Going Bananas

Best Beloved has a cousin who grows bananas, and last week he was kind enough to give us some.  Not a few, not a hand, a whole freakin' tree's worth...  Now I'm not knocking this:  Cypriots are truly generous, especially with what they produce.  We get tons of yoghurt, anari, peanuts, citrus, and other things from relatives, and it is very welcome.  I try and keep up in mango and plum season, and with my offerings of hand cream, etc.

But when someone gives you around 150 unripe bananas, whaddaya do???

Well, I started out putting some sugar solution in the stem 'to make them ripen evenly' according to BB (who had initially said when I had asked, open-mouthed, what do do with them 'Put them in the compost, if you want!').  For want of a better place, I put them in the Back Kitchen -- on a par with the basement for organisation -- and kept a beady eye out for the next few days.

They did, indeed, change from green to yellow.  Then, alarmingly, their skins began to split.

I knew that it was time to start using them, so I made banana bread.  I googled the recipe, used the first that showed up, and tweaked it by adding cardamon and walnuts.  That took care of nine bananas... except that, although yellow and with splitting skins, they are still a little hard.  When I put them in the Kitchen Aid and turned in to the lowest setting, bananas -- whole and parts thereof -- erupted from the bowl and whizzed around the room.  I returned them to the bowl and held a tea-towel around it, mashing this time without hazard...

Turned out tasty.  Now, what to do with the rest?  Muffins, pancakes, more bread -- for the freezer this time -- gifts for friends, and if the worst comes to the worst, the compost is always just 30 steps away!

The Gallery: My Kitchen

This week, the Gallery's prompt is 'My Kitchen'.  Please follow the link to see how other Gallery members interpreted the theme.

 

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My friend Cleo came over one morning for some baking. She and her four children and me and my two younger ones made plain rolls, olive rolls, and some wonderful cheesy pull-aparts with a filling loosely based on the recipe from Greek-Canadian food blogger Peter Minakis – but incorporating some of my mother-in-law's jewel-like cherry tomatoes.

I love the hands-on aspect of breadmaking, the texture and feel of kneading, the smell of rising dough. For kneading technique, we freely adopted our own take from Martin Bertinet's Dough, which incorporates a lot of banging of dough onto the table.

It is one of my favourite kitchen memories, and I'm glad that I had my trusty little Lumix on hand to record it.  

Cleo and her family are leaving to return to the UK on Monday, and we will miss them.

Updates -- On All Fronts

School is really over!  Alex finished his last IGCSE yesterday at noon, and with a flying leap vaulted over the wall, yelling 'I'm free!'  We're looking around for work for him at local garden centres and restaurants, and are arranging his Provisional Driving License and a set of lessons.  He has been promised my car, if his IGCSE average was B.  Results come in at the end of August -- in the meantime we are all trying to forget about it.

Sophia finished Friday, and with a huge sigh said: 'Well that's that!  No more going back there...'  She is taking a week off before diving into her distance learning IGCSE's and hopes that she scored well enough on the exams that she just took to get into the schools for which we have applied in the UK.  The results of those come out July 4, and we will duly send them off as well as making plans for a week's visit to England at the end of September.  She is highly motivated, and I think will do well.

Leo & Theodoros baking carob cookies.

Zenon and Leo finished in the middle of last week and are having a good time.  Both have projects to work on and friends to play with, so most days see them either at friends' houses, or with friends around here.  A mate of Leo's from school was over and they were making carob cookies today -- turned out delicious!  I know that some parents dread the holidays, I thrive on them...




House works...

At long last I have persuaded Best Beloved that SOMETHING Had To Be Done About The Floors Downstairs.  When we were building, I had wanted concrete.  My dad's house in Hawaii had a concrete living room floor.  It was beautiful: a mellow golden colour with weathered brick lines to discourage cracks.  The Turkish-Cypriot house in Agios Ioannis that we rent has a concrete floor, smooth, mottled, and coloured with ochre.  I wanted something similar for here.

Trouble is, no-one knows how to do plain, polished concrete floors... Believe it or not.  And we ended up with an ugly patchwork that BB decided -- against my and a friend's strong counsel -- to paint.  Disaster:  flaking, ugly, difficult to clean.  I have been lobbying with increasing stridency for a change, and he finally caved.

The Corridor Before...

Sophia's Flaking Floor

Leo Helps Tile His Room

The Corridor During.

We chose black granite for the corridor, and grey tiles for the bedrooms.

For the last week the house has been full of misplaced furniture (as each bedroom has been done at a time), dust, and the whine of the angle-grinder.  We are almost on the home stretch.  The five bedrooms have been done -- just in time for my sister's arrival this evening.  The guest bathroom has been done with pebble panels, and now the downstairs corridor is slowly being covered with black.  I got really cold feet over the corridor:  the granite would be too dark ("It will be like descending to the Abyss down there, Manamou!"), it would show every speck of dust, it would look like crap and I would never be able to change it...  But I think it's beginning to look really nice.  The next few days will tell.



The Irish Satellite...

Will Try to Enter for Companionship...

For some reason Leo cannot get his tongue around the name 'Sputnik' and instead insists on calling our latest family member 'Spud Mick'...  But whatever we call him, the Small Golden One has morphed from a Shivering Emaciated Wreck that peed himself if we so much as looked at him into a Happy Little Being who bounces around the garden and verandah, comes (mostly) when he's called, pees and poops (mostly) in his toilet spot near the old goat shed, and stretches out through the heat of the day in a doorway to catch any available breeze.

Training -- Mili came to learn how to cope with Lucky

Training -- Leo is the most dedicated of us all

A dog trainer paid us a visit one afternoon last week and gave us some tips on training him which I implement when I take him for his walks.  Leo is is most loyal supporter -- taking him for 'potty walks' every hour of the day, cutting  up treats, and teaching him to 'sit' on command.  Lucky, of course, is wildly enthusiastic at the presence of another canine about the place, but must be very jealous to see him wandering free.  Sophia takes both dogs for a run every evening, and reports that Lucky's rambunctiousness is as ill-contained as ever, but that Sputnik, although only about one-eighth her size, is learning to hold his own.

Easter Prep

Flaouna baking time is here again! Except for last year, when Marios was too little to really participate, Kay has always made flaounes with me. First with Alex and Sophia 'helping', lately with Zenon and Leo helping. So it seemed perfectly natural, now that Marios is a little bigger, to give her a call last week and suggest a morning's baking followed by egg tree making and a dog walk.

She arrived at just after nine and by ten we had a production line going: making the dough, leaving it to rise while we made the filling, then rolling each flaouna, filling it, painting with egg, and finally cooking tray after tray.

Time constraints mean that the egg tree is for another day, but we made several dozen flaounes (hers with raisins, mine with hash seeds) and walked Lucky along the dam.

A Day of Baking in anticipation of the Morrow…

I started out making pumpkin pie this morning… well, butternut squash pie, really. I know it’s not Christmas Fare. We don’t always play by the rules, Christmas being such a grafted on novelty to Cypriot culture and our family being such a hybrid blend. Besides that, I had a butternut languishing on the shelf, and Phil liked the pie last time I made it.

By the time that was out of the oven, the Christmas lunch starters were on the rise. Also not Christmas Fare, they are bread sticks from Richard Bertinet’s excellent book, Dough. I pitted olives, grated parmesan, gathered and chopped fresh herbs, then applied them to the dough that Leo had kneaded earlier, folded, cut, and twisted the sticks, put them for a second rise and then baked them… Lo and behold, appetiser and starter for lunch tomorrow… Done!

Poor Leo’s grasped the short straw with his no-gluten diet, so we dived into a recipe of gluten-free carob cookies. We were both a bit dubious of the blend of dried figs, almond flour, honey, vanilla, and butter, and it seemed to produce only a small amount, but I just took them out of the oven and Wowee!! Worth a try even if you’re gluten tolerant, and a super-super food.

This new diet thingie in our lives has led me down some interesting culinary roads and into some fantastic and inspiring blogs. I mean to post more in the new year, but the main thing I’ve learned (which many others have learned before me, but each has to travel their own path) is that substitutes DON’T work. Don’t think you can spend a fortune on gluten free flour or pasta and get the same result that you would with wheat… It doesn’t happen that way. People just say ‘Yuck! It doesn’t taste the same…’ Explore new cuisines instead: Asian food and Mexican are almost completely gluten free. It’s just hard work getting four children to stop resisting new tastes. From all of them, at least once, I’ve heard: ‘I don’t see why I should eat differently just because the others can’t eat what I want!’ Even Best Beloved, though he is the most innovative of us all, drew the line at a gluten free meal.

I did try blood tests for the Littles yesterday, just to see if the results tallied with the bioresonance – even though I have been warned that blood results ‘can give false negatives’. Stay tuned!

Best wishes to everyone for a happy Christmas and a peaceful, healthy, and prosperous 2011.

Making Flaounes

In the run up to Easter, every self-respecting Cypriot housewife on the island prepares her flaounes, her eggy-cheesy Easter pastries. In this, unlike in most Cypriot traditions, I am no exception.

I hated flaounes when I first tasted them. I found them too hard, too goaty, too salty; I had to lie when I wrote articles for the in-flight magazine about the delights of Cypriot Easter cuisine. ‘Yuck!’ I thought. ‘Who in their right mind could really call these delicious?’ For the first few years of my wedded bliss, I sureptiously dumped my mother-in-law’s offerings and played ‘dumb foreigner’ when asked if I had liked them.

Then, dread day: nine-years ago, Best Beloved asked me to make them. ‘Because my mother always makes them with raisins and I prefer them with hash-seeds!’

(Before you rush for the phone to call the Drug Squad down on me, let me mention that hash seeds are a traditional part of Cypriot cuisine: my father-in-law remembers being fed them as a small child for their soporific effect, and the area of riverbed below the village was given over to hemp production – mostly for the making of rope. These days, the seeds are denatured – adding a crunch to the dish rather than a buzz to the brain.)

I tried to get out of the baking project, but Best Beloved was insistent, and I do love him, so I pulled out The Taste of Cyprus by Gilli Davies, and together with Kay, got to work.

The recipe was surprisingly simple – a basic pizza dough encasing a mixture of special flaouna cheese, halloumi, eggs, mint – and of course the hash seeds – for the filling. Kay’s Cypriot husband likes raisins, so we made two batches.

They were delicious. Soft, un-goaty, just the right balance of salt and egg. They didn’t sit like boulders in my stomach, sending up fumes every quarter of an hour for the rest of the day like all the ones I’d ever eaten before. ‘Not quite the traditional Cypriot taste, Manamou,’ Best Beloved said. ‘But tasty, none the less. And with refrigeration these days, we don’t need ones that will last forever like they did in the old days.’

This year the Little Ones helped me – kneading the pastry, mixing the filling, and rolling out the discs of dough. We made a batch yesterday using flaouna cheese from Best Beloved’s goat-keeping Auntie, and I have another kilo of cheese for a batch next week.

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