Vicki Bray

Rats, bloody rats.

2012-02-02T11:23:00.000+01:00

I might have mentioned rats once or twice before, we usually find evidence of them trying to nest in boxes or wood piles, the Christmas tree box had been nibbled at sometime over the last year, sometimes we find an abandoned nest in a box but over the years we have protected most things. The shed has wire mesh over the air vents, shelving has now become cupboards, and the wood is stored further away from the house as we don't want them too close. I don't think we'll ever be rat-free, after all we live in the country, other friends have lots of cats to deal with them but 2 dogs is enough for us. Our neighbours have 2 cats which we see around here so maybe they help keep the population under control.

But they do nest, or find nesting material, in the most inconvenient places. Last Wednesday I went into Cadiar in the 4x4 as we had empty gas bottles to replace and the car hadn't been used since December 28th!! A month is longer than normal not to use it so it needed to go out. All was fine down to Yator, but driving into Cadiar which is gradually uphill, the car was very sluggish, wouldn't accelerate, 2nd gear just juddered but finally got there very slowly in 3rd. Rang John, said I don't think it'll get home as that's even steeper so when I'm finished in town I'll take it straight to the mechanic. He came in the other car - thank heavens we've got 2, as I had bought 4 gas bottles and a sack of potatoes , and we left it for Luis to look at. It was overdue a service but only in time not in mileage - or kilometres - we've only done just under 5000 in the last 2 years.

Luis rang Tuesday evening to say the car was ready so we went to collect it yesterday. And the problem had been the air filter, but it wasn't blocked with dirt or dust, but had been eaten away by rats, the chewed up middle had been rolled into a ball and then sucked into the air inlet when I went out!!! He'd kept the air filter to show John, it had gnaw marks from the rats teeth in the plastic. So what to do? It only takes a few days for them to set up house somewhere and we can't go out every day. And we can't protect the car with wire mesh either! The bottom of the washing machine now has a wire mesh base as they ate through the water inlet tube a few years ago (the machine lives outside under cover) and a mouse got into the kitchen once and nibbled the insulation around the oven, the foil lining from that dropped down onto the electric contacts that work the light and spark and shorted it out so that is now wire meshed around the hole.

What or where will they try next?

Afternoon walk.

2012-01-31T18:06:00.001+01:00

We very rarely get such a low overnight temperature as last nights....when I opened the front door to take the dogs out this morning the thermometer said 0°. At first I thought maybe the battery had gone but then it wouldn't have any figure on it at all, and there was frost on the cars, at the side of the road, everywhere was glistening. Definitely hood up and gloves on type of morning. And the oranges were oh so cold, when I tried to pick them my fingers hurt so I did that with gloves on as well.

But then the sun has shone all day, lovely clear blue skies and after a trip to the shops this morning, a bit of housework - not much, cleaned out and relaid the woodburner for tonight and a bit of a dust around - just enough. Then after lunch as John was busy with other stuff, I took the dogs for a lovely long walk along the GR7 footpath to the river below El Golco. The rosemary bushes are in full bloom and buzzing with bees, the gorse is starting to bloom too so there are spots of bright yellow amongst the blue of the rosemary.

Monty had a wallow in the water when we got to the river but Pip seemed a bit wary and only paddled far enough to have a drink. The temporary wooden bridge built when the river changed course 2 winters ago is still there but not used by the look of it. The concrete one is still joined up with the other bank where I suppose someones rebuilt it as there was a huge gap.

The first sight of El Golco from Montenegro

A much calmer river than after the bad winter rains of 2 years ago.

The path to the river is mostly a single track, occasionally wider, but with terraced land either side. Then suddenly this.....

about 10 metres of dry stone wall, the land above doesn't seem to be any different there than anywhere else along that stretch.

The view on the way back is looking east towards Sierra Gador, still with a snowy top.

So an hour and a half walk in the sunshine, lovely and warm as well as yesterday there was a very cool breeze coming down from the snowy mountain tops. Hopefully 2 sleepy dogs tonight, that makes it sound as if they don't sleep well, they do, but a lie-in past 8 o'clock would be nice. It might be warmer then outside too!

Splat!

2012-01-27T19:02:00.000+01:00

Did I mention when my new phone fell in a large bucket of white paint?????

We were painting the outside wall yesterday morning, nice sunny day, I put on an old work-shirt of John's to keep my t-shirt clean from paint splashes and put my phone in the top pocket. I have a phone holder that clips on the waistband of my trousers but that was indoors, I also have a knitted sort of thing that you put your phone in and that you hang round your neck but that too was indoors. You know what's coming don't you?

I lent over the paint bucket too far, my phone fell out of my pocket and it landed keypad side down into the paint. John said something along the lines of "well, that's well and truly *************!" 'Don't panic' I said as I rushed indoors with paint covered hands and phone, grabbed an old cloth and wiped the excess paint off the key pad. Another cloth, more wiping and eventually the phone appeared from the mess, cotton buds, tooth picks for those awkward edges, tried to use it and yes! it's fine. Slightly off colour looking which is perhaps understandable given where it's been but at least it works.

The paint was thick and gloopy, if it had been a bucket of water it would have sunk without trace but it just went splat onto the surface.

But why do things always fall face down?

And that was another fiesta.

2012-01-25T21:35:00.000+01:00

Another week gone by, another fiesta in Yator - the big one this time, San Sebastian, but quieter than usual. Lots of cars in the village but not so many people there at Saturday lunchtime. Some years you can't get near the tables of food it's so crowded, this year there were less people and less food too. This morning when I was on my way out I spoke with Eduardo and he said people don't want to pay for fiesta and if they don't pay there is less in the 'pot' for the next event and so it goes on. Payment is almost voluntary, when you are around over the weekend, someone will come up to you with a large book, write down your name and you pay what you think is right. If they don't find you, you can always go and find them or pay more next fiesta. But if you don't pay anything, and neither do lots of other people, then the fiesta fund gets smaller and smaller.

We don't usually go down for the evening dance, by the time it gets started either we've had too many glasses of wine to drive down, or it's so late we're ready for bed. Some friends from UK who have homes here as well, had dinner together on Friday night and at 11.30 they wandered across to the salon to find it still empty but apparently it did get going by midnight. Then finished at 7am. Followed by another all night session on Saturday night. And a late night on Sunday too.

In the vegetable garden, what is growing is doing well. Coriander, pak choi, lettuces, broad beans and peas were all planted October or November time and are very healthy. Chillis left from last year are all red and slowly drying on the plants, sprouts are still sprouting although quite tiny ones, cabbages are slowly getting hearty and kale is still making new leaves, the sugar beet that was too small and ignored has taken on a new lease of life and is looking very healthy. Unfortunately though, something has decided to take a regular short cut through one of the broad bean and pea beds, cutting across the coriander and lettuce rows and exiting via the pak choi. Could be a small dog or cat or fox, or one of those chasing the others. Most days I have to mound up soil around bent or broken stems and hope that not too much gets too damaged. Broad beans are very forgiving, they just grow again from the base and if the stem isn't completely snapped the plant will continue to grow but with a curved stem. It just heads on up to the sun and ends up U- shaped.

Still picking and juicing oranges, still pruning for firewood, other on-going jobs around the place that we start and stop according to the weather and time available. Olives? The mill this year is paying 26 cents a kilo, the lowest we've ever heard of. 8 years ago we were getting 79 cents. Not many on the trees, not worth the work. It takes the same amount of work per tree to get 1 kilo or 10 or 100. What there is on the tree is probably worth more as compost/fertilizer and left to drop and rot back into the soil.

10 to the litre

2012-01-19T21:33:00.000+01:00

This doesn't refer to petrol consumption but to the number of oranges we pick to get a litre of juice. Started picking on Tuesday morning, 24 oranges gave us just over 2 litres and today I picked 33 oranges which when juiced gave us a very large jugful. The jug holds 3 litres and it was full to the brim. Last year we juiced more than we could easily drink and ran out of bottles to freeze it in, so then we started to keep empty juice cartons when we bought juice out of season. Rinsed, dried and stored the cartons in a dry place, now we only have to rinse them again and sterilize them - just in case - and the fresh juice can be poured into the cartons and frozen for the next 'out of season' months.

So it's orange juice for breakfast - plus coffee of course. Can't start the day without a large mug of café con leche. Orange juice in the evening - plus a little bit of vodka - and a lot of ice. Tomorrow morning I'll pick some more and that will probably all get frozen. Next time we're out at the shops we'll get some sugar and make some more marmalade. Last years was tasty but a bit too solid - think what it must be like if it needs 30 seconds in the microwave before you can get the spoon in it - different recipe this year so hopefully slightly softer.

So oranges with everything at the moment, and then the juiced halves go on the top of the woodburner to dry out in the evening giving a lovely orangey smell to the lounge, when they're dry they get burnt in the fire and another batch goes on the top for drying. If we get overwhelmed with orange skins, they go into the compost heap.

Firewood again.

2012-01-18T17:20:00.000+01:00

Chain sawing for him, trimming off anything that the loppers can cope with for me, more chain sawing and then log splitting.   After we've stacked the wood in the log store we start - or try - to deal with the enormous piles of greenery that we're left with. We did this all Saturday afternoon and got rid of everything from Wednesday and Thursday's tree pruning but haven't done anymore till today as the weather got too cold and cloudy on Sunday followed on Monday by a very grey day.

Low cloud, drizzle in the morning, snow showers in the afternoon, more drizzle later in the evening followed by gusty winds in the night. Not a day to be outside doing anything, so we lit the fires and stayed in cooking, reading, doing not much at all.

When the clouds lifted on Monday morning there was snow on the Contraviesa, on the hills above Mecina Bombaron but not here.   It tried to be nice yesterday, the sun really did try hard to peek out from the clouds but still too cold if you weren't actually in the sun doing anything. However today's been great. All the washing caught up with, dried and put away, and another tree tackled. John cut off an enormous trunk that was overhanging the bottom land, tied it up with rope first so it didn't disappear into the undergrowth (overgrown bramble patch actually) and when it was down we saw that it was mostly hollow and riddled with ants.

It's now cut up, logged, split and stacked, and the ants are scurrying around looking for a new home. A few more branches to deal with tomorrow from that tree then it's on to the next one.

Winter food favourites.

2012-01-14T19:32:00.000+01:00

This time of year we keep a close eye on the weather forecast as we normally get some rain or snow or wind or maybe it'll stay sunny for a bit longer! But what we don't to do is start an outside job and find it suddenly gets too cold to be painting a wall and that we've wasted time and money.

With that in mind, and the forecast saying cloud and not much above 10° yesterday, I thought I'd have a cooking morning. There was steak and kidney with lots of gravy left from the night before, mince in the fridge, lots of potatoes and onions, so I had a pie making morning. Meat and potato pies may not sound exciting but with slow cooked onions for flavour, browned mince, add the cooked diced potato and finally a spoonful of gravy - steak and kidney yesterday but any left over gravy is good - and you have a really tasty pie.

I made one batch of pastry and used that up, made another lot too, the end result was 11 individual meat and potato pies, another 4 that I added curry paste to the gravy for a bit a difference, 4 steak and kidney pies, and then we had some for lunch as well. There was flour everywhere, except in the storage box, need to go and stock up soon! But we have lots of instant-ish lunches and evening meals. Pre-cooking the filling, glazing the pastry with egg and then freezing the pie, means it can come straight out of the freezer and into the oven - it just needs 40 minutes at 200°. Plus, depending on your appetite, a big buttery jacket potato, or maybe some crunchy chips.

Definitely winter warming food. Otherwise known as comfort food. Along with rice pudding, steak and dumplings, shepherds pie and pickled red cabbage or beetroot, big hearty soups and crusty bread, hot spicy wine, porridge for breakfast, ...... there are some lovely things about winter time involving food and drink!

Any more favourites anyone?

New cushions.

2012-01-13T16:26:00.000+01:00

This is not an advert, I'm not on commission on anything like that but I do think when you get quick efficient work done it's surprising. It shouldn't be of course, when you're paying and someone says this is the price and this is the timescale.....

We have a black corner unit in the lounge, not leather but you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference. Over the last few months the surface of the corner cushion started to crack and split. I kept thinking I'd better take it to the upholsterer in Cadiar, of whom we'd heard good things, but as Christmas got closer and closer and we'd still not done anything about it, John said maybe we'd better leave it till the New Year as we don't know how long it'll take and we don't want Christmas with a cushion-less seat.

Wednesday I finally got round to taking it into Juan's shop - more like a workshop than a plush store - showed him the problem and he pulled a roll of fabric out of the corner of the room, said it's 10 euros a metre and will cost 15 in total and be ready in the morning. Amazed doesn't describe what I thought, I did double check the price with him - are you sure that includes your work? yes, quite sure. And ready tomorrow morning? yes, quite sure.

Now I'd also heard that he will give you the old cushions and covers from re-upholstery jobs if you want a dog bed for your pet, so I asked and he said you can have this one. A nice cherry red fabric, feels like suede but isn't, and how much would you like for that I asked? Nothing, it's only going in the rubbish, you can have for free.

So yesterday morning I collected the re-covered seat cushion and Pip is now the proud owner of a cherry red dog bed. That means Monty can stretch out at night on the previously shared bed without squashing her. And it was 15 euros for the re-covered cushion and nothing for hers. And all within 24 hours as promised.

2 out of 3.....

2012-01-11T21:21:00.000+01:00

They do say that 2 out of 3 isn't bad, but when it's relating to your olive harvest - or lack of olives to harvest - I don't think it's good at all. Last year we had a very small harvest and the year before they were full of the olive fly and those olives that managed to hang on to the tree till January, then got blown off in the winter winds. This year about two thirds of them are shrivelled and infected with the fly. They don't stay on the tree long, the mill won't take them off the floor, the quality of oil is not good - the acidity is too high - so another year with no oil.

We do have some trees that are of a different variety, small trees but big olives, excellent for brining and they ripen much earlier. So at the end of October/beginning of November I picked enough to refill the spaces on the shelves. Last year I did half with garlic in the oil but they didn't taste that much different so this year they are just all in oil. The oil isn't wasted, it gets used in cooking, as does the oil from storing the dried tomatoes.

Having said that, the oil from the local mill is not ours, it's a cooperative, and it's just as cheap to buy oil when on offer at the supermarkets as to work like mad for a couple of months, take the olives to the mill, pay for the processing and then find extra virgin on offer for the same price but without the work. As they say, that's a no-brainer. We still need to prune to get the firewood but without picking off the olives, it's a quicker job and can be done at a more relaxed pace, not when the mill is open.

None of this is good news for the mill though, last year they said that the less people harvest due to the low cost of buying oil, the less people live on their land and tend to it, the less production there is........the less likely it is they will be able to continue opening the mill. It's a family run business and has been for a long time. Sad if it comes to that but where's the incentive to pick them? One of our neighbours did his last week, the lorry came up from Yator to collect the sacks of olives, he took his harvest as oil but for 30 cents a kilo, is it really worth doing it for money? To put it in perspective, it works out at about 2 euros an hour.

But for firewood, it is worth pruning. We've found that the drier that we use in summer for tomatoes, figs etc is very good for rapid drying of wood. This time of year it's empty but still hot from the sun and wood starts to dry and split within a couple of weeks. Handy to know just in case winter should arrive before we are fully re-stocked.

Early almond blossom

2012-01-08T14:49:00.000+01:00

The sun has been shining for days and days now, in fact we can't remember the last time it rained, the temperature has been high enough for me to change into a summer skirt by about 11am- ish but back into trousers by 5pm as the sun goes down and loses it's heat.

At the start of this week, we were basking in 18 or 19° and one day it was 21° - a bit unusual even for here in early January. But today although blue and sunny it's down to just touching 15.

The result of all this sunshine is early almond blossom. We first saw some when we went over the Contraviesa on the way to the airport before Christmas, but now our almond tree opposite the front gate is in bloom and I noticed this morning that the trees on the hillside behind us are also flowering. It was cold overnight - a touch of frost on the open ground - just hope the flowers don't get frosted otherwise there goes the almond crop for the year.

Just when you think it's all over....

2012-01-06T18:28:00.000+01:00

Just when you think it's all over another fiesta explodes with daytime rockets and evening firework displays. Christmas, New Year, then Yegen's fiesta is the 1st, 2nd and 3rd of January, last night was the 3 Kings celebration, today is Epifania del Señor and during all that there are seemingly random rocket explosions.

On the evening of the 2nd, Yegen's firework display started just as I was about to take Monty and Pip for their last walk of the night. She doesn't like fireworks, or rather doesn't like the noise, and runs to hide under the bed. Couldn't take her out during the display which is normally quite quick and nothingy, so we waited in the garden for it to finish. But it went on and on, John came out to watch with us, there were multicoloured fireworks which lit up the sky for about 15 minutes. So much for the times of austerity! Not sure how big Yegen is - the population listed is for Alpujarra de la Sierra which is Mecina Bombaron, Yegen, Montenegro and El Golco. This whole area only has a total of about 1100 people so a good display for the size of the village.

Today was Epifania del Señor, we heard rockets being sent up from Yator and there was lunch in the salon, but as we'd been out for lunch yesterday with friends decided not to have two days out as there are things to be done. There is also a dance tonight - starting at 10pm which normally means sound check time, followed by a few of the youths and the girls looking in the salon, it won't get going till nearer 11pm and won't be lively till nearer midnight. Probably give it a miss.

As I said at the beginning, just when you think it's all over, another one is being planned. Yator's main fiesta is in January. They celebrate San Sebastián Mártir - January 20th this year - so I'm assuming that weekend will be fiesta weekend. But not always! Just to surprise you, sometimes it's the 3rd weekend of the month, the weekend before the day, not the one closest to the day. Confused? So are we some years. The best person to ask is Roger at the bar as it will be a busy weekend for him.

Big birds - Vultures?

2012-01-02T21:46:00.000+01:00

Just having an afternoon cuppa in the sunshine, chatting together and thinking how quiet it was for a holiday Monday, when I happened to look up and saw a flock of big birds soaring high above us. Ran for my camera, John got his as well and we took lots of photos. I took over a minute of slightly grainy video footage - the birds were really a bit high up for my camera - and John took these (actually he took 20 but these are the edited highlights)

Altogether there were 10 birds, having looked at the bird book we think they are Griffon Vultures, although we get Bonelli's eagles here, they only ever come in twos, the only big birds that come so many together are the vultures. And they are big! They have a wing span of almost two and a half metres and are about a metre long. They swooped and soared around above Montenegro then gradually drifted up the valley towards Mecina.

They look so graceful that it's hard to imagine just how big they really are.

Ps: the sky really is that colour, 18° in the shade again today, not a cloud in sight and nothing apart from sunshine on the forecast either.

New Year thoughts.

2012-01-01T21:53:00.000+01:00

Every New Year brings new thoughts about what to do with our land : what shall we grow, what is easy to grow, what is best bought when in season and cheaper than doing it yourself.....

Each year we seem to be growing more and more, that obviously has to be stored so we now have 3 freezers running, plus jars of dried, brined or vinegared stock. Drying and storing in jars is the most economical, buying in season actually works out cheaper sometimes when you take into account of these things.....seeds- compost- pots- bottling- gas- electricity etc. Add to that the immense amount of time we spend digging and rotavating, planting and weeding, watering and harvesting, and at the end of it there might be a bug-infested soul destroying crop!

So this year we have decided to grow things that are easy and reliable, such as beans and peas, chillis and strawberries, kohlrabi and globe carrots, kale and lettuce, tomatoes and cucumbers in smaller numbers so we have enough to pick and eat as and when needed, squash and courgettes in the newly built raised side garden bed - again, only enough to eat without the need for another freezer. Plus we want to grow things that can't be bought, such as horseradish, but we've given up on swede, turnip and sweet potato, there are easier alternatives to those such as squash.

We always try to grow onions and garlic, with some success, but never achieve the size of onion that we can buy locally. 25 kilo sack for 5 euros 50 cents - 22 cents a kilo / 59 huge onions. Can't get them to grow that big, ours are only pickling size at best! Our garlic always grows but never very big and this year it didn't store well, all went soft and although I've planted it in the hope something may happen there is no sign of anything yet.

Potatoes are another extra, we plant sprouting forgotten ones and if they produce enough for a few meals it's a bonus but it's easier to buy them.

But the strawberry plants are flowering and fruiting again, we had fresh strawberries on the Christmas trifle, they seem to be unstoppable.

We have plenty of other things to occupy ourselves with, we won't be sitting by the pool all day bored stiff and it would be nice to get out and about with Monty and Pip for long walks.

These new year thoughts may yet change as we look at the seeds we have left from last year, look at the land and the amount of compost that needs to be dug in, I'm sure we've thought all these thoughts before and ended up planting as much if not more than the previous year - but we don't have room for another freezer, the shelves are full from this year, so it'll have to be grow to eat only. And I'd like to have a year that doesn't involve spending every Sunday watering, and filling storage tanks for the coming week.

Whatever your plans, thoughts, and resolutions are for the coming year, hope you have a good one.

And finally - for this year -

2011-12-29T18:00:00.000+01:00

One last Christmas photo of the gold and silver pine cones, some on bases John made from pieces of pine or olive wood, surrounded by holly lights Airi bought from Paris, and with a sad looking polar bear waiting for next Christmas to come.

Hope next year brings everyone health, wealth and happiness.

Thanks for reading my ramblings this year, more to come in 2012 :)

A snapshot of Christmas

2011-12-27T21:43:00.000+01:00

Doesn't Christmas come slowly and go so fast! It was only last Thursday when we did the trip to Malaga to pick up Mat and Airi (4pm, still 24° down on the coast) drove home along the coast road with a wonderful sunset behind us - both Mat and Airi taking photos through the car windows of the sea shimmering gold and red as the sun got lower and lower. Arrived here at about 6.45 and still not quite dark, the horizon was glowing still.

Next day we did a trip up into the pine forests above Mecina Bombaron to walk the dogs and collect pine cones. Enormous ones up there, about 6 inches or so, some bigger and better than others so although we took a big bag to put them in, we started throwing some away and only keeping the very biggest and best.

On the way to the pine woods

Christmas Eve was last minute food preparation for me, figgy pudding cooked so it only needed reheating on the day, but I can't think what else we did! Oh, made some silver and gold Christmas cones for the table, plus Airi made this 'hedgehog'. John was duty chef that night - he made a huge paella that we weren't sure we'd eat but there wasn't much left, just some rice for Monty and Pip.

Christmas morning wasn't as sunny or as hot as it had been but still very nice. A bit of a nip in the air so when our friends walked up to join us for coffee, mince pies, cake, cream and brandy butter - a bit big for elevenses but it's only once a year - we had that indoors in the lounge. With the sun streaming in through the window it was lovely and hot.

Presents were opened mostly in the morning although I think we kept a few back till later. Mat and Airi found Xmas stockings on their bed post late on Xmas eve but managed not to open them till the morning. I couldn't put them on the end of the bed in case Pip discovered them and the contents....chocolate money and chocolate covered almonds amongst other things.

Boxing Day we went up to Granada for a walk around the tiny streets near the cathedral, full of Morroccan goodies - leather bags, so many different types of lights, woollen clothing, tea shops, spice shops, all sorts of sights and smells. John bought me a wonderful all-in-one hat and scarf with a long, long pointed hat ending in a tassell half way down my back. It's frosty overnight at the moment and although I have a scarf and gloves my head and ears get very chilly. Plus when we get the big winter winds I don't have a hat to keep me warm. Or I didn't, now I have my "scat" (scarf and hat) or should it be a "harf" ?

Had lunch in a lovely tapas bar where we ate a mixed cold platter and mixed hot platter of tapas. Hot included salmon covered in melted cheese, tortilla, bacon with blue cheese, lomo with tomato, pork filled croquettes, slow cooked pork with roasted peppers, and fried habas. The cold platter had 4 different cheeses and 4 different pates on, smoked salmon, jamon, smoked lomo, smoked trout, different chorizos, all on a bed of salad and topped with toasted almonds, plus a basket of bread. Add a glass of wine each and that was lunch.

More walking, more photos, bumped into Mariano and Marie-Carmen out for lunch, quick chat with them then it was time to go round to the bus station for Mat and Airi to get the bus to Malaga. They stayed overnight there, went out with friends from Paris who just happened to be in the same city at the same time, then they were flying home this morning.

And that was it - all finished.

Ho Ho Ho..

2011-12-19T21:21:00.000+01:00

Ho ho ho, it's cold outside. Not as cold as some parts of the world but for Southern Spain, 4° at 9pm is pretty chilly. Just done the last dog walk of the day, well wrapped up in a fleece, scarf, woolly socks and gloves. At least the house is warm and cosy, both wood burners simmering away keeping us lovely and snug.

During sun-up it's fine outside in just a t-shirt and light top - I tend to add a cardi or zippered top to my t-shirt as one minute it's warm enough not to need the extra layer then the next minute is too cold.....or maybe that's an age/hormonal thing :(

With ho ho ho in mind, Christmas will soon be upon us and without saying too much about what we've been doing, the house is sparkling... decorations are up, the lights are on the tree, wine glasses gleaming, silver and brasses polished (not that we have that much but at least it's all shiny) as much food as is possible to pre prepare has been done, presents wrapped...

And the reason I'm not saying too much about food and other things is because Mat and Airi are coming this week and we want them to be surprised and hopefully delighted with the food and decorations that we have done. This will be a special Christmas, their first together, and they are now engaged and planning weddings.

Creepy crawlies

2011-12-15T18:12:00.000+01:00

Moving in, taking up residence, on it's last legs, don't know what to call this one!

Two days ago a praying mantis arrived at the outside sink and spent all day resting on the edge, then gradually and oh so slowly, climbed up the wall and along towards the laundry area. Because everything was done in slow motion I came in and googled praying mantises - or should that be manti - and apparently they only live 10 to 12 months with the males dying first as they get eaten by the female after - or even during - the mating process. She bites off his head! Then when the female has laid her eggs in the autumn she will die during the winter months. So the chances are that this is a female and as I said 'on her last legs' as the weather is getting colder and soon her time will be up.

Today she spent the early part of the morning on the front of the washing machine cover but moved to the tumble drier cover when I put the washing in. Late this afternoon she'd gone but John said she is down in the courtyard on the outside of a large geranium tub. She's still moving but very slowly. How Pip and Monty haven't seen her I don't know, Pip would probably be frightened and bark at her while Monty would have a good sniff then go off and lie back down in the sun.

Pruning time in the front garden today, a huge pile overflowing the wheelbarrow of roses, geraniums, chrysanthemum prunings. Just about to tie up a wayward plant when I saw this huge spider sitting in it's web strung from rosebush to sage bush. No pruning near this! I'm sure it's got teeth!

ITV time again

2011-12-09T21:31:00.001+01:00

At this time of the year we don't get up until the sun is well and truly above the horizon - or in our case above Sierra Gador. But today the 4x4 had its 2 yearly ITV test and we'd booked it in for 10.30. Which didn't seem too early but then when we worked back the timings, we realised we'd have to leave home at 8.45.....down to Yator, via Cadiar, over the Contraviesa, along the coast road, through towns that would be waking up as businesses opened, book the car in and pay the 35 euros it costs. We arrived at 10.15, but didn't get called till nearer 11am. Such is life.

So we were up earlier than usual, and as I opened the lounge curtains and shutters I saw the reddest sky I have seen in a long time. Unfortunately the camera didn't capture the full extent of the colours, it spread left and right of Sierra Gador, a huge red glow that brightened as the sun rose.

As we drove down to the coast the sun was shining through the low clouds and it looked really pretty.

After the car passed, another 2 year sticker for the windscreen issued, we had a little retail therapy consisting mostly of food and drink for Christmas - and hopefully longer considering what we went for and what we came back with!!

Todays bargain - John went into Aki for some cup hooks, sandpaper and came out with a pair of very large red Xmas bells to hang up, probably in the garden. Why bells? As he went into Aki most of the people coming out were carrying them and they were on a 2 for 1 oferta so why not have some too?

Do we need Christmas cards?

2011-12-05T21:11:00.000+01:00

If you walk down the average high street or shopping centre in many places, there are always lots of card shops. If you do the same in Spain you will not see card shops but shoe shops. Wonderful for shoe-a-holics but not so good if you just want some nice cards for friends and family back home.

Most people have email but not all, some would be quite happy with an email greeting, but somehow it seems very impersonal and a card - especially one chosen for a person rather than out of a box of 36 - seems better at this time of year.

Cards are very rare here, surprisingly there are some quite nice ones sold in the local tabac, but not Xmas cards, nice cards in El Corte Ingles but a day in Granada seems a bit extreme just for some cards so imagine my delight when I saw some Xmas cards today in Ugijar. OK, so I was in one of the bazaars - think Woolworths-ish, everything you didn't know you needed at a very reasonable price.

10 cards for 75 cents. They do say that you get what you pay for and I should have stopped at that point and not bought any but in fact I bought 2 packs. When we opened them tonight we just started to laugh. Cheap and tacky doesn't begin to describe them. Bright and garish does. So flimsy that they don't stand up. Thin paper - apparently photocopy paper is 80 gsm, these can't be much thicker than that. John said if we glue them together to stop them bending we could hang them up as decorations.....then we thought we could cut them up and use them as labels for presents.... maybe if we don't get any/many cards we can hang them up and pretend we still have cards sent to us.

So if you are reading this and expecting to get a card from us this Christmas, sorry, but not this year.

And back to my original question. Do we need to send cards at all? It's just as easy to pick up the phone and wish someone a merry Christmas, send a picture and a message to those who have email and in these days of austerity, much more economic, although I'm sure the post office won't agree with that!

PS - we had a bonus with our cards, someone can't count and one packet had 11 cards in it!

Early this morning..

2011-12-02T14:38:00.000+01:00

Sunrise as seen from our living room window, this morning. Not much to say about it except what gorgeous colours.

Skiing in Spain

2011-11-30T17:46:00.001+01:00

For those of you who don't know, the Sierra Nevada ski slopes are now open and have been since last weekend. It's very rare to see anything written about this resort, most ski reports concentrate on the usual places: Italy, Austria, France and Switzerland but the resort here once held the Winter Olympics and also the Ski World Championships in 1996.

There is a live webcam here, this is a snap shot from that, there are 40 kms of ski runs now open.

There's also an article in the Ideal newspaper with some photos and links of the area - it's all looking very wintry indeed.

A little light pruning.

2011-11-29T21:05:00.000+01:00

September last year Fernando pruned - if that's the right word - the mulberry tree and since then it has done what it does best, grow and grow and grow. It gets to the point where the front garden is very shady and the flowers don't bloom as much as they should. That's when we think about cutting it again.

November 9th, full of leaves

The leaves have finished dropping, most of them have been raked up and are in the compost heap although there are still some further down the land which may or may not be raked up, depending on other things which need doing.

It's much easier to see which branches need to come off when the tree is bare, so today was pruning day. Up went the ladders, up went John and down came the branches. We aimed for the middle ones that grow straight up - and block our sun - leaving the sideways growing branches for shade as when Carmen comes, she likes to sit under the tree in the summer afternoon.

A little light pruning

From down on the ground or in the garden it's difficult to appreciate just how much the tree has grown. But we measured some of the branches and it's grown between 8 and 9 metres in 14 months. And it's not watered, or not deliberately, just rain and whatever it gets from the ground. No idea how far the roots stretch, hopefully away from our garden as it's got quite a lean on it - at least if it ever falls over it's pointing away from us.

Four hours later, most of the log store nearest the tree was full, there are still some branches to cut and trim down tomorrow, but the bulk of it is done. But what a mucky job, the tree leaks a white milky sap which is very sticky but luckily washes off clothing and skin. It is quite a light weight wood which doesn't take long to dry out so by the time the cold January, February and March evenings come, it should be dry enough to burn in the fire.

Why do slippers always stretch?

2011-11-28T20:55:00.000+01:00

I bought the most wonderful comfy pair of slippers last Tuesday - not the most beautiful I'll admit but so warm - and they were snug. I thought that they'd stretch slightly as slippers always seem to but that wearing them with socks would be ok. One week later they are like small boats slopping around my feet....John says if they get much bigger he'll wear them and I can buy another - and much smaller - pair.

So why does this happen?? I realise they are made of fabric which has some looseness, but so do my clothes and they don't go saggy and baggy. All slippers that I've bought seem to do this, I'm not getting at this particular make of slipper. I've had well-known high street brands in the past, locally made uk ones and cheap and cheerful from the local market. Some wear better than others and the price doesn't seem to have any relationship to the sagginess or bagginess or even the quality of the finished slipper.

Do I buy cheap and cheerful and frequently? Do I buy something more expensive and then mutter and moan when they don't last longer? Do I give up on slippers altogether and wear sox indoors (but then they don't keep my feet warm.... ) I have some very warm and toasty slipper- socks that do what they are supposed to: i.e. warmth and slippers all in one.......but they are hard to find and I have been lucky enough to have been sent them as a pressie.

When I find the perfect slipper which I'm sure must be out there somewhere, probably at some astronomical price - or maybe not in these days of financial doom and gloom - then I'm sure I'll be ready to give them a 'road test' and report back. Any slipper makers out there reading this - please take note!

To the shops

2011-11-24T16:09:00.004+01:00

It was a lovely sunny day on Tuesday so we thought we'd take some time out and go to Roquetas for the day. Not especially to shop for anything definite, just for look around, although my phone needed replacing as for some reason it won't take the sim card anymore, just says 'insert sim'. Luckily we had an old fairly huge nokia tucked away that I've been using recently.

I did want to look at Christmassy stuff, maybe a new tablecloth and matching napkins, there is a really nice shop in the Gran Plaza called Casa, so thought we'd look in there first. Parked the car, up the escalator, turned right - whoops, no Casa, just another shoe shop. However as we were there we took a look inside. Don't often go shoe shopping, our needs are quite basic, limited to wellies, trainers and crocs mostly. 'Best' shoes are still ones we've had for ages as high heels (for me obviously!) don't get worn much.

But I did fancy a nice pair of warm slippers, even though we have rugs down on the floors upstairs, the kitchen and dining room are only tiled and feet get chilly! They had loads of slippers, really spoilt for choice, the ones I bought were some fluffy ones but grey not beige and sadly no bobbles unlike some that were on sale.

But they did have some super smart wellies that I was tempted by but didn't buy.....a wonderful pink pair and if you've looked for boots you'll know what I mean. At least I know where to go when my Hunter green ones finally bite the dust. The leak is only on the top of one foot at the moment so as long as I don't paddle too much in the puddles, my foot stays dry. The other boot is perishing along the join but about halfway up the length of the leg, mid calf ish.

Sorted out a phone, had a nice lunch rather than a rushed fast food meal as we quite often do, did some food shopping and after much measuring and pricing of wood versus chipboard, bought some 'planks' to make cupboard doors. There are 3 recessed areas where we store stuff but - usually in the winter, maybe because it's cold or nesting - we have had a rat trying to set up home in the boxes. So cupboard fronts will be made and then they won't be able to get inside.

Currently cooking...

2011-11-20T18:22:00.001+01:00

is one of the half legs of jabalí from last weekend. Alongside that are chunks of calabaza from Paco which he gave us last week. Actually I did a swop with him for a bag of strawberry plants, we'd heard his tractor working so I said to John I'll go up and ask if he'd like the plants in return for a calabaza. He said most of the ones he had left were quite small but take what I needed, so I had 2 small ones. About an hour later his elderly mother came trotting down the road in her slippers (as is normal, they actually sell slippers for the house or campo) and she had 2 more much larger calabaza tucked under her arm for us.

Ready to cook later is a pan of kale which has escaped the beady eyes of the butterflies and subsequent caterpillars and the leaves are also totally free of whatever the grey fly thing is. And not a netted cage round any of it either!    Whereas the brussel plants are going to be a total write-off - completely infested with bugs.

And for even later, there will be an apricot upside down cake. Don't remember buying apricots or being given them, but there are two boxes in the freezer labelled 'halved, stoned, sugared', but not dated....

The nice thing about an upside down cake is that I can cook it in the microwave when we need it. Ok, so it has a pale top, but as that then becomes the bottom it doesn't show, also we don't need to leave the oven on, and anyway we are usually too full straight after the main course to eat a pudding. First we feed the dogs, do the washing up, take them for a walk and then have our pudding.

Tomorrow we are going to have jabalí again as yesterday when I was rearranging the meat in the freezer some got left out by mistake. Only the fillets, they are quite small compared to the pork fillets we buy, these weigh about 200 grams each. Perhaps I've been watching too much Masterchef recently, but I'm going to make 'beef' Wellington. Or should that be jabalí Wellington?

And talking of wellingtons, (what a link!!!) my much worn and loved welly boots have sprung a leak!   I know they've been around a long time and today have found photos of me wearing them at Malham Cove back in 1988. I wonder if Hunter Wellies will give me a replacement pair after all this time...

And as a footnote - sorry, couldn't resist that - jabalí is almost a cross of lamb and beef as far as taste goes. If it's roasted, served with mustard, horseradish sauce and yorkshire pudding as we did tonight, you'd be forgiven for thinking that you'd eaten beef. And if it's roasted with garlic and rosemary then served with mint sauce or mint jelly you'd think you were eating lamb. But certainly not pork. It's a dark and slightly gamey meat, nothing like the pale colour of pork.   Also an excellent substitute for steak in pies and casseroles and what makes it even more attractive is that it's free!

Olive bundles.

2011-11-18T18:32:00.001+01:00

Although we live closer to Yátor than Mecina Bombaron, Montenegro is part of an area called Alpujarra de la Sierra which also includes Yegen and El Golco. We can see Mecina, when the Ayuntamiento broadcast messages we can just about hear them although they are not clear enough to understand - although I'm told that some people in the village can't make out the message either! It's about a half hour drive round to Mecina which is quite a way when you just want to find out when the bonfire permissions are going to be available. We've asked twice now and each time been told 'maybe in a couple of weeks' - what we want to do is prune the olives and burn the trimmings. (Yes we could phone but we'd get the same shrug. We try to do a round trip when we have other places to go to as well.)

Not a huge problem you'd think. Must be a way round this.

Pottering in the kitchen a few days ago, I had a bit of a brainwave. We keep loo roll middles as seed starters but don't actually use very many so have a big pedal bin sized bag hanging in the shed. What if I cut the olive trimmings down into small sticks, pushed them into the loo roll middles, stacked them into the empty (and not needed at the moment) fruit and vegetable drier, then burnt them in the wood burner? Surely a better use of heat to warm us up indoors, rather than the atmosphere?

Complete and utter success. What a brilliant idea, even if I do say so myself. OK, so we've run out of loo roll middles but have a lot of newspapers from friends who share their old papers between three of us as fire starters. Roll up a sheet of paper, wrap it round your bundle and carefully, very carefully so the paper doesn't rip, pull tight. After a day in the drier, even this time of the year, they dry out and burn very well. If the leaves are green it's a smokier fire but that's outside, the heat given off is the same.

So I've been making bundles - trying to think of a good name for these - and can make 24 an hour and we use about 24 in an evening, supplemented with chunks of split wood later on for longer burning time which lasts into the night.

Will we bother going to ask about a licence? Not sure now, we're pretty certain they've been issued as we saw fires a few days ago but if I can find an hour a day - especially when the sun is shining - it's quite a pleasant job snipping up leafy bits and tieing bundles. And certainly rewarding when the house warms up so quickly.

Another foody afternoon

2011-11-14T19:47:00.002+01:00

After yesterdays mega big jabalí cooking session, we thought today would be a bit more like normal....we do tend to have days when we do certain things so today was supposed to be like that.

I did a quick trip into Cadiar first thing for a few bits and pieces, put the washing out when I got back, John was doing other stuff, then we were cutting down some firewood trimmings before we had a quick lunch. Don't tend to eat a big meal then, a sandwich or bowl of soup is usually enough then we have a bigger meal at night. Opposite way round to the Spanish, but even after 8 years here, we still haven't got used to eating more at lunch time and less in the evening. And a late lunch at that - they eat about 2.30 or 3pm.

Anyway, at 3pm the phone rang...Mariano. 'Have you eaten?' 'Yes, but not much, why?' 'Well, come for lunch, both of you' 'What now?' 'Yes, in half an hour?'

So up we went to find him, his mujer Marie-Carmen, his brother in law Antonio, plus a nephew Javi and his girlfriend Vanessa - she was cooking a huge paella. We went indoors to eat where the open fire had a huge log smouldering. Mariano disappeared off to his seemingly endless drink store for red wine and beer with the meal. After that we had apples that had been sugared, brandied, wrapped in foil and baked in the embers, coffee and pastries, more brandy or whisky or ron (dark rum)

The sky outside got gradually darker - not because it was very late but the rain clouds were gathering. First a light drizzle, now a bit heavier. We left at just gone 6pm, Javi, Vanessa and Antonio left as well as they had to drive back up to Yegen and the pista can be a bit slippery when there's been a bit of rain. Not a nice drive in the dark although I think they will have got home before it was too dark.

So another long foody afternoon, one of these days we will be home in time to cook ourselves a meal! But these impromptu meals are lovely, and it's good Spanish practice for us - not having neighbours here all the time means we don't get to talk spanish as much as we'd like. There's only so much conversation you can have with your local butcher!

Food, food and more food

2011-11-13T16:22:00.000+01:00

III JORNADA GASTRONÓMICA OTOÑAL en YEGEN Gastronomic autumnal III YEGEN

11:00 horas. Excursión etnobotánica por el sendero de la Fuente de la Salud.
11:00. Ethnobotany tour along the path of the Fountain of Health.

14:30 horas. La Gastronomía tradicional en el otoño de Yegen. Degustación de productos de la tierra en el Salón Cultural
14:30. The traditional cuisine of the autumn in Yegen. Tasting of local produce in the Cultural Hall.

22:00 horas. Velada Musical en el Salón Cultural.
22:00. Musical Evening in the Cultural Hall.

This is what was advertised for yesterday in Yegen, and as we had agreed to meet some friends who are over on a walking holiday we thought we'd walk up and enjoy some of the day's events. They are staying up in Berchules and followed the footpath across country via Mecina Bombaron, down through El Golco towards Montenegro where we met up and walked to Yegen together. They'd done 3 hours by then and were in need of a cold drink so we stopped at the first bar we came to for a beer and tapas - costillas in a picante sauce plus slice of bread.

Onto the next plaza, another bar, another drink or two, this time with bacon on a slice of bread followed by a slice of garlicky lomo on bread. And olives. Despite the lack of crowds flocking to the salon, we wandered round and popped our heads in the door for a look. People? Yes. Lots? No. Probably about a couple of dozen at most. Lots of food to eat? Not really, not what we'd expected anyway. We'd thought there would be different foods to taste and possibly buy, local cheeses, honey etc but in reality they'd opened a bar and were cooking local meats for tapas. So more costillas, morcilla (black pudding) panceta, longaniza (a sausage) bread of course - can't have tapas without bread - crisps and olives.

Enjoyable but not any different to being in one of the bars except the bars have chairs and tables so are more comfy! So onward and upward we went - Yegen is quite a steep village and we started at the bottom. Next two bars were shut, probably just as well as afternoon drinking can be tiring. Stopped at the last one - Cecy's - where we sat outside to keep an eye out for Omar who was coming from the hotel to pick up our friends. Another couple of drinks and more tapas, cheese with slices of bread, then lovely crispy fried fresh anchovies (nothing like the strong things they put on pizzas) and more bread.

I think the bread is to soak up the alcohol although they do say it was a lid - tapa - to keep flies out of your wine. Then things were added to the bread like cheese or jamón hence tapas.

John and I set off back home and were about half way down the pista when Antonio came back from a days hunting up in the Sierras and offered us a lift. A big group of them had been for jabalí, 2 cars were towing double-decker dog trailers, couldn't count how many dogs in each, but John reckons more than a dozen. And in the back of Antonio's pickup was a large 30 kilo jabalí. I'd seen Antonio earlier in the morning when I took Monty and Pip out and he'd said we could have some meat if they were lucky with the hunt, so we stopped at his house and waited while they skinned and jointed it. Not something I'd seen before, being a bit on the squeamish side, I like my meat to be a bit less animal like. But it wasn't that bad although I didn't watch them cutting off the head......last seen with the skin in a wheelbarrow. No idea where that ended up.

A quick wash down with the hose pipe, meat in a very large bowl, (basically they cut it up - 4 legs and a full sized rib cage) quick discussion amongst the 4 hunters who were there.....'would we like all the meat?' They had shot 3 and the others had enough so home we came with it all.

This morning we've been trimming, jointing, dicing and slicing, freezing and making stock. The end result is 8 joints (we halved the legs) totalling 13.5 kilos, 8 bags of diced steak for casseroles etc totalling 4 kilos, 2 solomillos (fillets) and more still to come. Both slow cookers are full of ribs and bones, with garlic, red wine and water to make stock and soup. Going to leave them for a while longer till the meat has all come off. The big slow cooker holds 6.5 litres and it's full to the brim. Plus there are 2 large saucepans full of scrappy stuff that is going to be frozen for the dogs. I did wonder where the kidneys and liver were - John said I'd have to go and delve in the wheelbarrow leftovers for those - yuk!

All in all a good weekend. Oh, and our friends know that we have a collection of geckos outside on the terrace walls and bought us a lovely one to join the others. We also have lots of real geckos, I wonder what they make of these static ones!

After the rain...

2011-11-09T20:50:00.000+01:00

After the rain we've had wall to wall sunshine, hardly a cloud in the sky during the day, just a bit of haze seems to come over just before sunset. And when the sun does set, the temperature plummets. It's like someones turned off the heating out there, so we do a quick dash indoors and light the estufa. I know I said we hadn't needed it, but over the last few days it's been alight every evening.

Just got a quick photo of the mulberry tree tonight as the sun was setting, it's really autumney.

A few weeks more and all those leaves will be down on the ground - hopefully we can get them raked up and into the compost before they blow away.

The first broad beans are up, as are lettuces and pak choi. That's a new one for us, supposed to plant it in the spring but our autumns are so mild they are like a second spring and as the lettuce grows again now I thought why not try it? It will be planted again in the spring the same as the lettuce seeds do. Just waiting for the coriander and parsley seeds to spring into life - they all went in the same day so shouldn't be long now. More beans went in the week after, the garlic beds are prepared and I just need to sort through last years crop that we stored to see what is worth eating and put some aside for replanting. It hasn't all stored that well, a bit rubbery feeling so don't know if we should eat it or not. But as there is plenty of space, it'll probably get planted and if it grows that's good, if not - well, never mind.

The rain in Spain...

2011-11-04T10:24:00.001+01:00

is mostly in our front garden at the moment! Take a look at this......

...... then came the wind and in the background - maybe not so loud because of the noise from the rain - there is thunder and lightning over the Contraviesa.

Not a day to be outside. Managed a quick walk this morning in the drizzle - the weekend though is going to be dry and even sunshine breaking through.

Anardana - pomegranate seeds.

2011-11-03T17:04:00.000+01:00

Yesterday there were more pomegranates bursting open although not as many as before so today I juiced them and made more grenadine. I intended to keep it as a juice but for some reason today's batch was much sharper than before, same tree so no reason to be different but it was, so now we've a litre bottle in the fridge alongside the others.

Some friends were here Tuesday afternoon to use the mill that we have borrowed - they needed to crush some barley, I think to make beer with. They also have pomegranates but instead of throwing the seeds away, dry them and use them. So off to google I went today and came up with this little lot.

Pomegranate seeds are called 'anardana' which comes from the Persian anar + dana = pomegranate + seed. The seeds are dried, can be roasted and ground, or soaked in water then used in cooking, in Indian cuisine, for chutneys, in granola style bars, on salads and many other things. Loads of recipe ideas out there, this one looked especially delicious and will probably be one of the first we try - partly because the name of the blog caught my eye....sinfully spicy. There is information plus a list of culinary uses on this site plus 65 recipes using the seeds. Might have to dry some more!

Not sure how long they will take to dry at the moment as we are having a wet and sometimes blustery day and the forecast is wet for tomorrow as well. No point putting them outside in the dryer as there isn't any sun to warm it up. If it was cold as well then we'd have the woodburner alight and I could dry the seeds near it but as yet we haven't needed it as it's not cold indoors.

Normally by November we've some sort of heating in the evening, maybe a gas fire on for a couple of hours or the woodburner but the house hasn't yet lost all it's stored summer heat. A few more damp drizzly days will do it though - especially as today it's only been 14° outside (forecast of 12°) and they reckon on a high of 9° tomorrow.

The too tomatoey tomato soup.

2011-11-01T21:32:00.000+01:00

If that sounds a bit odd then bear with me....

This time of year we're at the end of the season for most of the vegetables so I don't go daily to pick, yesterday I went out to one of the chilli rows - we have 5 different sorts growing in different places - and noticed that there were ripe tomatoes on the same terrace. Only a few days ago they were small, hard and green, but now they were small, red and juicy. Not a huge amount, but a good mixing-bowlful. Some had brown marks on the skin, almost like stretch marks but inside the fruit was fine. So I cut off any bad bit, quartered them, put them in a pan on a low heat and left them to simmer for about half an hour. Or maybe longer as I forgot about them, luckily they didn't boil dry. Into the liquidiser, pushed through a sieve, added some sauteed garlic and fresh basil, black pepper and a bit of muscovado sugar and tasted. Wow! Absolutely wonderful. Back into the liquidiser to smooth out the garlic and herbs, then a sample upstairs for John to taste.

Now he's not a huge tomato fan, likes them cooked in things such as spaghetti, chilli, curry and as a pizza base, but can't eat them raw on salads. However he said it's very tasty so I thought we'd have it today for lunch.

2 large steaming bowls of fresh tomato soup, served with a mollete (see here and here for what they are...... ) but it didn't seem to be going down as well as I'd hoped. Not nice? Nice enough, he said but a bit too tomatoey. 'Well what do you expect from tomato soup made from fresh tomatoes, and anyway you like tomato soup' said I. I like, he said, tinned tomato soup because - like ketchup - it doesn't taste of tomatoes. 'And the tinned stuff is cream of tomato soup so maybe if next time we added cream it might be more like the 'real' thing.'

Does he really think there'll be a next time?? For me certainly but he might get something else to eat.

La granada

2011-10-29T16:55:00.001+02:00

or as it's more commonly known, the pomegranate. The fruit is included in Granada city's coat of arms and one of the gates to the Alhambra is called the Gate of the Pomegranates. It appears all over the city in one form or another, laid into paving using tiny stones, on the tops of the posts at the side of the road.....

October is the time when ours start to split, usually after the rains have come. I read that the rains cause them to swell just that bit more and then they burst open, a lovely dark ruby red inside. Messy to de-pip (if that's the right word) no matter how careful you are some of the juices spray everywhere so I now do them into a bowl of water. The papery layer that the juice sacks are covered with then float to the surface and are easily scooped off. You don't want that layer to go in with the juice as it's very bitter tasting.

There were 16 ripe pomegranates on the tree this morning so I thought I'd better pick them before the birds got to them. What seemed like ages afterwards I finally had a large bowlful of juicy red arils (thanks wikipedia - not seeds at all)

They went into the liquidiser, then I strained the resulting juices off into a pan, 1.6 litres of deep red juice.

For a change this time we thought we'd make grenadine which is a syrup of pomegranate juice. You need to add an equal amount of sugar to the juice, bring it to the boil, simmer for about 10 minutes till it's syrupy, cool and bottle. End result today, 3 bottles of grenadine.

on the left, yesterdays marrow waiting to be cooked

Next stop, online recipes to see what else to use it for. Primarily it's for drinks, be they alcoholic or not. This site has it listed as an ingredient for 583 drink recipes! Also lovely mixed with lemonade, tonic or sparkling water as a refreshing summer drink and then I found it recommended as a glaze for pork, duck and chicken, poured over icecream, and as a pancake syrup amongst other things.

Something for everyone!

Roasting chestnuts

2011-10-28T17:56:00.002+02:00

We had a kilo and a half of chestnuts yesterday which we roasted in a *holey* pan - not over an open fire. We were given the pan soon after moving here but don't use it very often as the chestnuts don't grow this low - they are all up around Mecina and Yegen. Probably lots of other places too but that's the nearest they come to us.

It took ages to cut the cross in them all, I'd read somewhere recently that it's easier to open them after roasting if the cross goes across the top of the chestnut then as it roasts, the cross opens up and you have something to pull on. And that worked well. But the nuts need opening when they're still quite hot as the inside layer seemed to come off much easier when more hot than cool. Didn't matter for the ones we ate as we peeled but I wanted to freeze some them for chestnut stuffing to have with the Christmas turkey.

Monty and Pip sat as close to the kitchen table as they could get to catch anything we dropped, don't what they made of all the painful oohs and aahs as our fingers got hotter and hotter the more we peeled. We ate quite a lot I thought, but still had 800 grams left over for the freezer. And all the shells are in a bag ready to go into the woodburner when we light it.

Locally there is a celebration of the chestnut, any excuse for a fiesta! It's the 15th year they've celebrated! Jornada de la Castaña 'The Day of the Chestnut' is on tomorrow, Halloween celebration tomorrow night and the 4th Jornada de la Seta 'Day of the Mushroom' is on Sunday. This is the programme of events that are happening up until Christmas in both Mecina and Yegen.

Half an hour later....

Just had a quick break as Fernando stopped on his way past, he has left us 6 large aubergines and a marrow, or at least I think it's a marrow. I always assumed marrows were green like a large courgette and he called it a calabaza - calabazín is a courgette, this is the big version. But it's orange not green, the last one we were given by Paco was a green one, again a calabaza, and some we roasted with the Sunday joint, the rest I added to the soup pot. So I'll put some round the roast on Sunday and maybe make soup again.... I wonder if it freezes then I could add it to stews and curries when needed.

**re: the holey pan. Looks like a frying pan but with holes in the base and with quite a long handle. Probably easy to make out of an old pan, ours came from the local market and I think was about 75 cents.

Update...the calabaza weighs 2.5 kgs, it's about a foot long and more of a pale golden honey colour than orange. Maybe it's just a ripened version of the one we had before?

Better than we thought.

2011-10-27T16:07:00.000+02:00

We were prepared for the worst but - so far at least, we've only had overnight rain. Quite hard rain in the night I think as it woke me up, but it stopped early this morning. This afternoon has been quite sunny and although there were huge clouds to the north and south of us we managed a nice long walk before the clouds gathered again. Looking out now, we are completely covered and it's looking oh so gloomy.

One of my favourite walks is along the section of GR7 heading towards El Golco, it's wooded and green to start with then opens up into a more rocky path with rosemary covered slopes either side. Problem is that the green end gets very overgrown, probably due to the spring here in Montenegro overflowing and encouraging the growth. Not so much undergrowth as overgrowth too. In the summer it's almost impassable unless you're in trousers which I'm not then - too hot - and I don't like bramble scratched legs. And in the winter especially after rain, it can be too wet from the branches and overhanging leaves. Normally the path is kept clear by the medio ambiente guys who come and strim it. Not this year though - no idea why but possibly budget cuts.

However, yesterday morning 2 guys came down the track from Yegen, not medio ambiente and not driving a Junta de Andalucia vehicle either, they stopped at the Yegen, Montenegro, El Golco junction of paths and as we walked past they were getting the strimmer up and running and we could hear it all morning. We've just been to take a look and go for a walk and the path has been cleared as far as Cortijo Miguel which is a ruin about half way along, pretty much where the lush green stops and the rosemary bushes take over.

This is near where the over flow from the spring runs across the path.
With the sun shining through the overhanging trees it looks like a green leafy tunnel.

At last, it's rained!

2011-10-23T19:15:00.001+02:00

At last we've had some autumn rains ranging from - on Thursday afternoon - an all-out thunder and lightning 'event' as the weather forecasters seem to call these things nowadays, to a grey drizzley day yesterday and then over lunchtime today the rain came again, and the wind blew loads of leaves, remaining almonds and dead bunches of grapes down.

We raked up the leaves and put them in the compost, Monty and Pip tried to eat all the dried grapes before I got to them for the compost, we collected the almonds that we'd not been able to reach when we harvested - much easier picking them up off the ground - and then checked the forecast to see what else is coming our way.

It looks like it might be time to batten down the hatches at least for tomorrow and maybe later in the week as well as there is more on the way. But it's the first rain that we can remember since the start of June and that was such a small shower that it was over and done with without really wetting anything.

John was passing the Ayuntamiento in Mecina Bombaron last week and stopped in to ask about the permissions for having bonfires. They usually run from the start of November till the end of April - depending on the weather conditions. This year they said the medio ambiente won't come to do the permits till after it's rained, which day of the week do they come? when it's rained.

So now it has rained, but we don't know if it's enough for the permits to be issued. Next time we're passing by we'll take last years permit and leave it there to be re-issued and collected later. It'll be olive pruning time soon and we want to burn the trimmings. They take a long time to rot down in the compost even after going through the shredder and being layered with other fruit and veg waste, so alternate years we burn and add the ash instead.

Of course, along with rain comes a drop in temperature. So off with the summer bed cover - a cotton throwover, and on with the heavier cosy bedding. The rugs have come out of their bags and are down on the floors - the tiled floors suddenly get cold and once that happens they won't warm up till next year. The wood burners are laid ready for lighting, scones and jam for elevenses yesterday and a rice pudding in the slow cooker for tonight.

And next weekend the clocks change - autumn is here!

Winners and losers.

2011-10-21T21:27:00.000+02:00

Some plants are always winners and some have big 'hit or miss' years. We've made a list of this years planted vegetables and fruits called "foolproof, very insecty, not worth the hassle and just enough to eat".

Under foolproof comes strawberries, every type of bean, peas, kohlrabi, chillis, aubergines, sugarbeets, garlic, cucumbers and lettuce.

Under the insect heading comes cabbages, brussels and kale.

Not worth it (cheap to buy for the amount we need) cauliflowers, sweet potatoes, onions, sweetcorn, courgettes, celeriac, parsnip, swede, leeks, peanuts, radish.

Grow enough just to eat as an extra - carrots, tomatoes and potatoes.

A bit of a mixed up list as things like courgettes should grow well and some years they do, but we don't eat that many and when they don't do well like this year, it's something we think is easier to buy when needed rather than digging and planting then getting a glut that we don't want.

Onions are a strange one, they always grow but never swell very much - I use them more for salads and pickling. Bought a sack last week - 30cents a kilo. Is it worth buying the plants and then looking after them for the 6 months they are in the ground?

Tomatoes we have always grown lots of, this year no-ones have done well and although we have lots dried, they are cheap to buy in season (3 kilos for 1 euro) and large tins of tomato triturada (sort of pulped) work out even cheaper per kilo than that.

Potatoes need loads of space as we seem to eat lots over a year and I'm not sure we could ever be self-sufficient but if they sprout in the kitchen, then we plant them and eat them as tiny ones with mint and butter - so we grow them as an extra.

This years carrot crop was amazing, we grew round carrots, and for using in salads and as a baby veg they were lovely. But now they've all gone so we're back to buying them.

Cauliflowers took a lot of space for many months, some bolted and some didn't stay white but sort of tasted ok, especially under cheese sauce when you couldn't see the colour. Worth it? Probably not, but worth trying.

The biggest disappointment as always are the cabbage family. Love sprouts, red cabbage and green cabbage, no problem growing them but those pesky butterflies and caterpillars drive me mad! This years kale is growing very well and tastes wonderful - but needs so much cleaning before cooking as the little grey flies are tucked up tight in the curly edges.......but we'll persevere. We always plant them in different places - this year they are spread over 3 different areas in the hope the butterflies won't find some. One year we'll win!

But the gold star of the crop has to go to the strawberries and the bean family. Never let us down, no insect damage, the beans bend with the wind, the birds eat other fruit and leave the strawberries to us, just give them plenty of water and sun and pick and eat. Wonderful. I wish all fruits and vegetables were so easy.

Planting by the moon

2011-10-18T17:40:00.000+02:00

Not by moonlight, but by the cycle of the moon! What seems like many years ago, but was probably our first spring here, Manolo came round one day asking if it was creciente - what crescent? de la luna he said as if that made it any more obvious. But what he was referring to was an age old custom of doing things by the cycle of the moon, when it's rising you plant things that grow up - leafy, herby types of plants - and when it's a waning moon you plant root vegetables. There's more to it than that, but basically that seems to be how it works.

I was reminded of this a couple of weeks ago when I saw a link to this website about planting according to the different moon phases and I read it meaning to try something and see if it grew any quicker than expected. I sent the link on to a friend and then forgot all about it....when I next saw her she said thanks for the moon guide, the coriander and parsley both appeared after 2 days! Really quick, especially for parsley which is apparently very slow to germinate and I find almost impossible to grow!

I've had a look for this week and it seems I have a bit of a break from planting as the moon is in it's last quarter and we can concentrate on digging, weeding and composting. Apart from today that is as I have a day off 'cos it's my birthday.

Opened my cards and a present over breakfast, went out for a coffee and then spent some money on myself, then later we had lunch and drinks with friends. Another lovely sunny day, clear blue skies and not a sign of autumn yet. Long may it last.

Colourful quince.

2011-10-12T21:03:00.000+02:00

Another day, another batch of quince to deal with. But not chutney today although I started off the same: peel it, core it, and chop it. It wouldn't all fit in the pressure cooker so some was simmered in a pan and look at the difference in colour!

Ready for roast pork...

I think the longer it's cooked the deeper the colour and the pressure cooker is a very intense way of cooking. Much less water, much quicker and a different colour altogether. So it was all cooked, drained, pureed, then some was frozen for serving as 'apple sauce' with roast pork while the rest was put back in the pan, an equal amount of sugar added and it was then simmered until thick, then cooled, poured into containers and is now in the fridge.

and ready for some good strong cheese.

This is traditionally served with cheese at the end of a meal although it's very nice on hot, buttery toast too. And possibly on scones instead of jam? Worth trying I think!

PS: Just look at the colour of this sky! Finished with the quince at 3pm, came upstairs to find it was still 26.7° in the shade so had a couple of hours by the pool reading and topping up my tan just in case autumn should come soon.

Todays offering...

2011-10-11T21:07:00.000+02:00

I've finally got round to doing something with the quince that I picked last Tuesday, luckily they last for a few weeks after picking. I make some sort of chutney every year with some of them and a few years ago - 2009 to be precise - I found a recipe that included lots of Indian spices such as cardamom seeds, coriander seeds, turmeric... Unfortunately my filing system/recipe file has totally let me down and I can't find any trace of the original recipe. So off to google I went, put in the fruit, spices etc that I think went in the chutney and up popped a recipe from Turkey. It didn't look familiar, don't think it's the same one, but that's what I've made today although with a bit of tweaking of the ingredients.

The end result but only using half the quince.

It's a 2 stage recipe, day 1 you peel, core and chop 2.5 kilos of quince and put in a bowl then cover with 700g of brown sugar. I used soft brown but not dark. Cover with cling film - or a shower cap - and leave overnight.

Day 2, put the sugary quince into a large pan - I used the pressure cooker - and add these spices..... Dry roast 1 teaspoon cumin seeds and 2 teaspoons coriander seeds and grind. Add to fruit along with 1 teaspoon cardamom seeds, 1 teaspoon turmeric powder, 2 or 3 teaspoons grated ginger, 1 teaspoon ground cloves, 8 cloves garlic finely chopped, 2 spanish onions finely chopped, 2 teaspoons salt, and chilli.

(chilli is to taste, the recipe said 1 teaspoon of cayenne but I added 1 fresh chilli absolutely no chilli taste at all, added 1 more, and 1 more, 4 in total but I wanted a fruity chutney with some kick.)

To all the fruity spicy mix add 500ml of white wine vinegar and pressure cook for 10 minutes on high, reduce pressure with cold water, mash fruit down using potato masher, add remaining 300ml of vinegar and simmer till thick. Don't know how long it would take to reach that consistency if cooked without a pressure cooker, this took 40 minutes in total.

Put into sterilized jars until - well, most chutneys you have to keep till they improve. We ate the left overs tonight as there was just a bit too much for 11 jars and it was wonderful.

PS: the caterpillars are back...on the biggest, best red cabbage that we have - or had!

Cabbages and caterpillars.

2011-10-10T21:40:00.001+02:00

What is it with caterpillars and cabbages? I know they have to eat but why our veg? The seeds germinate well, the small plants get transplanted and continue happily in their new place, I make cages out of netting and still the butterflies manage to get in. They seem quite happy to eat both red and green cabbage, brussel sprout plants, kale but - luckily for us - not cauliflowers (yet!) The netting has quite small holes, sold either as pea or bird net, but I have seen a butterfly in the cabbage cage and then as I watched, it folded it's wings and went out through the net. It was the middle of the morning, I was stone cold sober, I wasn't imagining it.

So how to stop them? I check all the vegetables every morning and sometimes again late afternoon, pick off any caterpillars I find and put them in a bucket of water (they don't swim very well), but yesterday when I went to water the vegetables and the olive trees I found that the caterpillars had moved on to the kohlrabi and swede leaves! Some days I find one or two leaves of a plant completely stripped back to the framework of the leaf but no caterpillar around. Maybe something else is getting in the cage and eating them but there's no way a bird can get in.

It's very frustrating and annoying - lots of our time and effort goes into the preparation of the land, digging, weeding, watering, just to fatten up a family of cabbage white butterflies and caterpillars. And that's not even thinking about the aphids which get onto the plants as well. Sort of a grey fly thing, tiny and very difficult to get rid of. Maybe something to do with the caterpillars as we always seem to get both, not one or the other. But they don't strip a plant bare and can be washed off the leaves eventually. Took 5 washes to get the kale clean on Sunday but it can be done.

I know you can live in harmony with nature and that wasps, ants and ladybirds etc all do their bit to eat as many insects as possible. There's no way we want to resort to sprays as we like to know what's going on our plates so all we can do is plant far more than we need and hope the caterpillars appetite doesn't grow when they see the extra veg that we have planted.

One of the plants that nothing touches are the strawberries. I made 2 new beds yesterday and planted out 40 small plants from runners. They've been rooting in yoghurt pots and have grown out the bottom of the pots now, so I cut them away from the mother plant and transplanted them. There are still another 37 in pots.........and lots more that have 'run' and rooted themselves in between the parent plants. I'm going to leave them all for the time being, and next summer see how well this years 2 year olds fruit. If they don't do well, then they'll come out this time next year and I'll use that space for something else. Not desperately short of space so no need to get rid of them just yet. The original mother plant is now 4 summers old and still producing fruit and babies. This years plants are still giving us about half a kilo a week, enough to have with cornflakes for breakfast.

It's wine time again

2011-10-04T19:23:00.000+02:00

Out first thing this morning with lots of buckets to collect as many grapes as we could for this year's wine making. The grapes started off well this year but for some reason many of them have shrivelled up. Not just ours, our neighbours too and the many Paco's here also have less grapes. So we've picked everything within reach and although not as much as last year, it all helps.

We bought a fruit press a few years ago for squeezing the grapes which up till now we've chopped in the food processor. But that's not designed for kilo after kilo of grapes and also it takes longer as we have to pick the grapes off the bunches. So this year we invested in a 'crusher' - looks a bit like a wheelbarrow top with a handle - it bursts the grapes ready for squeezing or fermenting then squeezing, depending whether you want red or white wine. It's very similar to this one.....

Picked 18 buckets of grapes altogether......

While on the hunt for grapes, I noticed the quinces were dropping onto the ground, it's only a small tree, but has provided 24 fruit for another day's work. Probably make chutney as we still have some frozen from last year for pies/crumbles and I have a good recipe for a spicy chutney, a good alternative for when the mango chutney runs out.

Pickles and chutneys

2011-09-29T22:35:00.000+02:00

Most of the pickles and chutneys we make are using our own fruits and vegetables but there are a couple of exceptions, hot lime pickle and mango chutney.

Hot lime pickle and mango chutney are both favourites, lovely served with a plate of poppadoms together with yoghurt and mint dip before eating the curry main course. I also make a spicy aubergine pickle to have with it, but those we grow and I make the pickle when we have too many to eat and don't need any more in the freezer.

We saw hot lime pickle for sale over here, think it was about €4.50 a jar, the recipe I have uses 12 limes and makes 2 jars. The first time I made it, they cost €2.50, the next time was a few months later and in a different shop and they were nearer 3.50. Maybe slightly out of season or something. Anyway with a few teaspoons of spices and quite a lot of chilli it's no different from the real - and more expensive - thing.

Mango chutney is another one we make but buy the fruit, the last batch I made when John saw two mangos for a euro - that made 2 jars as well.

And the spicy aubergine pickle is another tasty one. Quick, simple to do and tasty although like a lot of pickles you do have to leave it to mature for a few weeks. Although you can eat it straight away, the flavour is so much better after a few weeks in the fridge.

So the recipes....

First up,

Hot lime pickle
Take 12 limes, juice 4 of them and cut the remaining 8 into small, teaspoon sized pieces. Put in a bowl with 6 teaspoons of salt. Stir well, cover, put in fridge and stir daily for 4 days.

Day 5: dry roast 1 teaspoon each of cumin seeds, mustard seeds, fenugreek seeds and grind. Add 1 teaspoon of turmeric powder and 5 of chilli powder. Mix well, add to lime mix and keep for 3 more days. After this time the lime skin should be soft, if not keep a few more days. Put into sterilized jars and keep for a few weeks - if you can! Fills 2 ex-mayo jars.

Spicy aubergine pickle
Dice aubergines, add 1/2 teaspoon salt and mix with enough turmeric to coat them, then fry in enough oil till they go golden brown (about 5 minutes) Add chopped garlic, 1inch piece finely chopped ginger root, 3 teaspoons garam masala and 1 teaspoon cayenne pepper. Simmer till aubergine is soft. No precise amounts of aubergine to garlic - it's all in the tasting! Should be quite oily though, the recipe says 2 cups oil to 1 and 1/2 lbs aubergines. I just make it as and when I have too many aubergines so it's a bit hit and miss but still tasty. Bottle, put in fridge and as before, keep it as long as you can as the flavours improve after a few weeks.

Mango chutney
3 mangoes, peeled and cubed, in a bowl with 200g soft brown sugar, (I think the darker the better for a really rich flavour) 1/2 teaspoon ground turmeric, 1 teaspoon grated fresh ginger. Mix and leave for about 2 hours. Then put into a heavy-based saucepan with 1/2 teaspoon salt, 2 chopped garlic cloves, 1 large chopped onion, 400ml white wine vinegar and stir constantly till cooked and thickened. (recipe says up to 2 hours but it's never taken that long). Leave to cool, put into sterilized jars and into fridge. As before, keep if you can for a few weeks.
Makes 2 jars.

All you need now are some poppadoms, some cucumber raita, yoghurt and mint dip and a very large plate!

Enjoy.

There is such a thing as a free lunch!

2011-09-27T18:42:00.001+02:00

We were in Yator yesterday morning and when we'd finished it was almost lunchtime. Didn't have anything planned to eat here so thought we'd stop in at the bar for a beer and tapas - Roger's tapas being almost meal sized. (not sure how to spell his name, it's pronounced like the Rocher in Ferro Rocher chocolates and maybe - in Cuba where he's from - that's how it's spelt)

Although the sign on the door says Lunes descanso (Mondays resting - a day off) there were a few people outside, and another guy inside with a beer. But when we asked for a drink Roger said not here, let's go over to the salon.....off we went across the square wondering why. Yes, Monday is their day off to cook and clean but he would rather have a beer with people leaving his long-suffering other half to do the work. Eventually 5 of us were in the salon, another couple came and went and it turned out that there had been a 'do' Sunday evening and we were drinking the barrel left from fiesta plus eating the tapas too. Dishes of olives, patatas pobre, slices of cheese and fresh bread. (The salon is the village hall) Some melons left over too so we were given 2 of them to bring home.

Fernando came in looking dusty (and in need of a beer) but he'd not been harvesting almonds as I thought but runner beans - would we like some? Back he came with a carrier bag - weighed them today, 4 kilos.

One of our fellow drinkers said he was only staying for one beer as he was off to Cadiar for lunch.....then he had another, and another, and so did we, then he said "I'll cook, lets go up to my house" so we did - four of us - and had rather a mixed meal...sardines, fried eggs, fried frankfurters, jamon and chillis fried together, a salad of tomatoes and onions, bread (bit dry but couldn't have been the previous days' as they don't deliver on Sundays) and a bottle of somebody's home-brew.

A bit surreal really, the 'chef' who'd gone out dressed for a restaurant in his very smart white chinos and striped shirt, plus hat, took off his shirt so it didn't get splashed on and replaced it with a wonderful flowery apron. Wouldn't let any of us help prepare the lunch or tidy up afterwards. A cup of tea followed at another house then I was given 2 house plants in need of a little bit more tlc than they'd been getting. The 'chef' was last seen heading back to the bar - plus shirt, minus apron - whereas we headed home with all our goodies.

And when we asked for the bill from the bar/salon - Roger thought about it then said "nada. "

A wonderful afternoon, although a bit longer than we'd anticipated!

First day of Autumn

2011-09-23T22:43:00.000+02:00

The first day of Autumn and late this afternoon came the first rain we've had since June 6. Actually, we don't remember rain then but the gardening diary that we keep says "thunder and showers 1pm and 6pm".

It was a lovely clear sunrise - I went out early with Monty and Pip for a walk but as the sun rose so the clouds gathered and although the sun was there it really struggled to get through today. Not cold, but not hot either. Then later this afternoon a breeze picked up, I put all the sunbed and chair cushions away just in case, as we know from past years that the weather can change really rapidly. About 6pm, a few drops of rain started then we had a fairly steady drizzle for a few hours. Enough to dampen the ground, it smells really earthy outside. Took off the covers from the compost heaps to let the rain get in them too.

It seems to have stopped now, took the umbrella out with me when we went for a last walk this evening but only a few spots coming down. Tomorrows forecast is back to sunshine, although it is cooling down now. Some of the leaves are starting to drop, especially the almond trees, when we knock off the almonds the leaves come down too, but they all get raked up and composted.

Lots of chillis.

2011-09-21T17:21:00.000+02:00

About 4 years ago one of the many Paco's gave us a long string of dried chillis, 2 different types, 1 long and dark red, the other small and round and very hot. We called the round ones Scotch Bonnets although they weren't because Scotch Bonnets are squashed looking and these looked like small fat peppers. And the long ones just became known as Paco's long reds.

We saved seeds from both types and grew them for the next couple of years, ate fresh and dried and again saved seeds. Last year they seemed to take forever to germinate so we bought 10 chilli plants as well which produced nearly 500 very hot, very small chillis. (I know because I counted them when I picked as I couldn't believe how many chillis such small plants could produce)

We also grow jalapeños - some years we have had almost a forest of them, this year less grew but still enough.

Jalapenos in the sunshine


The normal hanging down type

But the strange thing is the way the chillis from Paco grow. All our other chillis grow hanging down from the plant but both of Pacos varieties grow upwards. And we have no idea what type they - any one recognise them?

The 'Scotch Bonnets' - or may be not.

The long reds that grow up!

I know, looks more like a pepper but it's a chilli.

If you like jalapeños and cream cheese, then for a quick tapas, cut the chilli in half lengthwise and fill with cheese and eat. Removing the seeds is up to you, depends on how much spicyness you like.

Jalapeño Poppers.
For a hot tapas - takes a bit longer but it's worth it - slit open a jalapeño and carefully fill with cream cheese. Easier to do with an piping bag for icing than with a teaspoon. Leave on the stalk, dip the jalapeño in tempura batter and holding the stalk carefully lower into hot oil. When the batter has started to brown you can let go of it. If you just drop it into the fat it'll probably sink and stick to the basket. We first had these as a bar snack in Rochester, New York, we found them in England but breaded not battered - a bit on the stodgy side. Tried making and freezing them but the chilli seemed to lose it's crispness, much better made fresh.

Catching up.

2011-09-18T17:41:00.000+02:00

I'm still here - I know it's nearly 2 weeks since I last wrote anything but I've been busy with one thing or another. Still watering the vegetables on a twice weekly basis but there are less to water now as the borlotto beans are beginning to dry out and are being picked for seeds and the sugar beet is frozen, but the cauliflowers, swedes, carrots, kohlrabi, chillis, peppers, aubergines, tomatoes, cabbages, kale and sprouts all need water still. And we mustn't forget the strawberries. Picked half a kilo this morning and we now have about another 30 runners potted up into old yoghurt pots. The roots haven't yet come out the bottom of the pots so I'm leaving them for a few more weeks, last year I planted them into a new bed at the end of September but lots of them died off. I think it's still too hot - 30° at 4pm today - they need the sunshine for the fruit but it's too much for a small plant to cope with.

Filled the drier with very ripe tomatoes this morning, they haven't been picked for a week and were very red and juicy. Kept enough in the kitchen for us to eat until the next batch have fully ripened. 63° in the drier at 4pm, still getting very hot in there, even though the sun is lower in the sky.

I was away for a mid - autumn break last week from Tuesday till yesterday lunchtime. John was chief vegetable waterer, dog walker and cook. He's renamed Monty and Pip "the clingons" as they didn't leave his side during that time. Normally they come for walks with me and first thing in the morning they come to my side of the bed to make sure I'm awake. But of course there was nobody there so they were a bit confused, especially Pip. I have a suspicion that she slept up on the bed to be close to him at night as well.

So that just about sums up the past fortnight, we had friends over for dinner one night and they stayed here before going back to England the next morning, but apart from that we've been doing the usual things. The red chillis are strung up under the terrace drying, there are bunches of sage drying in the breeze too, I've pruned down a geranium that had got way too big and collapsed on top of a sage bush, John has rebuilt one of the raised vegetable beds that was edged with pallet wood but is now done with mini-bloques, (half the thickness but full sized in height and width) and we have plans to do the other 2 beds before next spring and fill them with fresh compost to give the plants a really good start in life. We don't have many almond trees but the 2 closest to the house have been picked, husked and stored. Now we need to get the other trees picked before the almonds drop off and roll down the slope into the brambles.

Sugar beets.

2011-09-05T22:05:00.000+02:00

Seems like a long time ago, but way back in June we were given some vegetables from one of the many Paco's which we realised were sugar beet. Planted as he said, watered when he did, then watched them grow. OK, not all of them grew wonderfully well, but as an extra and for free anything is good. We googled at the time to find out what we could do with them: boil, roast, make into chips, fry sliced like crisps, grate raw for salads, even bake whole like a jacket potato!

This week the biggest ones have started lifting out of the ground, so we re-googled and when they are about 10cms plus across, and have grown for approximately 45 days, they are ready for eating. I think that if they are grown for animal food, as Paco's are, it doesn't matter if they are left in the ground and get tough and woody - maybe a pig isn't as choosy about these things as we are!

Out came the biggest yesterday, the first one - and the smallest - we peeled and cut into sticks for eating raw. Crispy and sweet and very delicious. The next smallest we peeled and cut into carrot sized pieces and cooked along with the carrots for dinner last night. Again, delicious. The flavour? Think parsnip but sweeter. Think of a just pulled baby carrot. They are crisp like a turnip but sweeter. (That's if you cook your veg like we do - certainly no soggy veg in this house) The biggest ones weighed in at between 600 - 700 grams and they have been prepared and frozen for the winter. There are more in the ground, hopefully they will carry on growing and fattening up. And apparently the tops can be eaten too, a bit like spinach. It's surprising how many green leafy tops are edible that you throw away...kohlrabi, beetroot, sprout tops, even the small leaves from the horseradish plants.

Not pretty things, but tasty.

Not my flowers....

2011-09-02T21:48:00.000+02:00

These aren't my yucca plants - they grow just up the road and are our neighbours. Came into bloom earlier this week and don't they look amazing! There are two of them, took these photos early one morning just as the sun was catching them.

What you can't see - or hear, obviously, are the bees buzzing around the flower spikes.

Almonds in August?

2011-08-29T22:41:00.000+02:00

Over the past couple of days the almonds on one of our trees have been opening and I have started to pick them. It's a tiny tree, more of a bush than a tree, about 1.5 metres max, but is absolutely laden with almonds. We don't remember ever having almonds ready to pick quite so early - sometimes there's a tree with almonds that start to split in early September but August??

Once upon a time this particular bush-tree was a proper tree, tall and leggy, but totally unproductive and prone to greenfly and nasty sticky stuff all summer. So late one autumn a few years ago, it was cut down to the base, and a very large base it was. Took ages to cut through it, even longer to cut the trunk into chunks and longer still to log the chunks. But it made wonderful firewood! The next year nothing much happened apart from some new growth but this year all that new growth flowered beautifully and each flower made an almond and now we are picking them.

The end result from today's picking was one bucket of almonds and two buckets of husks, the husks will be dried and kept for the wood burner. When the almonds have dried out and have been shelled, the shells also go in the wood burner.

Outside now there is thunder rumbling away down south and lightning flashing - lighting up the garden. Not enough clouds for rain and nothing is forecast but we quite often get this happening in late summer. Maybe a build up of pressure? Rain would be quite nice, not had any since the first week in June when there were a couple of showers.

A few more fiesta photos

2011-08-24T18:05:00.000+02:00

The most enormous paella!

After lunch, waiting for the foam. Me, talking to son.

Bubble girl, Airi.

John and Mat with womble feet!

Outdoor living.

2011-08-23T22:37:00.000+02:00

One thing neither of us really enjoy doing in this hot weather is cooking indoors. The kitchen gets hot, we get hot and it's not nice. But earlier this year some friends who were redoing their kitchen offered us their cooker and sink unit - if we could find a use for them. 'An outside cooking area' we thought and put the cooker in the shade of the olive tree out by the pool. It's a 5 burner gas cooker and as gas is bottled here the cooker can live anywhere, doesn't need fitting near a socket. I made it a cover for when it's not used and to keep the winter rains off it, John made a frame to fit the sink unit into and we started to cook out there.

We prepare food in the kitchen, then bring it up to cook. There is a spare set of china, cutlery and assorted other things stored in the caravan - salt and pepper, olive oil, glasses and such like. The sink can only be described as functional - it's obviously not plumbed in as it's outside the caravan on a frame, so after washing up when you pull the plug out you must make sure there's a bucket underneath to catch the water otherwise you get splashed. Then the water goes onto the plants, it's not wasted.

Made a wonderful pizza for lunch last week, well 2 actually as there were 4 of us, and the oven needed to be very hot to get a crispy base - the thought of that indoors didn't bear thinking about but outside in the shade was fine.

So, a panorama of photos from around the pool.

First is the drier for fruit and vegetables, a kindling store,


a sunny sunbed, shaded seating area, shady sunbed


shady cooking area and caravan with sink outside.

Sunrise

2011-08-22T16:07:00.000+02:00

Just a photo of this mornings sunrise as we went out for a pre-breakfast walk... not as early as it looks, this was taken at 7.39.

A rat run.

2011-08-21T18:08:00.000+02:00

A little light pruning this morning to stop the rat run. Yes, even this far up off the beaten track we have a rat run, but with a difference as this is a real rat which has decided to do it's daily commute via our palm trees, olive tree, terrace roof, grape vines and across the top of the garden gate.

The day before yesterday we heard it pattering over the terrace roof, presumably it had come from Carmen's, up the wall and over our house roof first, then it went down a palm branch, along the ivy-clad fence - but very cleverly the outside so although Pip tried her hardest she couldn't get it - then over the gate and via the olive tree onto the far fence and away.

In the evening it came back along the fence, up the olive tree, jumped onto the grape vines, down a palm branch and back along the ivy-clad fence. Chased all the way by the dogs but again it was outside so they could only bark and scrabble at the fence. Don't know where it's going to - we did see a rat going up into the mulberry tree when that was full of fruit back in June, maybe it's eating the figs now.

So we took the loppers to every palm branch that came anywhere near touching the olive, grapes and house in the hope that it can't jump the gaps and will find a new route home - hopefully further away.

Unfortunately Pip, in her desperate attempt to get at the rat, has scratched her eyelid on a bush and it's all swollen and she can't see from that eye. The good thing for her though is that it's her bad eye and we're not sure how much vision there usually is in that one, and she can still see with her good eye. Has it slowed her down? Not at all, still careering around before collapsing in the shade.

Mat and Airi's visit

2011-08-19T15:28:00.001+02:00

We've had a busy week and I haven't been anywhere near the computer since Mat and Airi arrived last Saturday. They flew into Granada at lunchtime and we came straight home as it was a fiesta weekend in Yator. We missed the lunch but the plaza and the bar were still busy with people talking and drinking so we stopped in the village for a cold drink or two and had some huge plates of tapas.

The afternoon was spent showing her around the house, garden and pool area then they went down to our bottom land - or tried to, it's a bit overgrown so they didn't get very far down. A quick trip around the vegetable areas, picked some strawberries and then it was time for a swim. They have been in the pool every morning and afternoon and Airi even managed to have a fairly dry float just before leaving yesterday. How she didn't fall in I don't know, she was balanced on a tiny lilo.

Sunday was another fiesta day - we walked down at 1pm for a pre-lunch drink, paella was served later plus plates of salamis, cheeses, chorizo, crisps, bread.....jugs of beer, bottles of wine, bottles of lemonade and coke, and later on we slices of a kind of creamy swiss roll for dessert with a glass of sparkling red wine. All very filling. And all the time there was music playing, a brass band played jazzy stuff - we have some video of it from Airi which will be added later.

About 4 o'clock ish the foam man set up and we had bubbles and buckets of water going everywhere. No point in trying to stay dry or hide in the bar as there was no safe place. Eventually the bar door was shut while they mopped up a bit but it didn't stay shut for long, or dry for that matter. Pictures and video to come soon. I didn't take my camera as Airi has a waterproof one which we used. All we had during the foam party was some money in a sealed bag to pay the bar bill with at the end. Everything else was safely dry at a friends house. Some friends gave us a lift home and as if we weren't wet enough, we all went in the pool. Actually, I went to get wine and glasses from the kitchen and wondered where everyone was when I came out, then heard laughing and splashing and they'd all jumped straight in the water, fully dressed.

Most mornings Mat and Airi went out walking before it got too hot, up to Yegen one day, across to the river below El Golco, and round to the fuente. In the afternoons they had language practice, he's learning Japanese and she's learning French. Or so they said, he was fast asleep on the sunbed and although she was sitting on a chair, her book fell onto the ground and I suspect she was sleeping too. Off to Ugijar one morning so they could buy gifts for friends and some things for their apartment plus we stopped for churros and chocolate as a mid-morning break. Then all too soon their time here was over and we did a trip up to Granada yesterday morning to drop them off.

Loads of photos to sort through, some to be added here when we have time. And the videos need shrinking down before uploading so it may be a few days yet.

Painting and decorating.

2011-08-10T22:00:00.001+02:00

In the corner of our dining room is an open fireplace where Marie used to have a fire and sometimes cook over the open fire. Consequently, the surrounding bricks were blackened by soot and cooking. There is also a brick arch which used to be the entrance to the bread oven which was in the bodega - now our kitchen. When we bought the house we thought the oven took up a lot of valuable space so knocked it out. It was over a metre square - if a domed oven can be a square - of floor space and although the room measures 3.5m by 4m, it seemed to take an awfully large chunk out. Plus it was almost as high as me so maybe that's why it seemed a bit overwhelming.

For a long time, I've wanted to have a go at the blackened bricks and try to get them clean, also the wall above was black, and would look much nicer white like the rest of the room. So part of this weeks decorating involved lots of elbow grease, scourers, hot soapy water, degreasing spray and muttering from me. Not easy working in a corner, tucked in the side of the woodburner which we have put in the open fireplace, in the heat of August. Even though the dining room is one of the coolest rooms, I was dripping.

But at last the bricks are as good as new, the wall has been wire brushed back from black, sooty paint to just dirty paint and after 3 - or possibly more - coats of paint, is now gleaming like the rest of the room. Table and sideboard freshly waxed and polished, new pictures on the walls and we're ready.

At least decorating doesn't involve lots of complicated paint charts, carpet and wallpaper samples. The tiled floors don't need covering, we moved the furniture from one side, prepared the walls, painted, moved it back, did the same with the other half and cleaned the floors afterwards. Sounds quick, but it took 4 days as there are still all the other things to do here involving the vegetable plots, so it wasn't only decorating, all day every day.

August already.

2011-08-04T22:25:00.000+02:00

Just because I don't write regularly doesn't mean nothing is happening or that we've given up on life, but it's because there's so much to do that I don't start to think "I really should write something" until about this time of night - nearly 10pm now. And by then I've will have had a long day and am only ready for vegetating, not writing.

However, I'm sitting here with a large glass of wine - local (ours) of course and ready to write.

Every morning the sun pops up and shines all day - blue skies, sometimes a few clouds too but nothing much. The fruits and vegetables are being watered, picked, frozen/dried/eaten depending on what it is and how much there is. The lettuces - all 120 of them - have suddenly bolted over the last week and most of them are in flower. Very pretty and should produce seeds for next year but not edible any more. At least we've had more than enough to eat for the past few months. Next year I think we'll look for a later variety as well to last through these hot months. If any one knows of a lettuce that'll grow in August and later, do let us know. Contact details on here.......

Another paper work day this week which involved a day on the coast, somewhere different for us and what a place! Parked in an ordinary car park, nothing fancy, but there were Lambourghinis, Porsche 4x4's and sport versions, a wonderful historic red E-type Jaguar, a Hummer (not the prettiest thing around) a Maserati and I can't remember what else. I know this is a small village, but our GTi is a bit flash for here, but we were so insignificant compared to what we saw there! Can't imagine going shopping in a Maserati but if that's all you've got.....! We did notice the driver of the Lambourghini had problems paying at the cash desk to get out of the car park, not sure why!

Last but not least, Mat and his girlfriend Airi are coming down from Paris next weekend to stay. Having someone to stay concentrates the mind wonderfully and makes you get on with all those small jobs that you know about but don't notice enough to spend time on. And some things you don't notice after a while ... so we have started some decorating today. Wire brushing loose paint, repainting, cleaning, tidying, some tiles to replace too. I just hope we can find things that we've moved when we put the rooms back as they were!

Only 6 for dinner..

2011-07-29T22:53:00.000+02:00

but this time we weren't cooking. We went to dinner with some friends in Yator on Tuesday night and had lots of tapas followed by a Morrocan style meal - chicken with apricots and cous cous. Plus of course some drinks, mostly red wine which somehow got splattered on the cloth. Add the colour of the sauce from the chicken which also dripped and the cloth was quite colourful! No clearing up for us this time though - last Saturday morning we spent nearly 2 hours tidying up despite washing and clearing up as we cooked on Friday evening.

Another batch of tomatoes and strawberries through the drier today, we now have almost 3 jars of dried tomatoes which doesn't seem much but it's about 10 kilos of fresh ones. I used to dry them halved but as these are big tomatoes - variety Simona, a bit like beef tomatoes, they take too many days so I quarter them and then they only take 2 days to dry.

Watering continues on a regular basis, picking as well, plus time-out in the afternoons when it's at its hottest. The pool thermometer says the water temperature is 28° - that's probably right as the air temperature is 30+ in the afternoons.

The pear tree is now ready for picking, the pears are going rosy although still crunchy but they ripen when they've been picked. Just need to find somewhere coolish to store them. The kitchen is the best place as it's the old bodega and is the coolest place in the house, the temperature doesn't vary much at all.

August coming soon so most of the cortijo owners of Montenegro will be here for their fortnights holiday. Our neighbours arrive this weekend for 3 weeks, Mariano and his wife on the 12th for 2 weeks and Antonio and his family for 2 weeks as well - Antonio is our jabali supplier. It's going to be a busy place and much noisier too what with the children next door splashing in their plunge pool and their dogs running around barking. Still, it's good language practice for us and nice to see the cortijada lived in.

Dinner for ten.

2011-07-23T19:07:00.002+02:00

There aren't many drawbacks about living the good life, being almost self-sufficient in fruit, vegetables and wine, with the bonus of jabali (wild boar) every so often, but it means that because we don't go out very often we don't see friends very often either. Some live as we do, growing fruit and vegetables and wine making but with live stock as well - chickens and rabbits mostly although some also have goats. One couple we haven't seen since fiesta here in May although we can see the roof of their cortijo in the valley below. We only go out about every 10 days or so, maybe not even that much, and they do the same. But not on the same days as us, and not to the same shops.

So we decided to have a get together last night for 10 friends - a curry night as we all enjoy spicy food - and to catch up with with everyone. I am the onion bhaji specialist, John is curry king. Yesterday morning I made 72 bite-sized bhajis (7 finely shredded onions, garlic, ginger, chillis, gram flour and curry paste plus water) We had those as a starter with a large platter of poppadoms plus mango chutney, lime pickle, yoghurt and mint dip and chopped tomatoes. All home made apart from the poppadoms which came from an Indian shop in Paris - thanks Mat.

Next a quick batch of bread dough to make naan bread with sultanas in (should have been sliced almonds too but couldn't find any on the shelf) while John spent the afternoon brewing curry sauces. A large selection as not everyone likes the same heat in their curry so we had a vegetable one, bombay potatoes, chicken madras, prawn puri, pork podina (marinaded in yoghurt and mint) and jabali vindaloo (marinaded in red wine and garlic to start with.)

Plus a large bowl of pilau rice with many added extras, so tasty and fluffy. I can't recommend highly enough this book......it was a Christmas present a few years ago and it's wonderful. Follow his instructions for rice and it's impossible to have sticky boring white stuff ever again.

But back to last night, plenty of food, lots of variety of flavours and heat and enough left for us for another meal. Then to follow strawberry flan with ice-cream and cream. Yes, more strawberries and I've picked more again today.

Everyone bought wine with them so plenty to drink too. Then as we sat talking later on, the conversation got round to 'where can you go if you want to go dancing'. 'Wait for fiesta' was the general opinion but we put on the music and the terrace became our dance floor for the next couple of hours. Photos were taken but not yet looked at. They may appear here if not too embarrassing!

Sundried tomato puree.

2011-07-16T23:08:00.000+02:00

The first of this years tomato crop are in the dryer, we've been picking enough to eat for about a week but now there are too many so they will be for 'out of season'.   But another job that needed doing was to make space on the kitchen shelves for this years dried fruits and vegetables.

There were still 2 jars of dried tomatoes from last summer but no tomato puree so Thursday afternoon I put the tomatoes into boiling water to soak and then simmered them for about 10 minutes before liquidising. You need equal amounts of tomatoes to water and that's it. The hardest part is getting all the puree out of the liquidiser, I don't put all the cooking water in with the tomatoes but keep some back and use that to rinse it out afterwards. It can always be added to the puree if needed - it's easier to add it than to remove it! While it's still hot I put it into sterilised jars and when cold, into the fridge. Don't know how long it lasts as we always use it quickly.

The strawberries dried very quickly and have such a wonderful intense flavour. A dinner plateful - 2 layers actually - have dried so much that they only fill an ex-mint jelly jar.

We have one and a half kilos of apricots in the kitchen which we were looking forward to eating but they are very disappointing - no juice at all - at least they won't take long to dry as we reckon they're half way there!   I thought about cooking them and then freezing for winter pies and crumbles but drying and storing in jars make much more sense especially as it's free and there is more use for dried fruits which can be rehydrated if needed. Just need to get the tomatoes dried so there's some space for the apricots - but more strawberries coming - need a bigger dryer!

Tomorrow - Sunday - is watering day and having done a last walk round everywhere just before sunset, I know that there are more tomatoes and strawberries waiting to be picked.

It's time now to put my feet up and have a large glass of wine .......or maybe two.

Early starts.

2011-07-11T17:46:00.000+02:00

Early starts, lazy afternoons and late finishes - that seems to be the pattern at the moment. Up and out with Monty and Pip by 7 o'clock for a good long walk before it gets too hot. Even at that early hour it's about 22° but still fresh feeling. Usually manage to pick some capers and then when I've a jar full and they've been brined for a few days, they get put in a 50:50 water and vinegar mix for storing.

The fuente at Montenegro is still in full flow and so far this summer we haven't had to open the deposito tap to water our land as the overflow has been enough. Instead of dumping the excess water down to the river as sometimes happens, we leave it flowing through the acequias and then it's always available if anyone needs it. Plus, as our neighbours said, it's nice to hear the sound of running water. And as the deposito is always full, if anyone needs lots of water to reach far away olives, there is plenty to provide a good whoosh.

Some of the fruit and vegetables are getting watered twice a week, especially the strawberries, borlotto beans and cauliflowers. The aubergines, chillies, peppers, cucumbers and courgettes are done first thing every morning while they're in the shade. The lettuces get done every evening as that is their shady time. And in between times, we refill the storage tanks from the running water. We use pipes from the tanks to water the vegetable beds as the acequias run mostly round the edges of the terraces. In some places we have diverted the water to fill channels around raised beds but it's not always possible due to the slopes on the land. Not huge slopes but it's easier with hosepipes.

Picking, freezing, drying and bottling fruit and vegetables is an on-going job now - picking and weeding while we water just becomes a habit. I have an old paint tub with string, trowels, scissors, tiewraps, carrier bags, secateurs, labels, pens and all sorts of bits in that I take with me whenever I go to any of the veg patches as you never know what's going to need doing.

Afternoons are relaxing times, for a couple of hours after lunch when it's really too hot to be doing much, we take time out to swim, read, just chat and do nothing till the evening watering session followed by a drink or two and dinner. And then after the last dog walk about 9.30, that's it for the day.

Yesterday we were invited out for lunch at a friends house in Cadiar. "Can I bring anything.....a bowl of strawberries for dessert possibly?" Yes, still picking about half a kilo everyday. So we had strawberries and cream after lunch but also they had a pot of melted chocolate to dip the strawberries in first - so yummy.

Lots of house martins still flying around. They come swooping in one end of our terrace, hover around the beams and swoop out again, sometimes coming down very low. But they haven't nested here yet. Don't know if that's a good thing or not. I don't want all the mess they make, but aren't they cute! John took this photo today when he was down at a friends house in Yator. The nest has been there all spring but today was the first time he's seen any chicks.

Drying time.

2011-07-03T15:47:00.000+02:00

The summer before last John made a small temporary dryer for drying tomatoes and fruit in - it worked so well that we used it last summer as well but this year he has made a bigger one. Completely different in shape, catches the sun from early morning as it creeps over the trees to almost sunset, although at that time the sun is not on the front of it but the side. Still keeps the temperature high though. The temporary one was a converted window on short legs with a black plastic base and didn't have much space to dry a lot at once. This new one however has 4 drying trays in it and at the moment we have 2 trays of black figs and 1 of white mulberries in there.   It reaches a peak of about 60° inside between 2 - 3 pm. Ideal drying temperature starts at 38° - 45° is better and 50° quicker still. If it gets too hot things start to caramelise which isn't what we want!

Not sure what I'm going to do with the mulberries, it's more of an experiment as there was space and they were dropping off the tree. Maybe put them in muesli? Also we have a glut of strawberries again, picking about 1 kg a day and even though we try, we can't keep up with them. When there's space they too will go in the dryer - apparently dried strawberries are very nice added to cookie mixture, with cornflakes, in muesli or added to scone mix. Today's glut has been liquidised and frozen for using out of season - in a trifle? on one of those sponge flan bases and then topped with cream and other fresh fruit? Strawberry daiquiris?? Well John made us one each a few nights back and it was more like a dessert in a glass not a cocktail. Really thick and difficult to drink, could have done with a spoon not a straw.

And in the vegetable garden things are looking good. The garlic has been harvested, we are picking/pulling carrots and kohlrabi as needed.   Growing well are kale, red and green cabbages, brussels, cauliflowers, sugar beet, swede, dwarf borlotto beans - some nearly ready for picking - tomatoes - just started to pick this week - chillis, aubergines, peppers, cucumbers, courgettes and lettuces - cutting lettuce leaves as and when needed. The leeks and celeriac are still rather small, not sure if they'll do well but there's plenty of time for them to do something.

Some small onions are nearly ready for eating, these were the 'free' onions that I have mentioned before. When you prepare an onion, cut off the root end and plant it. After a few weeks it will put up a shoot and new roots will grow too. If it makes more than one shoot, carefully divide the onion and replant. Doesn't always work but if they were going into the compost anyway it's worth a try. Mine have never grown as big as the original and so I use them for salads or as pickling onions.

And did I mention strawberries?   It's our watering day today, the water is just running round the land now soaking in and everything is done, I just go and check it's all ok every so often and each time I find more ripe strawberries! Either I'm not looking properly or they are ripening very quickly.

A perfect tortilla

2011-06-29T22:53:00.001+02:00

Before coming to live here, I'd never made a tortilla in my life but we had neighbours then - Carmen and Manolo. Carmen made the most fantastic tortillas - she'd had plenty of practice as she and Manolo owned a restaurant in Granada and she'd made 15 different tapas every day for 30 years. That's a lot of tortillas - she should be good at them.

She showed me how to make one, I tried but could never get it to slice like hers, we always needed a knife and fork to eat it whereas hers could be eaten sliced or cubed. Solid but not dry, whereas mine always collapsed - sometimes closer to scrambled eggs and potato than tortilla. It's not just me that has a problem, neither of Carmen's daughters can do one like their mother.

We've both watched her make them over the years we've been here and although we don't see so much of her nowadays, when she comes she always makes at least one and then gives us a shout to say when it's ready.

However practice makes perfect and with a little help from a newly discovered blog, we had the first perfect tortilla for tapas tonight. I'd been looking for ideas about how to make fried broad beans (actually roasted not fried) preferably spicy ones and came across a blog/recipe site called 'the daily spud'. We tried the Posh Spicy Beans and they were good so I looked at other recipes on the site and just out of interest read her way to make a tortilla. Seems this lady has some Spanish relations - but the only difference in her way of making it and mine/Carmens was to put the potato onion mixture back into the beaten eggs before returning that to the pan. How that can make my scrambled egg and potato mix into a wonderful, sliceable tortilla I don't know, but it did.

Lots of other ideas to try from 'the spud' such as beer battered sage leaves as part of a tapas. We have more sage bushes in the garden than I can count and there's only so much sage and onion stuffing we can eat so this sounds an interesting tapas. Plus I make beer batter when we have fish and chips and there's always batter left over. If you're looking there, check out
oven dried potato crisps in the nibbles and small bites section, we've not tried them yet but they sound good and so easy.

Happy reading!

Just flowers.

2011-06-25T16:54:00.000+02:00

Just flower photos today, no idea what most of them are but a splash of colour by the side of the pista on our very early morning walk. Both dogs are rising and shining earlier than usual due to the heat, they like to get and about before the sun gets too hot then they collapse on the floor for most of the day. Two black dogs in a darkened shuttered house - to keep out the sun and heat - is quite tricky especially when you come in from the brightness. Not uncommon to hear a yelp as one of them gets trodden on.

Not many capers growing on the way down to Yator - they're probably still in the ground it's just that the ground has been moved when the new road was built. Maybe they'll find their way out in a few years time. Apparently they have an amazingly large root system. But there are still capers on the way to Yegen...

you can see the buds - picked and brined small for pizzas, tartare sauce etc - and the start of the seed pod coming from the centre of the flower which is brined and eaten as tapas.

These other flowers I don't recognise although someone probably does!

looks pretty but lethal spikes sticking out by the flower!

Paco's beets.

2011-06-21T19:04:00.002+02:00

One of the many Paco's who has land here in Montenegro, has something growing which I've been looking at for a few weeks thinking it looks like spinach and if so, why isn't he picking it? And more importantly, why hasn't it bolted and gone to seed? It's in full sun all day, and until Sunday evening I'd never seen it being watered and we walk past twice a day with the dogs.

He has the most dreadful looking grey, rock hard soil but once it's been ploughed a couple of times, first into big lumps then down to a fine powder it produces the most amazing vegetables. He only has a large heap of manure but even that doesn't seem to be dug in - only gets put round the base of his vines.

About 10 days ago he was within earshot so I asked him what he was growing and he said "remolacha" which to you and I are beetroot. Now he has a very strong local accent and I don't always catch everything he says but that was a definite. But these leaves are green, no sign of red stalks or veins like I always thought beetroot had and so I consulted my vegetable book. They looked very much like a leaf beet ....beetroot - leaf beet ......also considered to be a bit like spinach which is what I'd first thought.

Then he said would I like some? Obviously yes, never turn down free food so he said come up tomorrow afternoon and you can take some as I have more down there.....waving his arm somewhere in the distance. More? There must be a couple of hundred plants just where we were talking!   Up I went the next afternoon - about 6 o'clock which is when he waters as it's getting a bit cooler but no sign of him. Oh well.

Next day at 6 o'clock, a knock on the gate and there he was with an arm full of plants. Come in, have a beer and tell us what they are!   Remolacha he said, but they look at bit like a nabo (turnip to us) John said, well yes said Paco but these are much sweeter and they can grow to 4 or 5 kilos each.

He gave us planting and watering instructions - go and plant them right now......and later on when we'd settled down with a well earned drink John suddenly said ' I bet they're sugar beet - white like a turnip but long like a parsnip, large like a swede but sweet like a sweet potato'   and after a quick search on google that's what we think we've got.   And you cook them like all the root veg that they look and taste like - roast, boil, mash, whatever.

And we've got 48 of them growing. So now when I go past Paco's field of beets I have good look to see what he's done - if these grow well then we'll let some go to seed for next year.

What a bunch.

2011-06-20T22:00:00.000+02:00

Over the last few years we've tried to grow carrots, sometimes we have lots of feathery green tops but very strange looking carrots appear, other years very few grow at all and we've always assumed it's to do with the soil. But no matter what we dig into it to make it softer or richer and no matter how many times we rake out the stones to stop the carrots 'forking' we never achieve the perfect carrot.

But look at these!!

All it takes is the right sort of carrot for the soil you have and these are it. Round carrots for stony soil or container gardening. We tried them at the end of last years season - planted some at the beginning of June before it got too hot and they did quite well. This year the first sowing was planted in March followed by two more lots - these are from the first sowing so they've taken about 8 weeks. And lots more to come :)

We ate these last night with roast wild boar, some baby turnips and the last of the fresh peas followed by strawberries and ice cream - no, we don't make ice cream, that comes from the supermarket.

The sound of summer.

2011-06-13T22:44:00.000+02:00

Someone told us - but we can't remember who - that when the cicadas start singing/shrieking then you know that summer has arrived as they magically appear when the temperature reaches 27°

Yesterday it was up to 26° and this afternoon it reached 29° - sure enough we heard the first of the cicadas. It's difficult to describe the noise they make, it's not a gentle sound like a cricket and it's definitely much much louder. If you happen to be under the olive tree in which they are "singing" it seems to make your ears ache and echo with the noise. Luckily it's only from sun rise to sunset so not for many hours then....... :(

Only the males make the noise and they do it by vibrating membranes in their abdomens! (Yes, I'm full of useless information.) We saw a TV programme once about the loudest insects and the cicada was the winner by a long way.

But leave here, go down to Yator and it's blissfully quiet. Apart from the horns of the delivery vans of the fish man, bread van, frozen food lorry, fruit and veg lorry......

Grinding flour.

2011-06-07T21:46:00.000+02:00

About these beans we've been growing, I know we've got far more than we thought we'd ever have but thing about planting is that you never know for sure what is going to pop up. Take this years beetroot for example, lots in but almost nothing growing. Such is life.

So we have too many beans, now nearly all dry and podded and we thought we'd try making some broad bean flour as it has lots of uses. You can replace up to 25% of normal flour in bread making with broad bean flour, use it instead of cornflour for thickening sauces etc. The biggest problem - for us anyway - is converting the dried bean into flour. The food processor and liquidiser are not designed for beans, even coffee beans are not recommended and habas are much harder. A quick look online comes up with home milling machines but at some very expensive price but what we do have is a table top meat mincer. Worth a try.

In went a handful of beans which came out the other end into a bowl, slightly chopped up. They then went into the liquidiser to see if we could grind them finer which we did although we then sieved them to get rid of the biggest bits left from the outside skin. Long term it would seem that the liquidiser - as it's name suggests - is not meant for making flour and either the blades will go blunt or it's motor will burn out.

This morning though I was up on the top terrace digging over an ex-bean bed ready for other vegetables and my neighbour was also working on her vegetable garden. Chatting as we worked, the subject of bean flour came up again - we talked about it a few days ago - and she offered us the use of their flour milling machine that they don't use as they have an electric one for grinding wheat flour. It's big, quite heavy to move around though easy to use. And it grinds anything - we've ground down some more habas for flour and crushed some coriander seeds too. They were quicker and easier to do than using a pestle and mortar!

And here it is! Not the best of photos - it was taken at the end of a day of housework, digging, rushing in when the thunder, lightning and rain came at lunchtime then more digging later on. (Anyway, the photo's meant to show the mill not me)

Lists and more lists.

2011-06-02T16:38:00.001+02:00

The weather forecast for this week is all grey and miserable - although it's not actually raining and hasn't really done much more than drizzle occasionally, there is a complete blanket of cloud causing almost 100% humidity and no view of anything at all. It seems to be coming from the East which is unusual. In fact, it's more like we'd expect in November or March with low cloud swirling around us - certainly not June's normal sunshine.

I've still been checking the vegetables are ok, planted lots more seeds on Tuesday to take advantage of the damp conditions, tied up the tomato plants and picked 68 walnuts for pickling. After pricking holes in them all and putting them into brine to soak, I look like a very heavy smoker as my fingers have gone all yellowy-brown coloured from the walnut juice. Should have remembered from last year and worn rubber gloves!

John has retreated to his shed, he's trying to organise it by putting up shelves and hooks for his tools. Discovered a rat's nest in there on Tuesday but we're not sure how it got in unless it was a very slim rat as the only gaps are tiny. Or were tiny - now they are all blocked off and unless it can get through chicken wire it'll have to find a new home, preferably further away. Last year a rat or rats tried to nest in the garden shed but we emptied everything out, the rat disappeared under the bushes and the gap under the door was blocked up. I think we're winning!

I have taken to making lists a lot - to do lists, planting lists, then a new list when one goes missing....Shopping lists as we don't go very often so without a list when we get to the shops we come home without something and that something is quite often the main reason that we went. My seed planting list is quite something. It's in alphabetical order as that's the way I store the seed packets, then next to each vegetable/herb are the months that they need to be planted, then I cross off the month as I plant plus a tick if they've grown or a cross if not. Last year I also kept a log of everything we harvested to see what was best - especially if we'd bought the plants. Didn't want to buy plants if it wasn't economical.

I don't want to seem obsessed by lists but there are more in the kitchen! We usually cook large meals and freeze half, have tapas ready, soups and stocks, and you need to know what is frozen and where it is so there's a list for that. Also we have fruit and vegetables frozen and you need to know what you've got for out-of-season and where it is - especially if you have 3 freezers on the go as we do. Do I get through lots of paper? Well, no because I use the inside of the cereal boxes cut up to make freezer labels and for lists.

One of the freezers is a chest type, not huge just a cube, but it's very easy to loose track of things in there. No list needed but different types of meals/soups/tapas are boxed and put into supermarket carrier bags which have a tag on the handle so we know which bag to take out when looking for something.

All this labelling and list making has just crept up slowly over the years. Partly I think it's because we keep so much stock here due to having had unreliable access before the road was concreted and partly because we now grow or have access to so many vegetables and fruit. And if it's not organised, things will be forgotten about and be found in years to come lurking in the ice at the bottom of a freezer.

Cherry time.

2011-06-01T16:16:00.001+02:00

Fresh cherries are wonderful but it's quite difficult getting to them before the birds have eaten them. One day the cherries are changing colour and we think hmm, couple more days and we'll be able to start picking, the next day they are much redder and riper so we start to pick the ripest, one more day and they are all ready. Off we go with a bucket and get several kilos - too many to cope with really all in one go but better that than lose them altogether.

Three days later and the tree has been stripped clean, just loads of cherry stones on the ground.

So we've eaten them straight from the stalk, de-stoned and had them with ice cream, (strawberry cheesecake flavour which tasted like vanilla but was nice and then with triple chocolate which was scrumptious) de-stoned half a kilo and put in a large wide necked jar with brandy and sugar which we have to keep for at least a month before trying and then I made a very large pudding called Cherry Clafoutis which made 6 portions. It's a French dish apparently... easily made, only needs basic ingredients which we always have.

Half a kilo of de-stoned cherries, put them in a buttered oven proof dish. The recipe said 10" diameter but mine is an 8 by 10 rectangle and it was fine. Whisk together 3 eggs and 11 fluid ounces of milk until it's frothy, then add it to 2 1/2 ounces of flour, mixed with 2 ounces of sugar. Beat well and pour over the cherries. Bake for 1 hour at 200°C till it's golden brown, well risen and a skewer pushed into the middle comes out clean. That's it - simple but tasty. You're supposed to dredge it with icing sugar when it's cooked but we didn't have any.

Leave for 15 minutes - it's meant to be eaten warm for some reason that's beyond me, I'm sure it tastes just as good piping hot! Also I have 3 variations of this recipe, one from a French cook book uses more cream than milk, also you can soak the cherries in 3 ounces of kirsch first so then you need less milk.

I have a cherry de-stoner - actually it was given to us as an olive de-stoner and is used more often for olives than cherries. But it's still a messy business, juice was dripping off my hands and squirting everywhere - John said I looked like something out of a gory horror movie! Lots of different de-stoners available but this is the closest I can find to the one we have.

Bean busy...

2011-05-28T22:28:00.000+02:00

Every morning this week after indoor housey stuff was finished - washing, tidying, dusting, that sort of thing - I went and cleared beds of beans. Pods put for drying, leafy stalks in a pile ready to go through the shredder and into the composts. Plus one afternoon of the same - that's a lot of hours just clearing space. Yesterday we had a strimming and raking day and also today, ......countless wheelbarrows of green stuff which has been piled up and covered with black plastic to rot down. Plus today John shredded all the bean stalks I'd piled up this week. All three compost heaps are full to the brim and we've started an extra pile next to them. Hopefully it will all be ready for the autumn when the summer vegetables come out and we rotovate ready for the winter.

The land looks about twice as big now all the green has gone - it's amazing how tall everything gets! The acequias are all cleared out too as tomorrow is our watering day and even a few clumps of cut grass left behind can cause the water to overflow easily when you're busy checking something else.

The beans spend their day outside in the sunshine drying - 2 ex banana boxes, 2 black buckets, 2 compost sacks flattened out, 1 large cardboard box and several smaller seed trays all full of beans. As they dry out and go crunchy, so we sit and de-pod them - helped by Monty and Pip who are ready to catch anything we drop.

And still the beans keep coming...

2011-05-20T15:53:00.000+02:00

One bed of habas has been taken out and replaced with cauliflowers, another has been replaced by swedes and we have a large bucket of picked beans here waiting for me to do something with them.   Our friends who were here on Tuesday took enough home for dinner that evening but still lots more!

I remember reading somewhere that they make a good alternative for hummus so have just made some as a trial for tapas with tonight's glass of wine.   One of the recipe sites I looked at also said it's a good alternative for guacamole if no avocado's are available.

So you need 250 grams of podded habas. (That was about 30+ beans)   I then took each bean out of it's skin - slit down the side with your nail or a sharp knife and out pops a bright green bean rather than the (sometimes) pale tough looking thing that you get when the beans are large. Cook them till soft - probably only need a few minutes but it'll depend on the size of the beans. Drain and then put in a blender or food processor with 1 chopped clove of garlic, 1 teaspoon of ground cumin, 1/2 teaspoon of smoked paprika, 1/2 teaspoon of ground chilli, the juice of 1 lemon and a tablespoon of olive oil. Whizz to a puree - I added two good long squirts of olive oil as it whizzed for a moister mix as it seemed a bit dry. Obviously the chilli content can be changed - we wanted something less bean flavoured and with a bit more kick to it. Add salt and pepper and that's it.

It made enough to fill 5 ramekins so with some mini tostadas to dollop it onto, it would easily be a tapas for 6 people.

Whoops!

2011-05-18T16:13:00.001+02:00

We spent most of Sunday afternoon at a friends house in Yator having a long lazy lunch in their garden - they have friends from England staying for the week and we'd met them last time they were over here. Yesterday they all came up for the afternoon for drinks and tapas and Barbara had said she'd like to have a swim in the pool....

but I don't think she meant quite like this! She and Tom had been sitting on the edge paddling in the sunshine, Tom went for his drink and I joined her on the edge. Not sure what happened next, but as she stood up and turned round there was an almighty splash and she somehow managed to fall fully dressed into the pool, soaking me in the process.

Of course, friends being what they are, they laughed and took pictures before going for towels so she could dry off. And our hat is ok today - that's dried out too.

Fiesta at Montenegro

2011-05-16T19:07:00.001+02:00

Friday was our fiesta day, celebrating Santa Fatima. A group of women from Yegen and Yator cleaned and polished the chapel in the days leading up to fiesta, they also bought some paint to re-do the door. Three of them arrived with one scraper and one paint brush - had we got any they could borrow please? Thursday afternoon they arrived with flowers to decorate the chapel and then came down to our house to cut fresh roses, ivy and periwinkle - but without any secateurs - could they use mine please?

The ayuntamiento sent a JCB down from Yegen to clean and tidy the pista, and they also put up 4 large wooden poles on the era to support some shadey mesh fabric for everyone who was eating their picnic there during the afternoon.

Anyway the sun shone for us all, we did a head count during the service and I got up to about 60 people when they had to stand and then I couldn't see where I'd got to. A friend also did a headcount and he reckons there were about 100 of us altogether. Not bad for a cortijada with 5 adult residents!

So first the service, then the procession then a picnic. People tend to form family groups and then share out their food, we sat with friends and neighbours and shared food and wine. I'd made a very English picnic - egg mayonaise and cucumber sandwiches, cheese and pickle ones, strawberries and cream and home-made Pimms to drink.

Later we went down to Paco's cortijo for wine and habas for tapas, then on to another Paco's cortijo, finishing off at about 11pm. Sampled a few glasses of wine along the way and - needless to say - had a slow and lazy day on Saturday.

Lorenzo bought his guitar and sang during the afternoon.

A taxing day.

2011-05-09T22:06:00.000+02:00

It's only once a year, but this is the week when we have tax returns to submit.... those who know us know that we don't have any income, anything we do have is far short of anything we have to pay tax on, but still a return has to be filled in even though it's a nil payment.

I think Spanish officialdom thrives on paperwork, usually in triplicate and always with an official stamp. It can be time-consuming and usually involves waiting for a specific person, filling in forms which you have previously queued for and paid 10 or 20 cents for........but today was different, one sheet of paper, in and out under 10 minutes.

The plus side is a day out, lunch out, a bit of retail therapy - usually more food than clothing though. You know what they say, a change is as good as a rest.

The sun shone - 24° - the sky was the blue it's supposed to be, the sea was calm and an amazing deep blue. We stopped on the way home and John took a few photos near Castell de Ferro .....

A mixed week

2011-05-07T10:44:00.000+02:00

Another week gone by with mixed-up weather. On nice days I've been outside and - amongst other things - have picked strawberries, peas and habas, frozen the small beans and put the large pods to dry for next years seeds. We had a day out at the coast to stock-up on Wednesday, it was a gorgeous day but when we got home realised that there had been rain here as the washing that I'd left out was wet. Yesterday was lovely too, I cut down one bed of habas, stripped off the leaves for the compost, put the stalks to dry for the fire, picked off the pods for drying and dug the roots back in to the ground. Then mounded up the soil to make large water channels down each side and transplanted 20 cauliflower plants. I have made a 'cage' for them with pea netting and sticks to prevent the cabbage white butterfly getting at them.

First thing this morning the sun was shining and my plan - plan A - was to go and hoe over the tomato beds ready to transplant them. I went up to empty the compost bucket, picked another 600 grams of strawberries but as I was picking the sun went in, the wind picked up, the sky went black and thunder started to rumble. End of this mornings plans then! The heavens have just opened - large splodges of rain coming down and as I write this, Pip has run indoors and is curled up under my chair. She was hiding in the kennel with Monty but really doesn't like thunder at all and normally hides under our bed. With ears as big as she has, it probably sounds very loud!

So it's plan B for today which normally involves cooking, both for tonight and for the freezer. And trying to be creative with strawberries - we don't want strawberries and cream every night and although we did a stock-up in the week we forgot to buy any more cream! So far we've eaten them as a trifley thing, with cream, sliced and sugared, with cereal for breakfast - does anybody have any more ideas?

End of April

2011-05-01T19:30:00.000+02:00

It's been a strange end to the month, we had some really lovely hot and sunny weather earlier when we started to clean and paint the pool, plant lots of seeds, prepare land for planting up and then the April showers started. The temperature went from mid 20's to mid teens, sunshine and showers for what seems like days on end - and more drizzle forecast for the next 48 hours.

During the sunny spells I have planted out a second round of seeds, beetroot, kohlrabi, 2 varieties of carrots, more chillis and peppers as the first ones haven't appeared for some reason, all the pepper seeds are in as the end date on the packet is this June and there seems little point in hanging on to the few that are left. Then when the showers come I don't need to go out and water, so that saves some time.

I've transplanted the lettuces - you know how the packet says 'sow thinly' well, that's what I did - or so I thought - but I have transplanted almost 150!! We weren't planning on pulling them for eating, only planned on cutting the leaves so the lettuce would keep on growing and we'd have a ready supply but with that amount we can have one a day and that will see us through the summer. I bought 2 packets, one a salad mix of red and green lollo rosso and the other says they are iceberg but so far they don't look like the iceberg in the supermarket. And there are more seeds if we should need any more!

We had old friends here on Tuesday and new friends on Wednesday - I don't mean old as in age but friends we've known for a few years. And the new friends are people who own a house locally but we'd not met before. Cold drinks and tapas on the terrace - thank heavens for jars of olives and capers! Plus a bowl of chilli and garlic bread - it's good to keep a stock of extras in the freezer for quick meals.

And then it was Friday. I'd planned my day so first off was a quick trip to Cadiar to the post office and then home. I thought I'd come and go, weed a bit, pick some beans, watch the wedding, but it drizzled and drizzled so I just stayed in and watched the lot.

How do you like your strawberries?

2011-04-30T14:02:00.000+02:00

This is the first proper picking of the year, last week we only had half a dozen at a time, but today I've just picked these....400 grams.

So how do you like your strawberries? Sliced and sprinkled with sugar? Sliced in a brown bread sandwich? Dipped into sugar and cream and eaten whole? We're trying something new today, using up yesterdays doughnuts. I don't often buy cakes but saw the doughnuts in the panaderia when I went in, gave them a gentle squeeze to make sure they were soft doughnuts not hard ones (Spanish cakes can be very dry - nicknamed dustnuts in this house) and bought a bag of 6.

Yes, they were soft but not as doughy as hoped for. Very sugary and ok dunked into a mug of tea but not amazing. I was going to keep them till Sunday evening and add jam and custard to them for a pudding but then when I picked the strawberries this morning John said why don't we slice the strawberries over slices of doughnuts then when the strawberry juice starts to run, it'll soak nicely into the doughnuts and soften them. Then we can add cream to the top - just in case there aren't enough calories already!

I've only done half the strawberries and one doughnut each - if it's scrumptious we can have the rest tomorrow, if not it'll be back to plan A: add jam and custard to make a sort of hot trifley thing with just the doughnuts and enjoy the strawberries on their own.

Every colour under the sun

2011-04-27T21:58:00.002+02:00

So many flowers blooming out on campo at the moment, every colour imaginable and more opening every day. This is just a snapshot from this mornings walk, some I can identify and have captioned .....if you know what anything else is please let me know.

poppies and daisies

thyme

wild garlic

? Wood sage ?

gladioli - gladiolus byzantinus (I think)

Salsify, Oyster plant/Tragoponon Porrifolius

Vetch. (?southern vetchling?)

Boozy hot cross buns

2011-04-21T18:57:00.001+02:00

We've been living here for over 7 years now, this is our 8th Easter here and as yet we haven't had any hot cross buns. Most things we make nowadays because what you may take for granted in England either doesn't make it this far or is way too expensive, however until this year neither of us remember even seeing hot cross buns for sale. This year we saw some but at 3 euros for a pack of 4, there was a sharp intake of breath from both of us and when we got home, I looked in my bread book for a recipe.

We had everything it said, except for the raisins/sultanas.....but if you have dried figs, apples and pears I reckon you can adapt most recipes. I thought the fruit needed re-hydrating - normally I'd add water and leave them to soak overnight but being Easter I thought we'd have a treat and so I added a little brandy. Maybe more than a little, didn't want the fruit to dry out but to swell and be juicy.

At this point I'd love to put up a photo of the hot cross buns - we haven't eaten them all, I made 12 and we've still 6 left - but they cooked really quickly and the bottoms were done faster than the tops so they have brown bottoms but pale tops. They taste wonderful though. Spicy, fruity, maybe a hint of boozyness but definitely pale.

Hot and dusty.

2011-04-16T16:43:00.001+02:00

We've had rather a mucky dusty week, every day different, but so glad to get in a long hot shower and wash out the dirt at the end of the day.

Monday we started to finish the new vegetable areas - six years ago when Manolo and his friend Pepe planted there, they spent ages rotavating, digging water channels, making raised beds and planting the tomatoes and aubergines before opening the acequia gate to water everything in. Unfortunately they hadn't noticed that the land ran slightly uphill away from the acequia so the water didn't do what they wanted. It took a lot of rearranging to flow properly and it wasn't easy with the plants in place.

9.30 and the start of the first water channel.

We decided - actually it was John's idea not mine - to make water channels first, get the water flowing well and then do the raised beds inbetween. He set off with the narrow blades on the machine and I followed, raking out the soft soil. Then as the water flowed it was easy to make sure it got to the end of the channel. We left a bigger space for a raised bed and made another channel, another bed, another channel.....finishing off by rotavating up the middle of the wide beds.

By then we'd done 4 hours of work, at first dusty from the dry soil, then muddy as we got the water going.

1.45 and the water is flowing.

Just after lunch Mariano came to see if we'd do a bit of work for him so after a clean up we went up to his cortijo. These old houses are built from stones and mud, rendered, then painted and don't have damp-proof courses so need regular repainting. Mostly wire brushing the loose paint from the bottoms of the walls, filling cracks, repainting internal and external walls, replacing a couple of broken floor tiles, "tidying up" the inside of the inglenook fireplace followed by a big clean up. And before Easter please.

Tuesday, I was dusty from wire brushing loose paint and J from chipping out the cracks before filling them. Wednesday was pretty much the same for him although I had lots to do here - watering the broad beans, picking and freezing, squeezing oranges for juice, mounding up the raised beds which didn't get finished on Monday, clearing out the acequias which go to the plum and peach trees.... Thursday was a painting and filling cracks day and the start of the clean up and J made a start on the fireplace. Over the years it's been painted, had cracks filled, painted again over soot and now it needs to be taken back to the original stones and started again. The only good thing about working in there is that he can do it standing up whereas I was painting at floor level going along on my hands and knees all day, getting further and further into the depths of the house. And the deeper you go, the cooler it gets. Outside, lovely bright sunshine but not where I was.

However I made up for the lack of sun on Friday as I had a day here cleaning the pool. We've emptied it this week, had the water running into the new vegetable patches, round the olives and fruit trees and it needed cleaning before the dirt dried onto the walls. It wasn't really smelly at the bottom, just green and sludgy, a definite welly boot job! Six buckets of sludge, umpteen buckets of clean water and a lot of scrubbing later, the pool is now gleaming in the sunshine. And I have the most amazing strap marks on my back as once the floor was clean, I worked in shorts and t-shirt to make the most of the sun.

Next week we need to sand down any loose patches of paint, re-paint and then it can be filled for the summer.

Spiced pickled almonds

2011-04-11T19:15:00.001+02:00

Regular readers will know that Pip - although she is now 2 years old - hasn't learnt that the vegetables we grow are for us not her. We have fenced off the kitchen garden and she hasn't made any attempt to get in there, instead she's turned her attention to an almond tree. Or rather an almond bush.

It used to be a very tall, straggly tree. Very sad looking, never had many almonds so about 4 years ago we cut it down to the base and since then it has grown into a very healthy bush, absolutely laden with almonds. But Pip has taken a fancy to the almonds, she can't bite through them when they have hard shells but presumably likes the taste so eats the small soft early ones. It wouldn't be too bad if she ate them but she just chews them up and spits them out.

We've watched this for a few days, then I thought that if we can pickle walnuts before the shell has formed about May or early June, why not almonds? So after a quick look out there in the big wide world of the internet, I found a recipe for spiced green almonds. I only had to change one thing - not enough honey only miel de caña, but hopefully they will be just as tasty.

You need enough small green almonds to fill your jar/s. I used some large wide-necked ones that I think will be easy to get them out of. Prick the almonds all over with a skewer, if the skewer won't go through, the almond has made a shell and it's too late to pickle. Pack them in the jars and for each jar add

1 tablespoon of coriander seeds
1 stick of cinnamon
1 bay leaf
1 dried chilli, cut in half

Make a brine solution of 3 cups of white wine vinegar together with 1 teaspoon of cloves, 1 cup of honey and 2 tablespoons of sugar. Taste and add more sugar if needed - I used 4 spoonfuls. Simmer for a couple of minutes and pour it hot over the almonds. Seal the jars, store for 4 weeks before eating, turning upside down occasionally to mix the ingredients. Apparently it keeps for more than a year.

Enjoy!

Anyone know what it's called?

2011-04-09T17:58:00.001+02:00

They look like French Lavender flowers but have the leaves of an orchid.......

I found these two plants growing on a bank under a fig tree near the house yesterday while watching the water go round the vegetable patch. Never seen them before, any one know what they are? They may be something really obvious like a Lavender Orchid but whatever they are called, they aren't in my plants of Southern Spain book.

Prints on show

2011-04-06T17:08:00.000+02:00

We've been in to Cadiar this morning to put some of our prints on display at a couple of local bars/restaurants:

More details are available here.

Spring greens.

2011-04-05T17:43:00.000+02:00

The broad bean plantation seems to be getting taller and taller, with more and more flowers every day. Yesterday I spent most of the day watering - should have done it on Sunday as that was our acequia day but first thing in the morning it was grey and threatening rain, although we only got a few splodges - then when it did brighten up some friends came to visit for the afternoon.

So I had Sunday yesterday and spent 6 hours watering and weeding in the sunshine. The acequias had lots of weeds and grass growing in them but it's easier to get that out when the water is running and the soil becomes soft. As I waited for the water to make it's way round and to soak into the beds, I started to pick our first beans of the year. Nice and small, like a french bean to look at and that's what they taste like too. Just need topping and tailing, a couple of minutes in boiling water and served with a drizzle of oil, or - as we did - a knob of garlic butter and diced chorizo.

The first 400 grams of baby beans.

More of a beep....

2011-04-03T12:12:00.001+02:00

Not much to look at here, in fact totally dark as there wasn't a moon last night, but this is what we are listening to as we fall asleep.

More of a beep than a too-whit too-whoo!

When we first came here and heard this, we thought it was one of our mobiles needing to be charged up but having consulted the bird book, we think it's a Scops owl as it's call is described as "monotonous and repeated" usually heard at night. Last night there was at least 1 other owl calling back and having listened to this again, you can just about hear the other one in between our louder owl's beeps.

Seeds and plants.

2011-04-02T20:07:00.000+02:00

"Preparing for planting" was a good name for the last post about the vegetable garden....Tuesday I took some seeds down to the new kitchen garden - the one we got ready last weekend - and put in a tray each of aubergines, peppers and 2 trays of 4 different types of chilli. The trays are some that I recycled from the recycling centre a couple of years ago, they each hold 45 plants and are much bigger than the ones you buy plug plants in. Yes, that's a lot of plants - especially chillis - but not everything germinates and it's better to have too many plants and vegetables than not enough.

I have half-sunk the trays into the ground and filled them - hopefully they'll keep warm and moist till germination and then when they are big enough to be moved, they won't have far to go to be planted out. I also put in the first courgettes, cucumbers, spinach and another row of radishes.

Thursday morning - back up to the original vegetable terraces where I put in seeds of beetroot, carrots, kohlrabi, parsnip, swede, turnip, celeriac, kale and leeks. Some are new this year, celeriac and kale we have never tried so I'm keeping my fingers crossed....if this first planting comes up I've got time to put in some more. Little and often seems best. Same with the carrots and beetroot, we plant every few weeks to get a continuous crop.

And then in the afternoon in went basil, coriander, cumin, chives, marjoram, mustard. Lots of everything as most of the seeds are self collected from last year although I do an extra row of packet seed - just in case.

Today I had to go into Cadiar and saw that - amongst other plug plants - there were tomatoes and cauliflowers for sale. Last year we bought cauliflower plugs from the market....but they turned out to be white cabbage!! so today I bought 20 labelled plug plants for 3 euros. Last time I bought a cauliflower it was 1.50 so I've got 10 plugs for the price of 1 full grown one.

Last year we bought a variety of tomato called Trés Cantos which were excellent. Almost like a beef tomato, full of flavour but needed a bit of staking as they grew to 1.5 metres. Today I bought 30 of them plus a variety called Simona which (should!) only grow to 80cm so no need to go and cut more caña for support. Today's plants I have put into half-bottles on a shady terrace to get bigger as we don't usually plant them out for a few weeks...... cut a pop bottle in half, punch holes in the base and use as a plant pot, you can see the roots developing and more importantly see when the soil is dry.

All being well, we should see lots of growth soon.

El-Golco

2011-03-31T16:33:00.000+02:00

Finished another oil-painting today, this time of the Alpujarran village of El-Golco

Calle del Pescado

2011-03-29T12:11:00.000+02:00

Added a new painting to the catalogue today:

It is of a sidestreet of Ugijar in Las Alpujarras. We are just waiting for the prints and frames that we have on order to arrive (hopefully this week) and then will be making them available to buy online and via a couple of local bars/restaurants. More info is available here.

We've also got some cards on order that we got for free at Vistaprint. See here to find out about getting some for yourself (those of you in Spain, anyway).

Preparing for planting

2011-03-28T19:05:00.000+02:00

Saturday morning dawned with lovely clear blue skies - not even a puff of wind around - so we thought we'd better get on with rotovating the last of the vegetable beds. There were only 3 to be done, everything else is planted up with habas, peas, garlic, onions and strawberries, but these had been left empty since the end of last year so were a bit weedy. 3 beds doesn't sound like much work but the smallest one was 3m by 1m and the largest a sort of triangular area 6m long and between 1m and 3m at the widest point.

what will be the triangular bed

However, the rotovator makes light work of it all. I'm sure John doesn't think that, it has 2 settings either hare or tortoise and I had a go when we first bought it - on hare setting I felt as though it was in control rather than me and on tortoise setting it was just so heavy that I couldn't manoeuvre it. But it's a lot quicker and less back-breaking than digging compacted soil by hand - even though he could hardly move on Sunday morning.

After he'd turned over the soil once, I tipped on the remaining goat manure and he went back again digging that in before I tidied up the bed ready for planting. We were done before lunch so decided to make a start on a totally new terrace as we have so many vegetable, herb and salad crops to plant that the existing space is not going to be enough.

the new terrace half strimmed + half dug

This area though was knee-high in greenery, mostly clover which I think is good for the ground. So first J strimmed it all down and then rotovated the chopped-up greenery into the soil. And what wonderful soil it is! Rich and soft and moist - it's not been planted up with anything since we've lived here, so we should get some really good vegetables growing. It's a terrace that we look at from our lounge and although it belongs to our neighbours a) they're not here, b) when they do come they don't have time to grow anything and c) it's nearer our house than theirs so feels more like it should be ours. That's not to say that we didn't ask, of course we did and Miguel says we can use any of their land that we need.

We have made 1m wide beds there - the width of the rotovator - and done 2 beds totalling about 40 metres.

As things were going so well, John decided to get the next area strimmed ready for rotovating although we didn't think we'd have time to finish that afternoon. As it happened some friends out for a walk stopped by to see what we were up to so that was a good time to down tools and have a well-earned beer.

4pm and ready for planting.

Sunday morning was another day of clear blue skies, unfortunately John was very stiff and so we thought more rotovating much just finish him off completely so we're leaving that till next weekend.

You can probably guess where I'm going to be spending most of this week....

Beautiful bird song, but what is it?

2011-03-27T15:58:00.003+02:00

All day every day this little bird sits in either the mulberry or the pine tree, singing its little heart out. When it's in the mulberry it's backlit by the sun so I can't get a photo of it and when it's in the pine tree it's hidden by the branches so still no photo.

This afternoon, I put my camera on the fence post and left it to run on video for a minute to capture the song. Please have a listen, there isn't much to see apart from the branches swaying in the breeze, but if you know which bird it is, then please leave a comment at the bottom of this post.

Someone must know what it is!

Got some photo's now and we think it is a chaffinch ...

What a slow week that was.

2011-03-22T16:53:00.000+01:00

After a long, slow week I am finally back to normal. No more waddling instead of walking, no need to stretch out before putting on socks in the morning, just a slight dull ache at the base of my spine in the evening. But nothing to stop me getting on with the pea planting and having a go at the weeds........except that the weather has decided to change for the worse. Not raining yet, although it's forecast for tomorrow, but decidedly nippy out with a cool breeze. Nice for walking but not for weeding. I can't think of much worse than kneeling on damp ground in a shady place with a cool wind blowing.

Had 2 long walks today, first this morning was our normal circuit up to the fuente and back although without any orange picking today as there are still 3 litres of juice in the fridge. Then later on we went back up there to show some visitors where the fuente was. It's only just off the GR7 walking route but isn't signposted. The overflow from the deposito and fuente run across the GR7 but unless you know where that water is coming from, you wouldn't think to go and look.

Back in time for lunch and then Monty and Pip curled up on the lounge rug in the sun. Well, it was almost sunshine, more of a weak hazy bit of warmth coming through the window. Enough to keep them happy and warm though!

Back to normal...

2011-03-18T20:22:00.000+01:00

....or not really. For many years I had back problems, finally found a consultant who realised what the problem was, not a pulled muscle but a torn ligament. The answer to my problem was to strengthen the muscles around the ligament to support it better. We bought an excellent book which I recommend to everyone and it's available on Amazon

No problems for about 6 years until Tuesday when it started to drizzle so I moved the airer of wet washing under cover. If you - or I - lift something heavy at arms length, then the weight pulls on your lower back and ping! It's not really a ping but there's definitely a pain and I know to be extra careful for a few days. Unfortunately later that night Pip decided to go to sleep on our bed and I - very carefully - moved her off. But not carefully enough and that extra strain has completely done for me.

First thing in the morning I have to stretch my back before I can even think about getting out of bed, no way can I put on socks until I've loosened up and our morning walk, which actually does me good, is more of a waddle than a walk. The further I go, the looser I get and by the time we've done our usual circuit I'm striding out with no sign of tension.

But then I sit down for breakfast and tighten up again. Bed-making is quite difficult, more of it done on my knees than standing and so the day progresses. There are lots of weeds to be dug out and peas to be planted and although I can do that kneeling, it also involves stretching forwards so not this week!

I have picked oranges though and so we have more juice, but instead of sorbet I have made an orange jelly.

Yes, another recipe!

1 pint of fresh orange juice,
1 sachet (10g) gelatine
4 tablespoons hot water

Put the gelatine onto the hot water, leave for a minute or so to melt then stir till dissolved and clear. Warm through if necessary but don't boil. Add to the juice, mix and pour into dishes/wine glasses. Put in the fridge for a couple of hours and an almost instant dessert. My recipe says 6 wine glasses - mine must be huge because it's only filled 2 of them - they are 300ml glasses though!

Haven't tried it but you can add Cointreau....

Just top it with cream and enjoy.

Another nice surprise.

2011-03-14T16:50:00.001+01:00

Way back in November 2009 I wrote a post called 'a nice surprise and other things' and mentioned a couple from Rye that we'd met who were in this area on a walking holiday. They subsequently sent us some much appreciated oxo cubes and since then have sent shower caps which we use to cover the wine during fermentation and the bread dough while it's rising.

Over the past 18 months they have kept in touch with us via the blog and e-mail and are back again on another walking holiday. Yesterday they walked down from Berchules to join us for lunch and brought with them some more oxos, 2 shower caps and - even nicer - a box of M & S chocolates!

We wined and tapas'd them during the afternoon - garlic and cumin toasted almonds, salsa verde, (green tomatoes, green chillis, coriander leaf, garlic and onions put through the liquidiser and dolloped onto slices of bread,) fabada (a rich pork casserole with lots of onions and garlic,) curried jabalí, cheese and membrillo (quince paste) then finally orange sorbet to finish. Plus of course, bread. No meal is complete without a basket of bread. Six tapas should have been six glasses of wine but I think we drank a few more than that.....The sun shone for us and although it clouded over later, it didn't rain. They were collected by the hotel transport at the end of a very enjoyable afternoon and we went indoors to catch up with the the rugby.

Of course, we had to try the chocolates, after all they'd come a long way and they were delicious. I say were delicious, we haven't eaten them all, only had a sample. Still plenty left for tonight.

Yorkshire puddings and pancakes.

2011-03-11T17:06:00.002+01:00

We had an extended Shrove Tuesday - it started on Sunday and finished this morning.

I know that Yorkshire puddings and pancakes are different but they both use flour, eggs and milk so......

We don't often eat pancakes, I don't know why as they are so economical and so tasty and quick to make. Usually we have Yorkshire puddings with our Sunday roast dinner - although it's a tradition to eat them with roast beef, we rarely buy that and eat them instead with pork, chicken or jabalí (yes, there's still some in the freezer)

Last Sunday was a roast pork day plus Yorkshire puddings. We only ate half of them, the other half did another meal with some of the left-over pork which I minced up and made into albondigas and served with a really thick onion gravy. More caramelised onions than gravy but gorgeous. There was also some batter left so I put it in the fridge and on Tuesday I added some more milk to thin it slightly and we had traditional pancakes. They were so delicious that on Wednesday I made scotch pancakes for a mid-afternoon snack (totally unnecessary but lovely) and the remaining scotch pancakes we had for breakfast today.

I know that Yorkshire pudding batter and traditional pancakes have a slightly different balance of eggs, milk and flour but the batter worked surprisingly well as a pancake. Maybe the addition of a big dollop of red grape jelly helped - although by the time I'd rolled the pancakes up it had melted and run out onto the plate.

And the traditional lemon and sugar pancake? Well it was raining and the lemons were still on the tree.   It's drizzling again and the lemons are still waiting - we'll just have to have pancakes again another day!

To make scotch pancakes you need:
120 g self raising flour               1 egg and 1/4 pint milk whisked together
30 g sugar
pinch of salt

Add egg and milk mixture to dry ingredients and whisk well. Drop 1 tablespoon onto a hot greased pan / griddle. When the surface bubbles, turn over and cook the other side. Makes 14.

Just add butter and jam.....so quick and easy!

Cats and dogs.

2011-03-07T19:05:00.002+01:00

I'm sure every village has them and probably more than they need. They don't seem to belong to anyone and eat whatever food people put out for them. Not quite strays, but not pets either. But sometimes they have an owner and a house to live in and for some reason decide to take on a second home - maybe it's because that way they get double portions at meal times!

Copi the cat is just like that. He has an owner in Yátor, but has decided to take up residence on the windowsill of friends of ours. He can normally be seen asleep in the sunshine tucked in behind the window bars. Sometimes he comes over the flat roof from their neighbours, onto their roof terrace and if their door is open into the house - well, it's another meal time as he goes downstairs and eats their cat's food. Then the front door is opened, he's pushed out and round he goes again.

Today they came up here for a walk and had some bones for Monty and Pip. Copi must have smelt the bones because he followed them up here and then sat outside the gate mewing. Monty took his bone out by the pool and found a nice shady spot under an olive tree to enjoy it, while Pip stayed on the terrace with us. Suddenly there was Copi, up on the pillar of the garden wall, looking down at Pip. She is very protective of her food and there was such a noise as she barked and barked at him. He did jump down and went back to the gate, soon came back up onto the pillar but by then the bones has been eaten.

So, where's my food then?

After 2 hours...

2011-03-04T21:29:00.000+01:00

9.15pm: a snowy olive tree

It's stopped snowing for now, but it's cold and the sky is clear enough to see the stars. Not expecting any more snow but wouldn't be surprised if it froze over tonight.

and a snow covered pampas grass

Snow time like the present

2011-03-04T17:56:00.002+01:00

Only a bit laying so far . . .

it started about an hour ago, big fluffy snowflakes, just starting to lay and turn the trees white.

I took this one through the lounge window - didn't fancy going outside.

Yet more jars of food.

2011-03-01T16:26:00.002+01:00

Yet more jars of home grown produce on the kitchen shelves. I've just added three very large jars of red cabbage in a sweet vinegar. I'm not really keen on vinegary things but the addition of a tablespoon of sugar to each pint of vinegar just takes the edge off that strong taste that makes me shudder! I used white wine vinegar although if I'd had enough I think red wine vinegar would have been a better colour with red cabbage.

The shelves are beginning to groan under the weight of the jars of olives, tomatoes, almonds, dried fruits, chutneys, jalapeños, jams and marmalade, onions, capers, walnuts and now cabbage that we have preserved so far. Not mention the produce that is in the freezers - yes freezers, as in more than one. At the moment the orange trees are laden and most days I pick a couple of dozen while out on the morning dog walk and either squeeze for juice, or if we have enough then it gets frozen into cartons which we have kept from bought juice and as an alternative, today I am experimenting making sorbet.

None of the recipe suggestions that I have give any indication of how many scoops they make, I've used 250ml juice plus 50g sugar today to see how many servings we get.

Unfortunately the gorgeous sunshine has gone and it's not really sorbet weather but it just needs one more whizz before we sample it tonight. And then I may tinker with the ingredients - the addition of vodka sounds rather nice to me. Another suggestion was to add grated zest or finely shredded peel for extra taste and for a 70's retro touch to serve it in a scraped clean orange half.

Exploding cabbages

2011-02-28T17:12:00.000+01:00

Actually they haven't exploded - they are just splitting open and when I left one for a couple of days it seemed to be growing a new shoot out from the split. Maybe going to seed, I'm not sure. My English vegetable growing book says to lift them mid-winter and store in a cool place but the Spanish seed packet says to leave them in the ground until needed. They aren't splitting because they're huge and have burst, some are fairly small but have still split. It could be the end of the growing season and fairly normal so today I have taken out the biggest six, shredded and salted them and tomorrow I am going to pickle them. Various recipes in various books and on-line using just vinegar, a sweet vinegar or a spiced vinegar so I will probably do a few jars of each and see which we like best. A lot will depend on what we eat it with, personally I like it with shepherds pie and pasties and I'm not sure a spiced vinegar which includes chillis is quite what I want. It's easy to add chilli to your meal but not to remove it!

Very slow 9-fingered typing this afternoon - sliced a chunk off my finger while shredding the cabbages and have a large white bandage on the end of my middle finger, right hand. For those that touch type, you'll understand that i, k and the comma are almost impossible!