Autumn arrived a few weeks ago and we were lucky enough to be in Italy just as the first chestnuts fell. They were the biggest I’ve ever seen, due to the high rainfall this year.

At this time of year in this part of Italy, there’s a tradition of making tagliatelle with the fresh nettles which have just started growing.

This is a great time of year for brassica buds. I’m not sure if buds is the correct term. Sprouts maybe? Shoots? For most people this means broccoli, but you can eat the buds from all brassicas. At least, I do.

I’ve been finding the coming of spring very slow. Winter was so long, and a few weeks ago it seemed that spring had arrived at last. The fields in the valley were all suddenly green, and quite a few trees in the woods, but then the weather turned cold again (as it usually does..).

Here’s another old photo of mine, also from 2013.

It was taken in the Swiss Alps. I really like the texture.

Here’s a photo I took in August 2013, high in the Apennine mountains of Italy. It popped up just now as my computer desktop background.

Today was a good day for drying. So good, the wind broke the washing line. Here’s a photo of the new one.

This week I added some seeds to my bread.

Just what I could find in the cupboard: sunflower, poppy, flax and sesame. I used a mix of 80% wholegrain flour and 20% white. Italian wholegrain isn’t quite as “whole” as I’m used to.

This week there was some locally produced chestnut flour to use up, so I put it in the bread mix. Here’s the recipe:

I thought it would be nice to use this blog to track the coming of spring, my favourite time of year. So here are the first daffodils. They look a bit odd. Perhaps they are a wild variety.

At last we’ve had some snow here today. But it’s wet and thin. So here’s some Swiss snow from a couple of years ago.

Look what I found when I sawed through a branch of a tree I cut down.