The Beat That My Heart Skipped – A blog dedicated to daily design inspirations. By Rohini Wahi.

Lifestyle envy isn’t pretty. But, I am afraid I have a bad case of it at the moment, and it is all down to our contributor for this week. I challenge anyone who reads on from here not to have a dose of lifestyle envy by the end of it. So you have been warned!

This week we are off to Italy for our recipe, to the beautiful olive grove that is home to Jason Gibb and Cathy Rogers. Jason and Cathy set up Nudo in 2005 after buying and restoring an abandoned 21 acre olive grove in Italy’s Le Marche. They gave up successful careers as TV producers to build a business in the Italian countryside, following a hunch that they’d enjoy being olive farmers. So it was, that they found themselves heading off to live in Italy, with little more than their one year old daughter, a pair of secateurs and an Italian dictionary!

Their philosophy for Nudo has always taken their love of food as its starting point. Nudo olive oil had, above all, to be the best. As the company has grown and developed and Jason and Cathy have learned more about Italy, olive farming and artisanal food production in general, they have coupled this passion for food with a desire to preserve the wonderful traditional ways of local Italian producers.

This philosophy has found clear expression in their olive tree adoption scheme, which allows people all over the world to adopt an Italian olive tree and receive its olive oil. On the production side, the scheme involves a collaboration between a group of small scale, artisanal olive producers in Le Marche and Abruzzo. Each olive farmer keeps responsibility for the care of their grove, and all the olive oil goes into the Nudo adoption programme. In giving financial security to the olive farmers, the scheme makes viable the traditional farming methods which, quite simply, produce the world’s best olive oil.

You can get your copy of Jason and Cathy’s book, ‘The Dolce Vita Diaries: Stories and recipes from an Italian olive grove’, from the Nudo website or Amazon. Jason and Cathy are kindly sharing one of their wonderful recipes with us this week; Lemon Ravioli with Sage Butter made with their very own fragrant lemon olive oil. So find time to make this recipe and block out the miserable dull English February that lingers outside your kitchen window and dream of those beautiful Italian olive groves.

You can buy Nudo olive oils as well as other gastronomic treats from the Nudo website, and if you want to fuel your lifestyle envy, you can visit Jason and Cathy’s fantastic blog which gives readers a welcoming insight to their lives including a lovely written piece detailing their typical day. But like I said, be prepared for that lifestyle envy to seep deep into your bones!

Until next week, happy cooking! Louise x

Lemon Ravioli with Nudo Extra Virgin Olive Oil with Real Lemons

Ingredients
Serves 4

300g Plain flour
4 Eggs
1.5 tablespoons Lemon olive oil
300g Ricotta
120g Cooked and finely chopped Spinach
Marjoram – a couple of fresh sprigs
Salt and pepper
40g Butter
Sage – a big sprig

[1] Find a nice big clean workspace. Pour the flour into a mound and make a well in the middle. Break 2 eggs into the well and whisk in with a fork, gradually bringing in more and more flour. Add the lemon olive oil [or normal olive oil for a general pasta]. When there is a lumpy mass sticking to your fork turn the dough onto a floured surface and knead for 5 minutes. I find it hard to believe 5 minutes is so long when I knead the pasta, so I make myself keep going for a couple of songs on the radio.

[2] When the dough is smooth and homogeneous, cover it with a kitchen towel and leave for half an hour. Then get your pasta machine together – we have a hand-cranked Atlas 150, which has been kicking around for ages and remains faithful.

[3] Cut the pasta into 4 manageable pieces. The trick is to roll the pasta through the machine 10 times on the widest setting, folding it back in half each time. The dough should be beautifully smooth.
Now work your way down the thicknesses on the machine from 1 to about 6. You should have beautiful sheets of pasta, which you need to lay out on a floury surface. This pasta recipe is the basis for all shapes. In general if you need a bit of elasticity [like for ravioli] use olive oil, if not [like fettuccine] go easy on the oil.

[4] To prepare the filling mix together 2 egg yolks, the ricotta, spinach [you can use frozen if you don’t have fresh, just make sure it’s well thawed and drained], marjoram and a couple of pinches of salt and pepper.

[5] Back to the pasta sheets. Put a teaspoon of the filling mixture at regular, well-spaced intervals. Paint around them with the egg whites. Lay another pasta sheet on top and press down over the mounds of filling. Cut into ravioli shapes with a pasta cutter. Bring a pot of water to boil, with a bit of salt and olive oil. Cook for about 2 minutes.

[6] Whilst it’s cooking, make the sage butter. Gently heat the butter in a frying pan with the slightly torn-up sage leaves. Spoon out the ravioli into your serving dish, cover with the sage butter and serve.

Nudo’s Extra virgin olive oil stone ground with Real Lemons is available from Nudo-Italia.com and a wide range of speciality food stores across the UK. The Dolce Vita Diaries by Cathy Rogers and Jason Gibb is now available from Amazon.co.uk and all good quality UK bookshops.