Belinda Hollyer

We decided to spend a night in Parma last week, on our drive from London down to Umbria. (Yup! It’s holiday time again, lucky us, and we’re back on the same little organic farm: our third visit, and loving it as much as ever.)

We’d never been to Parma before but we love the cheese and we love the ham, so honouring those with a visit seemed absolutely right. I even like Parma violets, despite their slightly sickly taste, although I know those haven’t been made in Parma for centuries. Anyway, what’s not to like?

And as it turned out we were spot-on about that – but only because of something we didn’t know about: the Baptistery of the Duomo in the old town. It took my breath away it’s so beautiful – and this in a country filled with astounding beauty of every kind.  The city had the good sense to commission an architect called Benedetti Antelami to build it in 1196, and the octagonal building is covered in pale pink marble from Verona. There’s a lovely statue of Solomon and Sheba outside, which you can just see in the photo above (I took it with my iPhone which doesn’t seem to be as good at focal length as it is at closeups.)

And inside there are 16 alcoves and an astonishing domed ceiling, all decorated with paintings and sculptures. Like this one.

The Michelin guides don’t rate the Baptistery worth the journey (which would give it three stars): it gets only two stars, which means it’s worth a look if you happen to be passing. I think the Tyre Man is mistaken.

Parmigiano is a truly great cheese with complex flavours, and that slightly salty, slightly granular texture has a lot going for it.  And Prosciutto di Parma is the king of hams – a silky, tender, melting jewel in the crown of Italian cuisine.

But the Baptistery! I promise you, seeing the Baptistery will make you forget about food. And in Italy that’s a tough call.

I’m not sure exactly how this happened, but since last night I am the proud and excited owner of an ice cream loyalty card. Perhaps I ought to be ashamed at freely admitting an allegiance to something as frivolous as ice cream but I’m not; not at all. I can justify it, I swear I can. I can even proselytise about it – everyone should have one of these cards – honestly, you should. And if you’re sitting comfortably, preferably with a truly excellent ice cream to hand, I’ll explain.

My love of ice cream dates from childhood. My mother used a recipe that involved junket and sweetened condensed milk, and came from a friend of my grandmother’s. It was called Mrs Morgan’s ice cream and it was absolutely delicious, although I’d probably find it too sweet if I made it now. The distinctive texture and taste that comes from using condensed milk – grainy and dense – is unusual now but I found it a few years ago in the ice cream sold from carts on the streets of Trinidad, and it’s a texture that goes well with tropical flavours like mamey and sugar apple.

The best commercially available ice cream I know these days is made by Kohu Road in New Zealand: a small – well, smallish – range of great flavours made by hand from largely organic ingredients. (Kohu Road were thinking of expanding to the UK but I haven’t heard more about that for a while – if anyone else does, please tell me.)

But my most recent ice cream pleasure (and my loyalty card) come from Gelupo in Soho’s Archer Street, which is related to Bocca di Lupo, the smart Italian restaurant across the road. Gelupo have a glorious range of flavours (ricotta, coffee and honey: pine nut and fennel seed: sour cherry granita: blackberry sorbet) and it’s the real deal with added sprinkles of fairy dust. I’d say it was worth the journey, although I admit that depends on where you start from. If it’s from Auckland don’t even think of it, just buy a tub of Kohu Road to take home – I especially recommend the golden syrup flavour, although the vanilla haunts my memory. If you’re in London, no question: Archer Street’s your goal of choice. In between Auckland and London, though, you’ll have to suss it out for yourselves. I’m too busy filling up my Gelupo loyalty card so that I’ll qualify for a freebie.

Thanks, Greg, for updating these: I expect Jon’s not the only reader who will be so, so glad that spider pic has gone.

I’ll talk about all the new photos in time but I’m starting with this one because its subject reflects late summer so prettily. The other week one of my favourite columnists, the food writer Nigel Slater, said he could smell the edge of autumn in the air – and I was frankly horrified. It’s still summer, for pity’s sake! What’s more, it’s one of the best summers we’ve had in London for years! How could he mention autumn? What foolhardy coat-trailing is that?

But I have to admit that because August is officially late summer a few signs of autumn are already on the scene, breeze, whatever.  I’ve certainly noticed that spiders (sorry, Jon) have started web construction outside our bedroom window, which is an autumnal event. The fruit flies that plagued us in the kitchen during July have all vanished. The salad greens in our garden have gone to seed. I even found myself looking out a cardigan on a recent, oddly chilly, morning. So OK, Nigel, I’m not embracing signs of autumn, but I accept they exist.

These glorious flowers belong to one of our plot neighbours at the community gardens where we grow veggies. I’ve been photographing their flowers for some months now, and I think this recent one reflects an undeniably late summer display of colour. (It also displays just how good the camera in my iPhone is – amazingly so, much better than my old, regular camera.)

So: enjoy the last of the golden weather is what I recommend (with a nod to Bruce Mason’s classic play, “The End of the Golden Weather”).  Enjoy! Enjoy! I’m off to Italy next week in search of sun-ripened figs, but that’s another photo.

Here it is, in all its glory, fully three centimetres long. We await its growth, and the arrival of its many friends and relations, with impatience.

The first peonies to arrive in London are, I think, from the Netherlands, and they’ve just hit the greengrocers and the flower stalls. What a joy! I love anemones and I usually name them as my favourite flower, but peonies are so extravagantly beautiful, and their scent so subtle – almost ghostly – that they come a very close second in my heart. I can’t afford the first rush of these gorgeous flowers (and in any case the first ones are always red, and I like the pale creamy ones best) but I’ll look forward to the price coming down to my level as soon as the English ones arrive. (In London, the last tranche of peonies come from the Irish republic wrapped in sheets of Gaelic newspapers. But that’s about 6 weeks away.)

Peonies and asparagus: two great joys in one month. I’m hoping to buy field-grown asparagus in the farmers’ market this Sunday – there are some around now from the Wye Valley, but they’ve been grown in polytunnels and their flavour’s not quite up to scratch. Call me fussy.

Now that I’m back in London I’ve managed to collect more empty jars, buy some powdered cardamom from the wonderful spice shop in Drummond Street, and unfreeze a batch of the Seville oranges I put away in January. I am still determined to get the cardamom variety working well, and I owe many thanks in this quest to Dan Lepard, who has a weekly baking column in The Guardian but also turns out to be the patron of The World’s Original Marmalade Festival – and who knew there was one? – and who suggested I try adding powdered cardamom at the end of the marmalade-making process.

Once I’d got a good set with the new batch of marmalade I took the pan off the heat, let it cool for a few minutes, and then stirred in one teaspoon of powdered cardamom for every 500 grams of Seville oranges. I also added a tablespoon of orange flower water for every 500 grams of oranges, because I’m still trying to replicate the excellent Arabica marmalade that inspired all this.

And the result is very good indeed! I am not completely convinced that the flavour is as good as the Arabica Seville & Cardamom marmalade – the cardamom level works very well but the marmalade flavour doesn’t seem to be quite as rich or intense as my memory of Arabica’s, which is frustrating. However, I still have 1.5 kilos of Sevilles in the freezer so I can try again in a couple of months when I’ve built up another supply of jars. So I’m still thinking how to get my final 2010 batch absolutely perfect …

And in the meantime I can admire these.

Earlier this week I bought some attractive new apples from the Waiheke Organic Food shop, and I discovered just how wonderful they were when I tasted them. Anyone who knows me or reads my blog on a regular basis will already understand how much I love good apples, and these are sensational. They look, I think, a bit like English Discovery apples because they have the same translucent skins, but the flesh doesn’t have the stain of pink that runs through Discoveries. (The skin also reminds me of the New Zealand Cox’s Orange Pippins that I used to eat when I was growing up; as I remember they also had pretty streaks of colour. You can almost never find Cox’s apples in New Zealand any more, I think they’re all exported. And anyway it’s way too early for them now.)

You can see for yourselves from the photo how lovely these new apples are to look at. What you can’t do, sadly – unless you’re here – is taste them. They have such a fresh and lively flavour, crisp and sharp and clean. To me, it’s the flavour of summer.

They are, I’m told in the shop, called Coromandel Surprise, and they come from the Coromandel Peninsula (which is just across the water from Waiheke). I’ve never heard of them and I tried to look up that name on the internet but I can’t find it there – there’s another NZ apple called Monty’s Surprise but that ripens at the end of the apple season, and this one’s an early developer. So maybe it’s a kind of sport – a one-off tree, or a small group of trees, that some organic grower on Coromandel has found and treasured.

It’s really no surprise that an apple from Coromandel is as delicious as this, because Coromandel itself is so beautiful. I’ve been back twice to the shop and bought almost all the stock, and I’m taking some to lunch with friends tomorrow. What a delight simple food pleasures can be.

I went mad this January. Usually the most I attempt in the marmalade field is half a case of organic Seville oranges, which is about 5kg or so. In the recent past I’ve shared a case with a friend who also makes it, but Mary was away this year, and anyway she’s still got some Sevilles in her freezer, so I slightly lost the do-able plot and decided to get what I thought was three quarters of a case all to myself.

But then I really stopped paying attention to reality and managed to order and buy FIFTEEN KILOS of Seville oranges slightly by mistake, and suddenly it all became a rather more serious enterprise than I had bargained for. Fifteen kilos of oranges takes up a lot of room, which we do not have, and our flat is not only small but also very warm (incredible insulation, thank you properly-fitting windows) so I had to use the oranges quickly before they went off. (That’s the downside of organic ones: they don’t last long.)

I’d collected lots of jars during the year, but even so I didn’t have enough of them – not even enough for 10kg of marmalade. What was I thinking? And once I’d decided to grit my teeth and go for it, I also had to trudge off on very many sugar-buying trips. I use as little sugar as possible when I make marmalade because I like it tart and tangy, but even so, to get the stuff to set I’ve found that you have to use at least 750 – 800g of sugar for every 500g of oranges: 900g is safer, but not quite so delicious.

Anyway. I made two helpful decisions to start with: I immediately washed 3kg of oranges and put them in the freezer, and then we drove to Lakeland and bought 24 extra one pound jars. Then Bruce offered to help with all the chopping, which was great because after three batches I started getting bored with that part – or maybe just anxious about how many more times I’d have to do it. And now we’ve finished! All the jars are done and dusted: filled, set to perfection, admired, labelled, and stored away. I don’t think I’ll ever make so much again at one time, but then again, I still have those frozen ones waiting for me…

Most of the batches are straightforward plain marmalade (see the recipe below which is twice as easy as, and much faster than, most of the other recipes I’ve seen around). I also made one batch of ginger marmalade (love or hate – it’s like Marmite) and tried twice to make cardamom-flavoured batches as well. Neither of these turned out as well as the one that had inspired me – Arabica’s ‘Orange and Cardamom marmalade’, which is simply sensational. I couldn’t find a recipe for that, so first of all I tried just adding cardamom pods to the water – a handful of pods when I cooked the oranges, and then a fresh handful of pods at the chopped oranges-and-sugar stage. (I also added a fresh pod to each jar, because there’s at least one in each Arabica jar.) But there’s almost no cardamom flavour at all in my finished product: great marmalade taste, but no spiciness.

So I went back online, and talked to a marmalade-making friend, and with the next batch I crushed up the seeds of about 15 cardamom pods and added those with the sugar (I make 1.5 kg of oranges at a time, which is all that fits comfortable into my preserving pan.). Result: a faint trace of cardamom, but still nothing like the rich but subtle flavour of Arabica’s product.

If anyone has any good suggestions to offer please let me know: those frozen oranges are just longing to be turned into something wonderful. And in the meantime here’s my marmalade recipe, found years ago in the ‘Melbourne Age’ and never bettered. Just don’t go as crazy as I did with the quantities!

GEORGINA WILSON’S MELBOURNE AGE MARMALADE

450g Seville oranges
1120 ml water
900g sugar
(And I always add a lemon to help the pectin along)

Wash the oranges and put them in a preserving pan with the water. Simmer slowly for about an hour and a half, or until a skewer easily pierces the skin. Keep the remaining water and cool the oranges enough to handle them. (I do this part of the recipe last thing so the oranges cool overnight in the pan, and then make the marmalade the next day.)

Cut the oranges into small thick strips (I used to do this by hand: not any more, I confess, although Bruce still does this bit by hand when he’s the co-cook) retaining all the pulp and juice, but extracting the pips. Put the pips in a little saucepan, cover them with water, and boil steadily for at least 10 minutes to extract the pectin, which forms a sticky scum on top. Add the pectin water to the preserving pan and repeat if necessary. (I never throw the pips away until the marmalade has set, just in case…)

Add the chopped peel, pulp and juice to the preserving pan, and bring the mixture to a boil. Then tip in the sugar (you’re supposed to warm the sugar but I never bother) reduce the heat and stir until the sugar has dissolved, then bring back up to a brisk boil.

Boil rapidly until the marmalade reached setting point (I assume you know how to test for that). It can take only 15 minutes but usually it takes mine about 40 minutes.

Leave it to settle for 5-10 minutes and then pour/spoon into sterilised jars and cool before sealing.

You’ll need to refrigerate it after you open it because it’s got such a small quantity of sugar. I usually reduce it further to 800g, rather than the 900g the original recipe specifies.

Happy marmalade making!

I haven’t blogged much recently although I have every good intention about keeping it up – I like having a blog and I enjoy writing it when I actually get to it. But life and work got in the way quite a bit after I returned from New Zealand, and in any case I tend to find London life both hectic and stressful. So when I’m in London I get to a stage where I only think about what I want to say in a blog when I can’t sleep, and then when I’m awake the next day picks me up again and throws me into a new set of demands and I forget about it all again, until the next time I can’t sleep…

But right now I’m sleeping like a baby: indeed sleeping better than most of the babies I’ve ever known. I’m also dreaming a lot –elaborate story dreams that perplex me for hours after I wake, wondering what on earth that one was about (a very detailed dream about being in prison in Zimbabwe is just one example).

One good reason for presently sleeping well is that I’m on holiday in my favourite place in the world: Italy. We’re in an apartment on a little organic farm in the Umbrian hills, north of Orvieto, where we first came two years ago and had such a glorious time that we’re back again. It’s just as wonderful this time. The air is clear and scented with thyme and rosemary, the sun is shining, the swallows are swooping, the olive and fig trees are burgeoning, the pool is beckoning: happy happy days. It’s so easy to have delicious meals: tomatoes and basil warm from the garden, good bread baked in a wood oven, local cheese, and melons, figs and peaches out of a foodie’s dream…

I’m writing every morning, and in the afternoons we think about going to look at something wonderful. We don’t always go, though. Sometimes we just read, or pick more figs, or swim, or walk to an abandoned house nearby that we fantasize about buying.

Just look at these figs and you’ll probably understand why they are worth a journey all on their own.

And here they are – the very first potatoes we’ve ever planted ourselves. It’s delightful to see them and also a considerable relief, because I thought that there wouldn’t be anything there when we dug the plants up. That’s not only because in times of trial I tend to fear the worst (Chicken Little is my alter ego); it’s also because the plants started off well, but then something ate the leaves to shreds in a sort of broderie anglais pattern. And although the books said that didn’t matter, you have to wonder – how could it not matter? And then all the plants died back without having flowered and I worried all over again; I didn’t even want to dig up one of them last weekend and learn what had happened, because I’d be miserable when I discovered disaster.

And there wasn’t a disaster after all! We’ve only dug up one plant so far but look! Three lovely ones, plus two tinies we’ve put on the compost heap and another big one that the slugs got to before we did.

Potato salad, here we come.

Five potato, six potato, seven potato more …