This is a classic dish from Marche, the part of Italy which is also home to Nudo olive oil. To stand a chance of making them, you really need a very large olive like those found around Ascoli Piceno; the key is stuffing the olives plentifully before frying them. In Marche, they are pretty ubiquitous, popping up as appetizers in the fanciest of restaurants right through to your local pizzeria. And very delicious they are too.

This recipe is courtesy of Paola from Azienda Agricola Fiorano and her mum.

Ingredients for 4

Big fat olives still on the stone – (classically Ascolane olives) about 30

Pork  – 200g/7oz

Turkey breast – 200g/7oz

Beef – 200g/7oz

Mortadella – 100g/3.5oz

Parmesan – 80g/2.8oz

Eggs – 4

White wine – A glass

Nutmeg – to taste

Salt – to taste

Pepper – to taste

Bread crumbs – as required

Flour – as requested

Extra virgin olive oil – as required

Sunflower oil – as required

Brown the chopped meat in a pan with a little oil, add salt and pepper and drizzle with white wine. Cover as soon as the wine has boiled away and cook for another 10-15 minutes. Place the cooked meat in an oven dish with the finely chopped Mortadella, the grated Parmesan, nutmeg, salt, a whole egg and a yolk. Mince finely with a chopping knife or with the mixer until smooth and thick.

Stone the olives by cutting off the flesh in a spiral – start at the top of the olive and try to cut the flesh off in one piece. Take a piece of meat about the size of the original olive in your hand, roll into a ball and spiral the flesh of one olive around it. Then dip the ball first in the flour, then the beaten eggs and finally the bread crumbs. Do this for all the olives. Heat up the extra virgin olive and sunflower oils until boiling and deep fry the balls until golden brown. Serve hot or warm as a yummy starter.

View more photos of our visit to Fiorano here.

This is a lovely light dish for those chilly months when pumpkins of all sizes and hues start to appear on the shelves. It is actually more like a soufflé than a flan and the rich cheesy sauce completes the transformation from humble pumpkin to luxurious belle of the ball. From our friend Guida Stacchietti.

Ingredients for 4 people

Butter – 40g/1.4oz

Flour – 20g/0.7oz

Milk – 100ml/3.4fl oz

Salt and pepper

Eggs – 2, gently beaten

Pumpkin – 150g/5.3oz (from Chioggia if possible) cooked in boiling, salted water

Parmesan cheese – 1 spoon of grated cheese.

Preheat the oven to 150°C/300^oF.

Prepare a béchamel sauce by heating the butter, adding flour and milk. Once it’s boiled add salt and pepper to taste. Let is cool and then add  the eggs, pureed pumpkin and parmesan cheese and stir well. Spoon into buttered ramekins and bake in the oven at 150°C for about 20 minutes. Once they have cooled slightly, remove from the moulds and keep warm.

Ingredients for cheese fondue sauce

Parmesan – 1 spoon

Taleggio cheese – 50g/1.7oz

Fresh cream – 50ml/1.7fl oz

Butter – a knob

Milk – 50ml/1.7fl oz

Olive oil crushed with mandarins -  a drizzle

Add the parmesan, Taleggio, butter, cream and milk to a saucepan and dissolve slowly taking care not to boil. Serve the pies with the cheese sauce poured on top and a drizzle of mandarin olive oil.

If you’re after a vegetarian version of our polpette (meatballs), these are so tasty you’ll be delighted to have renounced the flesh. Italians wouldn’t traditionally have polpette with pasta, and they do also work well with some vegetables and a salad on the side. Or just in a tomato sauce with potatoes for a bit of extra substance.

Ingredients for 4 to 6

Dried Lentils – 200g

Ricotta – 125g

Breadcrumbs – 30g

Ragusano/parmesan – 50g

Egg – 1 large beaten

Chill flakes – teaspoon

Garlic – flakes or 3 cloves thinly sliced

Salt and pepper to taste

Olive oil – for frying

First cook the lentils according to the instructions on the package. Drain them and whiz then in the blender for a couple of minutes until smooth. Then mix in all the other ingredients, except for the olive oil, really well. Really well, like get stuck in with your hands, it’s the best way.

You can leave this mix overnight or use straightaway. Heat the olive oil in a frying pan and roll the mixture into 4cm width balls. Fry over a medium heat, turning frequently to get them brown all over.

They are best served with a simple, spicy tomato sauce, and with or without pasta.

Valentine’s day falls on a Tuesday this year. Tuesday is not a day associated with lavish celebratory dinners and romantic indulgence. It’s a cursed school night! So here is a recipe which is a delicious and authentic piatto Italiano, but which you can knock up in minutes. Leaving you plenty of time for that romcom boxset and a bit of canoodling.

Ingredients for 2

spaghetti – 200g/7oz

Garlic – 2 large cloves, minced

Chilli pepper flakes – 1½  tsp

Extra virgin olive oil – 60ml/1/4 cup

Salt flakes – ¾ tsp

Freshly ground pepper – ½ tsp

Parmesan cheese – as much as you like

Bring a big pot of salted water to the boil, and I mean real salty, like the Mediterranean. Cook the spaghetti according to the directions on the package, until it is al dente. Now strain it and place in a large serving dish. Then add the minced garlic, chilli flakes, olive oil, salt, and pepper, and mix it together real well.

Serve immediately with a healthy grating of parmesan and a leaf salad.

Need ideas for dessert? Why not try our delightfully silky olive oil chocolate mousse.

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.

Carrot cake always feels a bit healthier than other cakes doesn’t it? Not really sure how much difference a grated carrot really makes to body and soul, but let’s keep the faith shall we. In this recipe the cake can be served traditionally as a teatime cake, or can be made fancier and served as a desert with the addition of the lovely lemon crema.

Ingredients for 4 people

Eggs – 3

Sugar – 150g/5.3 oz

Olive oil – 100g/3.5 oz

Flour 300g/10.5 oz

Walnuts – 40g/1.4 oz
1 carrot – 1 grated (50g approx)

Packet of yeast

Beat the eggs well with the sugar, add the olive oil, chopped walnuts, grated carrots and then gradually add the flour – the amount will be around 300g/10.5oz but the dough should not be too hard. Finally add the yeast. Bake in the oven for about 30 minutes at 160^oC/320^oF.

And if you want to serve the torta with a lovely zingy cream, here is the recipe for that.

Ingredients for 4 people

Egg yolks – 2

Sugar – 2 tablespoons

Flour – 2 tablespoons

Rind of an organic lemon

Milk – 400ml/13.5fl.oz

Mix the egg yolks  with sugar, add flour, lemon peel (a whole piece), and milk. Cook over low heat stirring constantly up to boiling. Remove the lemon peel and serve the cream with the carrot cake.

This is also delicious with a little crunch of almond croccante.

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.

Cathy and I, along with half the food-loving population, sometimes fantasise about opening a restaurant.

Cathy’s dream is the ‘starters and puddings’ restaurant, which cuts out the bossy middle man of the main course and allows for variety and experiment in the multitude of courses which replace it. It even has a name – which will only be appreciated by fans of the BBC brains show Mastermind (and quite possibly not even by them) – ‘I’ve started so I’ll finish’.

My mischievous suggestion is a vegetarian restaurant that has just one token meaty main course on offer – to give meat-eaters a taste of how I have suffered for the last three decades in restaurants where the only veggie option involves bland, overcooked pasta  or the dreaded 70s staple goat cheese.

In reality, opening a restaurant business is a bit of a pipe-dream, because everyone who has done it says it is a daunting 24/7 job that leeches the entirety of both your energy and your bank balance. And we would have to agree on the kind of restaurant it would be. The closest real-life example of something we’d have loved to have created ourselves is the Salt Yard in London. Its Italian-Spanish tapas – zucchini flowers stuffed with rich ricotta and drizzled with honey or velvety slices of tuna carpaccio in salsa verde with teeny little broad beans – are just our cup of tea. We’re by no means its only superfans: the success of Salt Yard has led to its brainchilds opening new restaurants Dehesa in Soho and Opera Tavern in Covent Garden (each one an assured and characterful sibling of the firstborn).

The same owners also opened a butchers/charcuterie deli nextdoor to one of their restaurants. Having the impeccable taste they do, they of course stocked Nudo olive oil – and through this connection we discovered that Ben Tish, the Executive Chef across the restaurants, was something of a Nudo fan. For a few months now I’ve been pestering him for a couple of his favourite recipes – and I’m very happy to present the first one. It’s well worth the wait.

Marinated San Marzano tomatoes with borlotti beans and buffalo mozzarella

This really is an assembly of ingredients in their prime with a simple vinaigrette to bring all the flavours together. The beautiful, sweet San Marzano tomatoes are worth trying to get; they are available from specialist food markets. And take the time to buy and cook fresh borlotti beans from the pod. They have a sweet, nutty flavour and absorb the other flavours of this beautiful salad. The Nudo chilli oil adds a really nice kick to the salad with a pleasant fruity undertone.

Serves 4 as a tapa

San Marzano tomatoes – 2, eyes removed and skin pricked

Nudo extra virgin olive oil with chilli – 100ml/3.5 fl oz

Moscatel vinegar – 100ml/3.5 fl oz

Thyme – 1 sprig

Garlic – 1 clove, peeled and sliced

Fresh borlotti beans – 40g/1.4oz podded weight

Small onion – 1

Bay leaf – 1

Carrot – half small peeled

Buffalomozzarella – 1x125g/4.4oz ball

Rocket/rucola – 1 bunch, picked and washed

Sea salt and black pepper

Blanche the tomatoes in boiling water for 10 seconds and then refresh in iced water. Peel off the skins and cut the tomatoes in half length wise. Scoop out the seeds and them place the flesh in a bowl. Pour over the oil, vinegar and add the garlic and thyme. Season well and marinate for at least 2 hours.

Place the beans in a pan and cover with cold water. Add the onion, carrot and bay. Bring to the boil, skim and then simmer until the beans are tender. About 1 hour. Drain off the liquid and reserve the beans.

To serve add the beans to the tomatoes and then tear in the mozzarella. Add the rocket and mix everything very well, season again to taste. Divide the salad evenly between two plates.

At this time of year no bona fide Italian would turn up to a dinner party without an elegantly packaged panettone, pandoro or torrone. If you people-watch at passeggiata time (that lovely post-day, pre-evening interlude), you’ll see all sorts strolling about, carrying their tasteful confections. In deference to this simple and lovely tradition, we started to make our own olive oil panettone. We were very proud when it recently came a close second in a Guardian taste test, and were the first panettone to be mentioned in the New York times for 9 years. Trouble is that this meant we ran out of stock in just three days. So in case you get given a panettone made by someone else, we’ve got a little recipe to turn it into something special.

Ingredients

Panettone – 750g/26oz

Butter – 75g/2.6oz

Milk – 400ml/13.5fl oz

Cream – 150ml/5fl oz single or double

Eggs – 2 free range

Sugar – 125g/1oz

Ground cinnamon – sprinkling

Ground nutmeg – sprinkling

Preheat the oven to 180^oC/350^oF/GM4. Cut your panettone into slices about 1.5cm/½ inch  thick. Butter one side of each slice and then cut it into triangles.

Lay the pieces on an oven proof baking dish. Continue until you fill the dish, nice and cosy.

Crack the eggs into a mixing bowl and gently whisk them with the sugar. Heat the milk and cream in a saucepan (you can add vanilla too if you like) until it just below boiling. Slowly pour the milk/cream mixture into the mixing bowl with the eggs, stirring continuously. Pour the mixture evenly over the panettone soaking each bready peak, and then put it in the oven for about 25 mins, or until the exposed panettone starts to brown. Eat straight away with cold single cream. (You can also cool it, take to a friend’s house, receive adulation, reheat and eat there).

See some more photos in our Panettone bread & butter pudding album here.

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

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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.

To stop any squabbling about what to do with your turkey this winter, here’s a Nudo twist on turkey tradition. The recipe comes from our favourite Italian chef, and far and away best neighbour, Guida Stacchietti.

Ingredients for 4 people

Slice of turkey breast – 500g

Sausage meat – 1 small sausage equivalent

Chestnuts – 8 cooked, roasted and cleaned

Minced chicken meat – 300g

Bacon – 50g cut into small cubes

Carrot – 1 cut into small cubes cooked for one minute in boiling water

Egg whites – 3

Salt and Pepper

Parmesan – 2 tablespoons

For the gravy

Carrot – 1, thinly diced

Celery – 1 stick, thinly diced

Onion – 1 small one, cut into small chunks

White wine – 1 glass

Tenderise the turkey by laying the breast between two sheets of clingfilm and beating it with a meat tenderiser – or any other heavy object you have to hand. You are aiming for a couple of millimetres in thickness so give it a good hammering. Season the meat with salt and pepper.

Mix the minced chicken with the egg whites and all other ingredients, seasoning with salt and pepper. Spread the filling evenly on the slice of turkey, and place the whole chestnuts in the centre (prunes are an alternative delicious wintery option for anyone who’s not into nuts). Carefully roll the turkey up, using the clingfilm to help you get a good tight roll.

Transfer the whole roll (minus the clingfilm!) to ovenproof paper and tie with string. Before you put in the oven, scatter over the gravy ingredients – carrot, celery, onion and wine. Then bake at 170°C for about 40 minutes.

When cooked, pour off the sauce and bind it with small pieces of “beurre maniers” (butter rubbed in flour). Strain the gravy for a smooth sauce. Slice the turkey into 1cm slices and pour a little sauce on each slice. Serve with sautéed seasonal vegetables drizzled with a little olive oil with thyme, or for something more unusual, serve with slices of pear cooked in red wine and cinnamon.

There’s a TV show on in the UK at the moment called ‘The Great British Bake-off’ in which very ordinary people do some very extraordinary baking. It’s all very old-fashioned and ‘sandwiches and scones for tea’ – ish but it’s intense and compulsive viewing. The show is being described as a ‘surprise success’ but personally I don’t think it’s a surprise; there is something endlessly uplifting about seeing beige batters transformed, through the magic of heat, into luscious loaves and tumescent towers. Baking, like singing in choirs and chuckling, is one of those precious things that separates humans from animals.

And then there are people who elevate baking to a level that is actually, officially, super-human. One such baking Hercules is Will Torrent, who not only has a fabulous name (which sounds like something frightfully clever your computer does) but is also a superbly gifted patisserie chef. He learned his trade on his father’s knee –or should I say genou – in a French patisserie and has been perfecting his skills ever since, in no lesser places than Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck. His exquisite creations have been known to make grown men cry. Not to mention this lady.

Recently, he invented some new masterpieces using Nudo flavoured oils and we are extremely delighted to present three of them right here.  Bake them and weep.

Will Torrent’s mandarin and basil chocolate cupcakes

Ingredients for 8-10 people

Plain flour – 250g/9oz

Demerara sugar – 350g/12.5oz

plain cocoa powder – 65g/2oz

baking powder – 1 tsp

dark chocolate – 100g/3.5oz

salt – 1 tsp

water – 250ml/8.4 fl oz

Nudo Mandarin Olive Oil – 250ml/8.4 fl oz

vanilla paste – 1 tsp

Preheat the oven to 180^oC/GM4. Then in a large bowl stir together the flour, sugar, cocoa powder, baking powder, dark chocolate and salt.  Pour in water, Nudo mandarin olive oil and vanilla paste and mix it until it’s well blended. Place the mix into an 8” loose bottomed lined cake tin or individual cupcakes. Bake them for 45 minutes in the preheated oven, until the top is no longer shiny. Leave to cool before topping with the Basil ganache (preparation method to follow).

For the Basil Ganache:

Ingredients

whipping cream – 250g/9oz

Nudo Basil Olive Oil – 60ml/2 fl oz

honey – 2tsp

chocolate (45% cocoa solids) – 500g/18oz

Place the whipping cream, Nudo Basil Olive Oil and honey into a saucepan and slowly bring to the boil. Once boiled, carefully pour over the chocolate. Leave for 1 minute before carefully stirring it together to create a glossy, shiny emulsified ganache. Leave this to cool before piping it on top of the cooled cakes (alternatively you could use this to make truffles by piping it into balls and rolling it in tempered chocolate or cocoa).

Will Torrent’s chocolate and mandarin olive oil cake

Ingredients

plain flour – 250g/9oz

Demerara sugar – 350g/12.5oz

plain cocoa powder – 65g/2oz

baking powder – 1 tsp

salt – 1 tsp

water – 250ml/8.4 fl oz

Nudo Mandarin Olive Oil – 250ml/8.4 fl oz

dark chocolate – 100g/3.5oz

vanilla paste – 1 tsp

for the ganache topping;

whipping cream – 200ml/6.7 fl oz

Nudo Mandarin Olive Oil – 75g

milk chocolate – 350g/12.5oz

Preheat your oven to 180^oC/GM4. Then in a large bowl stir together the flour, sugar, cocoa powder, baking powder and salt. Pour in water, Nudo Mandarin Olive Oil and the vanilla paste; mix until well blended.

Place mixture into an 8” loose bottomed lined cake tin. Bake this for 45 minutes, until the top is no longer shiny. Then let it cool for at least 10 minutes.

To make the ganache topping,  heat the cream and Nudo Mandarin Olive Oil together. Pour over the chocolate and whisk until glossy and smooth. Then drizzle this over the chocolate cake and leave it to set.  Alternatively you could serve this as a warm pudding using the ganache as a sauce. Yum.

Will Torrent’s roasted apricot and butternut squash cake

Ingredients:

butternut squash – 500g/18oz

ready-to-eat dried apricots – 85g/3oz

honey

Nudo Thyme Olive Oil – 1 tbsp

eggs – 4 lightly beaten

Nudo Lemon olive oil – 60ml/2 fl oz

plain white flour – 225g/8oz

baking powder – 2 tsp

bicarbonate of soda – 1 tsp

cinnamon – 1 tsp

ground almonds – 225g/8oz

orange zest – from 1

ground mixed spice – 2 tsp

teaspoon salt – ½ tsp

golden caster sugar – 450g/16oz

apricot jam

Peel and cut the butternut squash into small cubes. Place the squash and apricots into a roasting tin and drizzle with honey and a tablespoon of the Nudo Thyme Olive Oil. Roast this in the oven for 30 mins. Meanwhile purée the apricots and roasted squash in a food processor or with a hand-held mixer until very smooth, adding the eggs and the Nudo Lemon Olive Oil. Preheeat the oven to 180^oC/GM4. Place the flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda, cinnamon, ground almonds, orange zest, mixed spice and salt and sugar in a large mixing bowl and make a well in the centre. Add the eggs, oil, apricot and squash purée and mix until they are just combined.

Pour the mixture into the cake tin, smooth the tops, and bake for 30-35 minutes, rotating the tins half-way through, until the cakes have risen and a skewer comes out clean. When cooked heat some apricot jam and brush over to give a lovely shiny glaze

Ingredients for 4

Mixed wild mushrooms – 200g/7oz

Garlic – 2 cloves

Shallots – 6

Butter – 100g/4oz

Salt and pepper

Rosemary – 1 sprig

Risotto rice – 350g/12oz

Dry white wine – 125ml/4½ fl oz

Vegetable stock – 1 litre/1¾ pints

Parsley – handful

Parmesan cheese – 85g/3oz

Olive oil with basil – drizzle

Wipe clean and slice the mushrooms. Finely chop the garlic and shallots and fry them in half the butter until they start to colour. Add the mushrooms, a grind of pepper and the finely chopped rosemary. After another minute, add the rice to the frying pan and cook for a couple of minutes. Then add the wine, and stir it in until its all absorbed. Follow this with a ladleful of hot stock at a time, until you’ve used all the stock. Then add a good pinch of salt, the chopped parsley, the remaining butter and the grated parmesan. Serve up, adding a drizzle of basil olive oil over the top of each portion.

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.

Our friend Hamideh cooks the most amazing Iranian feasts. But last weekend it was our turn. We’d promised to have a pasta-making masterclass with the assembled crowd of five children and four enthusiastic adults. The real wonder of pasta lies in the transformation of boring old flour and boring old eggs into something utterly, divinely, tear-wellingly sublime. The only thing you need to add is effort – in our case readily found in the guise of ten small pummelling hands.

You mix flour and eggs and you work them. You work them so hard you should almost have a Jane Fonda tape on encouraging you in the background. (In our case it was Andy Williams singing Solitaire which worked, in a different way). Then you roll it and roll it and the machine rolls it some more, and then the lovely magic machine slices it into long elegant strips which you hang, so very satisfyingly, on a clothes drying horse.

We made pesto – another joy of few ingredients, and a rich tomato sauce – just three! – and the whole meal was as simple as that. I say simple. The whole thing took about five hours. Which might have been one explanation for the nine speedily emptied plates. And there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

Have a look at more photos here and follow the instructions for making your own homemade pasta here.

Ever tried lemon juice or lemon olive oil with pork chops? We’re hooked. Lamb chops work well here too, so do experiment – and if you’re lucky enough to have an open fire grill, well, that’s flaming brilliant.

Ingredients for 4

Pork chops – 1 per person

Salt and pepper

Orange and lemon – 1 of each

Garlic – 3 cloves

Rosemary – sprig

Whole cloves – 3

Olive oil with lemons – ¼ cup

Lightly season the chops with salt and pepper. Grate the zest of the citrus fruits into a bowl, and add the crushed garlic, chopped rosemary, whole cloves and lemon olive oil.

Add the chops and mix in the marinade with your hands. Squeeze over the juice from the orange. Cover the bowl and leave in the fridge overnight (or as long as you can manage).

Remove the chops and pat them dry. Preheat a cast-iron grill pan and cook each chop on a medium heat for 4 mins on each side. Serve with some roasted carrots.

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.

Ingredients for 4 starters

Garlic cloves – 4 peeled

Olive oil with chilli – 2 glugs

Red chilli – 1

Aubergine/eggplant – 1 large

Ciabatta – ½ loaf

Mozzarella di bufala – 125g/4.5oz

Parsley – handful

Squash three of the garlic cloves and mix with the olive oil and finely chopped chilli. Slice the eggplant into ¼ inch thick pieces and mix in with the oil. Cook the slices in a griddle pan for 5mins on each side until tender.

Cut the bread into 1inch thick slices, brush each side with chilli olive oil and then grill until golden on each side. Rub the last piece of garlic onto the bread. Thinly assemble the ciabatta with a slice of aubergine, then a slice of mozzarella and top off with a sprig of parsley.

Tagliata: sliced steak on a bed of rocket and tomatoes

If you’re out in the sun, barbecueing with friends, this simple delicious recipe is a must-try.

Ingredients for 4 people

Sweet vine cherry tomatoes – 500g/18oz

Arugula/Rocket – 100g/3.5oz

Balsamic vinegar

Extra virgin olive oil

Sirloin steak – 4 x 250g/9oz 2cm thick.

Salt and pepper

Parmesan cheese – 150g/5oz shaved.

Roughly chop the tomatoes and washed rocket. Mix in a bowl with a good dose of olive oil, balsamic, salt and pepper.

Brush the steaks with a teaspoon of olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Cook them on a hot  barbeque for 2 minutes on each side (or according to how you like your meat done – 4 mins for medium). Remove the meat, rest for 5 minutes then cut at a slight angle so you get strips about ½ cm by 1cm.

Lay out a plate for each person. Pile some salad on and arrange the cut meat on top. Sprinkle the meat with salt and olive oil. Add more of the salad on top of the meat then the shaved parmesan. Serve to your friends and see their eyes light up. It’s a lot better than a crusty drumstick.

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!

This is a great pasta salad to serve at a barbecue. You can prepare the sauce in advance and then just cook the pasta, mix in and serve. The zesty lemon and perfumey basil flavours are all summer.

Ingredients for 4

Ricotta cheese – 200g/7oz
Lemon – the grated zest of 1
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
Basil leaves – 15g roughly torn
Parmesan cheese – 50g/2oz

Penne – 400g/14oz

Extra Virgin olive oil with basil for drizzling

In a bowl add the ricotta, lemon zest, salt and pepper and beat together briefly with a whisk. Then mix in the torn basil and grated parmesan. At this point you can press pause and pick it up later. Cook the pasta in plenty of salted water according to the instructions. Add a ladle or so of the pasta water to the ricotta mixture and mix it in. When the pasta is al dente, drain it and mix with the ricotta. Add a drizzle of olive oil with basil.

When Italians cook fish their gold rule is ‘don’t mess’. A carefully chosen, beautifully fresh fish and a couple of judiciously selected simple ingredients are all you need.

Ingredients per person

Sea bream/Porgie – a 400g/14oz gutted fish

Garlic – a peeled clove

Parsley – small handful

Lemon – the juice of one lemon

Olive oil with lemons – 1 tbsp

Salt and pepper.

Scale, wash and pat your fish dry. Put it in a shallow dish and sneak inside a garlic clove and a couple of sprigs of parsley. Mix together the other ingredients and rub them all over the fish with your hands. If you have time leave the fish in the marinade for a couple of hours.

Heat a griddle pan, add the fish and cook for 15 minutes on one side and 10 minutes on the other over medium-low grill heat. This is also a delicious recipe to try on the barbecue, where cooking times should be about the same.

Ingredients

Unsalted butter – 60g/2.1oz melted or softened

Nudo lemon oil – 120g/4.2oz

Caster sugar – 170g/6oz

Tub of ricotta – 250g/8.8oz

Eggs – 3

Lemons – zest of all three, juice of one

Self-raising flour – 125g/4.4oz (though next time I’m going to try ground almonds instead)

Baking powder

Preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F/GM4. Beat together the butter, oil and sugar – being lazy I always do this with an electric whisk these days and it seems to work fine. Add the yolks of the eggs, then the zest and juice of the lemons and the ricotta, beating them all together. In a separate clean bowl, whisk the egg whites until they are good and stiff (but not so much that they become dry). Carefully fold the egg whites into the main mixture, trying not to lose too much air (that is, don’t overmix), then do the same with the flour and baking powder.

Pour the mixture into a large cake tin – I used a square one but it really doesn’t matter – and bake for about 40 minutes. It goes a lovely golden brown on top.

It’s delicious still warm with a bit of cream and a few raspberries. And equally delicious the next day; if you’re feeling decadent you can even have it as a breakfast cake.

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.

Our flavoured olive oils make the ideal lazy salad dressings – all you need is to add salt and pepper. They’re perfect for summer salads, when you want big summery flavours with a minimal fuss.

Ingredients for 4 people

Fusilloni pasta – 300g/ ⅔ lb

Pomodorino (grape) tomatoes – 2 cups

Asparagus – 15-20 stalks, trimmed

Almond flakes – 1/4 cup

Nudo Extra virgin olive oil – a few good glugs

Nudo Basil olive oil – a few good glugs

Salt, Black Pepper to taste

Heat oven to 400′F. Trim asparagus stalks, getting rid of the bottom of the stalk, keeping the heads and slicing remaining stalk in 1/4 inch thick diagonal pieces. On a baking sheet, toss the asparagus florets and stems with two good glugs of extra virgin olive oil. Next to that, do the same with the tomatoes. Roast together in oven for 10-15 minutes until the asparagus is bright green and tomatoes start wrinkling – takes 10-15 minutes.

In a medium pot, cook the fusilloni on a medium heat for around 10 minutes until al dente. Drain excess water, leaving a little bit of water with the pasta in the pot. Pour a few glugs of Basil olive oil over the pasta, toss and let it cool.

Whilst the asparagus, tomatoes and pasta are cooling, lightly wipe a small pan with extra virgin olive oil and place on low heat. Place the almond flakes evenly in the pan and roast for 2-3 minutes or until it turns golden brown. Be very careful not to burn them.

Finally add the asparagus, tomatoes and almond flakes to the cooling pasta with a crack of black pepper and coarse sea salt. Gently mix through and serve at room temperature or cold.

Our flavoured olive oils make the ideal lazy salad dressings – all you need is to add salt and pepper. They’re perfect for summer salads, when you want big summery flavours with a minimal fuss.

Ingredients for 4 people

Giant Couscous – 1 cup
Cucumber – 1 medium
Mint – 6 stalks
Feta – 100g, cubed
Mandarin olive oil – a few decent glugs
Salt and black pepper to taste

Drizzle a glug of mandarin olive oil in a pan and lightly fry the couscous for 2-3 minutes on a medium heat. When golden brown, add a cup of cold water to the pan and stir continuous. Once all the water has been absorbed, keep on adding more until the couscous is tender throughout. This should take about 15 minutes. Set it aside to cool.

Cut the ends off the cucumber and halve lengthwise. Scoop out the seeds with a dessert spoon. Peel the skin off the one half, or if you’re a bit fussy with your cucumber skin, peel both. Halve the pieces lengthways again cut the cumber into rough 1/4 inch pieces. Also cube the feta in a similar size.

Remove the mint leaves from the stalks and tear them into small pieces – this releases more flavour. Add the mint, feta and cucumber to the couscous. Add a few decent glugs of Mandarin olive oil, season with salt and pepper, mix through and serve chilled.

Ingredients for 12-15 cupcakes

Courgette (Zucchini) – 1 medium/150g/5.3oz

Sugar – 100g/3.5oz

Honey – 5 tbsp

Olive oil with lemons – 5 tbsp

Eggs – 2

Flour – 250g/8.8oz

Bicarbonate of soda – 1 tsp

Baking powder – ¼ tsp

Salt – ½ tsp

Lemon, zest of 1 and 3 tbsp juice

Almond – handful of flakes

Preheat your oven to 180°C/350^oF/GM4. Grate the courgette (zucchini) and then mix all the ingredients together. (Yes it really is that simple. Cathy, who has spent her lifetime beating and folding and blending, was also agog.) Divide between cupcake cups, filling them up two thirds of the way. Sprinkle a few flaked almonds over the top. Then bake in the oven for 25 minutes or until a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean.

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.

Ingredients for 4

Olive oil with lemons – 6 tablespoons

DijonMustard – 2 tablespoons

Lemon juice – 2 tablespoons

Garlic clove – 2 finely chopped

Salt – a couple of large pinches

Pepper – freshly ground.

Boneless chicken breasts – one per person, organic

Put all the marinade ingredients into a bowl and mix them well. Add the chicken breasts and leave for at least 30 minutes. Preheat a grill pan, add a splash of olive oil and grill on each side for 8-10 minutes making sure that any juices run clear.

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.)

In Italy, the preparation of carne alla brace (flame-grilled meat) is a ritual almost as vital to the national identity as the Sunday mass which typically precedes it. And a sight even more uplifting than the chalice of the holy sacrament, is that of a ruddy-faced chef preparing to get medieval on an open wood-fired grill. A pile of fresh, succulent meat lies to his right, a bowl of salt and pepper and a few herbs to his left. And in front of him a restaurant full of hungry souls awaiting salvation.

Enjoy this blissfully simple recipe for the grilling season ahead.

Ingredients for 4

Olive oil with garlic – 6 tablespoons

Rosemary – chopped sprig

Sweet chilli jam – 3 tablespoons

Salt and pepper

Lamp chops – 2 per person, organic

Mix all the marinade ingredients together in a large bowl. Add the chops and massage the flavours in with your hands. Leave for at least half an hour. Preheat a grill pan, add a splash of olive oil and grill the chops on a medium heat for 6 to 8 minutes on each side, depending on the thickness and your taste for blood.

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.

Still one of our favorite gift sets, the Citrus Club is the perfect kitchen companion for creating delicious, fresh citrussy salads in Spring.

Our customer help angel, Emily, this week shares her great aunt’s recipe for blueberry muffins, with a Nudo twist.

Although Mother Nature doesn’t always cooperate, the calendar tells us that it is now Spring at last. I can’t pretend that I haven’t been itching for Winter to end since, well, it started. One of the happiest consequences of the changing seasons is the changing food choices we get—it’s always felt like Spring to me when we start to see lighter, brighter fare, and tuck away those heavy winter roasts and casseroles till next year. To celebrate, I brought out an old family recipe for blueberry muffins, and spiced it up with our lemon oil—a Nudo spin on an old classic. The results were better than anything I could have expected; the lemony flavour keeps the muffins light and fresh, and the blueberries are the perfect complement.  For even more flavour, I made an easy lemon glaze to spread on top.

Ingredients for a dozen

1 cup sugar

4 tablespoons lemon olive oil

1 egg

2 cups flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

¾ cup milk

1 cup blueberries, fresh or frozen

1 lemon and sugar, for glaze

Cream the sugar and lemon oil together, add the egg, and beat until the mixture is light and fluffy. Next, combine the flour and baking powder in a bowl. Add this to the mixture gradually, alternating with the milk, until everything is blended smoothly. Mix in the blueberries, and spoon into muffin tins. Pop into a preheated oven, at 175°C/350°F, for 20 minutes.

If you fancy a bit more lemon, squeeze the juice of half a lemon into a bowl, and mix in some sugar to make a light glaze. I used a fine granulated sugar (caster sugar, if you’re in the UK), because I wanted more of a glaze, but if you prefer a more frosted effect, use confectioner’s sugar (icing sugar, again if you’re in the UK) to make a light lemony icing. Either way, drizzle it over the tops when you first pull the muffins out of the oven, and it will solidify as they cool. Serve to your friends and brag about becoming a muffin flavour mixologist.

Here we’ve used it with sustainably sourced shrimps. These can be eaten on their own, as in Sardinia, or mixed with spaghetti or, better still, in a risotto.

Ingredients for 4

Jumbo shrimp – 500g/1lb

Chilli salsa – 1 tbsp

Extra virgin olive oil with garlic – 4 tbsp

Salt

Parsley – 2 tblsp chopped

Grappa – 4 tbsp

Wash the shrimp and removed the heads and legs. Mix the salsa with the olive oil in a small bowl, pour the mix into a pan and quickly cook the shrimp a couple of minutes on each side, until they turn pink. Just before serving pour in the grappa and set it alight. Serve with a certain flourish and a sprinkling of parsley.

Ingredients for 4

Garlic – one or two heads

Peas – 200g frozen

Butter – 1 tbsp

Extra virgin olive oil – 2 tsp

Salt – a good pinch

Parmesan cheese – 80g

Tagliatelle – 320g

Pepper – freshly ground

Preheat the oven to 200^oC/GM6/390^oF. Cut the tops off the garlic so you can see the flesh peeking out. Place them on a square of tin foil, drizzle over the olive oil and loosely wrap the garlic so it’s sides aren’t touching the foil. Put it in the oven for about 50 minutes, until the garlic is soft.

Cook the peas in salty water, then add them into a food processor. Squeeze out the garlic in there too, and blend along with the butter, olive oil and a pinch of salt. Blend into a smooth paste then mix in the grated parmesan..

Cook the tagliatelle according to the instructions on the package. Once it’s cooked drain and mix in the pesto. Serve immediately.

Our Le Marche olive oil is quite mild compared to its Tuscan cousins – which makes it the perfect basis for flavoured oils. The range is great fun to experiment with in the kitchen – a splash of basil oil or garlic oil really does transform a salad and you can create amazingly mouth-watering smells by roasting with thyme or chilli oil. Let the flavours be your friends. Here are a couple of our current favourites…

Avocado with lemon oil

Avocado – half a ripe one per person

Extra virgin olive oil with lemon – a splash

Balsamico di Modena – a slightly smaller splash

Salt and pepper

Cut a ripe avocado in half, unplug the stone and fill the resulting bowl with a third balsamic and two thirds lemon olive oil. Sprinkle a big pinch of Maldon sea salt and several grinds of pepper over the top and eat with impunity.

Patata pobre, with chorizo and cheat aoili

Ingredients for 4

Potatoes – 1 kg/35oz

Red peppers – 1 ½

Garlic cloves – 2

Extra virgin olive oil - 300ml/10 fl oz

Extra virgin olive oil with chillies – 100ml/3.4 fl oz

Mayonnaise – 4 tbls

Extra virgin olive oil with garlic – 8 tsp

Chorizo – 2 sausages

Wash potatoes, then chop them into 1cm thick edges. Heat all of the oil in a deep frying pan on a medium high heat. When it’s hot add the potatoes and cook for 15 minutes or until the potatoes are just-not-quite-done. Now drain the potatoes, catching the oil below.

Chop up the garlic and slice the pepper into strips. Add the pepper slices to the thick bottomed pan and soften for a couple of minutes before adding the garlic. When the smell is just too delicious to endure (a minute or so) add the potatoes and let all the vegetables cook a bit more until things start to caramelise and go deliciously sticky and chewy, sticking to the bottom of the pan. Season with salt and pepper.

Whilst the potatoes are cooking prepare the aioli – I do enjoy making it from scratch, but let’s be honest it’s a fair amount of work. So since I tried out this shortcut with the garlic oil I’ve not looked back – scoop 4 tablespoons of pre-made mayonnaise into a bowl and simply mix in the olive oil, two teaspoons at a time.

Slice the chorizo into thick chunks and serve all together on a platter.

Watercress, pistachio and mandarin olive oil salad

Ingredients for 4

Watercress – 90g/3.2 oz with the stalks removed

Basil leaves – 20g/0.7 oz

Coriander leaves – 20g/0.7 oz

Dill – 10g/0.35 oz with the stalks removed

Pistachios – 40g/1.4 oz unsalted

Olive oil with mandarins – 4 tbsp

Salt and black pepper

Lightly toast your pistachios and then roughly crush them with a rolling pin. Mix the washed watercress together with your herbs into your salad bowl. Sprinkle over the nuts and then the mandarin olive oil. Add a pinch of salt and a grind of pepper. Now serve.

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.

There’s a scene in Walt Disney’s Lady and the tramp where the two newly acquainted hounds share a steaming plate of spaghetti and meatballs. They suck on the same piece of pasta and end up lip to lip, or snout to snout, in a romantic bind. Though I didn’t know at the time, it was my first image of Italian food and has had a strong impact ever since. Even subsequent brushes with grown men wearing bibs spraying a mist of meatball sauce haven’t sullied this vision of the ultimate romantic dish. So in tribute to those courting canines, here’s a recipe from our friend Stefania for the perfect romantic dinner for two, best enjoyed some time in mid February.

Ingredients for 4 or 5

Slice of bread – 1 whole wheat

Milk  – 60ml/2 fl oz

Garlic – 1 clove

Parsley – the leaves from 5g/0.2oz.

Egg – 1 free range

Parmesan cheese – 20g/0.7oz

Mince lamb – 250g/8.8oz

Mince pork – 250g/8.8oz (or use an extra 250g/8.8oz of minced lamb)

Fine breadcrumbs – 20g/0.7g

Sunflower oil – depending on size of pan

Extra virgin olive oil – several glugs

Onion – half

Passata – 200g/7oz

Tinned chopped tomatoes – 250g/8.8oz

Dried oregano – 2 pinches

Spaghetti  – 320g/11oz

Salt and pepper

Cut the crust off your slice of bread and tear the rest of it up into a small bowl. Cover the bread with your milk and mix it together with your hands.

Next, if you have a blender, add the roughly chopped garlic, parsley, raw egg and the milk/bread mix. Grate in the parmesan and season with salt and pepper. Give the ingredients several good pulses unto nicely blended.

If you don’t have a blender finely chop the garlic and parsley and mix together the ingredients by hand.

Put the minced meat in a mixing bowl, add the prepared mix and the dry breadcrumbs (the quality of these really does make a difference). Mix it all together really well with your hands. Cover and pop in the fridge for 15 minutes (the bowl, not you).

Now time to get you hands dirty for the third or maybe forth time – take the mixture out of the fridge and mould the meat into ping-pong ball-sized polpette. They should be about 25g each and you really need to press them firmly into a ball so that they won’t break up later.

When you have your 20-odd pieces on a plate you can then prepare a small frying pan with half a centimetre (1/8^th inch) of sunflower oil on a medium/high heat. Also prepare a thick bottomed saucepan, with a few glugs of olive oil on a medium heat. Add the roughly chopped onion to this saucepan.

Once the sunflower oil is sizzling hot add 4 polpette at a time, and using a couple of forks, brown evenly. Then transfer the meatballs to the saucepan with the onions and add more raw ones to the frying pan. When all the polpette are in the saucepan add the passata and chopped tomatoes along with half a cup of water (so the polpette are more or less covered). Turn the heat down to low and season it with salt a pepper and the dried oregano. Then cover and let it cook away for 20 to 25 minutes, stirring gently with a wooden spoon every now and then. This give you time to tidy up and set the table.

As the sauce starts to thicken cook the spaghetti according to the instructions on the package. When the pasta is cooked, drain it and, in the saucepan that you just cooked it in, add most of the sauce from the meatballs. Mix the sauce and the pasta together well and then scoop a portion onto a plate. Add 4 meatballs and a spoonful of the remaining sauce on top. Serve straightaway

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.

This looks fiddly, but if you can get some beautifully fresh courgette flowers (try your local farmers’ market in the summer) it’s as easy, or even easier, than pie.

Ingredients for 4 people

For the sauce:

Onion – 1 medium

Extra virgin olive oil – 100ml/3.5 fl.oz

Tomatoes – 250g/8.8oz

Basil – several leaves

Salt to taste

Sheep’s ricotta – 400g/40oz

Sage – 10g/1.5 tsp

Parsley – 10g/1.5 tsp

Basil – 10g/1.5 tsp

Chives – 10g/1.5 tsp

Marjoram – 10g/1.5 tsp

Thyme – 10g/1.5 tsp

Courgette/pumpkin flowers – 12

For the sauce, finely chop the onion and fry in a little olive oil for a few minutes, then add the chopped tomatoes, chopped basil and a pinch of salt. Cover and cook for 30 minutes on a very low heat. Add a couple of tablespoons of water if necessary.

While this is cooking mix together the stuffing for the flowers. Just put the ricotta and all the finely chopped herbs in a bowl and mix well. Cut the flowers away from their stems and slit them open along the side so you can roll them out flat. Gian Paolo then uses an icing bag to squeeze a neat, fat tube of filling into the open petals, but some careful spooning works just as well. Then roll the petals back up and place on a well-oiled baking tray. Preheat the oven to 200oC /Gas mark 6.

Back to the sauce – once it’s cooked pass it through a food strainer (you could use a fine sieve and wooden spoon if you don’t have a strainer) into a bowl. Then add the rest of the olive oil as you whiz the mixture with a hand blender, forming a slight emulsion.

Cook the stuffed flowers for 10 minutes. Place them 3 to a plate and pour over the sauce. Decorate with some fresh herbs and serve.

{Book Extract from The Dolce Vita Diaries (HarperCollins 2009) by Cathy Rogers and Jason Gibb}

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.

Ingredients for 4 starters

Fennel seeds – ½ tsp

Basil leaves – 15

Mint – 15 leaves

Garlic – one clove

Olive oil with garlic – 4 tbs

Lemon – 1

Salt and pepper

Mozzarella di bufala – 250g

Vine tomatoes – 2

Dry fry the fennel seeds until they start to pop. Bash them up and put in a bowl. Chop the mint, basil and finely chop the garlic. Add them to the bowl along with the oil, the grated zest of the lemon, ½ tsp of salt and some pepper. Pull apart the mozzarella with your hands and mix into the bowl of marinade.  Leave for half and hour and then serve with the chopped tomatoes and a few chunks of lightly toasted ciabatta.

Cathy’s friend from choir, Nicoletta, is from Milan. She promised to cook us a Milanese speciality to show us how different it is from Marchigiani food. She chose osso buco, which uses braised veal shanks. The name comes from the Italian for ‘hole in the bone’ and the bone marrow itself is one of the real treats of the dish. It is invariably served with saffron risotto (p 300 in The Dolce Vita Diaries), one of the pillars of Milanese cooking.

Ingredients for 4 people

Butter – 80g

Onion – 1/2

Veal shank – four 3cm thick slices of shank cut across the bone

Plain flour – for dusting

Salt and pepper

Red wine – 1/2 a glass

Meat stock – 175ml

Carrot – 1

Celery – 1 stalk

Lemon – rind of 1

Parsley – small bunch

Melt the butter in a deep-sided frying pan and cook the diced onion over a low heat for 5 minutes.

Lightly roll the shank in flour and add to the frying pan with the heat turned up until browned all over. Season with salt and pepper and add the red wine. Let the wine evaporate.

Add the stock, diced carrot and diced celery, turn down the heat and cover. Carry on cooking for up to an hour or more. If it starts to go too dry add more meat stock. If it’s too runny add butter and flour to thicken it. When it’s about ready mix in the grated lemon rind and finely chopped parsley, and cook for at least a couple of minutes more. When ready, place a slice of the meat on top of the risotto and drizzle some of the remaining juice from the frying pan over the top.

{Book Extract from The Dolce Vita Diaries (HarperCollins 2009) by Cathy Rogers and Jason Gibb}

After a long day at the office or harvesting in the grove this is an easy, no-fuss recipe for a deliciously creamy soup. Perfect for the colder Autumn evenings.

Ingredients for 4 people

Olive oil – for frying

Onion – 1

Potatoes – 6 peeled and sliced

Vegetable stock – 1.5 litres/52 fl.oz

Guanciale/pancetta/unsmoked bacon – 200g/7oz

Heat the oil in a saucepan, add the sliced onion, cook for 5 minutes, then add the potatoes and cook for another 10 minutes. Season with salt and pepper and pour in the stock. Lower the heat and cook for 1 hour, when the potatoes will have broken up and thickened. Blend to a velvety, fine texture with a hand blender and check for seasoning.

Cut the meat into thin slices and fry in olive oil for 5 minutes until slightly crispy. Serve the soup with a small mound of crispy meat on top, drizzle on some extra virgin olive oil and garnish with a sprig of marjoram.

{Book Extract from The Dolce Vita Diaries (HarperCollins 2009) by Cathy Rogers and Jason Gibb}

Whether it’s cycling to work, going for a long Sunday stroll or spending a day harvesting olives in the grove, one of the best things about a bit of fresh air and exercise is what it does for the appetite. At the end of a big day in the grove, this dish is just what the harvester ordered.

Ingredients for 6 people

For the béchamel

Milk – 450ml/¾ pint

Butter – 50g/2oz

Plain flour – 50g/1¾ oz

Salt – 1 teaspoon

For everything else

Nudo almond or Ligurian pesto – 200g/7 oz

Lasagna sheets – 350g/12.3 oz

Parmesan – 90g/3.2 oz grated

Pine nuts – 30g/1 oz

Butter – a knob

Salt and pepper to taste

Make the béchamel by heating the milk in a saucepan just to before the point of boiling. In a heavy bottomed saucepan melt 50g of butter and add the flour. Cook for a couple of minutes, then take it off the heat and slowly add the warm milk, continuously stirring so it stays smooth. When all the milk is in you can put the sauce over a low heat to thicken and salt to taste.

Toast the pine nuts. Preheat the oven to 200oC/400oF/gas mark 6. Bring a big pan of salted water to boil. Cook the pasta sheets a few at a time, for a couple of minutes each, as you build your lasagna.

Start off by greasing your lasagna dish with a decent bit if butter and spread a small spoonful of béchamel. As the pasta sheets are ready, cut them to fit the dish, and do alternate layers of pasta, then béchamel, a spoonful of pesto, a sprinkling of parmesan and a sprinkling of pine nuts. The Italians tend to have lots of layers of pasta and I’d aim for at least 8. On the final top layer spread the béchamel, sprinkle some cheese and pine nuts then dab on some butter.

Whack it into the oven for 20 minutes or until it’s beginning to brown on top. Let it sit for 5 minutes before serving.

An integral part of Movie Night is homemade popcorn. In fact the miracle of taking those little yellow nuggets and seeing them bursting Incredible Hulk like out of their skins and into new white light bright delights is sometimes better entertainment than the movie. Recently we’ve been getting creative with the flavouring – cook the popcorn in lemon oil or mandarin oil for a delicious zesty flavour. Or go for chilli if you’re feeling cheeky.

If you want even more of a helping hand with your perfect staying in evening, here are some ideas for flavour/film pairings.

Lemon oil popcorn: perfect for bright summer films. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Bednobs and Broomsticks and Annie are our current favourites.

Mandarin oil popcorn: slightly more eccentric. Partner up with something a bit more unusual like Ponyo or the collected works of Maurice Sendak.

Chilli oil popcorn: a bit spicy so one for the grown ups. Try with Glengarry Glenross or Midnight Cowboy.

Ingredients for 2 kids
Popcorn/dried mais – 50g
Citrus olive oil – 2 teaspoons
Caster sugar – 1 tablespoon

Heat the oil in a thick bottomed saucepan over a medium to high flame. Add the corn, pop the lid on a shake. As soon as the popping has  stopped take the lid off, sprinkle over the sugar and transfer to a  big bowl.

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.

This is a great simple but indulgent dinner, ideal for this time of year. It’s rich and creamy but the citrus kick keeps things in check and it makes a lovely romantic dinner for two. Finish it off with a box of Nudo’s handmade olive oil chocolates.

Ingredients
Nudo tagliatelle – 150g/5.3oz
Butter – 20g/0.7oz
Grated rind and juice of 1 organic lemon
Parsley – 1 tbsp chopped
Sage – 1 tbsp chopped
Rosemary – 1 tbsp chopped
Chives – 1 tbsp chopped
Double cream – 80ml/2.8fl.oz
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
Parmesan – 20g/0.7oz

Melt the butter in a saucepan. Chop the herbs, add to the melted butter along with the cream, salt and pepper. Then grate in the lemon rind. Slowly simmer for a couple of minutes. Add the lemon juice to the pan and bring back to the boil, then take the pan off the heat and keep warm. Cook the tagliatelle in plenty of salted boiling water until al dente. Drain and mix into the sauce along with half the grated parmesan. Stir well and serve with the remaining cheese sprinkled on top.

It’s a common Mediterranean and Middle Eastern culinary habit to stuff vegetables with a variety of grains such as rice or couscous as well as ground meats or nuts like pistachios. That said, this dish is amazingly versatile. If you don’t have peppers, you can substitute zucchinis or eggplants instead; if you don’t have couscous, try cooked rice or meat as a filling.

And, of course, Nudo’s extra virgin olive oil with lemons gives these peppers a unique flavor you wouldn’t normally expect, but your tastebuds will welcome.

Directions

1. Preheat the oven at 350°
2. In a sauté pan over medium heat, warm the butter. Add the carrots and onions and sauté in the butter until soft, about 3 minutes. Add the raisins and sauté until plump, then add the couscous and water, salt and pepper. Cook for the amount of time according to the couscous package instructions. When it is done, remove from heat and allow to cool.
3. Wash and dry the peppers and tomato. Cut each in half, removing all seeds. Pat the insides completely dry.
4. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and place peppers and tomatoes face up on the baking sheet, a couple of inches apart.
5. Fill each half of the peppers and tomatoes with couscous mixture. Place one basil and one mint leaf on top of each pepper or tomato.
6. Drizzle each pepper and tomato with a bit of Nudo’s extra virgin olive oil.
7. Bake in the oven for 30 minutes, or until the couscous has begun to brown somewhat, but not dry out. Allow to rest a few minutes, uncovered, before serving.

Yvonne Maffei is a food writer and blogger who has combined her great Sicilian cooking heritage with her preference to eat Halal foods, setting out to solve the problem many Halal eaters face: enjoy their favourite traditional and ethnic foods, but without restricted ingredients.  We think she’s a real trailblazer and look forward to what is still to come from at her wonderful blog, MyHalalKitchen.com.

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.

Put the clams in a bowl of cold, salted water for half an hour. Then rinse them under some running water and throw away any that are open (i.e. dead). Heat the wine in a pan and add the clams. Cover and cook at a high heat for five minutes until they have opened. Take the pan off the heat and scoop out the clams.  Sieve the nice liquid that is left in the pan and set aside.

Heat the olive oil in a large pan, add the chopped chilli and garlic and cook for a couple of minutes. Then add the liquid from the calms and simmer uncovered. Salt to taste.

Meanwhile prepare the spaghetti as directed on the pack. When the sauce has thickened up, add the clams and the parsley and simmer for a couple of minutes.

Drain the pasta and add it to the sauce. Mix and serve with a garnish of parsley.

Bring a saucepan of salted water to boil. Trim the very ends of the broccoli and discard, then chop up the rest of the stalk up to about a few centimetres from the head (or until the stalk is nice and tender).

Peel and finely slice the garlic and add this to another saucepan with a good drizzle of olive oil.  Add in the chopped stalk (not the tender heads), the crushed chillies and the anchovy fillets. Cover with a lid and cook for about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Add the penne to the boiling water. Make sure you stir at the beginning so the pasta doesn’t stick to the  bottom. 5 minutes before the pasta is ready add the tender broccoli heads to the pasta.

Finely grate the pecorino cheese. When the pasta is cooked, scoop out a cupful of pasta water for use later and drain the pasta and broccoli. Mix this into the saucepan with the chilli and stalks and add the cheese. Add a few teaspoons of your pasta water to give the sauce the right consistency and mix thoroughly. Season with salt and pepper and serve immediately.

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.

Cath said ‘Try it before you judge it. And please don’t call me dude.’

She was right. Thanks to the ciabatta, this dish is yummy AND filling. The crunchy slightly burnt bread which sops up the juices and oil of the salad is a highlight.

Thinly slice your onion and put it in a bowl drizzling over the red wine vinegar and a good pinch of salt. Cut the crust off the bread, tear the white part into thumb sized chucks and dry-toast them in a frying pan.

Now prep the dressing by grating the zest off your lemon into a small bowl and squeezing in the juice from one half. Now add the lemon oil and oregano, a pinch of salt and ground black pepper.

Now get the body of the salad together in a big bowl  – roughly cut up the tomatoes, leaving out the stalky bit, then wash, dry, chop and add the lettuce, and stone, half and add the black olives (I do this by squashing them with the palm of my hand.

Give your dressing a quick stir then add it to the bowl along with the onions and toasted ciabatta chunks. Mix well and then tear the mozzarella into chucks and place on top of the beautiful mound of salad. Serve in a pretty bowl.

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.

Prepare a bundt (ring) tin with greaseproof paper on the bottom and a small amount of olive oil up the sides, making sure also to coat the central spout.

Sift the sugar, flour, baking powder, ground almonds and a pinch of salt together in a large bowl. Add the zest of all the citrus fruits.

Make a well in the centre and into it pour the milk, orange juice (squeezed straight from the oranges), the mandarin oil, a few drops of almond essence and the eggs. Mix well – using a hand or electric beater – for a few minutes until you have a smooth batter.

Pour the batter into the bundt tin and put into a preheated oven at 180^oC/360^oF. It’ll take about 45 minutes with a fan-assisted oven, a little more in a normal oven. You can tell it’s cooked when you start to smell delicious orangey aromas in the kitchen and when a skewer comes out clean. Turn out onto a wire rack to cool then sprinkle with icing sugar.

The cake can be eaten warm as a pudding served with fresh summer fruit and cream – but is also delicious the next morning as a breakfast cake. The cake keeps really well, retaining its moistness and zest.

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.

Grate the cheese into a bowl (big enough to fit the cooked pasta too) and mix with a very generous quantity of freshly ground pepper. Don’t stint – the piquant pepper is the counterpart to the cheesy richness.

Cook the spaghetti in abundant salted water according to the instructions. When you drain it, keep back half a cup of the starchy pasta water.

Pour the drained spaghetti over the cheese and mix with a couple of forks (sometimes the waiter does performs this ceremonial act before your very eyes). Add a teaspoon or so of the cooking water and toss thoroughly. Serve at once – this needs to be eaten hot, so the flavour of the pepper comes through, and moist.

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.

Cook the spaghetti in abundant salted water according to the instructions. Meanwhile fry the onion in the oil for 5 minutes, then add the anchovies for another 5 minutes, until they break up. Add the drained pasta to the onion anchovy sauce and mix in the grated cheese. If it’s too dry add a spoonful or two of the pasta water (which by now, being a pro, you’ll have kept aside as a matter of course).

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.]

Lightly fry a whole, peeled clove of garlic in a good drizzle of olive oil. Once it’s started to brown, remove the pan from the heat and let it cool for a minute. Add the lemon juice and remove the garlic.

Add the pasta to a pan of boiling, salted water and cook until it’s al dente.

As soon as it’s ready drain and mix in with the olive oil and lemon juice. Before serving mix in the lemon rind, chopped parsley a pinch of salt and grated parmesan to taste. Now stop the clock (about 8 minutes right?).

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.

Put your drained and washed chickpeas into a food processor with the chopped up garlic, tahini, lemon juice, cumin seeds and a big pinch of salt. Process it till it’s a smooth paste then add the oil 1 tablespoon at a time, with the machine running if possible. If not whizz it between adding the spoonfuls. Check for seasoning, add some ground pepper and it’s ready.

Dissolve the yeast in the warm water, making sure there are no lumps. Add the flour, the salt, the yeasty water and oil to a mixing bowl. Mix it all together with a plastic dough scraper and then turn onto a floury surface. Knead it for 10 minutes till it bounces back to the touch and feels elastic. Make it into a big dough ball and put it in an oiled bowl, drizzle all over with olive oil, then leave in a warm place covered with a tea towel. It should take about 1 hour to double in size. Now grease a baking tray with some oil and ease out the dough onto it. Next flatten it out in the tray with your fingers until it’s about 2cm thick. Pull off clumps of rosemary leaves and push them into the dough. The better they’re inserted the less likely they are to burn. Cover again with a tea-towel and leave for half an hour to rise some more.

Preheat the oven to 220^oC/425^oC/GM7. When the dough has again risen to about twice the thickness make more indentations with your fingertips, drizzle all over with olive oil and sprinkle on a good dose of rock salt. Now whack it in the oven for 20 minutes or until golden brown. Turn out onto a wire rack so it doesn’t sweat underneath.

Last time we went round there for a cup of tea (a habit Guida has taken to with gusto since we moved in next door), there were a couple of tins of our lemon oil knocking around, so Guida whipped up a quick lemon olive oil cake for the kids. It has no fat in it apart from the oil so is a great cake for anyone preparing for the bikini / speedo days of summer.

Preheat the oven to 160^oC/320^oF. Whisk the eggs for a minute (in a mixer), then add the sugar and whisk for 5 minutes more. Now gently, but thoroughly, mix in the flour and baking powder. Now mix in the oil and then the milk till you have a uniform batter. Pour 2 thirds of this into a greased baking tin. With the final third, mix on the cocoa powder before pouring it into the white batter. Don’t mix it again,. but bake it for  30 minutes, keeping your nose alert for ‘done’ smells. Test it with a sharp knife or skewer – which shouldn’t come out with any gunk on it. Take out and turn onto a rack to cool.

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.

Linguine with red duck sauce.

First thing to emphasise is that it’s the sauce that’s red rather than the duck – so spare your blushes. Something about the recipe here. Brown one duck leg or thigh per 1.5 people in olive oil. Remove the duck, pour off the fat and sauté a sliced onion, carrot, celery stick and a couple of garlic cloves. Once they’re softened return the duck pieces and add a glass of red wine a can of chopped tomatoes, a cup of stock and a handful of rosemary.  Simmer on a low heat for a hour or so until you can pull the meat off the bone. Then reduce to a nice thick sauce for another half hour or so. Season with salt and pepper. Cook about 80g of dried linguine per person. And mix in the sauce.

Chicken with black olives and bell peppers

Marinate two chicken breasts or legs per person, add half a cupful of olive oil, two cup fulls of black olives (pitted or not), two sliced red peppers and two sliced green peppers, chopped rosemary, oregano, bay leaves and sage, and 5 cloves of chopped garlic.

Heat up a large saucepan over a medium flame, pick out the chicken pieces and sauté on both sides until golden brown. Then add the rest of the marinade and sauté for several minutes more. Once the peppers are tender season with salt and pepper and you are ready.

Roasted potatoes

Clean your potatoes. The quantity depends (obviously) on how many people and how hungry they are, but always always do more than you think as they’ll always get eaten. Slice into wedges. Cook over a medium heat for 30 minutes in a large heavy-bottomed saucepan with lots of olive oil and chopped rosemary.

Spinach

Italian spinach doesn’t seem to wilt and disappear as much as the stuff I’ve had in the UK. Anyway, roughly chop whatever spinach you can and steam it in a thick saucepan with a spoonful of butter and a grating of nutmeg.

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 July, when the tournament starts, we’re going to do a series of 10 minute meal recipes so the footie fanatics amongst us don’t go undernourished. At Nudo we’re also thinking of doing a special World Cup gift box with yum foods that can be turned into an instant, delicious and healthy dish. Whaddya reckon? Here’s one to get you going.

Finely chop the shallots and garlic. Fry in a good drizzle of olive oil and after a minute add the pancetta. Once the pancetta starts to colour, add the chilli, season with salt and pepper and cook for a couple more minutes.

Cook the spaghetti in plenty of boiling salted water. Once it’s ready, drain and add to the pancetta. Mix in the chopped parsley and serve with a generous grating of parmesan cheese.

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.

Grab a thick bottomed pan and add the olive oil and butter.  Once the butter is melted over a low heat add your finely chopped onion, garlic and celery. Cook nice and slowly for around 15 minutes. Now add your rice and fry it over a moderate heat. Don’t get distracted (like I always do), keep stirring and warm up your stock. When the rice starts looking translucent it means that the creamy starch is ready to be released, so add the wine in one go. Keep stirring till the wine is absorbed. Turn down the risotto a bit and add the stock a ladle at a time, each time allowing most of it to be absorbed before adding the next.

After 15 or 20 minutes you should have a creamy, rich risotto still with a bit of bite. Season with salt and pepper and remove from the heat. Stir in the butter and grated parmesan. Then take it to another level with a twirly drizzle of basil olive oil.

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!

Ingredients for 6

For the raspberry sauce

For the posset

Double cream – 600ml/1 pint 1fl oz 100ml
Caster sugar – 150g/5oz  25g
Lemons – 2 large ones, zest and juice

Start with the raspberry sauce. Put your raspberries, bar six, into a large saucepan.   Add the sugar and squeeze of lemon and stir well. Cook for a couple of minutes until the mixture thickens. Divide the raspberry sauce evenly between six large serving glasses. Transfer to the refrigerator and chill for 10 minutes.

You can then start on the posset. Pour the double cream into a large bowl and add the sugar. Over a medium heat bring to the boil slowly. Boil for three minutes, then remove from the heat and allow to cool. Add the lemon juice and zest and mix in well.

Pour the lemon cream mixture over the slightly hardened raspberry mixture and, add a raspberry on top and refrigerate for two to three hours.

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.

Anyway, this recipe is a brilliant combination of crab and orange oil and if you can’t be bothered to shell the crab yourself your fishmonger will happily do it for you I’m sure. But make sure you buy the crab already cooked as the fishmonger will be better at killing it swiftly (i.e. humanely) than you.

Crab – 550g/20oz gives about 200g/7oz of flesh

Gather together a sharp knife and a hammer (Rosie enjoyed this bit, eagerly hunting down the toolbox). Turn the crab belly-side up. Pull off the triangular-shaped belly flap, which is actually its abdomen. Then turn it over and pull off the shell by inserting your thumb between the body and shell at the back of the crab and pulling the shell up, or use a knife with a similar manoeuvre.

Scoop what you can out of the shell and then crack it in half, if necessary, to get the rest out. Now twist off the legs and work your way carefully through the body compartments, cutting it up where necessary to get to the good bits. Make sure to pull off the spongy gills and any bits of gristle and membrane and discard. Use the hammer to crack open the leg shells, and scoop out the nice bits.

Bring a large pan of salted water to the boil, feed in the spaghetti and cook for the time it says on the pack, stirring a couple of times to stop it sticking.

Finely chop the garlic, halve and finely chop the chilli and roughly chop up your parsley.

Heat the orange olive oil in a large frying pan, add the garlic and chilli and fry for 1 minute. Add the crab meat to the pan with the wine, season with salt and pepper and cook off some of the wine, but not all of it.

Drain the pasta and tip it in the crab mixture. Toss in the parsley and serve.

Pineapple chunks and raisins caramelized in Nudo orange oil and rum, served with vanilla ice cream

In this refreshing and unusual dessert, olive oil is used to caramelize the pineapples, infusing them with a subtly grassy flavour and giving them a beautiful gloss butter can’t match. The pineapple chunks fray away effortlessly in the mouth, their warmth and sweet acidity contrasting deliciously with the cool and soft ice cream. The sticky, rum flavoured raisins keep your throat warm between bites, making this a perfect antidote to the last Winter cold. If you can use a fruit flavoured oil such as Nudo’s flagrant orange oil, this will add a lovely citrus taste to this already delightful combination.

Chop off the leafy and bottom parts of the pineapple. Peel the pineapple, making sure to cut off the columns of dark brown “eyes”. Remove any remaining ones with a small pointy knife. Slice the pineapple, core the slices and cut them into even segments.

Heat the olive oil in a large frying pan. Toss the pineapple chunks into the hot oil and sprinkle with the sugar. Cook on medium-low heat stirring regularly to ensure even browning for 15-20 minutes or until the pineapple is soft and caramelised. Halfway through, add the raisins.

Add the rum and cook for 3-5 more minutes or until all the rum has evaporated.

Serve immediately with a scoop of top quality vanilla ice cream.

Tips:

You can also try this recipe with pre-cut chunks of pineapple, although fresh is best.

When shopping, choose a pineapple that has firm, gold to brown skin (not too green) with green, loose leaves (not brown or wilted). A ripe pineapple will have a strong, fresh pineapple smell.

Tasty Diaries is a free weekly newsletter written by Anne-Laure, a real foodie who lives in London with her beautiful Anglo-French family. Hailed by the Times as “… charming and inspiring… a weekly missive of kitchen tips and colourful, seasonal recipes…”, it simply arrives in your inbox every Thursday with exciting, simple and nutritious recipe ideas for the week to come.

Anne-Laure’s food philosophy is that home cooking is always best, but it has to fit around today’s families hectic lifestyle. This is why she features “workweek recipes” that are always quick and straightforward to make. Her inspiration comes from traditional and modern French family cooking, books, old magazines and other blogs. Anne-Laure also regularly invites Michelin starred chefs to create weekend menus for Tasty Diaries, which she cooks herself to show that it can be done by a ‘normal’ person and then makes it accessible to everyone.

These days we look out in anticipation for what Anne-Laure has come up with for the week, and soon we know you will too. Check out this week’s newsletter and subscribe by clicking here.

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.

Get ready your three clean mixing bowls and a metal or glass bowl to melt the Chocolate. Use your biggest bowl for the egg yolks as you’ll add all everything into this at the end.Slowly melt the broken up chocolate in a bain-marie. Separate the egg whites and yolks into separate spotlessly clean bowls. Beat the yolks and half of the sugar until the mix turns pale and thick. Then beat the egg whites and the rest of the sugar until the mixture just stiffens.

By now the chocolate should be melted, so mix in the mandarin olive oil and put aside to let it cool. Now, in another bowl, whip the whipping/heavy cream until it’s stiff – it should be ‘sticky’ and not ‘cloggy’.

Take the bowl with the chocolate/olive oil mix and carefully fold in the contents of the other bowls using a metal spoon: start with the creamy egg yolks, then the stiff egg whites (you want to keep the bubbles intact, so use a figure of eight movement to mix) and lastly the whipped cream. Carefully spoon the mixture into some nice serving bowls or glasses, cover with cling film and chill in the fridge for a few hours before serving.