Scotch eggs and Italian wines

Monday morning started with a clean of the apartment having decided to avoid the job Sunday in favour of getting some work done outside together.

Helen exercised as usual and headed into the office while I took Reggie out for a walk before grabbing the box of cleaning supplies and heading downstairs for the morning.

Early morning as the sun rises to warm the terraces

Hugh and Donna were due to arrive around lunchtime having made better than expected progress on their drive over from Wales over the weekend, and as such had spent the night in Marina di Carrara, about an hour and a half away. That meant there could be no hanging around with the apartment turnaround and having our trusty checklist made it easy for me to get through the jobs without missing anything - and so I even had time just before they arrived to cut some wild flowers to welcome them.

Weeds or flowers?

Hugh and Donna arrived on the dot of 13:00, as they had estimated they would, and it was nice to welcome them under glorious sunny skies and to see them again - it had been a number of years since we last met at Le Manoir restaurant as guests of my old friend Chris Perkins.

We had a lot to catch up on, and Donna having read the entirety of our blog was thrilled to actually be here and had a head full of questions. As such it was two o'clock before we paused to unload their car.

I suggested that we should maybe all pop out for a workers' lunch somewhere as, having arrived in their Audi TT, they hadn't had space to bring anything in the way of food items. So, after making a couple of calls and finding somewhere that was still happy to do some food for us as late as 14:30, we bundled into our car and headed up the valley to Macchino.

We enjoyed a 'light' and lazy 'lunch' of antipasti and a pasta course, finally leaving the restaurant not long before 17:00! What happened to the afternoon?

On Tuesday morning I headed off up to Vellano to do a bit of deck staining with David in the 26 degree heat of the Tuscan sun - I was fortunate to at least have a roof over my head to shade me for the most part.

Post work beer with David on his terrace.

After lunch and a trip into Pescia with Hugh, Donna and Helen to do some food shopping, I spent the afternoon in the veg garden hoeing and weeding all of the beds and laying out the first of the drip hoses onto the squash bed.

I arrived eventually at the lettuce bed to find we had lost another three to whatever varmint is tunnelling around beneath the surface and munching on the roots from below - they, or it, had even demolished half a dozen beetroots further along the bed and a cornflower and celeriac in the adjacent beds, it's starting to feel a little ominous in this part of the veg garden now as we have no effective way of dealing with a family of critters.

Tell-tale hole bottom centre.

Lettuce without roots in the centre.

Happy cabbages and mustard lettuce.

On Tuesday evening we invited Hugh and Donna up for pre-dinner drinks under the pergola, which then turned into a plate of pasta to follow once the sun had gone down, cooked by Helen and Donna while Hugh and I chewed the fat at the table over a glass of wine.

A lovely evening was had by all and we retired to bed before midnight feeling sated, Hugh being particularly impressed with the pasta dish served up for dinner.

On Wednesday I was up early enough to harvest the lettuce and chard before it got warm as we were keen to bag up the harvest in prime condition today to give it a good shelf life of a week in the new ziplock bags we ordered and received last week.

5th and biggest harvest to date.

After the harvest it was time for our group lesson with Johnny, but without Sarah this week who is back in the UK for a few weeks doing some work.

After a fun lesson learning some local slang and swear words, Johnny left with a sample bag of our salad and headed up the valley to Castelvecchio to Paul and Kathy's, giving me enough time to weigh and bag the produce before lunch - a mundane task I'm sure once you've done any amount of it, but it being the first time was an enjoyable half hour which made me somehow feel like the real deal - although I know the real deal is someway off yet it was a nice little step in the right direction.

Bagged and ready for sale... we hope!

Wednesday afternoon was pretty much spent dealing with my thyroid, in that I had an appointment with an endocrinologist in Pescia.

Having had a tough couple of weeks lately, operating on 60% energy, I went for a blood test last week to check my levels to find out that there had been a significant change in one of the readings. TSH was up by 50%, which was enough for me to increase my own dosage at the weekend, knowing I had an appointment booked a few days later. Sure enough, within 36 hours I felt back to normal and all was well, but this afternoon I had the appointment that had been made for me by Samantha, herself a sufferer with a lazy thyroid who knew all too well why I hadn't been able to do my homework for the last few weeks or even fully participate in recent lessons (even walking out on one lesson in total frustration).

Back in the UK I had never been offered a visit to a thyroid specialist - all the treatment was managed by my GP, and having only developed the problem in the nine months leading up to our move to Italy, I had only just got myself onto the correct dosage of medication (after various blood tests and dosage adjustments) in the weeks before moving here. Anyway, given my recent struggles, the offer of a visit to a specialist, which would involve an ultrasound scan of the thyroid as well as some specialist advice, was too good an opportunity to pass up, and so it was that at 15:15, we found ourselves sitting in a very hot a waiting room with about 6 or 7 other people but no hospital staff - just a huge list of room numbers and timetables, none of which seemed to quite correspond with our appointment details.

We were sure we'd followed the directions correctly to get to this waiting room, after having paid the fee for the appointment to the receptionist in the adjacent building, but as 15:20 (the appointment time) came and went, we started to doubt ourselves. From time to time a nurse or doctor would appear from one of these rooms and call in the next person, but my name wasn't called.

We eventually reached the point at which all of the people who had been in the waiting room when we arrived had been called in to be seen, and left again, so we figured we'd soon see if there was a problem.

Around 16:00 a doctor came out that we'd seen come out once about twenty minutes earlier, but had gone back to her room patientless, before coming out and calling another name. It turned out that the first time she came out it should have been my turn, but as I hadn't made the appointment myself, she didn't have my full details and wasn't sure of my name! She was very apologetic when she realised we had been there the whole time and that she had seen the next patient on the list before us!

So with faith in the health service restored, we went in and had the consultation. The ultrasound scan of my neck confirmed I had a 'lazy' thyroid, but showed no signs of any nodules or other issues, which was good to know. After a discussion of my test results and my dosage history (and after having had to convince her that, no, this wasn't a flare up of tiredness caused by the change in seasons and that, no, this was something more than the tiredness caused by having a physical job), she suggested that I remain for the time being on the higher dosage of tablets and repeat the blood tests in July. She gave me her mobile number so that I can simply call her when I need to.

Wednesday evening Hugh and Donna invited us downstairs to return the offer of pre-dinner drinks, which of course we gladly accepted and we enjoyed a couple of cold glasses of bubbles together before leaving them to their dinner that evening.

Thursday was another morning of wood staining in Vellano before heading home for lunch in yet another glorious day of Italian sunshine.

Nice fresh coat of wood stain.

After lunch I went back to the veg garden to finish the tidying that I had started earlier in the week. We are determined to stay fully on top of the veg garden this year, which does mean I sometimes have to ignore a long list of other jobs, but I'm always pleased when I leave the lower terracing knowing how nice, tidy and weed-free it is down there.

New compost pile nice and hot.

After her stint in the office, Helen went back out on to the terraces to do another few hours of strimming on the upper terracing.

Over the weekend we had, between us, made a huge dent in this month's grass cutting, having done five hours between us, but that still left roughly 3-4 hours to do. We estimate that with the recent winter's clearing we now have 10-12 hours of strimming to cut the entirety of the upper terracing behind the house - a job that needs doing roughly once a every four weeks from April to October, and one that will be much easier now that we can share the burden with two strimmers.

More strimming but almost finished the May strim now. 

Around 5pm, I was invited over to Franco and Mara's to look at and try out the second-hand two-stroke powered winch that Franco was looking to purchase (from a friend) together with us, so once showered, Helen and I hopped into the car and headed across the valley. A trip to their part of the valley is always a good opportunity to see our house and the terracing from a similar level of elevation.

Our house in the empty patch of woodland mid picture.

The two-stroke powered winch. 

We duly inspected the winch and Franco set it up for a demonstration, anchoring it to the tow bar of our car and attaching the cable to the small tractor they currently had on loan from Franco's Dad. After a few false starts due to the cable being a little jammed, the little power tool dragged the tractor back up to the car with relative ease. We were impressed with the winch and said we'd be happy to go ahead with the purchase, although Franco thinks there's still some negotiating to do on the price, as well as insisting on a new cable.

On Friday morning I cleaned up the 750g of beetroots I'd harvested and saved from the jaws of the varmints in the garden and added some to the leftover of yesterday's salad to bulk it up for Friday's lunch, and what a pretty addition! Matchsticks of stripey tondo beetroot.

Beautiful 'Tondo' beetroot

For those of you paying attention, we didn't have our usual lesson with Samantha on Thursday this week, it had been changed to Friday for this week only, so after lunch she arrived, and we went through the usual games with Reggie who barked at her before settling down and taking a few cheesy crisps from her.

Having felt much better since tweaking my dosage, I had even managed to do my homework this week which I had marked before leaving Helen and Samantha to the rest of their lesson.

The gate buzzer rang as Samantha was readying to leave, it was Mario the courier delivering my new safety boots.

I pretty much live in my safety boots here, I have very little cause to wear anything else on my feet these days, and as such they have a hard life. Since being here, I have destroyed the work boots I was using in England, the new pair of work boots that were still in their box from England, two pairs of Italian work boots, and finally the pair that I had on my feet at that point, which after a tough winter on the hill had split open all down the side of the left boot after just 6 months of wear. Helen doesn't put her work boots through quite as much as I do, but similarly, she has managed to get through two pairs here. As such, I have been determined to try and find the very best safety boots I can, and to make an attempt at buying quality over quantity. My first experiment arrived in the form of a pair of DeWalt boots, which, at less than €100 delivered, were not much more expensive than what I had been buying here - but these boots had achieved a 4.5 out of 5 rating from 150 or so online reviews, (the best score I could find of any safety boot). Of course, the proof will be in the pudding (or the wearing).

Enough with the cheap work boots! Ever hopeful that these will be up to the task.

After the lesson, Helen helped me finish off some tidying down in the veg garden and we soaked everything in water as the day upon day of relentless sun was starting to show in some of the plants.

Watering the precious veg.

The evening was fairly uneventful, being interrupted only by Reggie finding a huge toad outside and going nuts in its general direction. Thankfully we intervened in time to save Mr Toad before he was squashed or worse eaten.

Mr Toad.

On Saturday morning we walked Reggie together in the woods before hopping into the car with Hugh and Donna, Pescia bound for coffee before dropping them at the train station for a day in Montecatini. Today, the famous Mille Miglia vintage car race was passing through Montecatini before heading north, and Hugh and Donna were keen to go and have a look.

After helping them navigate the automatic ticket machine and making sure they validated their tickets we headed off home to do some work in the form of making a start on upgrading the chicken fencing by cutting sheets of rebar into panels and burying them into the ground 12-18 inches to stop predators digging... we hope.

Having played with the idea of changing to a movable electric fence set-up that could be moved, along with chickens, around the terraces thus helping keep the grass down, fertilising, as well as potentially helping with the olive fly problem beneath the trees (the chickens eating the flies/larvae), we decided on keeping the existing set-up and reinforcing the existing fence. While this still wasn't a quick job (or indeed pleasant in 27-28 degrees of heat), it means that, confined within the current enclosure, we can better protect future chickens against disease spread by wild birds than if they were free(er) roaming on the terraces, as well as being a lot easier to manage Reggie around them.

We toiled away for about three hours, calling it a day when the sky suddenly darkened and the claps of thunder that had been rolling around the hills started to get closer and closer. By the time we came in, we had stripped all of the previous anti-dig netting from the bottom of the fence and dug in almost half of the new steel mesh. If we can find another afternoon together this week we'll hopefully be in a position to get new chickens very soon indeed. (We then just have to hope that it was indeed a fox and not a smaller beasty like a ferret/weasel that got in, although from research we're still sure it was a fox as the chickens had their necks broken and nothing more.)

The hole used by Mr Fox for his/her murder spree.

Digging trenches.

Anti-fox... we hope.

Here comes the rain...

As the much-needed rain fell outside, we made a start on the scotch eggs we had decided to make for a brunch party at Mara and Franco's on Sunday morning. We used a recipe that we'd cut out of a foodie magazine and kept for many years, but had not ever cooked. They seemed like the ideal food to take to a brunch, culturally educational, and most importantly something we could cook on the hob as we are still without a working oven.

By the time six o'clock arrived, we had got the eggs boiled and wrapped in sausage meat at which point we had to put them safely in the fridge and head into town to collect Hugh and Donna from the station. The plan was to take them to the wine bar in town on the way home to introduce them to aperitivi and the obligatory Aperol spritz.

One spritz of course turned into two so that we could finish the platter of snacks that accompanied the first round of drinks, and we had a very pleasant couple of hours chatting and snacking. By the time we got home we were all too full of snacks for any dinner - but that in turn meant I could concentrate on finishing the scotch eggs.

As is often the case with recipes, this one seemed to have understated the amount of time required to complete the dish. As it was, I didn't finish the frying the 12 eggs until 10:30pm!

The fry-athon commences.

Scotch eggs!

Shame they are not our own eggs.

After something of a late night we rose as late as we dared on Sunday before getting up to walk Reggie, locking him in the house for the morning and then dashing up the road to collect David who had also been invited to the brunch party at Mara and Franco's.

When we accepted the invite to the party, we did so with the caveat that we could only stay for a couple of hours as we had previously promised to take Hugh and Donna to the Montecarlo wine festival after lunch. When we arrived at 11am, along with Mara and Franco's German neighbours, we sniffed the faint aroma of a delay in the near future.

As it was, no Italians arrived until around midday, an hour after us, and it was only then that the party got started. It seemed unlikely we were going to get away when planned, but we didn't worry too much as we were enjoying the huge amount of food on offer that constituted both breakfast and lunch for us (...as I guess brunch should do!). People had brought lasagne, frittata, pizza, couscous salad, quiche, savoury tarts, there were different breads, dips... all of which were delicious. It was a challenge to get round to trying everything, but we did our best! (And, by the way, the Scotch eggs went down very well with those who tried them!)

As one o'clock (the time we had planned to leave the party) came and went, people were just starting to clear the table for puddings, and it also became evident that this "impromptu" little gathering had not only one but two hidden agendas: it had been Franco's 50th birthday the day before the party and also Mara and Franco's 6th wedding anniversary, and as the special cakes arrived (all four of them!), we felt it wasn't quite the right time to be party poopers, so I messaged Hugh, Donna, Paul and Kathy to say we'd be half hour late and as soon as we could got stuck into a slab of delicious strawberry cheesecake so that we could then make our excuses and leave, an hour later than planned... (I guess we forget we are in Italy at times and that Italians work on a different clock).

Birthday brunch.

Mara and David enjoying our scotch eggs.

FOUR CAKES!!

6 years married.

Party people.

Franco, Mara and Snoopy.

It was a lovely gathering of people.

We love these people!

Having parked the car someway along the track between Mara and Franco's house and the road (to avoid utter chaos at the house), we started the ten minute walk back to the car. Mara and Franco's little dog, Snoopy, seemed determined to accompany us. At first this just made us smile, but as we got further and further away from the house, we started to get a little concerned: Did Snoopy know where he was? Did he usually roam this far from home? Could he find his was back? Would he chase after us in the car, getting even further away from home?

In the end, despite time ticking rapidly on, we decided we had no choice but to turn the car around and drive Snoopy back to Mara and Franco's house, before turning the car around for the second time.

Snoopy the escapee going home.

We arrived home at 14:20 (having planned - that is to say re-planned - to leave for the wine festival at 14:30), and Paul & Kathy arrived about five minute later, so it was all a bit of a rush to get ready to head back out while also giving Reggie time to empty his bladder and have a sniff of fresh air in the garden before an afternoon in the house again - although with all the people in the house he could barely think about anything but barking.

We eventually locked the poor puppy indoors again and headed over to Montecarlo in a two-car convoy to sample the delights of the wine festival that Helen and I dipped our toes into two years ago but which was new to all of the rest of our party.

After each paying our €15 entrance fee (which gave us a map, a wine glass, a holder for the glass to hang around your neck, and a bottle of wine), we hopped onto the first shuttle bus that arrived at the terminus, one of five that spent the day repeating the same colour-coded route to drop off and pick up wine tasters from the various vineyards around the town of Montecarlo.

After clambering off the very hot, very bouncy bus at the first vineyard, we decided to go it on foot the the next two vineyards.

At each vineyard we sampled a couple of wines - red and white - and filled up on pieces of cheese, bread and salamis. The vineyards were absolutely beautiful - there are some really beautiful little spots tucked away that you'd never know were there unless you knew to look for them, and for us it was such a change of scenery (and activity) that it felt a bit like being on holiday!

After the first three vineyards, we picked up a less bouncy and better air conditioned shuttle bus back to the town where we waited at the pick-up spot for another bus doing a different route. After a wait of around 20 minutes, and then realising that everyone else was waiting for the same bus, we decided we would do the next route by car and clocked up another four beautiful wineries before finally calling it time on festivities after almost four hours of wine sampling. It was a fantastic way to spend a sunny afternoon in Tuscany, a real treat that we all enjoyed - it was just shame we were missing a couple of the gang... but there's always next year!

Wine tour started here.

Tuscan cypress trees.

This vineyard is arranging an English Sunday Roast in the coming weeks.

Vines and Cypress, quintessential Tuscany.

Mountains of the Garfagnana in the distance.

More vines.

A VERY old olive tree at one of the vineyards.

Free wine buses included.

Bottling and labelling machine.

Looking back towards our valley, the 'Valleriana'.

Our favourite vineyard of the trip.

A room with a view.

Another bottling and labelling machine.

Infinity pool at the winery for its agriturismo guests.

A beautiful spot.

Each winery was staffed with a sommelier.

The owner at this one was very friendly and chatty - and loved talking about English roast!

There were cheeses to sample here too.

Excellent white wines here in particular.

"I'll have what he's having."

Happy wine tasters. Cheers!

By the time we got home, we were all a little weary from an afternoon on our feet, so Hugh and Donna joined us for a seat under our pergola before Donna and Helen put together a meal of pasta with what Helen and I call "red sauce" - aubergines, courgettes, peppers, tomatoes and some secret ingredients to give it extra depth of flavour - and we shared a tasty dinner together with one of the wines Hugh had liked enough to buy from one of the wineries. A lovely way to end a lovely weekend.