Lots of lovely lemons

Lemons are very good at this time of year, in Cyprus. And they seem to be larger than usual this winter. I don't know if that's because of the vast amount of rain we've had, or whether it just happens to be a good year for lemons.

I've bought three or four euro bags from the fruitaria, each containing a couple of kilograms of lemons. I've been making lemonade, as usual, and also freezing some peel and juice for the summer, when it will be more difficult (and expensive) to get good lemons - sometimes all that's available is rather small green ones with not much juice. I make 'lemon cubes' too, in ice cube trays, which are useful for recipes that require a tablespoon of lemon juice, and also for hot honey and lemon drinks which are so soothing on cold nights, or when we have coughs.

A couple of nights ago, there was an unexpected knock on the door.. heralding a friend with two large bags of lemons for us:

He said there were plenty more on the tree, and they simply can't use them. So that's at least another three litres of lemon juice to freeze!

Summer has arrived in Cyprus

So, the first day of Summer was a couple of days ago, June 21st. Tomorrow, June 24th, is Midsummer's Day.

Logically speaking, then, the last day of summer should be June 27th.

Alas, it doesn't work that way in Cyprus. In the UK, some summers do seem to have only about a week of warm weather (though not, I gather, right now). But we're pretty much guaranteed heat and high humidity for the next two or three months, now that June is coming to an end. I really can't complain: the weather during May was warm but not over-hot. We had a couple of days earlier in June that seemed to threaten summer, but then a thunderstorm and some rain about ten days ago cooled the climate down, to about 27-28C, which is quite bearable.

We did run the air conditioning at night a few times, for a couple of hours, since the evenings were rather sticky. I've also got into my summer mode of doing any housework or shopping before 9.00am... as far as possible. Except that yesterday it wasn't possible. On Wednesdays I change our sheets and clean upstairs, and we have someone from the office to a cold lunch... and last night we were expecting friends for a meal too, who needed to go to the airport later.

So I needed to get out to the Froutaria; I did manage to do that fairly early. And I put a loaf of bread to cook in the breadmaker, and made some more lemonade as we had run out, and froze some extra lemon juice in ice cube trays...

By which time it was almost 10.00.

I was aware that I was feeling warmer than I like to be, but I took things fairly slowly. I changed the sheets, and did the laundry, and put away Monday's laundry, and dusted and mopped and cleaned out the cat litter trays and made the bed... which doesn't sound like much, but took me until nearly 1.00, with very few (short) breaks to sit down. Then I cleaned out the glass bottles where we store lemonade (using crushed eggshells to do so - very useful) and bottled the lemonade and made egg mayonnaise and washed tomatoes and hung the sheets and towels out to dry...

Then we had lunch and I sat down for half an hour or so to look at email and Facebook, etc. And was aware that I was feeling extremely hot and rather headachey and very tired.

So when I went to the kitchen at 2.30 to start cutting up fruit for fruit salad, and making ice cream, I put the air conditioning on. At 28C as usual... and I was astounded at what a difference it made. I don't think the kitchen was more than about 30C, but having the cooler air, and the humidity removed gave me a new lease of life. So I washed vegetables and fruit and chopped them and prepared food for an hour or two, feeling much more energetic than I had expected. I cleaned the kitchen too, fairly thoroughly, and emptied the dishwasher which went on after lunch, and FINALLY got into the shower around 5.00pm.

By then it was a little cooler, and I'd switched off the kitchen a/c. Our friends arrived with Richard shortly after 6.00 and we ate our meal by open windows with the ceiling fan on, and it didn't feel too hot at all. When we went to bed we ran the bedroom a/c for a couple of hours, as it gets humid in the evenings, but I slept just fine, and at 5.30am when I woke this morning it was still a little cooler out than in.

But I had a feeling it was going to be hot today. The prediction was for 33C in the shade. So I put away the laundry, and even did a little ironing, and emptied the dishwasher, and made orange juice, and froze 2.5kg tomatoes in a-little-over-400g pots, all before 8.00.

At 8.30, even having just had my shower, I felt rather over-warm. I checked the weather forecast, and it told me that it was already 32C. So I turned on my study air conditioner, and will probably leave it on for most of the day. Running it at 28 isn't very expensive, and is amazingly effective. I am very, very thankful for air conditioning.

So, summer is here, and will probably stay here for at least three more months.

The sad demise of our juice extractor

Our dishwasher seems to have been running considerably hotter than it ought to, in the last couple of weeks. It's not a huge problem - it just means that I have to switch it off after it's finished, and then leave it to cool down for at least a couple of hours before unloading. I'm not sure if it's the washing or the drying that's over-hot, but everything in it is coming out sparkling clean. Richard plans to talk to our friendly repairman at some point... when he has a moment. And since it's working, it's not a huge disaster. Glasses are not cracking, the empty margarine containers I use for freezing portions of food are not melting...

..indeed, all was well until I decided that the bowl part of our juice extractor could do with a wash in the dishwasher. Not, I'm happy to say, our citrus juicer, but the centrifugal one for apples and other non-citrus fruit. We have fresh fruit juice every morning, and I usually alternate oranges and apples, with other seasonal fruit added as relevant.

Alas, when I came to remove the items from the dishwasher, this is what I found:


It's hard to do it justice with a photo. It has become distorted; and as it's hard plastic, it won't bend back. There's no way it will fit into the machine:


Getting small appliances repaired in Cyprus is both difficult and expensive, and not generally worth it. I don't remember exactly when we bought this juice extractor, but it must have been about four years ago. Still, I've found a very useful site in the UK which supplies spare parts for just about anything. So on Sunday, I got in touch with them - the site is Belstar Electrics. I couldn't find any trace of this juicer (a Tefal Elea) but they had a contact form, so I used it.

A few hours later, I had a friendly reply saying that they were sorry, but they didn't have anything for this machine.

So I tried Tefal's own recommended site for spare parts, Britcom. I couldn't find the juice extractor listed there either, but they also had a contact form. So I got in touch.

Today I had a reply saying, 'I'm sorry, but this product and its parts are now obsolete'.

Probably it was obsolete when we bought it. That does, sometimes, seem to be the case in Cyprus; items no longer available in the UK or mainland Europe can still be bought here. It's a good machine, so I don't know why they would have withdrawn it; we haven't had any problems with it, and it must have run at least three times per week for four years, which is quite a bit of juicing.

Yesterday I remembered, suddenly, that our food processor has a juice extractor attachment. This morning I hunted in several likely cupboards before finally running it to earth. Rather dusty, so I washed it and will see how well it works. If it manages apples successfully, then I may simply use that, which is simpler (and considerably cheaper) than having a new juice extractor.