Les Vieux Alpages, Agriturismo, Aosta

This is one of the highest agriturismi in Italy (and Europe, I guess) at 1881m. This is also the place that encourages you to drive for one hour up the mountains just for the food. The views are a bonus.

We stayed there a couple of years ago with our small son and we were delighted by the breakfasts and dinners. They make so much themselves on the farm and what they don’t make is local. It is an exhibition of regional cooking. And at its very best.

As parents of a small child we appreciated it so much. Such an amazing escape from the mundane and what a pampering for a tired mind. This year we went back to see the familiar faces, admire the views and eat their abundant homemade food. We were very sad to leave.

You can contact Les Vieux Alpages and read more about it following this link: http://www.agriturismo.it/it/agriturismi/valle_d_aosta/aosta/LesVieuxAlpages-2960339/index.html

I hope you will enjoy your holiday as much as we did.

DIY: Heart Made With Salt Dough

Not being able to buy anything new for brightening and decorating our house made me a little bitter recently. The winter was just terribly grey and miserable and I really would like the house to look fresh and colourful again. I want to bring the life back into it. So instead of waiting for the first spring flowers to come out, I decided to go back to my school years and employ the old and ever-so-easy method of using salt dough for making decorations. The final product might be lacking in sophistication but it does cheer me up and the house looks heartened too. ;)

Ingredients:

1 cup flour

3/4 cup salt (I used a mixture of fine and coarse salt to make the heart look rustic)

1 cup water

2 teaspoons cream of tartar

Slowly mix all the ingredients together and knead the dough for around 10-15 minutes. Create shapes of your choice and using a pen make a small hole for hanging the ornaments. Put the ornaments into the oven at around 70°C. The dough may take from an hour to a couple of hours to dry out completely depending on the size and thickness of the ornament. Paint with any available colour. :) I used an old lace to hang the heart up. It looks perfectly fine on our window. :)

What’s inside our bread?

Wanted. Loved. Devoured daily. But messed with on a big scale too. Only a few decades ago in the UK its “particularly interesting” example was so white that it appeared almost luminous. People marveled over its brighter than chalk tint. The astonishing hue was mesmerizing and very few questioned its look. This was a mistake. Chlorine dioxide gas was nothing but a type of bleach used in the UK’s bread till 1999 when the government decided to put a ban on it (Whitley, 2006).

There is no chlorine dioxide in the UK’s bread today but there are still many bleaching agents, additives, preservatives and enzymes that aim to artificially enhance the taste and the look of bread, decrease its mixing and baking time and superficially boost the volume of the bread. In his book Bread Matters, Andrew Whitley gives a very long list of various enzymes (and their effects) that are used in making bread dough: Maltogenic amalyse, Peptidase, Amylase, Xylanase and many more (the names in themselves sound terrifying, don’t they?). Most breads also contain emulsifiers. Their job is to prevent the loaf from going stale too quickly. These and other supplements compromise the nutritional value of many loaves that we eat. No wonder therefore that there are more and more people who are deciding to go back to basics and who are learning to knead the bread again within the corners of their kitchens and who are finding enormous joy in doing so. Maybe it’s because they are creative with making different bread shapes (buns, rolls, loaves and flat breads), with using different flour compositions (wholemeal, white, rye, spelt, malted wheat flakes) and with putting their favourite ‘stuffing’ (sunflower seeds, sun-dried tomatoes, dates, pumpkin seeds, olives) into their breads. We do that too and I must say there is something very satisfying about baking your own bread… perhaps it is its comforting smell or the appealing symbolism that bread-making conveys… that of motherhood and that of life, strength and resilience. (More Images and Recipe Below)

Bread Recipe:

Ingredients:

250g Strong White Flour

250g Strong Wholemeal Flour

100g Malthouse Flour also known as Granary or malted wheat grain (it’s optional, but greatly enriches the flavour)

400-500ml Water

1 Teaspoon of Dried Yeast

1 to 2 Teaspoon of Salt

25-50ml Olive Oil

Into a small bowl of lukewarm water put the yeast with 2 spoons of flour. Put it aside for half an hour and let the yeast feed off the flour. When you see small bubbles forming on the surface of the water it means that the yeast mixture is ready. Now, in a large bowl mix all the flours with the salt and slowly stir them adding the water. It’s ok if it feels quite sticky at this point. Knead the dough for at least 10 minutes until it feels fairly soft and elastic [you can add extra flour or water to ease the process]. Slowly pour the olive oil and again knead it into the bread mix. Form a nice rounded loaf and cover it with a wet tea towel and leave it overnight for the dough to rise. A day after, cover a flat baking tray with grease proof paper and form small (4-5 cm) buns. Add dates, sunflower seeds or nuts to the mixture if you wish. Bake in 180-200°C for around 30-40 minutes. There is no need to preheat the oven. It’s good to allow the buns to grow with the increasing heat. It’s delicious served with butter and mirabelle jam (or stuffed with dates) especially if you are only baking with wholemeal and white flours. The wholemeal can be quite bitter and the sweetness of mirabelle plums or dates just complement those flours so well. Enjoy! Bon appetite!