Summer in Cyprus

 After over two decades, I am used to summers in Cyprus. I don't like them, but with ceiling fans, air conditioning, and somewhat cooler temperatures in the early mornings, I've learned to cope. Mostly. This year, despite excessive heat in various other parts of the world, we haven't had a major heatwave here yet. June was, if anything, cooler than normal. I kept walking the 4km trail with my friend Sheila three mornings per week almost until the end of June.

Facebook kept reminding me about the annual tradition Richard and I established a few years ago, where we go out for ice cream on the first day when it feels really hot. We decided to declare June 22nd as that day; and had a pleasant evening walk with some excellent ice creams.

We and our friends also decided that from July 1st we would move our Friday evening get-togethers from their home to the beach, as we usually do over the hottest months. 

I try to get out for a short walk around the neighbourhood each morning first thing, staying in the shade, and doing no more than about a kilometre; I know how difficult it is to establish a good habit and how easy to break it, so I do go out, if only for ten minutes, and generally feel better for it. 

And then I do whatever food preparation I need to do in the kitchen, before 8am. For the past few years I have managed to avoid turning on the oven for the whole of July and August. We mostly eat salads - and that doesn't mean lots of lettuce and tomatoes; I have discovered all kinds of excellent variations on salads, and usually make one or two new ones each morning. 

I always ensure at least one salad contains protein (black beans, chickpeas, eggs, canned tuna or canned salmon, for instance), and we have some form of basic carbohydrate. That's often potatoes, cooked or reheated in the air fryer before eating. But I've also made rice salad with peas and corn, or rather a nice pasta salad with wholegrain farfalle pasta, sun dried tomatoes, pesto and some vegan parmesan.

Remembering something I was taught many decades ago in school domestic science, I use as many different coloured fruits and vegetables as possible: red and orange peppers, cucumber, avocado, mango, tomatoes, frozen peas, chopped onions, peaches, lightly steamed broccoli... no more than two or three of them per salad, with a little lemon juice and olive oil as dressing. 

Summer is when soft fruit is in season, and often very good value. A couple of weeks ago, I went out early on Saturday morning to the local fruit market, planning to buy a kilogram or so of apricots to stew for a Sunday afternoon get-together. The best value, however, was a crate for two euros, which contained nearly 4kg apricots. We ate a few raw, and they were very good but clearly needed to be used quickly. I didn't want to make more jam. So I stewed half of them, and then used the dehydrator for most of the rest:

I had been wary of using the dehydrator in the summer months, but it wasn't too unpleasant; it didn't seem to add much to the heat or humidity of the kitchen, and I mostly kept out of the room anyway, after setting it going.

At the weekends we do eat hot food: on Sundays I use the air fryer and stovetop some weeks; other weeks we buy a takeaway roast lunch from a local taverna, which has sufficient chicken and potatoes to last us at least three full meals, although the salad that comes with it is only enough for one meal. Still, at just over 14 euros, it's pretty good value, so I make other salads to go with it during the week. 

I usually have portions of previously-made curries in the freezer that I heat on Saturday evenings. Yesterday we were expecting friends from Limassol for the evening, so I used the slow cooker to make my favourite pinto bean curry, and a similar one with chicken. My three-pot slow cooker is excellent for allowing me to cook a variety of different things at the same time, and a slow cooker is perfect for the summer. All the preparation was done before 8am, and it simmered gently through the day, generating very little heat. 

Something else I make in the summer more than other times of year is ice cream. I hadn't tried using our ice cream churn for a couple of years, as it had been somewhat disappointing. I thought I would give it another chance this year - and it appears that the fridge freezer we bought a couple of years ago to replace our elderly and inefficient one gets the churn sufficiently cold that it actually works as intended! I'm very pleased with it, and have made not just my favourite coconut milk vanilla ice cream, but a chocolate sorbet which is easy to make, and very good:

All of which covers the mornings from around 5.30-6.00am up to about nine o'clock, by which time I've also squeezed fresh orange juice, had breakfast and a frappe, and set Dustin the Roomba off to clean the main floor area.  It's still getting a lot of cat hair every day, and has done, slightly to my embarrassment, over a thousand 'dirt events' since we starting using it less than three months ago. 

Then I might give the floor a quick mop, or put on laundry etc, and Richard and I usually chat - about the day, and what we might have read or heard on the news (or Facebook), and whatever else comes up. But usually I'm showered and ready to turn on the air conditioning by about 10am. We run it at 28-29C, in 'eco' mode in our studies, which means the computers don't overheat; the reduction in humidity means it feels significantly cooler than the rest of the house even though it's only 30-31C most of the time.

On Tuesdays my friends usually come over for board games, on Fridays we shop, and on other days I catch up with email, and Facebook, and forums, and DuoLingo on the computer. For a week or so I was doing some proof-reading for a book that's just been published. I try to keep up with photos, adding more to photobooks, although I haven't done as much as usual this year. In the past couple of weeks I have been re-organising and finalising my recipe folder, something I used to do every few years as I like to keep all my recipes in one place - but also like acquiring new ones, and trying variations.

The most recent folder has been a long time in production: our last family recipe folder was in 2014, but at last I have a completely revised 2022 version, containing everything I make, with adaptations and notes; nearly 100 pages in an A4 pocket folder, which opens almost flat and fits nicely in my perspex cookery book holder that sits on the microwave. 

Not that I use exact recipes, necessarily, but I like to have them to refer to, even if it's something I make so often that I don't actually need the recipe. Such a relief not to have to keep digging out scraps of paper with recipes scribbled on them, or my 2014 folder which had become quite tatty.  I know most people nowadays use their tablets or phones for recipes, but I still prefer them in print. 

As for the afternoons, when I'm not working on photos or recipes: I tend to read more in the summer than I do in the winter, and as ever I write book reviews for my book blog. I keep in touch with various people, and pay bills and keep track of finances... and play the daily Wordle and Worldle and Quordle, and of course Lexulous and Words With Friends and one or two others. Just once a day, usually for half an hour or so after lunch. 

In the evenings, we might play games with friends, or watch a DVD, or just continue with what we were doing in the daytime. I usually put the computer to sleep by about 8pm and if we're not doing anything else, I read.

It probably all sounds quite dull to those who lead more active lives, but I'm learning that it's good for me to slow down, to rest when I'm tired. But I'm very much looking forward to over a month out of Cyprus, seeing relatives and taking a break from looking after the house.  The pandemic made that impossible for the past two years, although we did manage a week late summer last year. This time, I should have the opportunity to be a grandma in person rather than online, thankful though I am for the technology that enables us to keep in touch.

I'm relieved that I'm not going this weekend, however, since the UK is predicted to be significantly hotter than Cyprus, at least for the next couple of days... and without air conditioning, that is not going to be at all comfortable. 

A glut of soft fruit

One of the things which, on balance, I like about Cyprus is that fruit and vegetables tend to be quite seasonal. Most of what we find at the fruitaria is locally grown; there are imported apples, bananas, and potatoes much of the year, but soft fruit such as peaches and plums, and the huge inexpensive watermelons only appear during the summer months.

Of course, this is how it always used to be all around the world. People used to use the months of plenty to preserve fruit for the leaner winter months. And while I've always made jam using fruit in season when it's good value, it's only in recent years that I've started lightly stewing and freezing soft fruit, which I use instead of cans.

Soft fruit starts appearing in May, but it usually seems to be about the 10th-12th June when there's so much that it's available remarkably inexpensively. I have enough Scottish in me to like a bargain. I thought I might make apricot jam yesterday, before the weather gets too hot even to think about jam-making, so on Friday, when we do our weekly shopping, we made sure that we went to the outside fruit stall around 9.00, before all the best buys had been taken.

Sure enough, there were tubs of apricots, each around 1.5kg according to the woman selling them, marked at two euros. I thought that wasn't bad value, then she told me that they were actually one euro each. I said we would have two, and she gave us a third tub for nothing.  Then I chose a 2kg tub of plums, also at a euro, and then spotted an entire small crate of peaches at the same price - weighing them later, I discovered that there were over 5kg of them, all perfectly ripe.

So we bought around 12kg soft fruit for four euros.

We did the rest of the shopping and then I had the task of trying to fit everything in the fridge. I didn't have time to process the fruit on Friday, and I knew from experience that even one night left out would mean that the fruit would start to go bad.  We have quite a big fridge for two people, but it was a tight squeeze:

On Friday night I stayed up too late, and then woke very early Saturday; I don't do well with only five hours sleep but knew I had to deal with the fruit. So I started with the apricot jam and made nearly eight jars, using 2kg of the apricots:

I counted the other jars I made earlier in the year, and the few left from last Autumn, and there are around twenty so that should be plenty to last until next March when I will make more strawberry jam.

Next thing was to stew the plums. I might have dried them - dehydrated plums are delicious! - but they were the kind that didn't easily give up their stones, so I cut them in half, stuck them in a pan with a little water, and stewed them for about half an hour. Four 450g tubs resulted, and I've labelled them as 'plums with stones'.

Since I couldn't dehydrate the plums, and didn't much like dried peaches when I tried with those a year or two back, my next task was to put another couple of kilograms, or so, of apricots in the dehydrator, which then ran all day:

I don't dry them completely, but freeze them in little pots. The total was about 400g. A large part of any soft fruit is water.

Most of the rest went into another pan to be stewed; since I wanted to make a dessert the following day using stewed apricots, I only froze one tub and put the rest in the fridge overnight.

I did keep a few for eating during the week. I hope to buy more apricots next Friday so I can stew and freeze some more.

Finally the peaches.  Thankfully they were not 'cling' peaches, so it was easy to halve them and remove the stones, and then roughly slice them for stewing. I kept the best ones for eating, and stewed the rest; here are some of the resultant tubs ready for freezing:

Those Flora spread tubs make perfect containers for around 450g stewed fruit, making them a perfect substitute for the (less healthy) canned equivalent, for cakes and puddings and pies.

It took me most of the day, off and on, to do this, but none of it was particularly strenuous and it was most satisfactory to have so much fruit processed and stored for the future. I don't think I had to throw anything away.

Alas for my pride. I had made the decision not to make a batch of granola yesterday, while I was dealing with all the soft fruit. It would be more efficient, I thought, to use the oven which would be on for our Sunday lunch. So I put the oats in about fifteen minutes before our roast potatoes were ready, and turned the oven off while we ate, not wanting anything to scorch.

After lunch, I turned the oven on again, added the seeds, nuts and coconut (etc) to the oats, along with the oil and carob syrup, mixed it up, and put it back in the oven.

Then I saw the vast array of dirty dishes around the kitchen. It felt daunting. Richard and Tim had both had to go out to do other things, so I decided to sit down for ten minutes to check email and one or two other things on my computer.

BIG mistake.

With the warm temperatures, we have lots of windows open and ceiling fans going, so the scent of my over-cooking granola did not reach me in my study, where I remembered something else I needed to do...

.. it was an hour and a half later when I went through to the kitchen with a sigh, knowing I had to sort out the mess. My nose was instantly alerted to the granola, which I had completely forgotten about.

So much for being more efficient with the oven usage. I was particularly annoyed because there's an 'off' timer on my oven, which I could easily have set. It might have been slightly over-done, but it wouldn't have been completely un-rescuable.

It actually looked worse than it does in this picture:

Nothing was edible. If I'd needed charcoal I might have been able to use it.  As it was, I had to wait until it was cool enough to pour into a plastic bag and throw it away.

I hate throwing food away.

So I felt suitably humbled, and made another batch. 

In praise of Cyprus fruit and vegetables

I could undoubtedly save a great deal of time if I ignored the local fruit stall, and if I was prepared to buy ready-made chutney, ketchup, lemon squash or orange juice. Actually we do buy ready-made lemon squash (for Richard) in the summer when lemons are out of season, and we do buy long-life grape and pineapple juice in packets.

Lemons started re-appearing in the shops in November, I suppose, but my memories of spending hours peeling/juicing lemons in previous years made me reluctant to start that again. I've been getting quite bad backache when I spend too long standing in the kitchen... however, for once my procrastination bore fruit (so to speak) since Richard and Tim - the ones who actually drink home-made lemon squash - offered to deal with them this year.

So about three weeks ago, we bought around 100 lemons (for three euros or so) - not organic, but unwaxed and locally grown.  They spent a couple of evenings washing, peeling and juicing them, producing a batch of lemon squash (three litres), four litres of pure juice plus peeled zest for the freezer for future batches, and about 72 lemon cubes (in ice cube trays) for quick additions to various recipes, or to make hot honey and lemon.

After a couple of weeks we were just thinking we might repeat the process when a local friend called by with two large bags full of lemons, freshly picked from his abundant tree. Here's the contents of one of the bags:

The first bag made another batch of squash, and another litre for the future, and another 24 lemon cubes. The second is still to be dealt with. 

On Friday we bought a crate of oranges - about 80 of them, I suppose - for an extravagant four euros, but they are very nice oranges. There's really nothing like freshly-squeezed orange juice, so I make some every morning. That takes between five and eight oranges for three of us, depending on the size of orange. Quite a few... so 80 last at most ten days. I put as many as I could in the fridge, as they won't necessarily keep for long out in the kitchen - here are the ones I could not fit in: 

And then, there's tomatoes. History repeats itself - just over two years ago I wrote about processing vast quantities of tomatoes to freeze, and to make ketchup and chutney and so on.  Last weekend I bought and used quite a few, making more ketchup and chutney, but who could resist a large crate for just two euros, at the stall yesterday? We certainly couldn't. They looked beautifully ripe; it's hard to tell the size from this photo, but I suppose each one is about 5-6cm (2.5-3 inches) in diameter. 

I was on vegetable duty for our house group last night so I made some baked tomatoes, and also sliced several for one of the children who likes them raw only, sprinkled with garlic and basil. I then put as many as I could fit into a large bowl in the fridge, which left just this many, on a tray:

This morning I cut up about 25 of them for the dehydrator, and they're now nearly dried. I put another couple of kilograms in a saucepan to stew gently, prior to making tomato soup tomorrow. Then I managed to fit the last few, somehow, into the fridge. I'm not entirely sure what I'll do with them - probably I'll stew most of them to freeze in 400g portions, as that's what I use for any recipe that calls for canned tomatoes (which I don't use any more).

Except that our freezers - both the top of the fridge and the main upright freezer - are already rather bulging at the seams, and I already have at least five or six tubs of frozen tomatoes...

It would undoubtedly save time if I could resist these bargains - I didn't even mention the smaller crates of carrots and broccoli that I also bought - but I'm sure it saves money, and is a great deal healthier to use fresh, locally grown produce such as these.

(Although, given my current hacking cough, at the end of a cold that has lasted quite a while, it's a little ironic to think of being 'healthy'!)

Another post about shopping in Cyprus

Friday used to be our regular supermarket shopping day.  However, when our sons left home, we didn't need to do a big shop so often. Combining our smaller food requirements with excellent local shops within five minutes' walk of our home means that, in general, we now only go to the Metro supermarket about once every two months.  We also visit the grain/nut warehouse about once a month, for nuts, seeds and coconut. 

The last time we went to the warehouse was right after we returned from the UK, mid-September. We went to Metro early in October. However... we had unexpectedly run out of coffee filters. And I could not find any at the local shops. So, as we needed to get to the nut warehouse last Friday, I suggested we call into Metro as well, but promised I would not do a 'big' shop. And we also called by the Achna open-air stall where crates of various fruit and vegetables are available at remarkably good prices:

There wasn't a whole lot that interested us, so I picked up a small box of bananas (about 1kg) and one of potatoes (about 1.6kg) for a euro each. Not that great value, but reasonable, and saved me carrying them home the following day.

Then I spotted two lone pineapples, a little battered but smelling just fine. I asked how much, and was told they were one euro. Since they were a euro each at the main Achna shop, I said we'd get them. I love fresh pineapple, and thought I might dehydrate some, or even experiment with freezing some pineapple.  The woman who serves at the stall speaks no English, and my Greek is extremely basic... but another man appeared, with the usual excellent English of Cypriots, and explained that the pineapples were part of a 'two for €1.50' deal, so that I could choose any of the other crates nearby for 50c. I opted for some peaches which, when I weighed them later, came to about 5kg.  The pineapples weighed around 1kg each.

So we paid a total of €3.50 for nearly 10kg fresh produce:

Next stop was Metro. Richard had to pop into a friend's office, so I went around the whole store, just in case there were any special offers, or other things we might need in addition to the coffee filters. I did remember dried milk (which helps home-made yogurt to thicken), and raspberry and green tea (which we can't get anywhere else, and which I like very much)... and I also spotted some special offer washing-up liquid, carob syrup and kitchen roll. 

And, following on from something my friend Sheila did recently, I weighed my purchases from Metro too. We paid approximately €15 for this lot, which weighed a measly 2kg: 

Last stop was the nut warehouse. We bought around 1kg almonds, 1kg walnuts, and 1.6kg cashews. We eat these for breakfast, and I cook with cashews from time to time. There are also quite a few pre-packaged bags of produce, mostly quite small but also rather inexpensive.

So I also picked up 1 bag of raisins, 2 bags of sunflower seeds, 2 bags of flaxseeds, 3 extra bags of walnuts, 4 bags of brazil nuts, and 6 bags of coconut.  Which makes me sound a bit like The Very Hungry Caterpillar...

The nut warehouse bill was much the highest, a little over €53 for a total of 6.5kg produce:

I had not used my dehydrator since the previous weekend, but with plenty of fruit to experiment with, I set it going again and enjoyed the fruit-drying aroma through the day:

I also cooked large quantities of peaches - each one just cut into wedges after removing the stone, and put in a pan with a little water, simmering until soft. I froze some, and we've been eating (and sharing with friends) the rest. They taste a little like canned peaches in juice... they look a bit browner, but (at least in our view) taste even better.  

Dehydrating in Cyprus

Earlier this year, when apricots were abundantly in season, my friend Sheila and I talked about how good it would be if we could make our own dried fruit, to preserve apricots - among other things - for the winter months. They would be considerably less expensive than dried apricots in the shops, and free from nasty preservatives. 

We have guaranteed sunshine for several months, so after some discussion Sheila rigged up a system with trays, and mosquito netting, and set some apricots to dry on their roof. These took several days, and had to be taken in overnight (when the humidity is extremely high) - but the results were very good indeed. However, the hassle was such that I never actually tried it myself... 

Sheila mentioned that her mother had a home dehydrator, but when I searched online, out of curiosity, most of them were very expensive - a couple of hundred pounds or more - and consumed extensive electricity as well, something which is very highly priced here in Cyprus.  I put it out of my mind. 

Fast forward a few months. Richard and I were in Sussex, and visited Lakeland. We saw a £50 dehydrator, with five trays. We were very tempted indeed - I had some birthday money, and we thought we had space in our luggage. But we managed to resist. But we kept talking about it.  And then after we returned to Cyprus, I learned that if I had a dehydrator, I could make coconut flour out of what remains when I made my own coconut milk... 

When I looked on the Lakeland website for something else (a coffee maker for Richard's birthday)... I discovered that their postage charge to Cyprus was only £7.50, no matter how large the parcel. And it came via courier. Grapes were in season by then, as well as plums, and I kept thinking about making my own dried fruit... so I made the order. A week later, a courier arrived with the parcels:

There weren't many instructions, but I reckoned I could experiment with different types of fruit, and see how long everything took. I had various random fruit, so a few days later I tried some apple pieces, and some banana slices:

I was making a fruit salad and has a few leftover grapes and pineapple slices, so I put those on another tray, along with a few rather squashy plums that were sitting in the fridge:

I realised that the coconut meal would slip through the gaps in the trays, so improvised by cutting one of my small muslin squares to an approximate fit:

Then I switched it on!  

It didn't get as hot as I had expected - so although the instructions told me to use oven gloves, I found that unnecessary when pausing to check how things were doing, or to move the trays around. Since it's a simple and relatively inexpensive gadget, it has just one heat setting, and the air isn't all that even so it's a good idea to move things around, and to remove fruit that's finished on any tray.

By the end of the first day, which included some necessary (and very enjoyable) testing, I had made the coconut flour, and removed the dried pineapple, bananas and apples. Friends were coming to dinner, so I put them out with our dessert, to try:

Richard liked the bananas best. They were squidgy rather than banana chips, and he said they reminded him of some delicious banana pieces he'd eaten when camping as a teenager. He asked if I could try cutting them lengthways next time. One of our visiting friends liked the apple best, the other liked the pineapple best. And I couldn't decide... 

A day or two later, after we'd eaten most of the fruit salad, Sheila and I were talking about 'fruit leather', something made from fruit puree in a dehydrator. I cut some baking paper to fit, pureed the now rather squashy fruit salad, and set it to dry: 

Plums were particularly good value at the local fruit stall - an extension of our favourite Froutaria - so I bought a large quantity, and cut three or four trays' worth up to dehydrate:

The fruit leather turned out very well after just a few hours. I had to leave it to cool, then cut it into wedges. They peeled nicely from the backing paper, and were rather tasty. 

My own personal favourite, at least so far, has been dried plums. Sweet plums work very well, and slightly to my surprise are nothing like prunes (which are, apparently, from a particular kind of plum). But pretty much everything has worked well. I've made some very good raisins from inexpensive grapes, and am regularly making banana pieces for Richard.

The electricity usage is about 1 unit for four hours, which isn't bad at all, and the taste is so vastly superior to anything we can buy ready-dried that it's worth it for that alone; not needing any sugar or other preservatives is a huge bonus.