My Home Town

Very spring like today so Johns been working outside. The outside oven has a newly painted shiny black door, the barbecue has been spruced up, so too the metal work around the door into the laundry, outside shower room and workshop/tool-shed. We have decided to paint the door to all of the afore mentioned a nice green, the same colour we used when we renovated the pagoda in front of them.
There is also an awful lot of metalwork crying out for a fresh coat of black. Although we do go along to the large multi stores near Murcia for some things, mostly ones we cannot find near by, we will get our paint down in Blanca. There are one or two good little ferreteria and as the saying goes "if you don't us it you loose it".
Years back when we lived in Cornwall we saw shop after shop in the middle of the town of Penzance close down, it really took the heart out of the place as business shifted to edge of town multi national chain stores. In fact I do recall it happened even before that in my home town Wigston Magna with the advent of the "supermarket". Sadly yes I am old enough to remember the shopping experience which involved the shopkeeper weighing out and wrapping also most everything from butter to biscuit as well as sugar tea flour, well just anything you could mention .
Here in Blanca you can get just about everything you need in the small shops, the indoor and street market. The world may be a global village but if you dont support your own home village it will soon become a ghost town.

Too many figs

We love figs and at this time of year they are only €1 a kilo on the market, and if there is a handy fig tree they are falling off. The thing is you can only eat so many ... so i thought about drying them so that i have some later in the year. the ideal way is to have a proper drying machine, but then i heard about putting them in the sun in the windscreen of your car, and thought i would give it a go. I cut them in half and put them cut side up on an oven rack in the front of the car and sure enough they dried out really well, now they are in the freezer this pastuerizes them and they will either keep in the freezer for several months or in the fridge for up to eight weeks.