Classic Gardening

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The freshest seasonal antipasto around right now - at least on Lake Garda's Olive Coast - is asparagus and eggs with pecorino or Parmasan cheese.

Most people around here have a patch of asparagus in the garden, and a couple of hens.

The asparagus is boiled, the eggs can either be poached, soft boiled or fried, and the cheese is sprinkled over them. Here's the recipe.Very appetising after an afternoon in the olive grove.

In case you forget it is time to enjoy this wonderful spring dish, the grocers in Malcesine (the lakeside village pictured left where I spent last weekend) put their asparagus and eggs on display alongside each other as a sort of hint hint.

They also do that at the Consorzio Olivicoltori Malcesine which is the place in the village where olives were once turned into oil but that is now a bit of a tourist souvenir spot. But when you are a tourist, it can be very interesting.

We wandered past after dinner and saw there was a TV in the window showing a video of the olive harvest.

We were hooked. What a movie.

There were the old boys shaking the olives off the trees onto sheets laid beneath, gathering them into great plastic crates that were then taken by truck, fork-lift or Ape (a sort of three-wheeled scooter with a flat-bed on the back - not a large monkey) to the new olive press, out of town.

There was no one under - at a guess - 80 involved in all this. And only one was female. She was allowed to get the lunch organised. It consisted of salami, cheese, bread and red wine. Something to look forward to, come October. I can only hope Adriano and Angelo, my prune-tutors, will let me back to see the results of my labours with the secateurs. Just to remind them how industrious I was, here's me, hefting a jolly big bit of olive tree that was surplus to requirements.


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