Fraser - Italian Kitchen Garden : Enjoy the flavours of Italy from your garden

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	@PavilionFood1
	www.pavilionbooks.com

First published in the United Kingdon in 2011 by Pavilion
1 Gower Street
London
WC1E 6HD

An imprint of Pavilion Books Company Limited
www.pavilionbooks.com
Twitter: @PavilionFood1

Design and layout Pavilion, 2011
Text Sarah Fraser

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

Associate Publisher: Nina Sharman
Editors: Katie Deane, Helen Griffin and Barbara Dixon
Concept and jacket design by Georgina Hewitt
Layout: Rosamund Saunders
Digital Editor: Giney Sapera

Photography: Ian Nolan
Recipe photography: Yuki Sugiura
See picture credits for other photographs

First published as eBook in 2014
eBook ISBN 978-1-909815-68-1

Also available as Hardback
ISBN 978-1-86205-910-8

This book can be ordered direct from the publisher at
www.pavilionbooks.com, or try your local bookshop.

Italian food is considered to be among the best in the world. The reasons are simple: the food tastes wonderful, is healthy and easy to prepare. The best Italian food has a simplicity to it that leaves everyone yearning to reproduce that flavour at home.

So, what is the secret to great Italian food? Ask any Italian, from a qualified chef to the gnarled old contadini (peasant farmer) you still see in their vegetable plots today, and the answer is always the same: the best ingredients make the best food. You cannot compromise on ingredients, and any Italian will agree the best of the best is what you grow at home.

But is it possible to grow super tomatoes and awesome-tasting auber-gines outside the Mediterranean region? Absolutely. Growing Italian varieties of vegetables isnt mysterious at all. You simply need to understand that they are used to more sun and less harsh wind than in northern climes. In every other respect they are like all plants.

However, there are a few tricks that will help your growing vegetables think they are in sunny Italy and you need to understand and give each plant what it wants and needs. But, if you choose the right varieties and employ common sense, you will soon be well on your way to cooking with the best home-grown Italian ingredients. Ingredients that would pass muster in any Italian kitchen and will help you cook up that authentic Italian flavour in every meal.

Contadini are a dying race. In Italy it is viewed as very backwards to get your hands dirty; most young people aspire to living in a town apartment and never having to toil on the land like their nonni (grandparents) did. However, many nonni still do work a family vegetable plot, providing fresh produce for the whole family on a surprisingly small patch of land that has probably been in their family for generations.

When my family moved to Italy seven years ago the motive was to find a better lifestyle. In the UK we were a busy, two-income household. We were so preoccupied with aspiring that we didnt realize we were falling apart. Life had become empty and meaningless. We worked, we played childcare tag, we dreamed of upgrading the car and the house and forgot that we had souls that needed nourishing too. Slowly it became clear that we were unfulfilled. But what to do about it? This was when fate made a grand appearance in our lives and dangled the juicy carrot of Casa del Sole under our noses. We were trawling the internet for a holiday house to rent for a week when we came across the farm for sale. Just like thousands of other people do, we played a fantasy game of what if?. Should we stay in the rat race and follow our path with noses to the grindstone? Or should we break out of the box and try something new? We chose the new life; not because we are brave but because we needed a change and an adventure was calling to us. Casa del Sole was an idyllic, if decrepit, farmhouse in the Tuscan hills. Gardens, fruit trees, olive trees and woodland all combined to weave a dream of country living. I had big ideas about self-sufficiency (fuelled by the fact that we didnt have any money to live any other way) but little knowledge of the skills needed to exist off the land.

I was lucky when I started my kitchen garden because our neighbours not only were friendly and helpful with all things to do with gardening, from giving me seedlings to telling me where to buy the best implements, but their grandfather had owned our house and the next two generations had been born and raised in it. This meant that they were the ideal people to ask about siting for new garden plots and what grew best where.

One of the key objectives of our new lifestyle was to produce as much of our own food as possible. I quickly learned that I would rather be vegetarian than eat my darling chickens. From that moment of realization that I could no more eat my pet goose than eat one of the kids, I threw myself into making the best kitchen garden possible on our plot it was the only way we were going to get a good meal!

I come from a family of gardeners. And being from Yorkshire, they were a little obsessed with getting owt for nowt so grew vegetables rather than flowers. Some of my earliest memories are of the awe-inspiring mystery surrounding planting seeds in the ground and watching the green sprouts emerge and turn slowly into something that would end up on my plate. From then on I was hooked. Whenever we moved house as a family the first job was to dig a vegetable patch (and make sure it was bigger than the neighbours). Imagine my horror when I married my husband, who only had a concrete back yard of 55m (1616ft). Within the week I had a cascade planter of strawberries, a dwarf apple tree with carrots seeded under it, a barrel of potatoes and countless pots of herbs. But Im no trained gardener, and moving to a completely different climate meant my learning curve was steep. Yet my early experience has lent me an appreciation of how to explain gardening in simple and practical terms. Every year I learn so much and enjoy my garden to such an extent that I have become evangelical about gardening. I want everyone to have a go at it and experience how much their lives can be improved by taking care of a simple vegetable plot.