Food glorious food!

I spent almost the whole of today cooking or at least sorting out the meal we are to have tomorrow.  No pressure but I have Costas and Jackie coming (picking up Mum en route) to eat with us.  Costas and Jackie own the Tea for Two eateries and for the last 30+ years Jackie has made their famous mile-high lemon merinque pies!!!  It is always a little daunting catering for people who are, themselves, in the catering business.  Having said that Costas likes food so barring some dreadful accident all should be well.  

So for the main course I was making a traditional chicken casserole in the pressure cooker.  I had bought the ready cooked chickens from Sayyas on Wednesday and had stripped them and then made stock from the bones (along with a few veggies).  In the casserole was the chicken, onion, leek, bacon, carrot and swede and the stock pimped up with some herbs and spices, mustard, orange juice and cream.  This was to be cooked for a long time to ensure that the chicken was moist and soft as I cannot stand dry chicken.

My bargain veg from Tsada included some green beans and cauliflower so the cauliflower was being prepare to become cauliflower cheese with a sprinkling of nutmeg and cheesy breadcrumbs and my baby new potatoes from Lidl (thanks Mum for getting) were going to be roasted in their skins.  A few pes would be chucked into the mix to pad it all out a bit.

For pud I was making a traditional Cypriot Orange Filo Cake (Portokalopitta) which necessitates drying a whole pack of filo and breaking it into small pieces.  This is very important and, at this time of the year, takes quite a while so I had to have it in the conservatory and keep turning it and keep an eye on it to ensure that Charlie neither decided to eat it or sleep on it!

The dried filo is incorporated into an orange flavoured 'custard' and baked.  Whilst it is being baked you make an orange syrup which you then pour over the cake as it is cooling so that you get a moist and sticky orangey confection which is absolutely delicious and the recipe is on the food page of this blog.  I am sure it will be a winner - this cake helped win the Masterchef final a couple of years ago.

Today is Sonia's birthday and a couple of her lovely friends had organised tea and cake to celebrate and she had asked me to pop down in the afternoon to share it with her.

She is doing remarkably well bearing in mind she has buggered up her good wrist and her other one is worse than useless at times.  She is fiercely independent so wants to try and do as much as she can without asking for help - but as I pointed out to her this did not include melting the click gas lighter we loaned her and which she inadvertently left on the log burner when Gill and David called round earlier!!

I stayed to meet her friends and to have a cuppa and a slice of Tina's fabulous moist orange cake (different recipe to the one I was cooking today) and to make arrangements about getting her to the hospital in Paphos on Monday for her follow up appointment with Dr Aspros.

Sonia is a keen gardener and so I made her birthday card using the painting I did of Wellie Boots for one of the Lockdown Challenges.

My reward for a busy day was to have a takeaway - in fact John, Argy, Lakis and I all had takeaway cod and chips from Fitos and it was superb.  We really hope that our neighbours enjoyed it.  They certainly look like they did although they had initially been a bit unconvinced about whether it would be as good as we had told them.  We had popped the servings into a pre-heated oven just to make sure they were as crispy as they could be having traveled and that certainly worked.

Our curfew is still 8pm at the moment but will be relaxed to 9pm on Monday - John and I are unconvinced we will be able to stay awake that late!!