Dolmadakia with The Kitchen Table in Athens

I've never really written anything about microwave ovens in my blog. But a microwave sits on my kitchen benchtop, not because I ever thought I'd want one, but because it's convenient. My husband particularly fell in love with it since the first one (it died a few months ago) entered his life as a wedding present; I can't say it isn't helpful when we come back to a full stove-pot or oven-tray of cold food. I don't actually cook a meal in it - it is only for heating things up; I don't think I can cook anything in it that would resemble our regular daily food.

But microwaves are the norm in the restaurant trade. Tourists like their meals hot, even though many Greek dishes taste good at room temperature, especially those known as λαδερά (la-the-RA, meaning 'oily food'). The problem is that tourists to Greece are generally used to hot meals in their own cooler climates, and it's hard to convince them to eat certain meals at room temperature.

Greek ladera dishes are often slow-cooked and sitting in the pot on the stove or in the oven tray in its own heat which slowly dissipates over the day. But there are also the cheats' methods of making ladera: restauranteurs can just open a can of gigandes, fasolakia or dolmadakia (all considered ladera), pour the contents on a plate, heat it up in the microwave, and voila, you have a hot Greek meal ready in a jiffy. This would probably never happen in a taverna which serves mainly locals as opposed to mainly tourists. Locals' locals are also most likely to remain open throughout the year, without closing in the summer, except for a month before/after Christmas for a break.

Giorgos (right) at The Kitchen Table

Why do tourists like their food hot? I was speaking about this topic with Jeffrey from The Kitchen Table - Athens, who, with his friend and business partner Giorgos, is involved in one of the many new and alternative food projects to hit the Greek market since people started to search for novel business approaches: "One of the best ways to experience Greek food is to be invited to someone's home, but this is not always the case for most tourists and visitors to Athens. We created The Kitchen Table to offer an alternative. It's a small,  private space on Thiseos St near Syntagma where Giorgos and I (both food professionals passionate about Greek home cooking; Jeffrey trained as a chef in New York City) serve either a lunch or dinner family style that we've prepared ourselves for a group of 4 to 10 people using local products (most come from the Agora). We use the tried and true recipes of friends and family that we've come to love over the years. We prepare the meals by hand,  from scratch. Nothing canned, or prepackaged. Everything fresh, honest and wholesome. We even make our own filo daily. Our oil comes from a family friend's small grove in the Peloponnese. We begin each meal with a chat about the basic elements of Greek cooking, how Greek people like to eat, seasonality and regional cooking, similar things to those you discuss in your blog. We keep that part brief because we feel the best way to learn about Greek cooking is to eat Greek cooking!  So in summary, we're not a restaurant, and we're not a cooking school... we're something different." 

Athens Central Market

One reason - a rather obvious one - why tourists probably view hot food as better when it's hot is the Western world's aversion to germs, Jeffrey says: "I think there is an aversion by tourists who don't know any better to eating food that's at room temperature. It's a germ-a-phobe thing I think. They just don't know about the beauty of the flavor of ladera dishes once they've cooled down to room temperature after cooking, and that the oil is a preservative. They think they'll get sick from eating room temperature food, even if it's handled correctly. But microwaving ladera kills the flavour dead. I cringe in any taverna when I start to hear the "beep, beep, beep" of microwaves going off in the kitchen. Having said that, I know I could never serve the kind of ladera dishes the way I'd want to at a restaurant in New York City (Jeffrey's from New York) because of the somewhat insane health department codes..."  

Jeffrey and a Cretan yiayia, making dolmadakia

One of Jeffrey's favorite Greek meals is dolmadakia: "I was taught a lovely, simple recipe by a friend's mother from Crete.  We used fresh-frozen ambelofila (grape vine leaves) which she had frozen herself the year before. Practically speaking, at the Kitchen Table, we didn't have the freezer space nor the time to pack the amount we would need away for the entire summer. So, when we were at this food expo, we thought we'd check out one producer of brined vine leaves from Thessaloniki that was recommended as a good alternative to fresh leaves. This producer of jarred leaves is now also well known because they have "perfected" a way to freeze packaged pre-made dolmadakia which they sell to tavernas - you simply defrost the whole package in the microwave! I tried some of their dolmadakia at the expo. They tasted kind of OK, not repulsive, but not like home-cooked dolmadakia. With the sales rep standing before me I started reading off the ingredients on the back of the package of pre-made dolmadakia. I was horrified - they were made with... vegetable oil! I looked up at the sales rep over the top of my glasses and he could not understand for the life of him what the problem was! Anyway, we haven't found any brined leaves of the quality we want to use, so for now, we only serve dolmadakia when we can get the fresh leaves at the laiki in season."

While Jeffrey was in Istanbul on a visit, he went to Ciya Sofrasi, a restaurant run by Musa Dağdeviren  who was featured in Yotam Ottolenghi's Mediterranean Feast: "Meeting Musa was an amazing experience - he doesn't speak a speck of English! Musa makes kolokithoanthoi (zucchini flower parcels) in a similar way to Greek  dolmadakia (the meat filled ones), but with a twist: he places unripe green grapes in with the slices of tomato for flavoring. One of my yiayia friends who grew up in Crete told me that in summer when there were no lemons in her village they used unripe green grape juice for a sour taste to replace lemon in dishes."   

Stuffed zucchini flowers by Musa Dağdeviren, Istanbul

Jeffrey likes his Cretan friend's mother's dolmadakia recipe: "Kiria Maria's recipe is the one we use at The Kitchen Table. It's very simple, and typically Cretan. We don't precook the filling: onion chopped finely in equal mass to the amount of raw rice - the Karolina variety; it's very important with the amount of onion. It might seem like too much, but it's one of the things that make this recipe.  One cup finely chopped onion, one cup rice. Then loads of chopped parsley and mint (not to be confused with spearmint), a grated tomato stirred into the rice and herbs, a few tablespoons of oil proportionate to the rice, and the juice of one whole lemon, salt and pepper. I always taste for seasonings before I roll the dolmadakia. Then I pour a wine glass of olive oil over that and add very little water, just to the halfway mark of the first layer of dolmadakia, some more salt and pepper, and cook them as usual. The trick is the lemon in with the grated tomato for the filling, as well as making sure you have plenty of chopped onion. The taste of the finished product is amazing, especially the next day when all the flavours have blended." 

I was quite proud to hear Jeffrey talk about Cretan cooking: "Of all the regional cuisines in Greece, Crete has to be my favorite. I love the simplicity and brilliance with which they combine the minimum amount of ingredients for the maximum of taste and nutrition. A friend just recommended a recipe for kolokithokeftedes (zucchini patties) from Crete that uses ONLY mint. No onion, no cheese, no egg, no other herbs. Of course it's lenten, but it actually lets the flavor of the zucchini come out and not be overwhelmed by herbs, breadcrumbs etcetera." 

As a food professional, Jeffrey has his own ideas about Greek food: "I'm absolutely in love with the food here and have been since I first arrived here six years ago. I'm talking about the real Greek food that yiayias have been making for eons out in the villages without any fanfare, following the rhythm of the seasons."

I think he's summed up my own ideas about the kind of cooking I enjoy too. 

If you'd like to try some Greek home cooking while in Athens at The Kitchen Table, Jeffrey and Giorgos can be emailed at ktathens@outlook.com or call +306942780190. Bookings are needed at least 24hrs in advance.   

©All Rights Reserved/Organically cooked. No part of this blog may be reproduced and/or copied by any means without prior consent from Maria Verivaki.

Baby octopus pilaf with Swiss chard (Οχταποδοπιλάφι με σέσκουλα)

Here's a one-pot meal that keeps in good shape, which I whipped up last night for today's main meal. I had bought some fresh baby octopus for yesterday's lunch, which I didn't get round to cooking, because the day turned out quite differently to what had been planned. We've also got a lot of Swiss chard in the garden at the moment. Leafy greens pair well with seafood. Only the carbs are missing: voilà, octopus pilaf with Swiss chard.

 I rarely use my white soup dishes for taking food photographs, but I must admit that it makes the colours of the meal stand out magnificently.

Prepare and clean 1kg baby octopus (take out the inky innards and remove the 'eye' in the centre). Place in a pot with a lid and allow to sweat for 30 min on low heat. Drain the liquids, heat 1/2 cup olive oil and add 1 medium chopped onion and 2-3 finely chopped cloves of garlic. Saute with the octopus together for 10-15 min. Add 1 wineglass of white wine and simmer 10-15 min. Grate 1 large ripe tomato into the pot and season with salt and pepper. Add some finely chopped Swiss chard (I used 12 very large leaves) and cover the pot with a lid. Simmer 10-15 min, then take off the lid and stir the contents of the pot. Add 3 cups stock (or water) and 1 cup rice (I used basmati rice which gives off a wonderful aroma). Cook on low heat till rice is done (another 15-20 min).

Swiss chard can be replaced by spinach, and any other seafood can take the place of octopus (prepared appropriately). Basmati rice doesn't swell and clog like other rice varieties, so this dish will re-heat nicely the next day.

©All Rights Reserved/Organically cooked. No part of this blog may be reproduced and/or copied by any means without prior consent from Maria Verivaki.

The way we always will be: Octopus and dolmadakia (Χταπόδι και ντολμαδάκια)

When Betty Blair began writing her book Sun, Seasons and Souvlaki in the early 1970s, she was looking for ways to introduce foreigners to Greek culture. Among those themes was also included the subject of food. Greek tourists at the time knew very little about modern Greece - their knowledge was mainly limited to ancient culture. Picking up common threads in the Greek identity as the main topic, she identified a number of themes which she explored as briefly as possible, without complicating the issue. The food topics she included give us a hint of timeless Greek food.
 

Betty Blair, 1973, Athens, writing her first book Sun, Seasons and Souvlaki on the balcony of her apartment, in the company of potted plants and canvas awnings. She also uses some rocks to keep her papers in place in case of wind. Balconies in Greek apartments haven't changed much; Betty's apartment was a ρετιρέ, ie penthouse, on the top floor, so it was probably bigger than normal. The marble mosaic floor and the shaded glass also tell us something about Greek home renovations during the junta regime: construction had a functional rather than stylistic role. When I came to Greece in 1991, most of the apartment blocks erected in the building boom of the 70s had not been modernised, giving Athens her grey look in the inner-city suburbs.

We often think of cooking from a book in the form of recipes with a list of ingredients followed by a list of instructions. Even so, there are also many times when we are annoyed to find that a given recipe 'doesn't work'. But most home cooks around the world do not cook according to books. The recipes are carried around with them in their head and they move in their kitchens as if on automaton. They've been cooking the same meals so often that there is no need to refer to any other source. No doubt they have watched someone else cooking those meals, and they cook from memory. And their recipes always work.

The average Greek household cook prepares a similar range of meals as her contemporary counterpart on a daily basis. When cooking from the range of traditional Greek meals, most of the time, she will have learnt to prepare them from her mother and/or grandmother. At any rate, when her first time comes to prepare a particular meal, she will ask her mother/grandmother directly for the recipe. 

Sun, Seasons and Souvlaki approaches Greek cooking in the same simple way. Betty Blair was as much a novice cook as her intended (English) readers would have been. But her descriptions show that she was very eager to learn how to cook the meals she had gotten used to eating during the time that she lived in Greece, and that she had been watching someone preparing them before she picked up any skills. Instead of writing recipes in the conventional way, Betty simply tells you the story of the recipe. By reading Betty's story, you too can learn to cook Greek classics in the same way. It's a case of  'just do it', and eventually, you'll get it right.

I've made dolmadakia and octopus countless numbers of times before I came across Betty's book,; Betty's versions do not differ from my own first experiences of making these dishes. They also provide a fresh approach to cooking and Greek cuisine.

Above: Betty's recipe for dolmadakia (stuffed vine leaves). Below: doing it just like Betty says.

 

Pick the tenderest vine leaves, mix some herbs with pureed tomato and rice, roll the leaves into tiny parcels, place them into a saucepan lined with more leaves, pour the remaining liquid from the rice mixture over the dolmadakia, cover with more leaves, pour some water and oil over them - and don't forget to cover all the vine leaves with a plate before you place the lid over the pot.

 

Above: Betty's simple octopus recipe. I bought a fresh octopus, removed the ink sack, washed it and cooked it in a closed pot till soft. Then I lifted it out, cut the tentacles off, chopped the head in half and packed it into a small clay pot with olive oil, vinegar and salt. I left it in the fridge overnight to marinate. Octopus is very easy to cook - it requires no technique!

 

Being spontaneous in the kitchen at times often gives you the most interesting results. It does however require some effort. These days, you can easily buy canned dolmathakia and octopus in any Greek supermarket. Why compromise on taste when these delicacies are so easy to prepare at home?

©All Rights Reserved/Organically cooked. No part of this blog may be reproduced and/or copied by any means without prior consent from Maria Verivaki.

Cheap 'n' Greek 'n' frugal: Spanakorizo (Σπανακόριζο)

Prices are in euro (valid in Hania). All ingredients are Greek or locally sourced; those marked with * are considered frugal here because they are cheap and/or people have their own supplies.
 
Spanakorizo is Greece's answer to risotto. It involves making a light sauce with spinach, and adding rice to it. Instead of spinach, cabbage can be used, as well as any other tasty seasonal greens. But the most popular version is the one made with spinach. When I have fresh garden-grown spinach, I make this dish at least once a week, and because the spinach sauce freezes really well (ie before adding the rice), I make plenty of it so that all I have to do mid-week on a working day is to thaw it in the morning so that I can cook it with rice in the afternoon after work.

Spanakorizo can be cooked using a tomato or lemon based sauce, in the same way as most Greek dishes using beans or meat. In our house, we cook more with tomato, but lemon-based dishes make a tangy refreshing and lighter meal. Adding the rice after making the spinach sauce will give the dish a softer texture, resembling a pilaf. But if the rice is added before the spinach and sauteed with the onion until caramelized, it remains 'al dente', and it becomes a risotto. 


Spanakorizo needs only a little cheese to go with it. My kids eat all Greek rice-based dishes with Greek strained yoghurt, but not FAGE yoghurt, because it's hardly ever made with Greek milk these days (usually with mainly German and partly French milk). Non-FAGE strained yoghurt made with Greek milk is usually cheaper; there's no need to be brand-conscious when buying yoghurt.


You need:
1 1/2 cups of rice (~40 cents)
half a cup of olive oil*
1 large onion*
a few cloves of garlic*
half a kilo (or more) of spinach (~50 cents)
a bunch of parsley and/or fresh mint* (I used a variety of fresh aromatic herbs from the garden)
1 cup of tomato sauce (or some tinned tomato: ~50 cents)
1 teaspoon of tomato paste*
2-3 cups of water*
salt, pepper and oregano*


Follow the instructions for my spanakorizo recipe here.

Total cost of the meal for four people: about 1.60 euro, together with the yoghurt; 40 cents per serving.

©All Rights Reserved/Organically cooked. No part of this blog may be reproduced and/or copied by any means without prior consent from Maria Verivaki.

Cheap 'n' Greek 'n' frugal: Dolmadakia (Οικονομικά ντομαδάκια)

Prices are in euro (valid in Hania). All ingredients are Greek or locally sourced; those marked with * are considered frugal here because they are cheap and/or people have their own supplies.  

Dolmadakia - stuffed vine leaves - are often served as an appetiser in Greek tavernas. They are an oily rice dish, which makes them quite filling. They become a super-frugal meal when you have your own supply of leaves, like most Cretan rural dwellers.

 Zucchini flowers and choi sum leaves; dolmadakia are made all year round from seasonal leaves.

Stuffed leaves with herbed rice are a quintessential dish associated grapevine leaves and Greek summer. But you can also eat these parcels in winter, using a variety of whatever fresh locally sourced leaves are available according to the season. Possible leaves for the season which can be used for stuffing are lettuce, spinach, sorrel (also known as dock) and Swiss chard, all easy to grow in Crete's mild winter climate. In this way, I can make these little parcels most of the year round. In the summer, we also use squash flowers. This year, we even grew some very unusual (for Crete) leafy greens: choi sum, a popular leafy green in Chinese cuisine. The only prerequisite when choosing a species of leaf for making rice parcels is to ensure that it will not disintegrate when it is stuffed, layered and cooked. Small leaves can be used, and although they may look tricky to fill, with a bit of advice from an experienced yiayia, they can come out very pretty too.

To make super-frugal dolmadakia (serves 4, about 8-10 dolmadakia per person), you need:
about 40-50 medium- to large-sized leaves of edible greens* (only 30-40 will be rolled up - you may need to cut them to a smaller size if they are too big (eg spinach leaves are bigger than vine leaves)
1 teaspoon rice per individual leaf parcel (ie about 30-40 teaspoons rice; ~50 cents)
1 large onion, finely chopped
1 tablespoon of tomato paste (or one large juicy tomato, pureed)*
a few sprigs of parsley, mint and dill* (or fennel, which we have plenty of)
a small cup of olive oil*
a sprinkling of salt, pepper and oregano*
more olive oil for cooking*



First of all, clean your leaves well, making sure they are free from dirt. Then blanch them by placing them in a pot of boiling water for 30 seconds. Drain the leaves over the side of the pot, taking care not to burn them. In another wide shallow pot, place 5 leaves on the base.

Place all the ingredients except the leaves in a bowl and mix together. Place a tablespoon of the mixture on each leaf and roll it up, a little like the way fish and chips is rolled up in newspaper. Place each dolmadaki on top of the leaves lining the pot. Place up to two or so layers of dolmadakia in the pot (three full layers may not cook evenly).

When ready to cook, cover with another 5 leaves. Then pour a 1 cup mixture of olive oil and water over the dolmadakia. Cover the rice parcels with a plate, before placing the lid of the pot over it. Cook over moderate heat for 40-50 minutes. Be careful when removing the pot - it will burn!

Greeks usually eat dolmadakia with plain yoghurt or tzatziki, to dip the parcels in. You can also accompany the dolmadakia with a piece of feta or any other kind of cheese instead. A tomato-based salad completes this meal. You really don't need any bread with this dish. Vegans simply eat them plain.

If rolling up leaves is too much trouble for you, a variation of this dish can be made by simply layering the leaves and rice mixture. The same ingredients used to make this dish can also be used to make spanakorizo (spinach risotto). Because dolmadakia are generally considered to be quite a fiddly piece of culinary work, bear in mind that you can freeze them stuffed, but they must not be defrosted  - they need to be cooked straight out of the freezer.

Total cost of meal: about 1.60 euro, together with the salad and yoghurt; 40 cents per serving.

©All Rights Reserved/Organically cooked. No part of this blog may be reproduced and/or copied by any means without prior consent from Maria Verivaki.

Eggplant risotto (Ριζότο με μελιτζάνες)

I’ve been keeping a blog for three years. I started out writing about my limited view of the world, sharing an opinion about some news item that took my fancy. It was all quite random, but there was always a related food  photo uploaded with each post, mainly to add colour to a rather dull looking page full of words. I didn’t know who would be reading what I was writing, nor if anyone was really interested in it. I was just writing for the sake of doing something that looked productive in a world where most of the time life is routine and productivity is achieved by superficial means, pushing a button to start an machine, doing the daily shopping and cooking a meal with all the mod cons of the average kitchen.

I got the wacky idea to start recording all the food I cook for my family as a way of entering the writing world. I methodically and meticulously recorded every detail of the recipes I prepared in my kitchen: sensing my own mortality after the shortened lives of my parents, I wanted to ensure that my children would be able to remember to do some of things I did for them, or at least they could learnt to cook (or show someone else how to cook) their mother’s food, some of which they may even have acquired an affection for. To increase my readership, I entitled all posts by the name of a recipe or food item, so that people searching for a recipe would be able to land by chance onto my site. My first readers were food bloggers interested in the intricacies of Greek cooking. Comments ranged from ‘Delicious!’ to ‘Could you add garlic to this?’. This was not the intended response – I make no effort to be an outstanding cook – but it was a welcome start to a reader's circle.

I was enjoying being read, but I also knew that I would eventually reach an upper limit in such a venture. I cook to feed, not to create or to excite. And since most of what we eat in our house is seasonal, this means that I could only blog about food for a period of up to twelve months. We eat pretty much the same food from one week to the next, depending on what is in season. For example, fasolada is not a once-a-year affair: it’s a weekly winter entry, whose consistency does not change from one time I cook it to the next. I may have such a glut of zucchini in the garden that I can create all kinds of new recipes, but the truth is I don't. There is only so much you can do with eggplant, for instance, which the whole family will eat.

To beat away the boredom, I started a city daily photo blog, with the intention of evading the drudgery of the kitchen with its precise measurements, specialised terminology, detailed methodolgy and focus on hygiene. Instead of worrying about ingredients and cooking methods, I was now worried about running out of photos of my daily surroundings, some of which I thought of as commonplace. How many similar beach photos can someone tolerate seeing on the same blog? How many times can I photograph different olive or orange trees and say something new about them?

After three years of blogging about the traditional seasonal food we grew, cooked and ate, I find that there is very little to write about on this topic. I'd be fooling you if I were to start cooking food that is not seasonal or traditional in the area where I live. The only time we eat out of season or away from tradition is when we travel or I get nostalgic for foreign food (sourcing my ingredients from supermarkets that cater for tourists rather than locals cooking international cuisine). I'd be repeating myself if I were to continue to describe the food I cook in my house on a daily basis.

In the knowledgeable light of the coming of the end, I started throwing in an anecdote or two in the recipe and photo posts, turning them into stories and photographic exhibits. I played with cooking terms, I mixed in jokes, I tossed in a spicy word or two. And thus, my story-writing was born. The food blog eventually started taking on a new shape, confounding my readers in the process. What was I doing – cooking or story-telling? Some shirked away from the madwoman that I had become while others remained endeared to the blog, enjoying the hilarity of the scenes portrayed and the dry wit of the author or the poignancy of the feelings provoked. All I can do is update my food blog with a restaurant review or maybe a kinky food-based story that I know will delight many.

It is the final set of readers that I owe the development of my writing skills: without their continued interest in what I write, my food blog would probably have fizzled out long ago, accelerated by a lack of new dishes being cooked in my kitchen and the general boredom of any rote task, which of course I continue to perform in the kitchen. Of course I'm still cooking; I'll be cooking for a long time yet, but there must be light at the end of the tunnel. I never set out to be a cook; in fact, I'm surprised I ended up cooking such superb meals as my (often-copied) photographs attest. As I look back over my blog, I ask myself: did I really cook that? I hope my children remember that indeed I did. With two young ones, I still have a good many kitchen years ahead of me...

I've cleaned up my kitchen for all of you to see: not a pot boiling, not a dirty dish in sight, no garden glut to deal with.

Through this post, I praise those of you who continue to read me despite my many shortcomings as a cook and writer, which will have become apparent over time. I hope to continue to entertain you. Year 4 of Organically Cooked starts here.

*** *** ***

The glut of aubergines has not ended, and from previous experience, I know that it won't end until the end of September. Our eggplant trees are our most loyal garden plants. They keep on producing until Christmas, but by then, the shrub is looking a little worse for wear. Thankfully, aubergine freezes well too; one of the most popular posts on my blog (apart from fasolada) is all about how to freeze eggplant. 

Last year's eggplant was waiting this year for me in the freezer.

As I was clearing out the freezer I found last year's batch of frozen eggplant, which is sad because I couldn't really use it now that the new season's vegetables had started to grow. I couldn't just throw it out, so I decided to cook it for our pet dog, who basically eats what we eat, because she gets our leftover. So I heated some oil in a pan, and added the eggplant. That eggplant had been frozen at the height of the season so that its Mediterranean summer aroma was wafting around the room; even I realised that this food was not yet fit for doggie consumption at this point. When the eggplant had softened, I added some rice and poured in enough water to make what looked like a risotto. As I stirred the pot and watched what was taking shape in it, I began wishing the dog's dinner was mine. 

The dog's food looked so good...

Here is the eggplant risotto remake, originally modelled on the dog's dinner.

... that I made an improved version for myself.

You need: 

3 medium-sized eggplant, chopped into small cubes

1 medium-sized onion, chopped small
6 banana peppers, chopped roughly in small chunks (optional)

2-3 cloves garlic, finely chopped

a few glugs of olive oil

a cup of white rice, preferably basmati

salt and pepper

Heat the oil in a saucepan. Add the onion and garlic, and cook till translucent. Then add the aubergine cubes and cook till just soft, so that they don't lose their shape. If you are using the banana peppers (we have a glut of those too), add them together with the aubergine. You will need a lot of oil, because eggplant soaks it all up very very quickly. It sounds quite fattening, but if it's only olive oil, don't forget that it's an anti-oxidant and will keep you looking young. When the aubergine is done, add 2 and a 1/2 cups of water to the mixture. Add the washed rice and then the seasonings, and stir everything together to blend. When the water reaches boiling point, turn down the heat to the lowest point, and let the risotto cook away on its own, without stirring it (or the rice will break up).

Serve this risotto with a green (or garden-fresh salad), and some red wine. Bread is superfluous today!

©All Rights Reserved/Organically cooked. No part of this blog may be reproduced and/or copied by any means without prior consent from Maria Verivaki.

Egg and lemon soup (Σούπα αυγολέμονο)

Five minutes: that's about the amount of time I would say I spend washing my hands and face, brushing my hair and teeth, and applying a dab of perfume and maybe some lip balm on a cold morning, before going to work. That's after I've spent 10 minutes toasting bread, warming up milk and serving it all up for the kids' breakfast. So Xanthe Clay is way ahead of me when she makes the classic Greek soup, avgolemono, in just five precious minutes:

(Thanks for link, Peter)

Is chicken stock really truly that kind of brown colour? Is pre-cooked rice an ingredient or a fast food? Maybe this is the way soup is served in a fast food restaurant; it needs five minutes to cook, and if not eaten in the next five minutes, it will go off. To cook such a soup from scratch, admittedly, it would not take 5 minutes to make, but whoever heard of a whole meal being cooked in 5 minutes, except in fast food restaurants?

This kind of video is supposedly an attempt to get people cooking some kind of 'real food', which is all the rage these days, judging by discussions among 'top chefs' like Alice Waters and Anthony Bourdain:

(Thanks for the link, Elissa)

And I congratulate Xanthe's effort in this direction. But let's not forget, as Alice Waters says: where did each of Xanthe's ready-to-eat ingredients come from and how easy is it to actually cook the same food from scratch without wasting, beg your pardon, spending too much time in the kitchen? Xanthe's version of avgolemono soup serves 2 people and can be made in just 5 minutes. She probably needed a longer time buying her ingredients from the supermarket; in how much of a rush can 2 diners possibly be?

My mum used to make avgolemono soup very often on cold winter nights in New Zealand, especially after she came home with my father and her children from the fish and chip shop my parents owned and operated. It would be 7.30 at night, and she'd go into the kitchen as soon as we came home. She'd tell us to take our baths or finish our school homework, while during this time, she'd whip up the evening meal. Even though convenience foods were widely available in 1980s New Zealand, she hardly ever used them. Nearly everything she cooked was related to the food she remembered from Crete, and it was cooked from scratch.

I can still remember how she made avgolemono soup. As I write this, I remember our house in Wellington, the kitchen table, the cutlery and crockery; most of the time, I used to help her mix the hot stock with the egg and lemon sauce. "Pour it in drop by drop!" she'd tell me. "Wait till I've blended it in well!" she'd ask me. "Don't let the egg cook!" she'd warn me.

This soup took longer than five minutes to cook; by planning ahead, it is never a toilsome soup to make.

Here's my version of quick and easy avgolemono soup, using Xanthe's ingredients list as a base, which you can make for dinner after you've come home from work, to feed your family a nourishing winter warmer in the cold days that are ahead of us - and making use of all the fresh ingredients available around you. Making chicken stock does not require the luxury of time; you can make it in the 15-20 minutes it took Xanthe to buy her ready-to-gloop ingredients from the supermarket (and if time really is a hassle, then make your stock 1-3 days before: it keeps this long in the fridge).

For a family of 4, you need:

2 fresh chicken drumsticks (We usually buy whole chickens - I reserve the wings and neck to make really good stock, but you won't get much meat out of them if you intend to add bits of chicken to the soup)

the juice of 1-2 lemons, depending on how tangy you want it to be, placed in a medium sized bowl

2 eggs (we like our avgolemono less eggy and more lemony)

a fistful of raw rice (I am using Asian egg noodles today instead, for a more kid-friendly meal)

salt and pepper (you can add some chopped parsley as a garnish, like Xanthe did, but this is definitely not what the average working wife and mother who lacks time would feel the need to do when serving up a nutritious meal right after she's been at work...)

Place the chicken parts in a medium-sized pot and cover with cold water. Let the water boil away for about 15 minutes. Depending on the kind of chicken used (ie how the chicken is reared), it may require more or less cooking time (which is why I prefer to use chicken wings and necks for stock making). Strain the stock into another pot. If the use of too many pots in the kitchen perturbs you, then it's best to make your stock the night before so you can maintain control over the dirty dishes; my urbanised friends always freak out when they see the detritus of my kitchen - that's before they've tasted the food of course, after which they've forgotten about the kitchen chaos. Maybe they realised it was worth the effort. But they probably wouldn't invite me to cook in their kitchen.

My chicken stock always comes out golden, never brown, in colour. I only ever watched my mother make chicken stock in New Zealand, and her Kiwi chicken also gave her golden, never brown, liquid. The stock in the above photos looks fatty, but you can skim the fat off before you use it, like I did for this soup. This pot produced 4 servings of hearty chicken soup.

Make sure your chicken stock is very hot, then add the washed rice (or noodles). Let it boil away, without stirring (which will make the rice go mushy), for as long as it takes to cook the rice/noodles. At this point, start making the egg and lemon sauce. Break the eggs into the bowl containing the lemon juice, add some salt, and use a fork, whisk or hand-mixer to blend everything together. Remove the meat in small bits from the chicken and set aside. Switch off the stock pot.

Making a hearty chicken egg and lemon soup; even the dog gets her share today (bottom right-hand corner: the tub contains the chicken bones and skin).

Now comes the tricky bit. Stir a shotglass-full of the hot stock (clear liquid is preferable - strain away the rice) into your egg and lemon sauce and whisk it in really well. Keep doing this until at least a third of the stock liquid has been added to the egg and lemon sauce, which should be cool rather than hot at all times. Now turn up the heat for the soup pot to very low, tip the egg and stock mixture back into the soup pot and stir it gently but constantly, so that the egg does not 'cook'. Add the chicken meat and stir till the soup has warmed up, and has a thick soupy texture, but don't let it boil because the egg may start to cook, and that's highly undesirable.

Avgolemono soup with all the trimmings: a selection of cheeses, two different kinds of olives, extra lemon for tanginess, and paximadi (Cretan dry rusks) for dunking.

Serve hot, ladled into soup bowls, and sprinkle (read: garnish) with pepper. I had also added a carrot to the chicken as it was boiling, so I could make this soup more nourishing; the carrot was sliced into thin rounds, and added at the same time as the chicken pieces (along with some tinned corn - remember, we're making this soup kid-friendly).

Real food, for real people.

©All Rights Reserved/Organically cooked. No part of this blog may be reproduced and/or copied by any means without prior consent from Maria Verivaki.

Frozen vegetables (Λαχανικά κατάψυξης)

I was having an off-day, one of those days when everything seems to go wrong. I felt wheezy, my throat was itchy, and there was lunch to prepare. It had to be something quick and easy. The freezer is a good place to look for that kind of food, but since we had had pastitsio the previous day, it was a bit too much to bring out the frozen portion-sized moussaka, which would have been the easiest solution.

I found a packet of mixed frozen vegetables in the deep freeze, the type that contains peas, carrots and corn (this one also contained red kidney beans and green runner beans). It had been, let's just say, forgotten about, without any expressed intent to be used for any particular meal. I can't remember why I had bought this packet of frozen vegetables in the first place. We have a large garden, so there are always fresh vegetables in the house. I suppose the picture on the packet looked tempting: a jumbled pile of coloured pebbles.

In New Zealand, my mother would often boil this kind of vegetable medley and serve them with pilafi rice or boiled potatoes. This kind of meal was quick and easy to prepare, a very important factor for a working wife and mother who left the house in the middle of the morning, and did not return home until after seven or eight o'clock at night. Even though she worked away from home for so many hours, I don't recall a day when there was no freshly prepared food in our house.

Frozen vegetables don't do it for me anymore. I remember a time when I ate them with greater relish, during my dieting stints when my food intake was reduced in terms of portions and variety, so these frozen vegetables looked colourfully inviting. I now find that frozen vegetables have a strange plasticky smell and a woody texture even when cooked, as if they were unripe at the time of processing. You will find a spoonful of this vegetable medley as an accompaniment to meat steaks at tavernas; they are used to fill the gap on the plate - very boring, and highly suspect. For this reason, when my mother-in-law would serve up this convenience food to her family, she would cook them Mediterranean-style in a light tomato sauce.

You need:
a 250g packet of frozen mixed vegetables
1 onion
2 cloves garlic
some olive oil (between 5-10 tablespoons, depending on how oily you like your food)
2 freshly grated tomatoes
1 tablespoon of red curry paste (that was my addition, not from my mother-in-law's original recipe)
1/2 glass of water
a few sprigs of parsley
salt, pepper and oregano

Chop the onion and garlic finely, and saute in a pot with the olive oil heated up. Add the frozen vegetables and coat them in the oil. Then add the tomato and curry paste, and the water. Let the pot simmer away, covered, for 20 minutes, so that most of the liquid has evaporated. Add the chopped parsley towards the end of the cooking time. Done!

I keep some chicken off-cuts in the fridge for making stock, with which I can make a hearty Cretan pilafi. It doesn't take a long time once you have the stock ready. This is what I served the vege medley with. The curry and rice mixture reminded me of another cuisine I haven't had in a while? To date, I have no knowledge of any Indian restaurants in Hania...

©All Rights Reserved/Organically cooked. No part of this blog may be reproduced and/or copied by any means without prior consent from Maria Verivaki.

Live cook show: Yemista (Μαγειρεύω τώρα! Γεμιστά)

Join me tonight (8pm Greek time) as I make Easy Peasy Yemistes Piperies (Stuffed Peppers): you will need some green bell peppers, some rice, some herbs (a herb garden, even one of those balcony- or window-sill types will do), some canned tomatoes (I'm using my own freshly frozen tomato), and some rice, along with all the other kitchen staples.
See you tonight at 8pm (Greek time)!

6.00pm: Now you know why I chose peppers ...
The summer garden is drawing to a close, but the peppers are still thriving. They are looking slightly deformed and 'not very pretty' - but they are still peppers and they still need to be used.

6.15pm: Here's a look at the ingredients:

Once you've got them laid out in front of you, these peppers will be delicious and easy to make (I think you'll be eating in an hour from the moment you start cooking them).

6.23pm: I know the kids won't be hot on the pepper business (they prefer to see stuffed tomatos, even though they only eat the stuffing and discard the tomatoes), but hey, waste not, want not, right?

6.26pm: If you're using canned tomatoes, you just need to open a can. But if you're using freshly frozen tomato (like me), then you'll have to defrost it (never a dull moment, is there?)

7.16pm: We had lentil soup (fa-kes) for lunch today. There's another serving of that for each one of us in the fridge, but can you imagine the scene at the table the next day? "Lentil soup again, Mum?!?" It's much easier to serve these kinds of leftovers the day after - with a bit of luck, they may have forgotten when they last ate them...

7.24pm: Wouldn't it be great if they could all be satisfied with an excitingly different salad like this one? But one of them doesn't do greens, while another doesn't do live spinach (it's got to be cooked). So I'd just be preparing food for half of us...

7.30pm: Don't they just love the same old regular meals served up? 'Comfort food' isn't the right phrase: it's 'comfortable food'...

7.35pm: It's not just me that's stuck in a rut: UK mums rely on a range of nine meals to keep everyone happy on a daily basis - it's not much different to myself. Where we differ is that they spend half the time I intend to spend tonight to cook the meal, and they usually don't cook from the previous day to feed the family the next day...

7.42pm: Yes vilges suola, fa-kes won't look and taste like Greek fa-kes if they aren't cooked like Greek fakes, and they need at least one and a half hours (see why cooking is a pain in the butt sometimes?)
8.00pm: OK, it's show time. First, wash your peppers, and slice off the top part to make a 'cap'. Remove and discard the seeds from the peppers with your fingers, and there you have the cavities ready to be filled. Place them tightly upright in a wide shallow pot (cooking them on an element, while not traditional, is much faster and more economical). That only took a minute or two, right? I managed to fit 15 small peppers in the pot.

8.05pm: Now pour the can of tomatoes into a bowl, and add salt, pepper and oregano (and a hint of cumin, which I use).

8.07pm: Chop up the herbs as finely as you can. I used the classic Greek parsley, fresh mint and dill (well, fennel, actually, we had it in the garden). Then whizz (very finely again) an onion in the multi moulineux and add that to the tomatoes. See what I mean by 'Easy Peasy' food?

8.10pm: Now add a wine glass of olive oil. Don't skimp here. unless you like boiled rice instead of savoury rice.

8.12pm: Well, cupcakes, now you know the secret of a quick meal - my mum actually made them like this many times (she was a working mum in NZ).

8.16pm: Now add one large tablespoon of rice for every pepper you have in the pot. Don't worry about the liquids - you can fix those later. I have 15 small peppers, so I'm using one medium-sized tablespoon of rice per pepper.

8.21pm: If the mixture looks too dry to you, add some water; mine looks a little dry, too.

8.24pm: Now use a tablespoon to fill the pepper shells. Really easy, isn't it?

8.28pm: Place the caps on the peppers, pour some water and oil (in the mixtures that you prefer) so that there is liquid in the pot to just below 2cm of the tops of the peppers. Then place a couple of large cabbage leaves on top of the peppers, then place a plate large enough to fit on top of the pot. (I didn't need to use a plate, but this will help you keep the peppers from spilling as they cook - the cabbage leaves were enough for me.) Place the lid on the pot, and turn on the element. Cook on a high heat till the pot starts boiling, then turn the heat down completely, and let the peppers cook till the rice is done. You need about 25 minutes.

8.40pm: The dishes were a breeze on this one, just rinse and dry (except for the one that contained the oily rice stuffing).

While we're waiting for the rice to cook, here's my original recipe for yemista on the stovetop. Now get the kids to have their baths, warm up their evening milk and get them ready for bed. If you don't have kids, well, you can enjoy a glass of wine now or have a quick shower...

8.45pm: See you soon, cupcakes!

9.15pm: My yemista are nearly done: they needed more liquid (something you always need to watch for). I'm letting them cook a little longer. It's a good idea to sway the pot to and fro so that the liquid tips into the peppers. Remember, this is tomorrow's lunch, so, no rush...

9.30pm: DONE! Good night, and enjoy the rest of the evening!

UPDATE: Just came home from work - didn't they do well?
Now all I need to do is the dishes...

©All Rights Reserved/Organically cooked. No part of this blog may be reproduced and/or copied by any means without prior consent from Maria Verivaki.