When you got to go, you got to go. Even if you are a bit scared.

The image attached to this post is unrelated to the text itself. It is from Finland few years ago. Today 78 years have passed since the Winter War (against former Soviet Union) broke out. The image should be a symbol and a tribute to the determination and courage that the Finns at that time had when facing an overwhelming enemy and protecting our blue-and-white colors. As a result of that attitude, we Finns can today concentrate on totally different kinds of acts of courage. Like the one the actual text is telling about and which compared to the aforementioned event is absolutely insignificant.

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I had postponed it way too long, but now it was time. No way to avoid it anymore, regardless how distressed it made me feel. No, I do not mean buying a new bra even though I can not deny it, that is something I probably also have to force myself doing sooner or later. Now it was about going to a hairdresser. Every woman knows the amount of pain caused by the idea of going to a new hairdresser. You give the big part of yourself to the hands of someone and that someone has scissors in his/her hands.

One challenge for communication is that often the other party don´t quite understand the message you have been given. That may happen unintentionally and due to earlier experiments related to the same kind of situations with different factors. Or they may understand it totally the other way around. Especially if there is no earlier background for your mutual communication, which usually gives shelter from bigger misunderstandings in long lasting customer relationships. What to another is a shade of warm brown might be some kind of rusty shade of copper to someone else. Situation gets even more trickier if either of the parties can use their native tongue. Then you really might be on thin ice, sometimes you can almost hear the cracking... And there I was, about to start communicating with Croatian hairdresser about what to do with my hair. 

I had never been to hairdresser here in Croatia. My visits to Finland had included some little trimming of the dry ends but nothing more. The last coloring was fairly a year ago before our wedding so the roots were about ten centimeters long. During the summer the sun, that delightful creator of positive mind and vitamin D had pretty much blonded the upper layer of my hair, especially the previously colored part of it. So mixed blonde on the surface, brunette with the roots below that. That was my haircut. Looked as bad as it sounds. So it definitely was time.

My hubby had been at one salon several times so I knew at least some of the staff spoke English in there. Luckily this housewife timetable of mine is so flexible so I got to the place outside the busy peak hours, at one o'clock. No customers were present, five members of staff did. I asked if they had time to do the coloring and light cutting for me. After that we began to explore the desired color. I wanted toffee brown, the main thing was that all the hair would be more or less same color. My hair was inspected by three different experts. Obviously the mixed condition also worried them. Finally the samples of the color map were reviewed and then they went behind the curtain to mix the paste. Saying I was a little bit nervous would be an understatement.

Two hours later I sighed out of relief. The result was exactly what I was after. All the three ladies who previously helped in creating this new look were again messing with my hair and they were also quite positively surprised at how well it turned out. I also proved the best blowdryer straightening so far. After it my naturally curvy hair was completely straight and smooth all the way to the ends and just with the round brush and the dryer. So we were all happy. I also liked the total price for this, 369 kuna so less than 50 euros. Perhaps this is the beginning of a beautiful and long relationship under which the ice is strong and without any sound of cracking. 

Something good out of olives and lemon but how?

There have been same hustle and bustle among the olive trees in recent weeks and it seems to be continuing still. It is the time of harvesting, the green and dark olives are collected in baskets and sacks to be delivered to oil presses or to oil-producing factories as they maybe should be called nowadays. Croatia is a big producer of olive oil, though trees grow mostly only here on the Adriatic coast and on the islands, as well as on the Istrian peninsula up north. From here you can get some excellent quality oil on a world scale, in fact some Istrian oil just got a new award in some oil quality competition. I heard from somewhere that this year should be qualitatively quite good, only summer drought has left its mark and in some places olives are smaller than usual. There are differences between years in wine and also in oil.

Couple of weeks ago I got the opportunity to visit one small oil producing factory with our landlord, actually just few hundred meters from our home. I got to see how the olives were poured into a small silo from witch they went through the water wash and then to crushing machine that turned those little juicy balls into a thick mass. Finally as a result the greenish oil was separated from this mass and it was slowly running from the metal pipe. 

Olives or crushed pulp, however, were not pressed. Modern technology has slightly altered this ancient process, and nowadays more and more oil is produced by separating oil from a mass with a kind of centrifuge using centrifugal force. So the term cold-pressed olive oil in the label of the bottle in the market may be little misleading. Should it be maybe called cold-swirled, where can I suggest the new term?

Of course, there are also many traditional presses in operation, in witch crushed olives actually release the oil due to compression force. Certainly there are many who think that it is still the one and only way to make olive oil and surely these two methods of production will both continue exist also in the future. The main thing is that nothing is added to the pulp or oil when it is produced and only mechanical actions are been used instead of for example some chemical dissolution. As strange as it sounds, olive oil is one of the world's forged products. The demand for high quality oil exceeds supply and so the temptation to use some cheap tricks is increasing. For example, determining the origin of oil can be challenging, it is a completely different matter where olives have grown and the oil is made compared to where it is bottled. So be careful with the labels if it matters to you.

But lets go back to my visit. The olive growers of the neighborhood bring their olives to the oil mill as soon as possible, as the quality of the olives begins to deteriorate fairly quickly after they are picked. Around here in Podstrana the olive groves are generally quite small and there are no machines used in the harvest. Instead the families spend quality time together while harvesting olives. The amount of that quality time depends on the number of trees, some farmers have them enough to produce oil only for their own use and some have a few more so they can sell the oil also for others. In that case of course there may be a need for some extra workers in addition to those doing it just because of the same family name. But manual work it is. Sometimes the olive grower either don´t want or can not afford to pay for the oil mill. In that case they will leave some of the oil as payment in the spirit of a exchange economy. By selling this oil the mill will then make the money and people like me without our own olives will also be able to get fresh local oil for our kitchens. I also left the place with a five-liter jug.

Due to the high amount of chlorophyll, fresh high quality olive oil is greenish and has a strong scent of cutted grass. There is still a bit sharp, bitter taste that you can feel in the throat. This bitter throat feeling is due to oleocanthal, anti-flammatory antioxidant can be found in big doses in good fresh virgin olive oil. All in all, freshly made olive oil has the highest concentrations of good ingredients that will gradually deteriorate with storage. The green color begins to turn yellow as the chlorophyll becomes carotene and the oil's acids are also getting yellow over time. At the same time, the taste becomes softer and the bitterness disappears. To keep my oil better for longer time I also store it in green glass bottles that protect the oil from light better than the plastic jug I got it in. What a wonderful excuse to enjoy a few bottles of wine ...

Even though our own olive tree still did not give anything to harvest, our citrus tree did so. We have a hybrid tree that is mainly a lemon tree, but it has been associated with one tangerine branch. That part of the tree beared one gigantic mandarin that we ate with a hubby a while ago. It was really tasty, hopefully next year there would be more to pick from that branch.

The rest of the tree, the lemon compartment managed to produce four maturing fruits one of which we lost due to a storm earlier. But the three were spared, and now the first one had matured to be picked up. Yesterday I got that magical moment when I got to snap it off the tree. I have been quite childishly excited about this citrus tree and I have cared it with a lot of love. So it was absolutely wonderful to have the first self-grown yellow fruit in my hand, oozing with its exquisite smell that I just kept on sniffing.

But what would I do with the lemon? How would I use that precious treasure? After thinking about it, I ended up baking lemon buns, which contained a lemon-juice-flavored pudding inside a normal Finnish style bun dough. On top of them, I made the eyes of sugar, butter, grated lemon bark and a hint of fresh rosemary.

I have to say that at least to my taste they were just wonderful. So wonderful that I decided to give them away so I would not end up eating too many. So my landlady's family and my husband's co-workers were also able to enjoy these creations of my kitchen and seemed to be quite happy. Now I have to think about what am I doing with the remaining two lemons after they have matured...

Waiting for the snow and breaking the cold chain while doing that

The sun shines from the blue sky and it still has a bit of heating power left but long gone are the hot days of summer and soft warm nights. Autumn is a reality and winter is coming too, forecast just said we might even see snow here in Split next week. That would be a humorous happening for sure. And rare, the previous case of snow was several years ago, but it is still often mentioned and the pictures of those wonders of snow are been showed from the phones to anyone more or less interested. 

While the weather is getting chilly it is once again time to dig long sleeves and trousers out of the cupboards. And thick woolen stocks. Cause together with this start of cooler season floors are starting to feel particularly cold under your feet. Our apartment has largely tile floors and they already start to cool off quite badly. The locals use the shoes also inside, but I do not find myself local enough to do that. In our home the shoes are left in the hallway when entering inside just like in any other Finnish home. However, I also found some kind of indoor slippers quite comfortable cause even the thick socks don't really have what it takes to break the cold chain from the floor to the bottom of your feet. Last winter, our apartment in Murter had wooden floors which were slightly warmer but in the coldest days of winter there was a great need for slippers in there too. Now that season has already started here.

Getting and staying warm is, however, a topical issue just now. In this apartment, the only solid heating system is those two air-to-air heat pumps: one downstairs in the master bedroom and the other one upstairs. For example, neither of the bathrooms has any heat source. And when talking about the whole house there are no isolation of any kind which is very typical for houses here. So it is getting rather chilly when night temperatures drop to less than 10 degrees and during daylight it does not get too much over that 10 degrees especially when the bura wind is howling around the corners. When I returned from a long weekend trip on Monday evening, the indoor thermometer in upstairs had 18.5 degrees in its screen and the downstairs was clearly even cooler. So it was time to start up the machines to blow some warm air. That blowing is, however, not a good thing as the air moves a little too much and becomes unpleasant. For the same reason, I didn´t use the air con so much during summer, mostly only so much that Tiuku was more comfortable. Well ok, when the thermometer screamed continuously over forty degrees the cool air did feel good to myself too.

Yesterday we went on to get a relief from the hardware store: a couple of radiators and one small fan to the downstairs bathroom. In the bathroom the fan is convenient not only for heating the room, but most importantly it makes it easier to ventilate the moisture out of the window after showering. The only ventilation system in this house are the windows and it is especially challenging to extract the dampness out. With quick cross-draught it´s easy to get the air inside freshened but after two warm showers there is so much moisture in the bathroom that it does not go out of the small window so quickly. When you have a fan blowing warm air from the floor level, it will help a lot as we already figured out last winter when struggling with this same matter. Our landlord himself suggested this shopping trip to buy heaters, I will just deduct the costs from the next rent. They have some old heaters, but those are consuming so much electricity that getting new ones is more reasonable. 

And how wonderful it was to wake up in the nicely warm bedroom this morning and then come to upstairs to cook the breakfast without the draft. Slippers are still needed, but that´s ok.