Walnuts, Witches, Midsummer’s Eve & John the Baptist

with a recipe for rhubarb-strawberry cobbler too

For many years I took my family on vacation to a house on the island of Cyprus. It was in the village of Bellapais, high in the hills above Kyrenia, on the north coast of the island, with a view that looked out over the Mediterranean to the Turkish hills in the blue distance. Most of the year we lived in Beirut, a captivating place (with some of the bes…