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“What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wildness yet.”
The Harvest, 4 October 2024
This year with the hot, dry weather the olives matured earlier and faster than usual.
Even in the last week of September / first days of October the majority had turned dark instead of the bright green / just turning darker point that they usually have at this time of year.
Here in Noto people usually begin to harvest early because they prefer the taste of the oil to be green and peppery.
Because of the weather the harvest is very small this year: neighbours with over 2000 trees have produced enough oil only for their immediate family: yields have gone from over 1000 litres to less than 60, and this holds true for so many people I have spoken to in our region.
Climate change has a direct effect on peoples' daily lives and their ability to make a living from the land which they have nourished for generations.
Let's hope that next year will be better.
October 2024
Thinking about those dishes which in a sense are more of an emotion than something you actually ‘serve’.
For me there are more than I dare to count, and they will depend on where I am (Noto or Amsterdam), how many I have to cook for, how much time there is, and of course my mood and energy at any given moment.
One thing that I come back to time and time again is mussels. Since discovering southern Italian cooking more than twenty years ago while staying in Panarea with a Neopolitan friend, mussels have slowly worked their way into being a staple on my emotional food shelf.
Here they are as I cooked them last week, sautéed into a basic soffrito bed of onion, carrot, celery, black pepper and white wine, with some summer-made tomato ‘concentrata’ melted into it as well.
It is so simple, so well balanced and well - so meaty - that once you have tasted it I think it’s hard to go back.
Lunch is eaten as group, sitting on the ground under or close to the trees. Afterwards we gather the brightly coloured crates as they were left scattered in the vicinity of each tree across the land. Slowly they are loaded up onto the tractor and we follow it up and out of the valley. It's a procession, following the chosen green god of that day.
The Harvest: 3 October 2024
Let's not romanticize it, harvest is hard graft!
In Sicily it means waking at 05.30 to start work at
6.00... your day ends at 12.00 because by then it is already too hot to work and you are dripping in sweat. The mosquitoes are biting.
You work with the bamboo sticks high above your hard to tap down the olives for hours at a time. I can do it for 10-15 minute intervals and I am spent, l'm embarrassed to admit.
The spoken language spoken is usually Sicilian, though when I am there they speak in Italian out of politeness. I feel awkward that my Italian is not perfect and my Sicilian trails far behind. But I love to hear the men singing and talking as they work: discussing the rain (or lack of it), the wheat or lemon harvest and who did well, the cost of feeding the sheep until the time that the rain falls and the grass springs forth once more for winter; what they ate the previous evening and whose turn it is to marry next.
Summer 2025
“Silence is the poetics of space. It isn’t the absence of something but the presence of everything, what it means to be in a place: a whole topography of the surrounding landscape is revealed.
When I speak of silence I mean silence from the noise pollution of modern life, sounds that have nothing to do with the natural acoustic system.
Silence is the presence of time, undisturbed: silence is on the verge of extinction.”
Acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton speaking for the amazing @emergencemagazine podcast.
June 2024
Cooking - especially for my family and the people I love most - is a sharing activity that brings me enormous joy.
The one thing that I know I can always believe in and always rely on is my source of olive oil, which sits at the heart of almost every dish I make.
I watch our olive trees throughout the year as they grow, as they change colour with each season, as they are visibly tired towards the end of the hot months and then pick up after a good pruning and cleaning and of course the winter rains.
The trees feel like friends partaking in a wider kind of sharing: we give to them and we care for them and in turn they give us their fruits which nurture our body and mind and protect us from disease.
By bringing our olive oil to the table and giving it to those who are important to me, I can include them in this cycle and know they are being looked after a little better.
June 2024
In early spring the view from the kitchen is like this.
May 2024
A nourished landscape is one which creates life and does not destroy it.
In Sicily the care and understanding of trees is a knowledge passed down through the generations. The same family will care for the same trees over the course of a century or longer and they are very aware of the fact that their traditional ways of working support ecological balance, rural employment, a sense of pride and identity.
This approach to work and place not only keeps us healthy and our lives longer, it also produces some of the best olive oil in Europe.
April 2024
When walking amongst our olive trees and thinking about their age and wondering how things were when these trees were young, we often start to think more about time, and how so much and so little can change.
Olive oil is to a large extent a reminder of this: these very trees have been around for so long and for so long have shared their existence with the humans that have cared for them, cleaned them, pruned them and lived from their precious fruits.
When you live so close to a city such as Siracusa, you might consider time through the lens of the history of that place and the people that have lived there:
For instance, did you know that Plato travelled three times to Siracusa in his life, with each visit ending in a near fateful disaster?
In 388 BCE, aged almost 40, he arrived in Siracusa for the first time. Plato considered ancient Sicily the best setting for his idealized Utopia and it was in Siracusa that he decided to test his theory that if kings could be made into philosophers – or philosophers into kings – then justice and happiness could flourish at last.
Today Siracusa - and especially its small island of Ortigia - is a quiet and extremely beautiful town without the debauchery, hedonism and violence for which it was famous in those years.
It’s beauty might not turn us into kings, but I am sure that many of us has been tempted to feel a little more philosophical in the light of its combined beauty, history and culture.
March 2024
From New Year onwards the flowers in Sicily only become more and more present.
You can’t help but feel happy from their sight and scent, even more so when they are joined by the lemon and orange trees.
The flowers reach a peak in April/ May before dying down and going to sleep ahead of the summer heat.
February 2024
Very soon the capers will start flowering and we will be able to pick the little unopened flower bud and store it in a bed of salt for use.
They are the toughest of plants, growing through all untouched and wilder areas of the land, in some cases covering large swathes of a grassy verge or seemingly tumbling through a rocky outcrop.
In summer we use them almost daily, in pasta sauces and salads. We also love to make a fine sauce with them with garlic, olive oil and a little vinegar and eat it like a bruschetta on some old bread.
“A society grows great when its elders plant trees under whose shade they know they will never sit.”
This month we will be undertaking a planting project.
We will plant new olive and carob trees in the area of land furthest away from the house, the most wild.
The new trees will be kept company by the existing wild carobs and olives and also by the sage, myrtle, rosemary, thyme and the beautiful yellow flowers of the helichrysum.
We are in constant awe at how these plants survive in such poor soils, so little soil (the bedrock can be only a few inches below the level of the soil), and without irrigation.
In summer everything hibernates, in winter it come to life, reaching the apex of it’s beauty when it flowers in June, before the hot sun forces the colour and the abundance into retreat.
Carob roots can grow far and deep in their search of water. In contrast the olive roots are less long but the tree is hardier.
Our new trees will receive some water for the first summer or two, but after that they will need to survive alone. Some will not make it of course. But we hope that our children, and certainly our grandchildren, will one day be able to sit underneath them and enjoy their shade and companionship, and of course their olive oil.
January 2024
The start of the year is often the time when we make choices to try to live better for the future. In my case I have to say I have never adhered to this trend as I have a habit of railing against any ‘healthy change’ promises within a day or so of them being made. In order to make something work it needs to be so persuasive and so attractive that it becomes second nature.
This is where olive oil - and its role in Sicilian and Mediterranean food, culture and history - stepped in and become such a source of endless fascination for the brain and the belly.
Sicilian cuisine symbolises the meetings of so many different cultures and identities which have been assimilated into one tiny island over several thousand years of human civilization. It highlights the very best in the resourcefulness and creativity of the human spirit: that means to not only to survive but to thrive against all odds (an island and a people that has been used and abused by everyone that came to rule over it throughout its entire history).
When you visit this island and you eat its food you participate in a creativity that has existed for centuries and one in which the combined knowledge of the whole world is laid out on your plate with no pretension.
Olive oil lies at the center of this, and for this reason, it maintains its place at the heart of my cooking for myself and my family every day without any call for discipline.
December 2023
Family Christmas: a slow start and then a walk, a swim (for the brave) and a lie in the sunshine in the beach.
When we came home I walked through the valley and picked arms of sage, rosemary, purple flowering heather, myrtle, pine and olive sprigs and walked home as darkness fell to arrange them in different rooms in the house
This year our boys have decided that they really love cedro, having being always a little cautious with it in years gone by. Now they pick it from the trees and eat it like an apple. So here it is on last night’s table, soaking up the olive oil like a big sponge and balancing out the meat with its absolute freshness.
Dinner was candlelit and the table decoration was the greens, yellows, oranges and red of all the citrus fruits and their leaves.
