Food and Friends

This last week has been overflowing with food, friends and quite alot of Rugby.  We have enjoyed lunch with friends in a crazy restaurant in th middle of nowhere, beautiful crountryside, waiters running from table to table and really lovely homely food in what looks like a workingmen's social club!!   I've been experimenting with more seasonal Tuscan recipes and have decided to stick to the vegetarian variety mostly as I feel healthier by far on a meat and dairy free diet.  Today found a totally gluten free shop in Poggibonsi - nirvana for me, fresh pasta stuffed with ricotta and spinich, cenci, fritelle, panatone, biscotti and grissini all gluten free - Hurray!!!

Spent this weekend indulging the boys watching Rugby both on TV and in Prato near Firenze, my boy is loving meeting proper professsional Rugby players - thank you to all those lovely big chaps for being so encouraging and patient with an obsessed 10 yr old.

Today took sneaky trip to plant shop whilst waiting for school to finish, returned home with Raspberry plant, Climbing Rose and Chicory & Bietola seeds - I love spring and welcome this week's spring equinox - bring it on!

Crostini - Yum

This is great, the kids love and makes a simple lunch with a few salad leaves.  We had this today.  I made it yesterday for the very first time, it was a miracle, it worked, it tasted scrummy and was craziliy cheap.


200 g (7 oz) chicken livers and hearts (the hearts are optional)
2 small onions
30 g/1 oz. butter
2 tsp capers, soaked, drained and chopped
1 bay leaf
5 or 6 sage leaves
1 glass dry vin santo (or sherry)
Warm vegetable stock


Chop the onion finely and sauté in the butter with the bay leaf and sage until soft.


Clean the chicken livers and hearts of fat and gristle. Add add to the pan with a few grinds of pepper but no salt.
Cook for a further 5-8 minutes, until browned. Add the vin santo and evaporate off.
Cook for a further 6 minutes, gradually adding a little vegetable stock to keep it moist.
Whizz in blender for a 30 seconds until nearly smooth.

Cut small rounds of baguette or Long thin loaves and grill on each side to brown, then smother with the pate - to be posh place a caper in the middle of each peice of pate topped toast.  Cool xThis paté improves if you make it the day before.  This is very Tuscan a real local dish, enjoy,

Thanks to Shilpa at www.organictuscany.org for the inspiration and the image.

Carnivale 2011 - festivale a San Gimignano

Last week was all about Carnevale, costumes, cenci, prosecco and confetti,

Devon to Venice in pictures

hospitals, Doctors, Olive Oil and friends

Ahhhhhh.  Finally back home after 5 nights in Siena hospitak with my boy.  Ashtma related bronchial pneumonia crept up on us and stole a week of our lives.  Thankyou to all my lovely friends and family for their help, and mostly I must thank the dr's for spotting this when I didn't. I have totally realigned my priorities this last week and the time spent watching the boy on oxygen and attached to tubes has allowed me to clearly think where we need to be and what we need to be doing.  So happy to be home again with my clan x  I love Italy, our hospital meals came with olive oil and parmesan as standard, nothing gets in the way of good wating here.

Blighty part 2

Well I promised myself I would record our travels but had no idea it would take me this long to actually do it.  Once we had made it through the snow and ice to Somerset we then had to set off early from GG's to Devon for work meetings.  The country lanes were hideous and I had forgotton how scary the high hedges can be, as I am uses to Italian roads now (fast, windy, high).  Having got the work stuff done, we headed for the coast to see my other Grandma, the kids had a rare treat - fish and chips and we spent the afternoon with family, which always makes me feel sad when I go as I wonder if Nanny will be around when I next get to the UK.  The following few days were spent in a whirlwind of travel, friends and family, birthday parties, drunken evenings, beautiful countryside, sea views, fabulous food, the zoo, christmas shopping, nativity scenes and finally the last leg of our journey to venice.  I can't describe how wonderfully welcome our friends made us feel, feeding us up, forcing us to drink heaps of wine, and generally keeping us warm in the freezing depths of the West Country.  Thanks to all, we miss you all lots and hope to see you here in Tuscany soon x

Winter travels

Last month we took a crazy family trip to blighty to visit friends and family, I also squeezed in 4 meetings and some Christmas shopping, and to finish off we crammed in an overnight stop in Venice - phew!!!!

I have decided to split our adventures up into small bite size pieces rather than overwhelm this blog with too much blurb and endless snapshots.

So to kick-off the story of our little holiday, firstly we had to organise a house-sitter to look after our ancient buck-tooth lurcher Leo and our two teenage kittens Romulus and Remus, thankfully we have a wonderful friend who was able to simply take our place for 8 days and I have to say that I think the animals were delighted and totally spoilt. The forecasts for the UK were hideous and we really didn't think we would make it at all as we watched all the airports close and rail networks grind to a halt, but somehow we did manage to make it to London, to the only airstrip that was open on a very snowy and very cold Thursday morning. The idea of this trip was for our kids to see more of the UK as they had never visited the capital or travelled much before we moved to Italy. So we made it to London and managed to take in the following sights: The London Eye, Big Ben, Houses of Parliament, Lots of snow and ice, Christmas lights, Harrods, Kings Road, Westminster Abbey, Eros, Tower of London, The Thames, Speedboats, Open top buses in the snow, Black Cabs - and many more lovely things all from our cosy if somewhat packed bus!!!!

After our mad trip into London, the kids and Gary went to The Natural History Museum which was wonderful and I met them there later (bad mummy working). My mobile broke and I couldn't contact my client to say I was late (not great) and I couldn't contact DH to arrange to meet, all in all I was very stressed charging across London in the snow, heart racing, dry mouthed and heavy hearted wishing I was with my clan. Eventually we managed to find each other under a huge dinosaur skeleton and I slowly calmed down and managed to enjoy some time with my tribe. TT loved the moving dinosaur and Archie kind of just put up with her crazy unflinching enthusiasm. The boy was pretty overwhelmed by London, the tubes, the traffic and the amount of people - he is sensitive and I knew this might prove a challenge, TT however wasn't phased, just became more stubborn.

After a long, long day in London which was stunning, all the historical buildings frosted with snow we hopped on a coach (thank god I booked a coach as the trains were all cancelled) and watched the snow get heavier and heavier as we trundled slowly but surely to the West Country.

We eventually got to Great Grandma's late at night and enjoyed shop bought salad and roast chicken with big glasses of wine. Memories of my night at GG's will be: Tea and Biscuits, The Radio Times, Itchy Wool blankets, Ice, Frost, Children’s TV, Archie's Asthma kicking in, time well spent with my 85 year old Grandma. A good start to our English escapades.