’t going to stop us. There followed a stint of rummaging around for props and arguing about who got to be who. Jason scored the Jesus lead by playing the untrumpable birthday boy card.

After a few self-timer comedy moments (last supper with sprinter in foreground) we’d managed a quite good (by which I mean terrible but recognisable) offering.

Some days later, with everyone gone and the silence returned, we received the print we’d had made and I decided to go and get it framed at our local shop. I’d been in there a few times and had got to know the gruff-but-heart-of-gold framer a bit. We had even come to joke about how we had polarly contrasting framing tastes. I knew that if I went for a frame type that prompted an ‘urgh’ reaction, I’d probably chosen well.

I was a bit nervous about him seeing the picture. Maybe there was a law against masquerading as a biblical figure. Maybe he’d think we were mocking the lord. As I unfurled it, his eyebrows lifted. “L’ultima cena?” (“The last supper?”) he half asked, half stated. “Er…Si” I replied, smiling out of one side of my mouth, looking at him hopefully. He burst into a big fat laugh. Ha ha ha. I looked him in the eye. Ha ha ha, he continued, “Jesus is good” he said.

It is the classic Italian cooking rule of simplicity. They have good ingredients that really taste. They prepare everything by hand, fresh, right here right now. They don’t spread themselves thin by offering a squillion choices – they have the confidence to say ‘Here is what is good today’ based on the fresh ingredients they have, and maybe who is in the kitchen and maybe what they feel like. The customer doesn’t always have to be right. Sometimes a bit of unapologetic, proud and informed leadership is so much better for everyone.  And the La Perla tagliatelle could end wars.

It’s very thin, much thinner than what might be called tagliatelle in a British supermarket. I’d say the strands are roughly 2millimetres wide. It is delicate. It melts in your mouth. And it really tastes of something – subtly of course but the wheat, the egg, the fields – somehow it is all there. And here’s another amazing thing – the tagliatelle isn’t just a conduit, an excuse, a blank canvas for sauce in the way it so often is outside Italy. In London I have been given pasta dishes which are pretty much 50% pasta and 50% sauce. No no no no no. Here the dish is 90% pasta and 10% sauce, the sauce just nudging a mouthful of the pasta a bit more in one direction or another. And an almost sauceless mouthful bringing  not a feeling of having been short-changed, but one of extreme pleasure. It is as different from foreign tagliatelle as instant coffee is from a freshly brewed Italian espresso.

And the real beauty is the bill. A total La Perla three course lunch with wine costs about what two humdrum starters would set you back in Blighty.

Note to self: must make more time to go out for lunch. If everyone else thinks we are ‘living the dream’ we might as well try and prove them right.

When Jason went over to introduce himself, he was surprised to find that Jesus already knew who he was. ‘Ciao,’ he said warmly, ‘e benvenuto.’ Was he really Jesus and knew everyone in the world?  He noticed Jason was looking at him rather puzzled. ‘La tua casa’ (‘Your house’), he said, ‘ho messo tutte le piastrelle’ (‘I tiled your house’).

Another one?! We thought Elmedine’s dad had tiled our house!  No.  Apparently he only does the outdoor tiling. Jesus had done all the indoor stuff – a big job, big enough to pay for his new car, he ‘joked’.

Jason said that he’d like to come along to football training, just to do some exercise and keep his skills up. ‘Ma certo. Iniziamo proprio  ora?’ (‘Of course. Do you want to start now?’)

A bit embarrassed having seen what he was up against in the kit department, Jason headed back to the car to pick up his motley assortment of mismatched QPR socks, Liverpool shorts and raggedy football boots. Everyone else was in pristine Loro Piceno kits, clearly ironed by their mothers, and carried everything around in state-of-the-art kit bags with equally pristine boots tucked away in the bottom. They had two sets of shoes each – trainers for training and football boots for footballing. This was all a bit of a shock to J, whose previous idea of an evening of football was a few fast physical games of five-a-side with plenty of bruises and swearing, then straight down the pub.

Training proper began. It transpired that Jesus wasn’t the main coach – he was just God’s number two, God being a guy called Ciocci who used to play for no less a team than Inter Milan, so in the eyes of the ragazzi was genuinely pretty close to the big guy.  This was a man who had played alongside true footballing gods such as (Jason tells me) Jürgen Klinsmann. How on earth he ended up in Loro Piceno, the other God only knows.”

Another time Antonio met one asleep under an olive tree in the early morning. This he claims was a venomous one (the big black ones aren’t) so for safety he stabbed it in the head with his handsaw. I was off in another row clearing suckers out of a different tree so knew nothing.

Yet another time, one poked its cheeky head out of one of the drainage pipes that pokes through the tumbledown garden wall, glimpsed Jason and was never seen again. I was the other side of the wall pulling weeds.

Well this week all my near misses were forgotten as I enjoyed my first bona fide snake sighting. I was sitting in the office, working at the computer when I looked up through the glass door into the garden. Plain as daylight, there it was, sort of slithering around like a slightly directionless bellydancer. Rather beautiful and rhythmic but also quite big and long and stuff of horror films like. I stood up to get a closer look and even the tiny sound of my moving chair was enough to prick its ears (do they have ears?) and it was off. I was going to say ‘it legged it’. It moved so fast, it defied human logic – how could anything with no legs run so quickly? It almost flew in its strange spirally wiggle, covering at least double the distance those clever crows fly.

So there it is, another achievement to strike off my rural ‘to do’ list.

“Part memoir, part recipe book, even part business plan, ‘The Dolce Vita Diaries’ is seriously engrossing, with a huge personality.”

- Zoe Perrett, Foodtripper.com

“The book is written in a charming, breezy style and was a quite enjoyable read. There’s a good balance between the travails and the joys and there are some nice portraits of people they’ve met along the way.”

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I digress. Our neighbours – and there’s only one lot that matters because only one is even within sight of us and then only from the roof – are like a king and queen. Queen Guida and King Daniele. And when I say a king and queen, I mean a king and queen from fairytales or from Sweden, not our rum old British lot. They are elegant, unostentatiously glamorous, witty, sardonic, erudite, modern but learned about the past, lovers and practitioners of art, admirers of creativity and ideas and Daniele makes a very very fine espresso. That’s about where he draws the line cooking wise, but who wouldn’t if your fellow kitchen dweller was Guida. This is a woman who can turn a molehill into a mountain. A woman who could sew a sow’s ear into a velvet purse. A woman who would never mix her metaphors.

I think it all starts with her name. She was meant to be a boy. The boy was meant to be called Guido, a common Italian name, strangely really, since it also means ‘I drive’ (we have another, man friend called Guido and when we’re off on trips with him we always have a little joke amongst ourselves about who is going to drive. Oh, how the days fly by). Anyway Guida wasn’t a boy she was a girl. So she couldn’t be called Guido because that’s a boy’s name. But her parents weren’t venturing far and settled on the non-existent name of Guida. And that was it, from there she was a girl apart, a girl with a boyish name, freed to be a new kind of character, someone who can have a weakness for shoes and know how to reheel them with fresh leather. Someone who can grind wheat to flour and make her heavenly biscuits. Someone who lives near enough for a spontaneous cup of tea visit. Lucky old us.

Our first encounter with him was on an innocent mission to buy some sausages. It was in the days when we thought it was essential to befriend all the culinary artisans in our local area, to try to shop and interact in the Italian way rather than the supermarket way. The first thing to say about this approach is that it immediately thrusts you into the arms of your host community, the second is that you realise just what a lot of specialism there is out there and how many people who have a deep appreciation of food, the third is that it takes an awfully, awfully long time. And you must cast aside any notion as conservative and focused as ‘coming in to buy x’. I went in to buy sausages and came out, a full 75 minutes later, with a piece of animal in the shape of a medieval shield.

The first thing that happens to you when you enter Pepe’s small but packed butcher’s shop is that you are asked to go back out and come in again. Having taken his first impression of you (the 2 second rule) he must then find some appropriate music. He puts on a cassette into his 80s-not-in-a-retro-sense ‘boombox’. This being Le Marche and Rossini heartland, the music choice is usually, well, Rossini, almost certainly of an operatic bent. Music blaring,  you are then free to re-enter with suitable pomp, to the sight of Pepe miming the words and dancing around like some Frank Bough – Bruce Forsyth hybrid, fuelled by Italian speed.

The next thing is the guided tour of the meat counter, every bit as earnest as a curator in the National Gallery. But he’s not parading his wares, most things here aren’t even for sale (the very thought!) they are his carnal artworks. His bovine breast dinosaur, his porcine gristle dormouse, an abstract offal work which talks to ‘the origins of life’. You’re not kidding.

Then the tasting. People are so boring, laments Pepe, they put a piece of salami on a bit of bread and gulp it down like an animal. The thing is to revere the food, to elevate it, to treat it (help) like a beautiful woman. As he is talking, he is slicing a piece of ciauscolo, a deliciously soft local cured meat speciality that is half way between salami and pate, into the shape of a heart. He changes the music (Verdi now, no regionalist he), pours out two glasses of vino cotto (another local speciality, a sweetly toxic sort of sherry-ultra) and positions the salami heart, sliced up the middle a bit, betwixt the two glasses. It’s a bit like a rejected cover shot for ‘It’s my wedding’ magazine.

‘Um, sono vegetariano’ says Jason as Pepe pushes the glasses in our direction.

‘It doesn’t matter’ says Pepe, still pushing, as if to say he won’t hold that against Jason (as long of course as he still eats).

‘I’ll eat your half of the heart shall I?’ I say,