Green apricot salad

A day or two I stumbled across a recipe for using unripe peaches. You know the sort: they look ripe and promising but in reality they are never, ever, going to ripen and nothing you can do is going to change that. The recipe was from Food52’s Genius category and you can find it here.

Here we sometimes get a problem with nectarines in August so I was intrigued. But, it’s a little still too soon for the main nectarine crop (we’re still in cherry and strawberry season) so I filed the recipe until later in the year …

… only for a neighbour to drop by this morning with a bag of apricots in his hand.

About half of the fruit were underripe so were prime candidates for testing.

And the result?

Absolutely fantastic.

From crunchy flavourless apricots to juicy, glistening fruit in less than
ten minutes.

While the apricots were doing their thing I knocked up a leaf salad with some cold chicken and shavings of parmesan and then added the apricots and their dressing. Sadly we were too busy eating it to have the sense to take photos but you can see the gorgeousness of the fruit in this photo from the original recipe.

Pomegranates

Just how do they do it?  How is it possible for a fruit tree to thrive on neglect and to oscillate between ugly-as-hell and drop-dead-gorgeous?

It’s the time of the year when we fall in love with the pomegranates all over again.  Lush greenery, abundant growth and masses and masses of the most beautiful and showy scarlet blossom.  And all of this from trees which get no care or attention, no watering or feeding, no pruning.

Blossom

Scarlet blossom

The empty house next door has a mature tree, perhaps 20 feet tall, and we have a similar one just next to our back door.  Their tree gets no attention as they only visit the house once or twice a year; ours gets some fairly inept pruning once a year and that’s it.  In return each produces hundreds of massive pomegranates each year.

Next door’s pomegranate tree

Between you and I, I prefer them right now when they are full of blossom.  The colour, that sharp pop of orangey-red, is a reminder that summer is really on its way.  And as the flowers are pollinated and the fruit sets the blossom falls away from the tree and makes the most gorgeous red confetti on the ground.

A sprinkling of blossom

And all this from a tree that, in winter, looks like it should be chopped down to put it out of its misery.  It’s hard to imagine a tree that looks more desolate and unloved than a pomegranate in January.  But right now … it is just gorgeous.

Taken January 2010

Plenty of fruit to come

Tried & Tested: Spice Cubes

We are big fans of having a freezer full of building blocks ready for use. Sliced and frozen lemons, berries for morning smoothies, herbs which have been washed and frozen and are ready to drop straight into a dish.  These are all things that save us time, and often money.

A while ago we realised that whilst we often cook with garlic or ginger or chillis there are times when we buy them and don’t get around to using them  as we intended and therefore things sometimes go to waste.  We solved the problem with the garlic: instead of buying a head of garlic and using it a clove at a time we took to buying three or four heads at once and processing them all at once then freezing them.

It doesn’t take much longer to prepare a dozen cloves than it does one or two but there is no extra cleaning up and no more garlicy-scented hands. Whole cloves of garlic freeze fantastically and defrost in less time than it takes to chop an onion while ginger, if it is peeled and cut into single meal chunks, can be ready in a few minutes.

Having got into a routine of buying garlic and ginger every month or so and preparing them for the freezer it occurred to us that quite often we use both together and about half the time if we are cooking with garlic and ginger we use copious amounts of chillis too.  And so the idea of the freezer spice cubes was born: instead of preparing garlic ready to be used and preparing ginger to be used straight from the freezer could we go one step further?

The answer is yes:

• Take one head of garlic, peel the cloves and toss them into a food processor
• Take a piece of fresh ginger of a comparable size, peel, roughly chop and toss into the food processor
• Add fresh or dried chillis to suit your taste buds
• Blitz in the food processor until they’re the right size for your cooking needs
• Spoon into an ice-cube tray, drizzle a little oil over the top and freeze
• Once frozen pop the cubes from the tray and transfer to a suitable container
• Keep in the most accessible part of the freezer so they are close to hand when you want to cook

When we make these we’ve found that one cube is about the equivalent of one clove of garlic and a corresponding amount of ginger. If you use dried chillis (buy them in bulk when you come to Cyprus as they are absurdly cheap here) then you can make the cubes as spicy as you want.

These are best made in an ice-cube tray that isn’t destined to be used for making real ice-cubes, unless you don’t mind ginger tasting gin and tonics after dinner.

New freezers always seem to come with a spare tray so we keep one specifically for the purpose.  You can reduce the chance of the tray becoming tainted with the spice flavours if you wipe it out with a little light cooking oil before you start.

Since we started doing this we have massively increased the amount of garlic and ginger we use, and with hardly any wastage.

Christmas post …

… is AWOL.

This year there seems to be an island-wide issue with post from the UK and continental Europe.  90% of the Christmas cards that we’d expect to receive haven’t appeared; orders placed online in early December, intended as presents for each other, are missing; presents from family and friends in the UK have not arrived.

This isn’t an isolated problem: many of the Cyprus online forums have ongoing discussions about missing post.

Our lovely, if slimline, local tree bought courtesy of the local Forestry Commission, looks really rather lost without any parcels underneath.  Our best guess is that we might expect to see things arrive in the second week of January, after the Christmas and New Year and Epiphany holidays.

On the positive side we have a beautiful rib of beef ready to cook and piles of books to read and enough logs to see us through to the new year.  Not the holiday we’d planned but we’ll make the most of it and throw another log or two on the fire and perhaps in time we can chuckle about 2011 being the Christmas-of-no-presents.

Kleftiko ovens

Traditional cooking is a corner-stone of Cypriot family life.  Every weekend, every holiday, every festival is an opportunity to gather family together and spend time together, preferably whilst eating.

When we lived in Aradippou our neighbours had a traditional kleftiko oven next to their house.  Technically it was built in their driveway but every good Cypriot knows that the street is a perfectly good place to leave a car so why not utilise the driveway for something useful?

We’d been in the house a month or two when we were woken early one morning, perhaps 3 or 4am, by an unusual noise outside.  A quick check out of the upstairs windows showed the source of the noise: the neighbours were lighting their kleftiko oven.  Clearly there was an upcoming celebration that we weren’t aware of.

Kleftiko is a lamb dish, although in Cyprus young goat is sometimes used.  The lamb is cooked very slowly over the course of many hours resulting in meat that is tender enough to cut with a spoon.

According to local legends the dish was made from stolen sheep and to disguise the cooking process from the shepherd the lamb was cooked in a pit in the ground so that no smoke could be seen.  Today the dish is cooked in an external wood-fired clay oven.  A wood fire is lit in the heart of the oven and then allowed to burn very low; meat, and later potatoes, are added in shallow containers. The oven is kept sealed with clay until the cooking process is complete, many hours later.

On that first occasion it was too dark to get photos but the neighbours obliged by lighting the oven again a month or two later.  The second photo shows quite how fierce the wood fire is at the start of the process.

For anyone who is interested in trying kleftiko without the expense of building their own external oven there’s a nice recipe on the Waitrose website here.  With such a relatively short cooking time the dish won’t be as meltingly tender but should still be a nice taster of how superb good kleftiko can be.

The garden, mid-July

The builders have gone, the garden still looks mildly chaotic, summer is here with a vengeance and the yuccas are in flower.  Such is life here at Aradippou Tales.

Who knew that yuccas produced beautiful creamy-white flowers each year?  Well, perhaps lots of people did but we certainly didn’t until we moved here.  Perhaps they only flower under certain conditions?  We were out and about a week or so ago and spotted a yucca in flower: it was only when we got home and investigated that we discovered ours was too.  In our defence the tree is twenty feet tall and the only way to see the top is to climb up the outside stairs.

At some point later this year the yucca will need some care and maintenance, the removal of old leaves if nothing else.  It is not an easy job: twenty feet of tree, razor sharp leaves and a fair amount of catching up due to the previous owner’s belief that pruning or cutting back a plant breaks its spirit.

In the meantime we’re enjoying the sight of the gorgeous flowers.

Yuccas, from below

Yuccas in flower

Elsewhere one of our mystery plants appears to be suffering in the heat.  This plant grows and grows and grows during the spring putting on nearly five feet of growth in as many weeks.  Come the summer heat it begins to collapse back on itself but  at the same time produces a dozen or more flower stalks.

MadAlex said it was a lily of some sort; we are not so sure.  It may be a white agapanthus but we’re really not sure.  For one thing it is significantly bigger than they normally grow, that could just be the Cyprus effect though.

Mystery plant

Flower stalks

Elsewhere the fig tree growing behind the house is covered in fruit.  So far they are only small but once more there are hundreds of them.  Also in a growth spurt is the garden bougainvillea: it is absolutely covered in coloured bracts.

Fresh figs

Obligatory bougainvillea photo

And finally this month a tiny piece of thievery.  When the empty plot next to us was cleared a half pithari was uncovered.  Pithari are common sights here in Cyprus; we have already have two in the garden, one containing the bougainvillea and the other our recently planted lavender.  But there’s always room for another, they make such fantastic planters even when they are broken or in two parts.

This newly revealed pithari remained in the cleared plot for week after week with Mands lusting after it.  Because the entire village is built on a slope houses are often set at different levels.  Despite being the next plot over the ground is actually 10 feet below us so getting the pot out would mean climbing down the drop and lifting the heavy pot out or carrying it on a 10 minute trek through the village.

Perhaps not the best plan when, technically, the pot wasn’t ours.  So the pithari remained where it was.

After the builders were finished onsite the scaffolders came back to take down the scaffolding.  After plying them with mugs of strong tea and freshly baked lemon cake Mands cheekily asked them if they’d be able to help with a tiny job.  Pointing out the pithari she explained that it didn’t actually belong to us but that no one else, including the owner, seemed to want it.  The scaffolding boys caught on very quickly: it’d be a shame for it to go to waste they said.   Perhaps if they re-homed it into our secret garden we could make use of it?

Half an hour later they’d man-handled it up from the lower plot and positioned it against a couple of walls.  It’s now sitting there waiting while we decide what to plant it with … and while we see if the rightful owner comes to reclaim it.

The acquired pithari

Cyprus Cost of Living #5

The Guardian recently had an article in their Life & Style section about the spice saffron.  Their tagline for the piece was “It’s hard to produce and more costly than gold“.

These things are undoubtably true: each stem of saffron started life as a stigma on a crocus.  Each bulb flowers only once each year, producing just two or three stigma which must then be harvested by hand.  The writer of the article was provided, by Harrods, with a sample:  2g of saffron produced by over 400 flowers and costing £25 (at the time of writing about 30€ or $37).

Saffron’s usage, and cultivation, goes back an incredibly long way:

For as long as there have been people, people have known about saffron. A dye from its stigmas colours 50,000-year-old cave paintings in what is now Iraq. Ancient frescoes on the Greek island of Santorini depict a goddess watching – or perhaps blessing – a woman picking saffron, presumably for medicine. No one knows how old this painting is: a volcano buried it in around 1500BC, and the work could have been hundreds of years old even then.

Now here’s the oddity: saffron, and many other herbs and spices, are surprisingly inexpensive in Cyprus.  That’s not to say that it’s possible to buy premium grade saffron cheaply but it is certainly cheaper than the UK.

At the time of writing Carrefour are selling 30g of Syrian saffron for 3€; that is about 7% of the price of the saffron sold by Harrods.

For anyone coming on holiday to Cyprus it would be a great shame not to reserve a corner of the suitcase for a supply of herbs and spices bought from any of the supermarkets.  In the space it would take to re-pack a novel it should be possible to re-stock the kitchen stocks of herbs and spices for a year.

Saffron, peppercorns, coriander, mustard seeds and crushed chillis are all great buys here.

Tried & Tested: Frozen Lemons

Having two mature lemon trees means that we have masses of fresh lemons for much of the year.  However, even when our lemons were sourced from UK supermarkets we went out of our way to get every last bit of use from them.

To make sure that they were ready to hand whenever needed, and had no chance of going off, we do the following:

• Slice, overlap on a freezer-proof tray and freeze.  The slices behave best if they aren’t flat on the tray so use the ends to provide a support at one end of the run of slices
• Once fully frozen separate the slices, bag and keep on hand until the next time a gin and tonic, vodka and tonic or glass of coke is poured
• Because the lemon is frozen it’s possible to dispense with, or at least reduce the amount of, any ice needed

Frozen lemon slices

To squeeze the very last use out of the lemons:

• Retain the end slices
• Once frozen bag up separately to the slices and keep until kitchen-cleaning day
• Boil the kettle, put two or three frozen lemon ends into a microwave-proof dish and add cold water
• Make a cup of coffee
• Place the lemon bowl in the microwave for two or three minutes on hot, go away and drink the coffee
• Once it’s drunk return the kitchen, remove the bowl from the microwave and wipe down all the inside walls and surfaces with a cloth.  The lemon-scented steam generated by the bowl of water will have loosened any baked-on food, the lemon oil and juice will have fragranced and disinfected the microwave

Feel cheerful at the lack of effort involved in cleaning the microwave and the economy of using nothing but lemon ends which would have been discarded otherwise.

Cyprus Cost of Living #4

*** Warning … Not for vegetarians … Warning ***

We knew when we moved here that we’d have to adjust some of our normal ways of shopping.  Things that we used to consider as economical would, undoubtably, become more expensive when we moved to Cyprus and vice versa.  Grocery shopping is one area where this is particularly obvious.

Were we to eat grilled pork chops, salad and jacket potatoes every night then grocery shopping would be both cheap and simple.  Pork is, by far, the most economical meat to buy and is available in more cuts than are normally seen in UK supermarkets and butchers.

Did you want pork chops or fillet or lounza or souvla or souvlaki or shoulder or nondescript cubed pork or ribs or bacon or belly pork?

In contrast lamb is hardly ever seen.  We once tried to buy some lamb mince (ground hamburger) from the butcher who provided our first ever Cypriot rib of beef but he wouldn’t sell it to us.  No, it would be too expensive, he said. He would happily sell minced beef or pork or turkey or chicken, but not lamb.  In part he was right; all of his meat is cut to order and when a customer wants mince he cuts a piece of meat from the carcass and minces it there and then.  That has the advantage that the mince can be customised for the customer.  Making hamburgers?  Then you’ll need a cut with slightly more fat to keep the burgers moist as the cook.

With the lamb he would need to cut and weigh and price the lamb before mincing it.  By the time the usable meat was removed from the bone then the relative cost would be high he explained.  Rather than disagree we bought something else instead and ever since have used a mix of beef and pork  in place of minced lamb.

So, plenty of pork, not so much lamb.  And beef?  Well there’s plenty to buy but, steaks in particular, seem be closely related to shoe-leather.  Nice to look at but tough, tough, tough meat.  It seems not to matter where the beef comes from as the imported French beef is just as bad as the local meat.  That suggests, and those in the restaurant trade have said similar, that it is the length of time the meat is matured for that is the issue.  We’ve tried to get around this a number of ways by marinading meat for great lengths of time or buying it well before it needs eating to give it a chance to mature a little extra and lose some of the toughness.

All of this has been in vain so we pretty much stopped buying steaks.  There are plenty of other things we can eat so why go through this angst for a meal that won’t actually be that good despite our best efforts.  The final straw was a pair of fillet steaks bought from the meat counter of a decent supermarket for a special anniversary meal.  We winced at the cost: 32€/kilo and even then the meat was mediocre at best.

So, having sworn off beef steak we were in Larnaca running some errands and decided to pop into an English-run store specialising in fish, all of which is frozen before being shipped to Cyprus.  We don’t eat a huge amount of fish and that’s something we’re trying to change.  Actually having some fish in the freezer seems a good first step.

What we hadn’t realised was that the owner has branched out into other frozen goods.  As we were nosing around the freezers for fish he mentioned in passing that he had some fillet steak which was on special offer.  Did we want some before the price went up?  The price was nice, very nice.  The catch?  This meat is intended for the restaurant trade and therefore is packaged appropriately.  This wasn’t some fillet, this was an entire fillet.  A little under 2kg and frozen solid.

After some debating we decided to take a risk on being able to separate it into more useable portions and bought one.

About 2kg of prime fillet steak

Half an hour with a hacksaw (and a nice new blade just for this purpose) and the fillet was cut into 6 pieces, each large enough for two respectable steaks.

One hacksaw later ...

We put five of the six meals in the freezer and allowed the final one to defrost for dinner that night.  As a first test it was a simple cooking process: seasoned on all sides, seared in a griddle pan for a couple of minutes on each side, allowed to rest for 10 minutes, sliced across the grain and served over a mix of peppers, onions and mushrooms.

It was superb; the meat was tender enough to eat with a spoon.

At last steak is back on the menu.  And the price?  A very respectable 15€ a kilo.

There are bargains here but they often take some effort to find.

Plenty of lemons

The house smells of lemons.  We smell of lemons.  Right now it seems as if the entire world may well be lemon scented.

Today seemed the perfect opportunity to deal with the stockpile of windfall lemons from the trees.  It being our very first full year of lemon tree ownership we’re still getting to grips with managing the trees including when to harvest lemons to get the maximum amount of juice.  As a result of that, and combined with some high winds, we had a fair number fall from the trees.  About 50 or so.

The plan was to wash them, halve them, juice them and then freeze the juice in handy sized volumes.  Because the lemons had fallen we decided to forgo the zest this time.

It seem, having never juiced that number of lemons, we may have slightly underestimated the amount of time it takes to process that many lemons.  Several hours after starting we have a freezer full to the brim with lemon juice – a little over 4 pints (English pints so 80 fl oz all told) frozen in differing quantities.

There are lots of containers holding 4 fl oz for marinading meat for fajitas.  A good supply of 2 fl oz lollipops for lemon cakes and muffins and a dozen or so half ounce ice cubes for salad dressing and recipes which just need a small amount of juice.

The first third

The final two-thirds

A pint or two of lemon juice

As all this work was going on we could hear from the garden the sound of yet more lemons falling from the trees.  It seems unlike that we’ll run out this year.

Gin and tonic anyone?