This year’s olive oil from our trees is emerald green, quite peppery, and very aromatic!

We pressed it early with the help of our October KEArtisanal guests. As it trickled from the olive press, still warm and hazy, it tasted heavenly on slices of fresh bread, just out of the oven for the occasion.

  Slide Show: Green, Fruity, Peppery…

We did not have a large production. Olive trees tend to have a good yield every second year, villagers say. Often pruned as they are harvested, olive trees need time for the new shoots to grow and fill with fruit. We drastically pruned our trees last year, as they had grown large and heavy. We were not expecting to gather many olives, but having purchased our home olive press the year before, we were more than eager to use it again, and share the joy with our guests.

Unfortunately the late May Kea Artisanal group didn’t have the chance to taste our tomatoes. We had a prolonged spring with lots of rain, so until mid-June our tomatoes were tiny and green. Some of them, especially the Black Tula, were not quite ready even for our late June visitors, and the Yellow Pear, which we planted later, have no ripe fruits yet. We love our tomatoes, grown naturally, just with manure.

  Slide Show: TOMATOES revisited!

Manure is a scarce commodity on Kea, and everyone in our neighborhood is well informed of our purchase moves, keeping track of when we bought and from whom --as one neighbor wisely puts it “you can’t hide from God or from your neighbor.” This year, we had to import a huge truckload from the mainland.

The eighth stage of drunkenness according to the ancient comic poet Eubulus “is the policeman’s, the ninth belongs to vomiting, and the tenth to madness and hurling of furniture,” the very stately professor, Oswyn Murray, informed the lecture hall in his brilliant paper at the closing plenary session of this year’s Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery.

  Slide Show: CELEBRATING in Oxford!

During the mostly sunny weekend gathering of 230 scholars and food-lovers from England, the US, and all over the world a fair amount of wine—from Italy, Spain, Germany and Greece— was consumed, but of course participants never approached even the fourth stage of inebriation that “belongs to insults,” but there were hints of the fifth “that [belongs] to uproar.”

SLOW Fish Genoa 2011

From fishwitches, sandwiches made with bread from Triora--the Ligurian village famous for its Medieval witches—to jellied cubes of green tea with strawberries and head-on prawns, this year’s Slow Fish international gathering had it all: a multi ethnic sea fare complete with wines to taste and enjoy, but also plenty of food for thought regarding the grim future of fishing as we know it.

  Slide Show: SLOW Fish Genoa 2011

The biennial Genoa Slow Fish is a manageable fair, not overwhelming as the Salone del Gusto, he alternating huge biennial Slow Food Torino gathering. Its message was very clear: ‘If we want to continue eating fish tomorrow, we must take action today.”