Spring Sprout Salad

This is a refreshing, crunchy salad that goes very well with fatty meats like roast pork or bacon. I like to sprout my own seeds using a sprouting tray but you also buy sprouts from good farmers markets.

Ingredients:
50g dried Chinese shitake mushrooms
150g soy bean sprouts 50g lentil sprouts
50g mixed seed sprouts
100g carrots, shredded
50g Chinese celery, finely sliced
50g banana shallots, finely sliced
a small bunch of coriander, leaves only
half a tablespoon sesame seeds
a tablespoon rice wine vinegar
half a tablespoon lime juice
half a tablespoon lemon juice
half a tablespoon fish sauce
half a tablespoon light soy sauce
a tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
a teaspoon untoasted sesame oil

Put the Chinese mushrooms in a small saucepan and pour over enough boiling water to cover them. If you have one put a small plate on top of the mushrooms to hold them down in the soaking liquid. Leave for 20 minutes, then slice the stalk off from each mushroom and discard. Put the saucepan over a medium flame and bring the mushroom caps and soaking liquid to the boil. Simmer the mushroom caps until they are tender - they should not have any dry parts when sliced in half. Remove the mushroom caps from the simmering liquid and leave to cool in a covered bowl. When cool slice each cap into half cm thick slices.

Rinse out the small saucepan and heat it again over a high flame. Add the soy bean sprouts, stirring constantly for two minutes so they cook but don't brown. Then cover the pan and turn off the heat to allow the sprouts to cook through without losing their crunch. Leave for five minutes.

Set a small frying pan over a low heat and add the sesame seeds. Keep a close eye on them and shake the pan occasionally until the seeds brown lightly and smell lovely.

In a large bowl combine all the sprouts with the sliced mushrooms, carrot shreds, celery, shallots, coriander and sesame seeds. Mix the dressing in a separate bowl, then pour over and toss everything to combine.

Baby leaf salad with tuna dressing and anchovy crumbs

This is a salad for fish lovers, full of flavour from the meaty tuna, briny fish and piquant capers. The saltiness of the anchovies is tempered by a rich, creamy dressing and the breadcrumbs add nutty, garlicky crunch.

Ingredients

140g mesclun or other young salad leaves
3 spring onions or a small shallot
a tablespoon of salted capers
80g best quality tinned tuna in olive oil e.g. Callipo
a clove of garlic juice from half a lemon
3 tablespoons crème fraîche
a table spoon extra virgin olive oil
4 anchovy fillets
2 teaspoons olive oil (use the oil from the anchovy tin if you have it)
2 heaped tablespoons of breadcrumbs or Japanese panko crumbs 
1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper

Wash and spin dry the salad leaves and put them in a large bowl. Finely slice the onions or shallot, rinse and dry the capers and add both to the leaves.

Put the tuna with its oil into a small bowl, crush the garlic and use a fork to mash it into the tuna to make a smooth paste. Mix in the lemon juice, crème fraîche and olive oil and stir to combine.

Place a small pan over a low heat and add the anchovy fillets in their oil. As they heat up they will start to disintegrate into the oil. Add the breadcrumbs and the cayenne pepper and stir with a fork to coat the breadcrumbs in the anchovy oil mixture. Cook until the crumbs are browned and crisp then remove from the heat.

Toss the leaves in the tuna dressing, sprinkle over the breadcrumbs and serve immediately. Possibly with a cold glass of Chablis.

Hot and numbing chicken slices

This recipe is from Fuchsia Dunlop's Sichuan Cookery. It is probably the one dish from all of her books that I have made the most often over the years. It is so easy to make and yields deliciously addictive results every time.

You can use it to spice up shop bought cooked chicken to satisfy a craving, put leftover bits of chicken to exciting new use or throw it together and impress friends, whether they are novices to Sichuan cuisine or not. The dish can be made saltier or sweeter, chilli hot or mild, mouth-numbingly electric or gently tingling.  Served alongside a dish of garlicky smacked cucumbers and salty sour pickles (as pictured above) its a lovely cold starter before a spicy Sichuan feast.

In order to make the ground roasted Sichuan pepper, gently heat Sichuan peppercorns in a dry pan until they start to smoke and smell very fragrant. Be extremely careful not to keep the pan on the heat for much longer or you will burn the delicate spices - you will know this has happened as the ground result will taste bitter and not very nice at all.  I tend to roast and grind small amounts at a time, so it's not too devastating when I do burn my spices and to keep the ground Sichuan pepper powder from becoming stale and tasteless as it loses its flavour over time.

To grind the Sichuan peppers I use a brilliant Braun spice grinder from the Eighties that my mum handed down to me, but a pestle and mortar is just as good. Shake the ground powder through a relatively fine meshed sieve afterwards to get rid of the tougher, woodier bits of the spice and store any unused peppercorn powder in a tightly sealed jar.

The chicken is easier to slice when cold, but I prefer eating the dish at room temperature, or even lightly warmed in an oven on colder days.

Ingredients:
about 350g of cold chicken - a mix of leg and breast meat is ideal
4-6 spring onions, white and light green parts only
4 teaspoons of white sugar
3 tablespoons light soy sauce
3-6 tablespoons of chilli oil with sediment (Lee Kum Kee Chiu Chow Chilli Oil is my favourite)
2 teaspoons of sesame oil
a teaspoon of ground roasted Sichuan pepper

Slice the chicken across the grain of the meat as it will be more tender to eat. So for example with the breast you want to make slices across the breast not down along the length of it. Slice the spring onions thinly but diagonally so that you get relatively large slivers rather than little rounds. These slivers will be more similar to the chicken slices in size, making it easier to pair similar sized pieces of both together when you eat them. Cover the bottom of your serving dish with the spring onions and then add the chicken over the top. At this point I like to either warm the chicken pieces a little or leave them covered for 20 minutes to come up to room temperature before continuing.

In a smaller bowl, add the soy sauce and sugar and stir it will a spoon or a finger until the sugar dissolves. Add the chilli and sesame oils, stir again and taste the result. Adjust the seasoning if you prefer more salt, sweet or chilli.

When you are happy with the dressing, pour it over the chicken and toss everything together. Sprinkle over the Sichuan pepper and serve immediately.

Wood ear, jellyfish and prosciutto salad

My wonderful Mum sent me a care package from Hong Kong last week of dried wood ear mushrooms. You can actually buy these in most Chinese supermarkets but the ones she found have been ingeniously ‘shrunk-dried’ into tiny packages the size of a matchbox. Add hot water and hey presto, enough lovely mushrooms for two portions of the salad pictured above explodes out of seemingly nowhere!

It reminds me of those magic towels I was given as a child, where a compressed capsule the size of a ping pong ball would unfurl into a generously proportioned beach towel with a little watery encouragement. It was the same principle, though the results were not quite as delicious.

This exciting gift dovetailed with my discovery of jellyfish that is packed in whole unsliced pieces and preserved in brine. Having found other pre-packaged varieties of jellyfish rather disappointing (the jellyfish strands lacked texture and were accompanied by the chemically taste of artificial preservatives) this was a real find. Once opened, the jellyfish requires a good soaking in clean water for 3-5 hours, but the results are the best I have found so far in London.
The salad below is a celebration of all things crunchy, bouncy, crisp and clean, with a little ham to add a savoury undertone. In Hong Kong I would use wafer thin slices of Yunnan ham, but Italian prosciutto works well too.

Ingredients:
about 250g wood ear mushrooms, rehydrated in hot water, then strained
half this amount of jellyfish, sliced into strips about half a cm thick
a stick of celery from near the heart (not the tough outer bits) sliced as thinly as you can into strips the same size as the jellyfish
a tablespoon of light soy sauce
a teaspoon of sesame oil
two tablespoons of rice vinegar

two thin slices of prosciutto, sliced into the same small slivers
toasted white and black sesame seeds

sea salt

Give the wood ear mushrooms a good shake to remove any excess water, or dab lightly with kitchen roll. Slice the mushrooms roughly into easy to eat strips. Toss all the ingredients together except for sesame seeds, ham and salt, then cover and leave to chill in the fridge for a few hours at least.

When the salad is cool and crunchy, toss in the prosciutto and sesame seeds and check that the seasoning is to your liking. I usually add a sprinkling of salt to lift the flavours without overpowering them with too much soy sauce. The finished salad should be lightly sour, quietly nutty, and above all full of lively, tasty textures. Devour with forks, chopsticks or whatever comes to hand.

Marinated cucumbers

I’m back in Tuscany, celebrating a glut of cucumbers and getting reacquainted with flavours that took a backseat during the winter months. Eating here feels like emerging from some kind of taste-hibernation, remembering forgotten pleasures and rediscovering dishes as though meeting old friends. None of the artisan tomatoes from farmers markets in the height of summer in London tasted as richly delicious as the sun drenched examples from Sibilla’s garden. We feast on them every morning, sprinkled with a little red wine vinegar, torn basil and a splash of fruity olive oil. Yesterday there was creamy sheep’s milk ricotta from the dairy to go with our tomatoes. Sitting in the sunshine listening to cicadas I wondered why anyone would ever want to eat anything else.

We used home-grown Italian cucumbers with quite a tough, thick skin and spiky nubbins, so peeling is essential, however if you might decide not to peel yours if their skin is thinner.

Serves four as part of a summer's lunch

3 cucumbers, peeled and sliced into rounds about as thick as a pound coin (roughly half a cm)
One medium sized white onion, peeled and sliced into rings as thick as the cucumber
A generous teaspoon of sea salt
Half a teaspoon of sugar
A small clove of garlic, crushed
Good quality white wine vinegar
Fresh basil and mint
Extra virgin olive oil

Black pepper

Combine the cucumbers and onion rings in a bowl large enough to let you toss and mix around your ingredients. Add the salt and sugar and mix everything up. Taste a piece of cucumber – it should taste a tiny bit too salty. If not add a bit more salt. Add the garlic, toss again, then pour over enough white wine vinegar to just about cover the cucumber. The salt will draw moisture out of the cucumbers and together with the vinegar this will be your marinade.

Cover the bowl with cling film and leave it in the fridge overnight.

The next day, just before you serve the dish, tear up a small handful of basil and mint leaves and scatter them over. Add a good splash of olive oil, grind over some black pepper and give the whole thing one last toss.

The cucumbers are lovely and refreshing eaten on their own, perhaps with a slice of cold roast pork and chilled glass of white wine. Or add them to chopped up tomatoes, and throw in some cubes of dry, stale bread for a more substantial panzanella-style salad.

Honeycomb tripe salad

I know that for most people, tripe is one of their least favourite foods, to put it mildly. It's associated with memories of gigantic pots of boiling stinkiness, force feeding in childhood, and acts of human unkindness. But I love it.

Maybe it's due to my Chinese upbringing and the constant encouragement to try suspicious looking foods, or just that the Cantonese cook tripe with such savoury, piquant sauces you'd be a lunatic not to like it. Nevertheless despite my fondness, until now I had only encoutered tripe hot, either 'a la fiorentina' (submerged in a sweet, smooth tomato sauce) or in dim sum. Cold tripe was a revelation.

We bought our tripe from an incredible stall in Florence's Mercato Centrale, called Nuova Tripperia Fiorentina. It specialises in all things cooked cow offal. It may not be everyone's cup of tea, but Sibilla and I thought we had found a small stall from heaven. Along with several different types of tripe, you can buy cooked trotters, snout, udder and uterus to name a few.

Feeling brave we bought a slice of udder (called poppa in Italian), procrastinated over cooking it, and finally seared it on a high heat with a dusting of seasoned flour. Sprinkled with lemon juice it was delicious, almost cheesy tasting. I know that sounds deeply wierd, but really it was delicious!

Serves two for lunch or four as part of lunch

300g cooked tripe, the one with a honeycomb texture works best, but any will do
Three large tomatoes, coursely chopped
Two sticks of celery, thinly sliced
Half a red onion, finely chopped
Juice and zest of a lemon
Half a tablespoon of red wine vinegar
Olive oil
Salt and pepper
A good handful of parsley, mint, or both

Slice the tripe into thin, bite sized strips. Add the tomatoes, celery and onion, then season well and toss together with the lemon, vinegar and olive oil. This salad is best eaten cold so leave it to marinate in the fridge for a few hours.

Just before you serve, roughly chop the parsley and mint, scatter over and toss again. The tripe should have a cool, crunchy texture, which is lovely soaked in its earthy, lemony sauce and given sparkle by brightly flavoured herbs.

Here's a picture of some tripe from Nuova Tripperia. As soon as I can persuade Sibilla to translate the Italian, or sit down with my Italian-English dictionary, I'm going to try the recipes on the website.

Courgette and mint ceviche

Again this is best with small, sweet courgettes rather than the larger fatter ones that tend towards becoming marrow.

Serves four to six as part of a lunch spread

4 young courgettes
half a red onion, peeled and finely sliced
juice of a lemon
a good handful of mint leaves
a pinch of chilli flakes, crushed as finely as possible with your fingers or a mortar and pestle
olive oil
salt and pepper

Finely slice the courgette into paper thin rounds, or shave with a mandolin. Season with the crumbled chilli flakes, salt and pepper and toss with the red onion, lemon juice and a generous coating of olive oil.

This salad is even better if you have time to leave it for an hour or so to marinade. The acid from the lemon softens the courgette and onion, giving the salad an almost lightly cooked texture.

When you are ready to serve, layer the mint leaves one on top of another, roll them up into a sausage shape and slice into thin shreds, then scatter over the salad.

Baby broad bean Niçoise

This salad is best with young broad beans that taste sweet when shelled and eaten raw. You could use larger broad beans, but it would be a good idea to remove their bitter outer casings first.

We made this with gorgeous eggs with deep yellow yolks from Marcello's chickens and served the chopped tomatoes separately as one of the group was not a fan.

Serves four as lunch or six as part of a bigger spread

Around 800g to 1 kg of shelled baby broad beans
Half a tin of pitted black olives
One tin of best quality tuna in oil, flaked
Ripe tomatoes, coarsely chopped
3 hard boiled eggs, quartered
Juice of one lemon
Olive oil
Salt and pepper

Combine the beans, olives, tuna and tomatoes in a large bowl, squeeze over the lemon juice, season liberally and toss together with a generous glug of olive oil. Taste and adjust the seasonings, then scatter over the eggs when you're done.

Marinella's octopus salad

Marinella lives in Sardinia. She comes to Corzano e Paterno every spring to help with the holiday cottages on the farm and your stay is not complete without her octopus salad.

An octopus is a terrifying thing to behold in the raw flesh.

If your octopus is fresh it should be frozen first to tenderise the meat. Put it in the freezer the day before, then leave it in the fridge overnight to thaw. Some fishmongers sell frozen or thawed octopus which is cheaper and a little less work.

The recipe below will serve four as a main course with crusty bread to soak up the juices, or up to eight as a starter.

1kg octopus, frozen then thawed
plenty of salt
a fat clove of garlic, crushed
a handful of parlsey leaves, roughly chopped
juice of half a lemon
1 1/2 tbsp red wine vinegar
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
75g pitted black olives
3-4 tender stalks of celery, depending on their size
4 medium tomatoes
salt and papper

Fill a large pan with water and bring it to the boil. Salt it heavily so it tastes like seawater, then add the octopus, cover and simmer for 40 minutes.

Remove the octopus and allow it to cool enough to handle. Cut the whole thing into large chunks the size of a good mouthful. You can use every part except the tough beak. Dress the octupus while it's still warm with the garlic, parsley, lemon juice, vinegar and olive oil. Leave aside to marinate.





While the octopus cools, put the black olives into a new bowl. Cut the celery into pieces roughly the same size as the olives. Slice the tomatoes in half, use a teaspoon to scoop out the seeds, then chop them into pieces a similar size to the celery. Add everything to the bowl with olives and toss together with salt and pepper.

When the octopus is cool add the vegetables, not before as they will cook and become mushy. Mix everything together one last time and you're done.



The Corzano e Paterno villas are available all summer long, if you're interested take a look at www.corzanoepaterno.it.

While you're here you can visit the dairy, eat unimaginable amounts of the cheese they produce and taste their delicious wine. If you mention my name when booking I might get brownie points (hmmm... and maybe some cheese?) from the Gelpke family.

Our favourite picture of the trip is of Rupert, who was very fond of the octopus.