End of Summer

It's over a month since I last posted here, and summer is just about over now. August was hot and dry, with temperatures up to around 40??C and no rain whatsoever. The fires continued to burn, though later in the month there were fewer; we are not sure if that's because the weather was a little cooler, or people had learnt not to be quite so stupid with fire, or all the most vulnerable forest had already burnt. Anyway, we now seem to be through the worst of the fire season, and we've even had a little rain in September.

Mornings and evenings are already surprisingly cool, though it can still get quite hot in the middle of the day. With the cooler weather, we've started doing more in the garden -- though we haven't got much growing at the moment because of the lack of water. It's going to take a lot more rain over many months to restore the water table (and our well). At the moment, with the grape harvest coming up at the weekend, we will be happy if it doesn't rain for a few days. But after that we'll be praying for some more wet days!

One interesting 'find' in the past month is a shiitake producer in the next hamlet to ours. They are the only one in Portugal, and sell mostly to health food shops (in the major cities). Shiitake is definitely not something we expected to find here, so it's a real bonus. We both find we are missing Japanese food. We can of course make certain things, but authentic tastes are not that easy to create. Best we've come up with so far is somen and an avocado donburi (with wasabi, soy sauce, shiso, and nori topping). The shiitake adds one more ingredient to our available list, so the repertoire may broaden in the future!