A mosquito woke me about 4am this morning. I didn't feel it biting, but the buzz around my face made me feel as if my teeth were vibrating as I woke.

I tried to slap it in the dark but evidently missed. Or else there were more than one. For the next hour and a half I lay there, randomly slapping the air - and sometimes myself, inadvertently - while a mosquito dive-bombed me. Yes, I should have got up and put on the electric smelly zapper thing, but somehow at that hour of the morning I couldn't quite remember what to do, or summon up the energy to do it.

I finally got up about 5.30, as I knew I wasn't going to sleep. I actually felt reasonably energetic by the time I'd had my coffee and read etc for a couple of hours. I made some more strawberry jam this morning, as strawberries are fairly cheap at present, and also some mespila (loquat) jam, since they're right in season now and we can't eat them all raw, even though I've given away quite a few.
I did a load of laundry for someone staying at Richard's office, stripped the beds and washed sheets and towels - still hanging out now - and chatted with Dan on IM for a bit.

At lunchtime Richard updated me with the latest on our house in the UK. It still isn't sold. It sounds as if there is now some doubt about whether the mortgage really has been approved. A broker had said it definitely was, but there's no paperwork from the building society. So now the buyer's solicitor has sent some extremely complex (and unecessary) documents to the building society, asking for their consent to the mortgage in writing. The guarantor is worried that they will decide it's too much hassle, and pull out.

So it's potentially a big problem, but we're still hoping and praying that things will work out. Soon.

At 7pm, just as we were about to start eating our evening meal, the tiredness hit me. Pow! Right out of the blue. But I don't really want to go to bed before at least 9am, or I'll wake at four again, and the cycle will continue.

Flowers, Fruit, .. and Further Frustration

I'm quite pleased with the little border of bedding plants in the front garden:


.. rather more attractive then when I planted them out mid-December, as blogged here with a rather dreary photo.

Our mespila (loquat) tree is about to produce fruit, which is good. These fruit are good for cooking with (albeit rather too full of stones) and delicious when they're just ripe and eaten straight from the tree. We wouldn't choose to plant this particular tree, and never buy the fruit at the supermarket since by the time they've been stored a days or so they're rather tasteless. But there's nothing to beat freshly-picked and fully organic home-grown fruit so we'll make the most of them for the last time.


Well.

We hope it's the last time. Today the buyer of our house in the UK saw her solicitor, and our solicitor spoke to him too. Apparently he (the buyer's solicitor) said that contract exchange is impossible by the end of this week, because he has to deal with three other solicitors - those appointed by our buyer's mortgage company, those of the person I spoke to on Friday who's paying some of the deposit, and ours. But he didn't seem even to have worked out how the mechanics will work - with cheques taking three days to clear, it could take another two weeks even if the first cheques are written tomorrow, since they'd have to pass through three solicitors each.

Unbelievable...

Richard did speak to the guy paying the deposit, who does understand the process and the need for speedy completion, and he'll see what he can do. But I guess we won't be moving by mid-May (sigh).

Oh, and one more thing. I don't fully understand what a blogging carnival is about, but I gather it's a compilation of various posts on a relevant topic. There's a weekly carnival about home education, hosted at various places. I wondered if one of my posts from a year ago would be acceptable so I emailed this week's host to find out - and today had a notification that it was indeed included. I suppose it doesn't matter that my post is out of date from our family perspective, since it's still pertinent to home education.

Anyway, those interested in this subject might like to look through this week's carnival - and maybe folk who are currently home educating in the UK (or anywhere else) could submit posts for future carnivals, to make them a bit more international in flavour.

Confused trees?

I always thought that trees 'knew' what season it was, and so went through their cycles appropriately. In the UK, we generally get fruit blossom around March and April, fruit on trees from about June to September, orange/brown leaves in late September and October, which fall to the ground, leaving bare branches for mid-November until about mid-February, when the new buds start again. Other than the evergreens, of course. At least, this is what we learn in biology at around the age of 11, and the trees in the UK mostly behave as they're supposed to.

But in Cyprus, it's a bit more complicated. I already mentioned the almond blossom in our neighbour's garden; today it was looking even more stunning:


OK, so it's Spring. It was lovely and warm again today, about 21C [um, that's around 70F, for anyone on Fahrenheit] so we had all the windows open most of the morning and some of the afternoon.

Then again, it's still only February, and we may have another cold spell before it begins to get really hot. And sure enough, our mulberry tree looks much like a tree in the UK in winter:


On the other hand, our mespila (loquat) tree is past the blossom stage - so small it's hardly noticeable anyway - and has already produced tiny fruits. Evidently, it thinks it's already late spring:


Then again, the citrus trees are coming towards the end of their fruiting season - we still have lots of lemons:


And just to complete the cycle, the 'shade' tree (that's what the Cypriots call it) looks like a tree in Autumn:


Maybe the trees here never went to school to study the seasons.

Christmas Day and Boxing Day

It was a pleasant Christmas. We thought it would be a hectic morning but in fact we were all up and dressed by 8am, so we opened all our presents then. It was good having my mother staying - it's the first time we've had a house-guest over Christmas, although we always get together with friends for lunch. Dan had to be at church by 8.30 for music practice, then our service was at 9am and the Anglican service (which Tim and my mother attended) at 9.30am. Very early: usually Christmas Day services are at 10am, but this year they decided to go for regular Sunday times since Christmas was a Sunday. Of course it did give us more time afterwards to get all the food organised, so it wasn't a bad thing.

There were 12 of us sitting down to lunch on Christmas Day. After much family discussion we decided to cook the turkey on Christmas Eve so we could make roast potatoes to go with it on Christmas Day; our oven isn't very big and the turkey we'd ordered was 9kg. Richard then carved it into a large roasting pan (white meat on one side, red on the other, stuffing in the middle) and laid some of the skin over it to keep it most. Then I put foil over the whole thing and it went in the fridge overnight. It took just under an hour to reheat fully on Christmas Day, and was beautifully moist. It saves so much hassle (no getting up early to put it on, no worries about whether it would be cooked through, no waiting around while it was carved) that we'll probably repeat this next year even if by then we have a double oven.

Our menu (if anyone's remotely interested in traditional British Christmas lunch) was the turkey with two types of home-made stuffing, sausages, roast potatoes, brussels sprouts, steamed cauliflower, stir-fried cabbage-with-cumin, and home-made cranberry sauce. Oh, and a nut roast for my vegetarian son. In addition one of the families eating with us brought a sweet potato casserole and a brussels sprout dish with lemon. Of course there was lots over at the end. For dessert we had Christmas pudding with brandy sauce, mince pies, and a loquat fool I made with some puree frozen in the spring. The other visiting family brought an apple crumble. And there were a few clementine oranges too. Unfortunately there don't seem to be any satsumas in the shops at present. We much prefer those as they're seedless.

In the afternoon various people did music jamming together, some of the younger boys (12-15) played with some new toys and our ancient Scalextric, some of us did a complicated two-sided puzzle, some just chatted. Later on we played a difficult word game that was too much for my rather tired brain, so I opted out.

In the evening, out came some leftovers, some veggie sausage rolls I made the day before, the Christmas cake I made in November, and various salads and nibbles that our guests had brought with us. Oh, and some fudge Tim made. Not that any of us were really very hungry... I even managed to take a picture of the table before we ate in the evening:



On Boxing Day the boys arranged for three of their friends to come over in the afternoon, one of them bringing his laptop. They borrowed one of Richard's office computers too, and managed to network together five computers in all, to play a game against each other. I gather it was something like the American game 'Capture the flag', which is a bit like a British 'wide game'. All in the comfort of the dining room.


Then in the evening, Tim asked me to put my computer to sleep so he could do some important surgery on it. A little worrying when he got out the vacuum cleaner prior to operating...


... and even worse when he said, with clear enjoyment, how much he LIKES gutting computers. Gutting? I thought it was just having a few improvements...


But by that stage he told me it was (effectively) open heart surgery.

For anyone who cares (and has read this far) what he actually did was to remove the second hard drive and the graphics card and the processor from their desktop computer, and swap them for the smaller processor and graphics card from my computer.

Why such altruism to give me a fast machine with a 40 gig hard drive when I was just fine with a slower one and a 9 gig drive? Well there were two reasons. One: both boys now have MAC laptops, which they bought in the Autumn, so they barely use their desktop computer. It has a Linux drive anyway which is still there. They both felt that my computer should be upgraded since it's the most-used desktop machine in the house. However they knew I think along the lines of, 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it'.

But, not knowing this, I said idly one day recently that I wondered if the game Sims2 would fit on my computer. Richard had no idea what to buy me for Christmas, and I always enjoyed the original Sims game though I haven't played it for at least two years. Richard discussed it with the boys, and they came up with this plan to upgrade my computer and downgrade theirs, for the sole purpose (from my point of view) of being able to instal and run Sims2. And I was given it for Christmas. Something totally 'silly', unpractical, unwearable, un-useful... but potentially very enjoyable for us all. And I'm determined not to get hooked on it!

Fairly productive

I must have picked about six kilograms of mespila/loquats today. They're at the stage where some of them are wonderful to eat raw, but we don't get through many that way. The stones are so large that it feels like a lot of effort for not much fruit, and they discolour so quickly after picking, making them looking rather unappealing.

Apparently there are two varieties of this fruit. The ones I've seen in the supermarket, at fairly high price, are ovoid rather than spherical, a darker orange, and don't seem to discolour so much. I'm told they have smaller stones, too. And they seem to ripen slightly earlier. I've seen some like that in gardens locally, but more like ours with the pale orange globe-shaped fruit.

I gave away a bagful to the friend who gives the boys oral training music lessons on Monday mornings. Then I froze a kilo and a half in sugar syrup, as I did last week. Then I made another kilo into jam, and realised why the jam I made on Thursday came out rather oddly, not setting properly and appearing to have too much fruit. It DID have too much fruit! I had stupidly weighed the loquats after removing the stones, whereas my recipe requires them to be weighed whole. Ah well, it tastes all right so if we eat it fairly soon it won't do any harm.

There's still a bowlful of raw loquats on the kitchen table; only a few have been eaten, and although they looked wonderful after I'd picked them, they now look rather brown and unappetising. I think I'll put them in the fridge overnight, then make some more puree tomorrow. I do hope I can give some more away later in the week; there are still plenty on the tree which haven't yet turned orange.

I did an hour or so's gardening this morning too, before it got too sunny. Weeding is never-ending. The 'lawn' (ha!) hadn't been cut for two weeks and was beginning to look like what it is - a collection of tightly-packed weeds with a few blades of grass here and there. There were masses of dandelions, the small variety that evidently flower quite quickly, so I asked Tim to start mowing this afternoon. I didn't want them to turn into dandelion clocks and then seed even further. He cut about half of it, by which time there was quite a bit of shade so I did some more. There's still another hour or so to do, but we decided to leave that till tomorrow as it's the trickier bit around all the trees.

This evening I did my first major watering of the season, pleased that it's early May rather than early April that I'm starting. I'll try to remember to do it on Saturdays in future, as far as possible. It was dark by about 8pm - and getting chilly too - so I came in, pleased that we seem to be having a much longer spring than usual.

Four pots of jam, three lemonade, two orange curd, and some pureed loquats in the freezer!

I ignored the fruit for a day or two, other than collecting fallen lemons. Not too many, thankfully, so today when I needed ten to make some more lemonade, I only had fourteen. As soon as I get ten 'spare', so to speak, I'll freeze some more.

However the seville orange tree evidently decided to shed its fruit in the recent wind - this morning there were about twenty of them. We don't eat marmalade so I haven't used any of these bitter oranges this year. Some of them were rather soft, so they went straight on the compost heap. But I did use a couple to make some orange curd, which is almost nicer than lemon curd.

And the loquats/mespila.... there are SO many of those ripening, and many more to come too. I picked a carrier bag full this morning. I washed and stoned until I had a kilogram of fruit, then made some jam. I did think about my preserving pan, which is still in our UK house (I think) but am not sure I'd want to go back to making large quantities of jam. I've adapted all my jam recipes so they take a kilogram of sugar, as that's the size of the bags sold here, and it saves having to weigh it.

By this afternoon all the other loquats I'd picked had become a bit brown - they start to look bruised within hours of being picked, which is a bit of a nuisance. Anyway, rather than freezing them in halves as I did before, I stewed another kilogram and a half until soft, then turned into puree for freezing.

I dread to think how much sugar I've used in all today. I should think it must have been at least three kilograms!!

Out of interest I weighed the loquat stones I'd removed. I had thought they were probably as heavy as the fruit, but found they were less so. For a kilo of fruit, there was about 500g of stones. Which is still quite a bit. They all get thrown on the compost heap and seem to decompose satisfactorily.

With all this preserving and freezing of fruit, I'm very thankful the daytime weather is still pleasantly cool (for the time of year) in the low 20s Celcius, with a fair amount of wind.

Loquats and Lemons

This is how our front mespila tree looked this afternoon. Packed with fruit! Yet not quite ripe enough to eat much of it. I knew that leaving it a few days would mean that birds would get at it, as it would all become fully ripe together. The solution is to pick some at this stage and cook it - they look a little like apricots, cook a bit like plums, and taste somewhere like a cross between the two, with a hint of rhubarb. I didn't want to make jam, though. There are still four or five jars left from last year's batch. Richard said he wanted some fool, though, and I thought I might as well start some freezing.

So I picked quite a few. The worst thing about loquats is preparing them; they have very large stones inside - and not just one per fruit, but about three or four. Soft, satiny and oval. So the fruit has to be washed, then halved, and the stones and stalk removed. There never seems to be much fruit left by the time the stones have gone, but still it made two kilograms of fruit in all. I froze three half-kilos in rigid plastic containers in sugar solution (1lb of sugar to 1kg water according to my recipe book - and that was enough for the three half-kilos) with a the juice of a small lemon and a dash of vitamin C powder to preserve the colour. I stewed the last half-kilo gently with the juice of a lemon, 150g sugar and some water, then pureed it in the blender and mixed with some custard in preparation for a mespila fool for tomorrow's lunch (Richard's request).

About 25 lemons fell out of the trees today - it was extremely windy this afternoon - so I also washed and pared 20 of them, and froze the parings in two containers in preparation for lemonade when there are no more lemons available. Then I juiced the lemons, plus a few extra small ones, to make two litres of juice and froze that in two separate containers. I still have a massive pile of lemons, but at least I used slightly more than the number that fell today.  

Frozen Assets....

Sometimes it takes months - even years - for an idea to come to fruition in our household. But not always!

On Tuesday someone suggested freezing lemon juice from our surplus lemons. And then I realised that our mespila (loquats) were ripening fast and I never have room to freeze any of those, although I'd like to. I wondered vaguely whether we could fit a chest freezer in the house somewhere.

On Wednesday I pondered the passageway outside the kitchen where our little upright four-drawer freezer sits, but Richard pointed out that if we had a chest freezer that was significantly bigger, there wouldn't be room for us to get past - certainly not carrying anything. He did suggest we could put a chest freezer in the dining room but the rest of us vetoed that.

Then I wondered about replacing the four-door freezer with a much taller one, so it would take up the same floor space but have twice as much room inside. But it seemed a pity - the little freezer is just fine and should last for years. Instead I started thinking about our fridge-freezer, which has never really been big enough, and which was having problems with the door - it didn't seal very well, sometimes the freezer door didn't shut properly, and the paint is wearing off. It was a very cheap one when we bought it, and it's done us well, but maybe it was time to think of replacing it, before it actually died and left us with large quantities of defrosting food... we do have some money from a legacy so it wasn't an impossible idea.

On Thursday morning, Richard suggested looking at a couple of shops to see the prices and what's available. We went first to Giorgos Theodorou, the shop where we've bought most of our appliances over the years. The owner knows Richard, and they're excellent at repairing things that go wrong - rapid, efficient, and minimal cost. He showed us various options. The chest freezers available weren't all that big, and apparently they get a lot of frost. So we rejected that idea. We also decided definitely against the big upright freezers. But we were bewildered by the array of fridge-freezers, whose freezer capacity is apparently measured in cubic feet, with most of them having about seven or seven-and-a-half cubic feet. We did look briefly at an American style side-by-side fridge-freezer (with freezer size 9 cubic feet) but it was too big for our kitchen, and nearly twice the price of most of the fridges!

Then we went to Dalco, a newer shop which sends out catalogues of kitchen equipment and appliances. We quickly realised that similar-sized fridges were around the same prices as the other store, although it was hard to compare exactly, since their freezer capacities were measured in litres - most of the bigger ones about 160.

Over lunch we discussed it, and decided we really could do with a significantly bigger fridge-freezer. We measured the freezer part of ours and realised that it was about 50 litres. So the Dalco ones were around three times the size. A rough calculation showed that 7 cubic feet wasn't so different - a little less, perhaps, but still a great deal more than we currently have. Overall we preferred buying from Giorgos, since we know his shop to be so reliable and helpful, and in Cyprus relationships are very important.

Richard had a meeting that afternoon, and we assumed that everywhere would be closed for a long weekend as it's Easter here. I thought maybe we'd get around to it some time next week....

However he returned around 4pm, and said we might as well go and order the fridge! So off we rushed to Giorgos, pondered some more, found out his freezer capacities in litres to compare, and made our decision! Then - to my amazement - he said they would deliver at 9am the following morning. Apparently they were not taking Good Friday off at all, although they would be closed Easter Saturday and Monday.

So on Thursday night Richard and Dan moved the old fridge to the other side of the kitchen, and I cleaned the floor underneath (yuck!!) in preparation for the new fridge freezer, which did indeed come almost on the dot of nine o'clock. It was rather a tight fit through the kitchen door, but thankfully it did get through in the end.

During the day I've transferred stuff to the new fridge freezer, once it got cold enough, and we discovered that our Metro supermarket was open after all, so we did our shopping and bought some extra freezer containers. I even managed to defrost the small upright freezer (by dint of transferring its entire contents to the new freezer space - which still left room!) so there's now more space in that too. By the evening I had emptied and cleaned out the old fridge-freezer, so Richard and Dan moved it out to the garage where it can stay until we find someone who wants a fridge short-term.

Mespila in Cyprus

This is the loquat tree in our front garden. The fruit is known as 'mespila' here in Cyprus, so that's what we tend to call them too. They're about the size of plums when they're ripe, and the colour of apricots. The taste is a little like a combination of the two although there are three or four largish stones in each fruit.

Usually they are ripe by this time of year, or nearly so; however they're only just starting to turn orange so it'll probably be another couple of weeks at least before we can eat them raw. There's a good crop,anyway, assuming we get to them before the birds do. I'll probably make some jam with the earlier fruit, which tends to be a little tart when raw. I might freeze some too for future desserts, but we don't have a whole lot of freezer space.