Mr Sun is back. Temperature 18 in the shade. G&T weather again. Out to Sklavenitis and Prinos as our regular daily shopping resumes. Sklavenitis willing to grind the coffee as you wait for about the same price as other places charge for coffee packaged god knows when. Downside is that it’s really too finely ground for non Greek/Turkish coffee purposes, as machine has only one setting, but then this is true of almost all the coffee available on the island. J brings me coffee in bed in the morning here as in Canada but takes him much longer to deal with the talcum powder fine coffee here. (This is definitely sympathy and not complaint).
Actually raises a semi related question. Supermarkets here do not seem to sell flour or sugar in bags bigger than one kilo, whereas at home I would rarely buy less than ten kilos of flour. (Although vegetable oil suitable for deep frying sold in enormous bottles, so no need to romanticise the Mediterranean diet). Obviously restaurants must have access to larger, but do ordinary people seldom bake? If so, it’s not because baked goods, especially sweet ones are particularly cheap here. They’re not and never have been - well not within the last twenty years anyway. Where else could you persuade people to pay €1.50 (£1.32, $2.18 CAD) for a single small iced doughnut? That’s to take home from the supermarket, not being served it in a coffee shop. Not a doughnut fan and certainly wouldn’t become one here. And no, local sweet specialties no more reasonable.
But back to the semi related observation. Whole wheat flour here, which we do buy a kilo of on occasion, is also ground almost baby powder fine. Have never experienced that in Canada except for the time when I bought a ten kilo bag imported from India. Yes indeed, why is India exporting wheat to Canada? Would require a whole separate blog.