Two Cyprus restaurants in two weeks!

Eating out is quite a rare event for us. I know, in the US, some families eat out two or three times per week, as it's relatively inexpensive there. Even here in Cyprus, there are some of people who eat out regularly. It's never been part of our lifestyle, however. Meals at restaurants are for special occasions, or when visitors want to treat us.

A couple of weeks ago, our friend Alison was visiting. She comes on a working holiday each year to deal with the accounts for Richard's ministry; I cook most evenings, but she usually likes to take us out for a meal at some point.  We've previously been to our default - Alexander's - on the sea-front, but this year Alison decided she'd like a change. She checked an online site for recommended Greek food restaurants in Cyprus, and the top rated one was To Kazani, in Aradippou.

We found the location via Google Maps, and it took perhaps ten or fifteen minutes to drive there. It looked very authentic on the outside:

We were greeted with enthusiasm by the staff, and given a choice of tables. Inside looked equally authentically Cypriot - even if there was a TV at one end, and a wifi router on the wall near where we sat! 

The menu was simple - only about ten items, including the traditional meze. We asked how big the portions were, and the waitress - or, perhaps the owner - said she thought that for four of us, three servings of meze would be right. So that's what we opted for.  

We then ordered drinks - water for two of us, juice for the others.  The juice was certainly Cypriot, but not exactly how we had envisaged it... 

A meze is a series of different dishes, presented a few at a time, and usually starting with a Greek salad. This means that there's very little waiting time, and plenty of opportunity to taste different local foods. Sure enough, the salad arrived quickly, accompanied by some toasted village bread, a bowl of Greek yogurt, some chopped beetroot, and various dips:

I didn't take any other photos of food - the table quickly became crowded as we were given an aubergine dip, halloumi, various meat dishes, a bowl of chips, some mushrooms, an egg and courgette dish (which was my favourite), more that I don't remember... and even (ugh) some snails. Alison and Richard tried them but didn't much like them. Tim and I did not. I don't even like to look at snails. But they were the only thing that none of us liked.  

By the time we were nearing the end, we were feeling very full, so when a large dish with yet more meat arrived - small pieces of chicken, and pork, and Cyprus sausages - we couldn't begin to do justice to it. So Richard asked if we could take it home with us; this isn't an unusual request in Cyprus, so we were given a suitable container and the leftover meat then provided protein for our lunches (for three of us) for the next two days. 

After we thought we had finished, we were brought dessert: some fresh fruit, and some pieces of Greek baklava. Despite having ordered three meze meals between four of us, they made sure that when there were individual portions of anything, there were four, so we each had some baklava - and somehow found room to eat it! 

We enjoyed our meal very much and can certainly understand why it's so highly rated. Other visitors - including a group of people we know - gradually arrived as we were eating. But then, as Brits, we like to start eating around 7.00pm at the latest, whereas many Cypriots don't eat until well past 8.00, sometimes not starting until 9.00 or later. 

I had not expected to visit another restaurant for a while, but last Sunday Tim said he would like to take us out to his favourite Indian restaurant, Masalas, in celebration of the British Mothering Sunday. The only available evening was Monday, just a week after our visit to To Kazani.  

Masalas is in the other direction, along the Dhekelia Road which runs along the sea-front. The only photo I took was on the outside, before we went in:

Again, since we like to eat early, and arrived about 6.30, we were the only people in the restaurant when we went in. It looks quite up-market inside, with tablecloths and wall hangings in shades of peach. The menu is extensive, as is so often the case with Indian restaurants. They have a special offer of any curry with popadoms, rice and naan for weekdays so long as one orders before 7.15pm so we decided to do that rather than making multiple selections from different pages of the menu. 

Tim almost always opts for chicken bhuna which is his tried-and-tested favourite; Richard had a lamb curry, and I decided to be brave and have a chicken madras, marked as 'hot', but - I was assured by the waitress - not 'burning hot'.  The first time we went there, back in June, I tried the chicken balti, which was excellent.

The food was piping hot, served in traditional Indian pots and pans, and very delicious, although mine was perhaps a tad hotter than I would have chosen! However, it was very tasty. 

The one disadvantage of this restaurant is that they don't offer vegetarian options. I do eat some chicken and beef, and occasionally pork, but when I'm out I usually prefer to choose something vegetarian. Indian restaurants normally have a wide selection, but Masalas does not.  I was happy with what I ate - and would happily go there again - but it would be no good for a vegetarian. 

Cyprus style Thanksgiving

After I had written yesterday's post about Thanksgiving preparation, I baked the bread rolls - which turned out fine, if a little small - and made something approximating to a Greek salad:

Chopped lettuce and cabbage at the bottom, chopped cucumber and feta in the middle, a sliced tomato around the edge. It could hardly be simpler. 

Then I prepared the french beans, brussels sprouts and cauliflower to cook in my electric steamer:

Unfortunately, although I remembered to plug it in and switch on at the wall at about ten to six, it took another ten minutes before I realised that I hadn't also switched on the appliance itself. And it should really have been earlier still. I use it so rarely at this capacity that I forget just how long it takes to steam three tiers of veggies. I moved the cauliflower to a pan on the stove when I realised it was not going to get cooked in time, and that was fine. The beans were okay, if a little crunchy, and the brussels sprouts were far too hard. Oh well. 

I also cut up mushrooms and tomatoes, sprinkling the latter with garlic and basil, to put in the oven to bake:

Also in the oven went the previously prepared stuffing, mashed potato and some stuffed peppers I'd made and frozen some time beforehand. Carrots went on the stove in a little margarine and brown sugar to steam, sweetcorn with a bit of red pepper in the microwave. 

By 6.30 our guests had arrived and everything was ready (well, other than the brussels sprouts). I'd found a tablecloth that had the right kind of colours on it, and we used our brown Autumnal crockery.  Joan counted sixteen kinds of food in all, including the meat and devilled eggs she had brought:  

When we had all eaten our fill - and there was quite a bit left over - we brought out desserts. Very simple by US standards: just one pie, which Joan had made, using a delicious Dutch apple pie recipe. I had thawed some stewed plums and made some more yogurt, and had also put out a platter of dehydrated fruit - and some Fair Trade 'chocos':

It was, of course, quite a mixture of cultures. The turkey, stuffing, mashed potato and apple pie were certainly typical US fare for Thanksgiving, as was the variety of vegetables, although not necessarily the ones I had chosen; I opted for ones that looked good quality and which were in season. The halloumi and Greek salad were typically Cypriot and I suppose the Cadbury 'chocos' and the stewed plums were typically British (although I didn't add any sugar).  

Mark and Joan were the only Americans present - the only ones for whom Thanksgiving is a deeply ingrained custom. Still, Richard and I did live in the US for a couple of years, back in the early 1990s, and have celebrated this feast several times over the years; we grew up with the slightly outdated concept of harvest festival - a little out of place in cities where nothing much is harvested.  

Thanksgiving pulls together the thankfulness part of harvest festival, and demonstrates the immense bounty of local produce.  The one thing it lacks is giving part of what we have to those in need. I did feel a momentary guilt at having such a loaded table.. we have so much already. But nothing is wasted: we ate leftovers today, and will continue to do so until they're all gone. 

Delicious Meze meal at an empty Taverna...

I've written before about our local taverna, Ta Kalyphouthkia. It's about 200 metres from where we live, tucked away in a residential area... so not the kind of place people would find easily, if out hunting for somewhere to eat.

While, as far as I recall, we have actually only once paid for a meal there ourselves, we have been treated there several times by guests wanting to take us out for a meal, and suggesting something traditionally Cypriot. A meze is the classic meal here, consisting of several dishes of food brought out a few at a time, including salads, pitta bread, olives, various dips, an avocado dish, mushrooms, scrambled egg with spinach, several varieties of meat, halloumi, pasta with cheese, tiny pastries with cheese, pourgouri (bulgar wheat)... and more. To finish with, there's even a small plate of chips (fries), and then something light and sweet.  The selections vary slightly each time, but are always delicious. 

One of the great things about meze is that you don't have to order one portion per person, if you're going with a group. There's a minimum order of two, but it's fine for four people to order just two portions; there's plenty of food, so long as appetites are not huge, and everyone gets a taste of everything. We have never yet managed to finish the entire spread; I rarely eat any of the meat as there are so many delicious veggie options. 

Other tavernas and restaurants offer different mezes; some have more meat and fewer veggie dishes, some have fish and seafood rather than meat. 

Two ladies who have been staying in our guest flat took us to the local taverna last night. As usual, we chose to go early - about 7.00pm - and, as we expected, it was entirely empty when we arrived:

The taverna is usually frequented by Cypriots, and they tend to eat rather later than Brits.

The dishes kept coming, but we didn't eat particularly fast; we were chatting and enjoying the food, explaining some of them to one of the guests who had not previously been to Cyprus.  It was nearly nine o'clock before we left... and it was then that it struck me: the taverna was still empty.  

That was not what we expected.

Every time we have been in the past, other diners have started arriving about eight o'clock. By nine, it's usually starting to get quite noisy and busy. But not last night.

Perhaps Monday night is always quiet; perhaps there were more customers later. I hope so. But my worry is that this may be a sign of things to come, with the austerity measures, and drastically reduced incomes for many around the island. It's not as if we eat out regularly, so perhaps it's selfish - in a sense - to want this taverna to remain open for the rare occasions when we might use it. But it's the principle of the thing that matters more: small shops are already being forced to close down, and it would be very sad for the future of Cyprus if small family tavernas are also forced to shut. 

An evening socialising

In these annals I have regularly made reference to my small local friends, although I don't seem to have done so for a while. That doesn't mean we haven't seen them - far from it. They come over on Tuesday mornings, and we see them - and the rest of their family - every Friday evening.  They also come over on alternate Sunday afternoons to watch a DVD while the adults play a game, and then we have a cold meal together. 

Yesterday was one of those Sundays. The film of choice was 'The Wizard of Oz', and the rest of us played a game of Cities and Knights.  After we had eaten, the children were beginning to get a little hyper as bed-time approached, so their parents were starting to get them ready to go home, when the two ladies staying in our guest flat at present came up to say hello.  One of them has small grandchildren, and my extra-special friend Helen (now four) was very taken with her; particularly when she showed them how to make simple origami boats: 

Katie (seven) was pleased to learn how to make them on her own: 

Lukas (10) made a whole fleet, but for some reason I didn't take any photos of him. However, Elisabeth (two years and five months) wanted me to take a photo of the one that was made for her:

Meanwhile, on a galaxy far away, Marie (15) was busy with NaNoWriMo... which, to my great admiration, she does - including word counts! - by hand: 

Disclaimer: I did hesitate a little before writing this post, not wanting to give Sheila another excuse reason not to post... but I don't think she took all these pictures, and besides, I couldn't think of any other topic for today's blog post! 

Birthday cake!

When I wrote about the busy day we had on my birthday last Friday, I mentioned in passing that I wasn't going to have a cake this year, since Tim was not here. 

So imagine my surprise and delight when, having supper with our good friends Mark and Joan last night, they produced this as a slightly belated birthday cake for me:

It was beautiful, although Joan said that the icing (frosting) was a little runny.

It was also extremely delicious - a carrot cake, with pineapple and all kinds of good stuff.  Yum. Then they insisted we take the leftover cake home with us, to enjoy over the next few days. 

We feel very blessed with our various friends. 

(Western) Easter and a roast lunch

Most years, there are two different dates for Easter. One is celebrated by Protestant Churches in the West, and the other is celebrated by the Greek Orthodox, and those in the East. In Cyprus, where East and West meet, we usually take note of them both. For the last couple of years, they have coincided. This year, Western Easter is today, and Eastern Easter will be next Sunday.

Last year we were in the UK for Easter. I loved going to a church service there, in the congregation where we used to belong, and where our younger son Tim is now happily involved. The year before, I went to an Anglican service in the morning, and then we went on to the local house church, which was good - but where Easter was not actually celebrated as such.

This year, with none of the family here, and with Greek Easter not being for another week, we hadn't really thought much about it, other than a general feeling that we wanted to go to a church service somewhere. We also realised that we were having two couples for lunch - two sets of friends, who didn't actually know each other, but whom we've become quite close to in the past few years. Both the husbands travel extensively, and have other commitments, and we'd wanted to have both couples to a meal... it turned out that today was good for them all.

On Friday we did our monthly supermarket shop, and Richard chose a large chicken for roasting. I don't often make a roast lunch; I know it's not difficult, but there are so many different things to think about that I get a bit overwhelmed. Still, I thought, we'd keep it simple - fruit salad and yogurt for dessert, and perhaps something else cold. Knowing that we were having guests for lunch meant that there was only really one option amongst the local church congregations - the Anglican church starts at 9.30 and has usually finished by 10.45 at the latest. None of the others finishes before about noon (or later).

At 7.00 this morning I peeled and par-boiled potatoes, cut up pineapple and other fruit, made stuffing, and also melted some chocolate in preparation for another cold dessert. Then I made our juice and some coffee for Richard, took my shower, and ate breakfast while he stuffed the chicken and we turned on the oven (low).

So far so good.

The service was traditional, not my favourite songs (other than one), and all using a digital organ, which isn't particularly easy to sing to.  It was good to see a few people I haven't seen for a while.

We were home by 11.00. I didn't think there was much to do then (other than unloading the dishwasher, which went on after breakfast). Oh, and I mixed the coconut topping for the dessert and put that in the oven. Then I sat down to read email for half an hour.

After that, I prepared vegetables (broccoli, carrots, cauliflower), made cranberry sauce (with frozen cranberries left over from Christmas), put the potatoes in the oven to roast, and tried to keep on top of the washing up. Richard cooked sausages and poked the chicken a few times.

Typing it out, it all sounds fairly straightforward, but I very much missed Tim, who can easily make a roast meal for twice as many people, without any stress at all.  Keeping everything hot seemed tricky, but I solved that by decanting everything into warmed serving dishes and sticking them in the oven for the last few minutes while the chicken was 'sitting', ready to carve.  I cooked peas and sweetcorn in the microwave, and Richard made gravy.

All was ready for just after one o'clock. I didn't think to take photos until we'd sat down and started serving - that's my plateful at the front of the picture:

There was too much light for this picture of everyone, but I quite like the effect:

It wasn't until we reached the end of the first course that we remembered that we had forgotten to serve the stuffing!  Oops. 

During the course of the meal someone pointed out how much we all have in common. We are all foreigners living in Cyprus (two Brits, two South Africans, two Americans). Each couple has two grown-up children between the ages of 23 and 26. None of them are living in Cyprus.  And (although we forgot to mention this) all of them were, at some point, home educated. 

Four years ago after Tim left home, we felt quite lonely at times, and longed to have friends around our age, at the same stage of life.  Now, with these two couples and our other, slightly younger friends with six children, we feel very blessed indeed. 

Happy Easter! 

Life racing by in Cyprus once more

It's strange how, sometimes, life seems to go by quite slowly. The winter seemed endless, although it was only a couple of months .I know that the summer is likely to drag too. But now that spring is here, a couple of weeks appear - if it's not too much of a cliché - to have flown by. I had to look on my calendar, and then my camera to see what we'd done. 

There were the usual two public holidays on March 25th (Greek National Day) and April 1st. Since both those dates fell on a Sunday this year, there wasn't any obvious effect on the general public. Shops and businesses were closed anyway. We don't even live near any schools or the parade route any more, so we weren't awakened early by drum beats and whistles, as we were in our old house.

Still, I did go to a church service with my friends a couple of weeks ago, and then popped to the PO Box to collect mail. We happened to be there just as one of the parades was starting around St Lazarus Church, so we paused for a moment to watch: 

We seem to have spent a lot of time with different friends, too. We often see friends several times per week, but not, in general, quite so many different ones. Very unusually we were treated to meals out three times in two weeks, each by different people. All meze meals, but at three different places. One was a fairly newly-opened Syrian restaurant, which was rather up-market and very pleasant. One was at our favourite local taverna, and the third was on a rooftop restaurant near St Lazarus Church, which offered vegetarian meze. It included this rather delicious feta/tomato/onion dish:

And also this (melted cheese on sliced aubergine): 

However, my camera is devoid of pictures of anything much else. 

Possibly this is because our world has been rather taken up by forthcoming changes in Richard's office; for various reasons, almost everyone else will be leaving in the summer. So, with rising costs (and signifcantly reduced funding from the US) it was deemed to be time to close the office. He will be continuing some of the production work for at least another year or two, probably more, but will be doing so from the 'studio' in our guest flat. 

So although he is still officially on sabbatical, his time and energy has been taken up in beginning to dismantle some of the current office furniture and equipment, moving it here, and setting up a new production office in the studio. This has meant that the studio - which had become a general dumping ground for sailing and other equipment - has had to be cleared out... and our guest flat is currently in chaos. I haven't been much involved in the physical work, but somehow this, and related discussions, have taken up a huge amount of emotional energy.  

Our 31st anniversary... and my 1000th post!

It seems somehow appropriate that my thousandth post on this blog - started over six years ago - should be about the celebration of another wedding anniversary. Not that 31 is a particularly significant number (unless you are interested in the different kinds of prime numbers in which case there's a detailed Wikipedia article about the number 31.) Last year's 30th ('pearl') anniversary was more of a milestone. But this is the year in which Daniel was married, and Tim finished his degree... and it could have been easy to forget about our wedding anniversary.

We have a guest staying in the guest flat but he was invited out to a meal with some other friends, so we decided to take Tim out with us for a meal. Last year only Daniel was with us - and while we liked to spend our anniversaries on our own, where possible, when the boys were younger, it's now a treat to have either of them with us.

Since we only eat out a handful of times each year, we don't know many restaurants in Larnaka. We didn't want anywhere with hot or spicy food in a Cyprus summer, and we didn't really want to try anywhere new that might prove disastrous. So, perhaps unadventurously, we opted for our favourite of the sea-front restaurants, Alexander's.

Tim took some photos of us, for the record, with his good camera, and I think this is probably the best of them:


Then I did manage to take one of him:


Since Richard and Tim both attempt to be dairy-free in their eating, we knew there were no Alexander's desserts that would be appropriate. So afterwards we drove along the sea-front towards McKenzie and the yogurt ice cream shop which also does regular ice cream, including some sorbets.

Richard opted for strawberry sorbet:


Tim decided on peach:


I was going to have a yogurt ice cream with fruit, but the strawberry sorbet looked rather good, as did the 'coconut/bounty' ice cream. So I had a scoop of each:


Alas, they were rather disappointing. The coconut ice cream wasn't bad, but the strawberry sorbet tasted very artificial. And the peach, as Tim said, tasted as if it had been made with canned peaches in syrup.

Still, they were cooling and refreshing. And the ingredients can't have been too bad since I didn't develop a migraine the following morning.

We arrived home again about 8.30 and Tim suggested a game of 'Ticket to Ride', since he had not played it for about six months. Cleo was delighted when we took the lid off the box:


It was quite an interesting game, which I thought Richard would win since he (playing red) took the only eight-train-track (worth 21 points) and had a lot of different missions. Tim (playing blue) took several extras too, and it was clear that some of the new ones overlapped perfectly with the routes he had already played.


However, I (playing yellow) managed, rather neatly (I thought) to play all my trains AND all my train cards. I only completed the original three missions I had kept at the start of the game, but I gained an extra ten points from the longest contiguous route, and I had not used any stations... and since Richard failed to complete one of his routes, I won: