Cheats' Haniotiko Boureki

I ran into a couple of girlfriends in the supermarket the other day. By friends, I mean real friends, not the ad hoc kind we make on facebook. 'Ελα ντε that they are also on facebook and we are friends there too, which explains how they knew what I had been cooking recently.

"What a great boureki you made!" said one girlfriend.
"I wish I'd thought of making it like that!" said the other girlfriend.

Boureki is a very common favorite family recipe in Hania. (See my basic recipe here: http://www.organicallycooked.com/2007/09/boureki-courgette-potato-bake.html) While I was trying to remember how I made the last one we ate, and why it seemed to impress my friends so much, it occurred to me that I 'faked' it a little, by using 'cheap' ingredients.

"Did the family like it?" said one girlfriend.
"Did they notice the difference?" said the other girlfriend.

My husband noticed something different ("I prefer it without the pastry, the way you usually make it"), but my kids actually preferred it to my usual boureki, because it had a crunchier texture. But the family still doesn't know about the substitutions I made to the basic recipe, and they didn't seem to realise that I had made any. I don't intend to tell them, either. The boureki just looked different.

The whole issue could be phrased as a 'man' problem:
"My husband's always complaining that I don't buy mizithra much these days," said one girlfriend.
"When I refuse to mizithra, he goes out and buys it himself - and in bulk! Can you imagine what kind of money he's spending?" said the other girlfriend.

This will probably all sound like not so big a deal to most of my readers, but clearly for me and my girlfriends, it is. We can now draw some conclusions - among the three of us, despite our different age, socio-economic class, occupation and education, the three of us have many shared traits:
1. our families are quintessentially Greek, and their behavioural trends are more or less similar,
2. our husbands have fixed notions of what traditional Greek dishes are supposed to be made of, how they are supposed to look, what they are supposed to taste like,
3. our cooking habits are very similar,
4. we place a similar importance on ensuring that our families eat home-cooked healthy food,
5. our financial situations have changed over the last few years towards the worse.

It is this last point in particular that was really the basis of the conversation. We all know how to make a boureki, but it didn't occur to all of us how we can make it cheaply, without causing a domestic argument over the kitchen table. Differences in taste are immediately spotted by well trained eaters. Some are more open to variations, while others are not. (Look how well trained my family are, for instance: http://www.organicallycooked.com/2008/03/taste-sensation.html ) So you need to use all your powers of deceptiveness if you want to fool them.

It occurs to me that Cretan mizithra is difficult to find both in other parts of Greece and the rest of the world. So my latest version of the recipe for Haniotiko Boureki should prove very useful. Here are some useful tips on faking it:
- when you buy cheap ingredients, make sure to hide them in the fridge where your fussier members of the family can't see them,
- if some family members have a tendency to search the darker corners of the fridge (mine doesn't), then you should take off the packaging material and leave no label visible, repackaging the items in plain plastic bags,
- prepare meals when no one's looking,
- if anyone comments about how the meal feels/tastes/looks different to what it usually looks like, fake it even more by saying that you made it the same way that you usually do, by saying something like: "maybe the zucchini tastes different because it's out of season" (which it almost is at the moment), or "hm, the potatoes must be old" (they don't have a due by date, do they?). Just don't mention the substitutes (cheese in my boureki's case).
- if anyone insists that the boureki was made in a different way even though you say it wasn't, ask them to cook the next meal: you just provide them with the ingredients. This last one always works for me.

All over the western world, everybody's living standards are falling. So in effect, everyone is in crisis these days. Some of us are simply better at coping, like me an' my girlfriends. Just ask them.

I don't have much time these days for blog writing because I am incredibly busy at work (which basically means I am not unemployed, which is a good thing these days). I put up long posts on my facebook profile instead. Come and join me there if you like:  https://www.facebook.com/maria.verivaki 

©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.

Choices and decisions (Επιλογές και αποφάσεις)

It was getting rather late. Late for Londoners, that is. Most Greeks would be arriving at a restaurant after half-past nine (it was something like a quarter to ten) on a warm September evening, even if it were mid-week. The kebab house was typical of the style of London kebaberies: photos of Turkey, Aladdin's lamps hanging from the ceiling, arabesque red hues covering the walls, with a row of Tunisian wall tiles dividing them, and Greek music playing softly, all alluding to an exotic Mediterranean melange, which in reality does not exist.

"A table for five," I said to the black-garbed staff member who greeted us at the door. Black is the colour of service workers in London. The kebab house staff wore black shirts and black trousers, the staff at Primark where we would go shopping the next day also wore black, as did the staff at the Italian restaurant where we would have a quick lunch in between visiting exhibitions. Only the Muslim women staffing the museums and clothes stores weren't wearing black shirts and trousers - they wore black floor-length chadors instead, covering their whole body except their hands and faces.

The waiter waved his arm around the room and told us in his accented English (another London service worker's characteristic) to sit anywhere we wanted. The place seemed empty, save one occupied table. I felt embarrassed entering the restaurant so late, as if I would be keeping the waiters past their knock-off hour, but our host had warned us that some of the takeaways in the area might have already closed down by the time we got there, and he had chosen the closest eaterie to home. (I suppose we could have come earlier, but our previous view was rather exciting and we lost track of time.)



The table was already set, and the menu cars were brought to the table for our perusal. The word 'meze' featured prominently on the card, as it did on the paper placemat. Meze is used in many languages to mean the same thing. But when a Greek sees the word meze, it will be all Greek to him. And our Greek was at that point exploding from our mouths. We sounded just like a Greek TV news broadcast, where the news reader sits in the middle of the screen, with four little open windows on each corner with different people all speaking all at once. Our Greek chatter was immediately picked up by the waiter who came to take our orders.



Έλληνες είστε? he asked, with a big smile on his face. Standing before us was the epitome of Adonis (let's call him Adonis in this post): a tall, handsome, muscular young man, with an unmistakable fluent not-Cypriot Greek accent. He possessed the perfect proportions of a Greek statue, and in our eyes, his especially good looks and hospitable demeanour represented, precisely and unarguably, the archetype beauty of our country and people. Whatever trepidation I may have expressed initially about the restaurant before we entered it ('it's our first night in London and we're having a souvlaki?'), standing in front of us was proof that we could not have chosen a better place to dine. We felt, in our minds, as if we were in the home of a fellow Greek.

We got talking, in that Greek διασπορά way, where we all ask each other how we ended up in the non-Greek world. Indeed, everyone could tell a different story in answer to this question, even if they are from the same family. Most of us were born in Greece, some were born as Greeks in a faraway land, and one of us was a Greek who wasn't born Greek. Adonis was a Persian Greek. I recall a group of Persians of the Baha'i faith living in New Zealand; they spoke perfect Greek, having lived a few years in Athens after being granted refugee status there. I don't know how they arrived in Greece, but Adonis probably does, according to the stories his parents might have told them about how they came to Greece. Eventually some of the people Adonis' parents arrived with were given the right to travel and live and work in New Zealand. I am guessing that Adonis was born to refugees from the same stock as the people I had met in New Zealand, who never called themselves Iranians. They called themselves Persians.

Adonis had never been to Iran, and had only been in London for two years, as he explained:

"I was born in Athens. I lived in Greece all my life. My parents ran a small shop in an Athens suburb, selling car accessories and sound systems. And then the crisis came. So you can imagine how quickly we went out of business. No one was buying anything any longer. There were no jobs for any of us, my parents and my sister. My brother was still at school.

Potatoes

"Paying the rent suddenly became difficult. We were always worrying about being evicted. We were also worrying about the lack of food. If you live in the centre of Athens and you don't have any money, you won't have any food, either. We had put a little bit of money aside from our business. We never thought of savings as something you spend or fritter away on daily living expenses. So when things got really tough, we had to think of a plan. Staying in Athens was not an option. Staying in Greece wasn't an option either. We were urban people, and we couldn't make the transition to the rural parts. At any rate, jobs in the rural areas are always seasonal. We'd still have problems paying rent and bills.

Potato soup (with leek)

"Eventually, we made a decision to leave Greece. We had friends in London, and they told us that there were plenty of jobs there for anyone who wanted to work. We left as a family, the five of us. The most important thing for us was that we could remain together. We miss Athens, but we couldn't live there the way things were. We are all working now, and life isn't easy anywhere these days, but we are all working, we have a roof over our head, we aren't hungry.

Boiled potatoes

"For some time before we left Athens, we didn't have much food in the house, and we didn't want to spend our savings on daily living expenses, so we ate whatever we had in the house. At one point, all we had was potatoes. My mother cooked the potatoes in different ways. One day, we'd eat them boiled, the next day we'd eat them mashed, the next fried if we got hold of some oil. We had food, but we knew we were eating the same food all the time. We just got so sick of eating potatoes, but we could not do anything else about our predicament at the time. We just waited patiently for a better moment to come..."

Mashed potatoes

Adonis asked us where we were from. "Crete... oh, you're all better down there. There is tourism, there are jobs, you have food at your doorstep." We could not disagree. I asked him Adonis if he had been back, and he told us he had:

Potato cakes (with some leftover corn)

"I go back periodically for a visit. All my friends are there, I left a whole life behind in Athens. Sometimes the weather gets you down here. But it's hard everywhere and all places have their good sides and bad sides. It's hard... But it's also scary. Whenever I am returning to the UK, I get stopped at border control. My passport is Greek, but my name isn't, so I'm always asked to stay behind while they conduct their searches. I get delayed by about two hours before I get through..."

Fried potatoes

Adonis told us his story while simultaneously serving our meze (or more correctly, mezedes, in the Greek plural). "I told the chef to give you the works," he assured us, "I hope I haven't forgotten anything!" His smile was never absent while he spoke to us. Our appetite had of course diminished somewhat on hearing his story, but we did our best to eat everything up, to give a good impression, which was not really that hard, since the mezedes were very tasty.



I don't think we will ever forget Adonis. If we travel again to London, I intend to look him up. If I find him at the same place, that's a good sign. If he's left, that's even better. It means he will have advanced in his life and not remained stagnant.

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Chicken soup with broccoli (Κοτόσουπα με μπρόκολο)

Yes, broccoli again. I've uprooted all our broccoli plants, but I still have a freezer-shelf full of the stuff. It has occurred to me that we have been eating a lot of broccoli this winter, but this is for economy more than anything else. Instead of buying winter vegetables, I use our bumper crop of broccoli wherever I can. We have so much broccoli from the garden, that I par-boil a large pot of broccoli twice a week (yes, really), which gives me a chance to use it in different ways when I come home from work, eg stir-fries, soups, fritters, etc. I'm so glad I'm a really good cook, because I can cook broccoli this often and make sure that my while family still manages to enjoy their meal. We have had it in so many different forms, that they never complain. I'm that creative. Even the dog eats broccoli mixed in with her food. And if you know a thing or two about broccoli, it is regarded as a superfood.

The broccoli season is over - my neighbour's broccoli plants (the ones with the yellow flowers) are going  the way mine did and they need uprooting.

I knew that from a long time ago, when one of our Algerian students at the Institute researched the "Genetic and epigentic control of glucosinolates pathways synthesis in broccoli", whatever that means (I proofread a lot of stuff which I don't always understand), a thesis which contained a lot of research on the benefits of broccoli in the diet. Since then, broccoli is described in the internet press as a nutritional show stopper, an anti-cancer agent, a tumour reducer, an age suppresor, a vitamin-packed agent with more Vitamin C than an orange, among others. Well, I'm glad to hear all that, because we really do eat a lot of broccoli, and it just might help us all to keep up our good health, now that Greece has no public health system (just yet, apart from hospitals). We don't lead the kind of life that gives us the privilege of making proclamations like "I'm President of the United States, and I'm not going to eat any more broccoli!" like George Bush did. But lucky for us, broccoli keeps us healthy.

This broccoli soup was made on the go, with little time to spare for 'real' cooking; I was harvesting and processing celery for the freezer, at the same time as picking spinach from among the tall and rather overgrown nettles that have now surrounded all the spinach plants. But don't take my soft whinge seriously: the winter garden is really easy to maintain. The plants seem to grow by themselves, they rarely need much care, and all I do is harvest. It's really not as difficult as it may sound. I just wish I could be doing something else instead, like work on the project, which is underway - slowly, slowly...

I made this amazing soup last Friday, despite my aching bones, after a very tiring week, as I thought about the three-day weekend that we are now in the middle of (it's Kathara Deftera tomorrow). Perhaps everyone loved it so much because it was a cold night, but I have a feeling that they liked it because it was really delicious. it has a pungent taste because fo teh way I used the garlic. Normally I cook it in some way, eg sauteeing in oil before being added to a meal. In this recipe, the garlic is not cooked at all, so it has a strong but fresh flavour.

You need:
4 chicken backs, with necks
4-5 medium potatoes
about 3 cups of broccoli cut into bite sized individual heads
2 large cloves of garlic
salt, pepper and oregano


Boil the chicken backs, broccoli and peeled potatoes in a large pot of water, till the potatoes are soft. Remove the chicken, broccoli and potatoes from the pot. Puree 3 potatoes with the garlic and some of the stock water (strained to remove impurities from the chicken) in a blender. Pour the puree into another pot. Strain all the remaining liquid into the pot with the puree. Add the chicken meat (which you shredded from the chicken backs and necks), and all the seasonings. Chop the remaining potatoes and all the broccoli into small pieces. Mix well to form a blended soup. Heat through.

Serve the soup piping hot, with crusty bread. It will not make you feel poor as you think that you are cooking again with broccoli which you grew yourself; it will make you feel somewhat superior, having so much superfood at your disposal.

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Broccoli and potato hotpot (Μπρόκολο και πατάτες με σάλτσα)

Broccoli is a sweet winter vegetable which can be used in a variety of ways; it can be fried, baked, steamed or boiled. We have been eating HEAPS of broccoli this season, and we never get bored of it. I cook it with varying flavours - it goes very well in Asian cuisine, especially stir fries. Here is a really easy broccoli recipe to prepare and cook. It gives broccoli a Greek flavour and warms you up in the cold weather (we've been having lots of that lately).

You need:

a medium-large head of broccoli (about 600g), cut into florets - you can also use sprouting broccoli  

10-12 small potatoes, peeled (if they are of various sizes, cut them in half to make them even-sized) 

2 medium carrots, peeled and cut in chunks

1 tablespoon of tomato puree

1 large fresh tomato, grated 

1 large onion, roughly chopped

1-2 cloves of garlic, finely minced

1/2 wineglass of olive oil

salt and pepper (and oregano, optional)

Heat the oil in a wide deep pot, and cook the onion and garlic till translucent without burning. Add the broccoli, carrots and potatoes, and stir well to coat all the vegetables in oil. Let them cook for 2-3 minutes on high heat, stirring just enough to stop them sticking to the bottom of the pot. Then add the tomatos and seasonings, with a cup of water (about 250ml). The water should not completely cover the vegetables. Turn the heat down, cover the pot with a lid, and let the vegetables cook till tender (about 30 minutes). Check the pot from time to time to ensure that there are enough liquids, and stir lightly so that the vegetables at the bottom of the pot rise to the top. Take care not to break the potatoes. Serve warm.

This meal tastes even better the next day. It can be re-heated without a fuss. Although it is a vegan dish, it is easily adapted to a vegetarian one. The leftovers can be placed in an ovenproof dish and grilled slightly to give a crispy edge to the vegetables, and/or some cheese can be placed on top. A crusty loaf of bread is vital to mop up the juices in the pot, which are too precious to discard. 

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My son's first roast

My kids are starting to take an interest in cooking meals. My daughter has always been a good eater so this is no surprise for me, but my son, who is a picky eater, is now also showing signs of wanting cook his main meals. I think he likes this because he knows that if he shows willingness to cook, I am willing to allow him to cook what he chooses. He won't cook beans or greens (neither are particularly popular with most kids). So to get them interested in cooking, you have to allow kids to cook healthy things they like.

I bought some chicken pieces to let him cook his first roast. Roast chicken and potatoes sounds so simple:

"Place chicken in a baking dish, chop potatoes and place around chicken, season with salt, pepper and oregano, pour some olive oil, lemon juice and water into the pan and place in the oven. Allow to cook, covered, in a moderate oven for two hours. Remove the cover, turn the heat up high and allow the food to turn golden and crusty on the top."

For a child, more instrcutions are needed for all those things we adults take for granted:
- Wash the chicken pieces by rubbing them with your hand under a running tap to get rid of bones, blood and other impurities.
 - To peel a potato, hold the potato in one hand and the peeler in the other. Then place your thumb (from the hand with the potato peeler) at the bottom of the potato and the peeler at the top, and firmly run the peelr down the potato to remove the skin.
- When seasoning food, you have to mix things with your hands to coat the ingredients well, otherwise the seaosnings will stay in one place.
- Good food needs time to cook. If you don't prepare things early, you won't have your dinner on time.

I got a lot of satisfaction when I saw his smile after we took the chicken out of the oven to see how it was cooking. "This looks good," he said. I feel sure that this is a sign that he will want to repeat the experience.

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Boureki for the freezer (Μπουρέκι για την κατάψυξη)

My most popular posts have remained stable over the years that I have been writing this blog (which is five this month - happy blogoversary to me!): fasolada (bean soup), Roses (a story about the chocolate brand) and how to freeze aubergine (see sidebar on the right-hand side). The latter has become the most popular post this month, given that it's summer and the aubergine season is in full swing.

I freeze everything that grows in our summer garden: eggplant, zucchini, peppers, tomato, beans, corn and herbs (as well as winter garden produce, in season); my biggest forte is freezing a meal that I have made from such produce, at a stage where it is ready to cook without defrosting. My freezing techniques have been learnt by experimentation, mainly borne out of the desire to preserve a great amount of excess produce. Some of my techniques sound quite unusual, and they probably aren't well documented in other sources, because they seem to go against what we take for granted.

Eggplants, like potatoes, turn brown when their peel is removed and their flesh is revealed. You need to work very quickly to stop this from happening when you want to freeze them. If they are left to go brown, they are useless in terms of freezing. The most important aspect of freezing any vegetable is to freeze it at its freshest, in the same form that it will be cooked when it is to be used.

Boureki, a Chania specialty containing potatoes, zucchini and mizithra cheese, with herbs and olive oil added, is a self-crusting pie. I freeze it at the point where it is assembled in the tin with all its ingrdients, except the olive oil, which is poured over the top. Some cooks make boureki with the addition of pastry, but I never do this - it's too time-consuming.

The tins go into the freezer at the ready-to-cook stage - all they need when I decide to cook them is to pour some olive oil over them. Because I freeze a lot of boureki every summer (6-8 family-sized tins), I place them very carefully, one by one, in the freezer. I never freeze one tin on top of another - they will stick together (even when the bottom tin is frozen solid and you place a fresh tin in top). They can be stacked on top of one another once the tins have all frozen. This goes for all my pie-type freezer meals: moussaka, pastitsio and spinach pies.

Sometimes I mix the ingredients together in a large mixing bowl, other times I make the boureki in layers. At any rate, the potatos don't discolour. The thin slices of frozen potato are visible in the photo. To avoid freeze-burn, it's better to keep them in a plastic bag.

When it's time to cook the boureki, I take a tin out of the freezer, pour 1/2 cup of olive oil over it and stick it in the oven - WITHOUT DEFROSTING! That way, the potatoes do not have time to discolour. The boureki cooked from frozen does not need extra water added to it - it will have accumulated enough liquids from the freezing process.

Boureki is always beter the next day, as Laurie says, who made boureki in Alaska with a mixture of feta and ricotta cheese, as mizithra is unavaible there. My frozen boureki is always made to be eaten in this way: I cook it in the evening (last year I was cooking them in the wood-fired oven), and it is left overnight to set. The next day, it comes out of the tin like a piece of pie. It makes a very fresh nourishing meal in the winter when everyone comes home from school or work very tired, and there are other activities to attend to in the evening, leaving no time to cook meals 'from scratch'!

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Cheap 'n' Greek 'n' frugal: Gardener's end-of-season delight ('Ολα του κήπου)

We're in the middle of renovating our house, so most of the time, I am surrounded by sights like this one:

According to my husband, due to the extremely heavy winter we faced last year, the problems in the construction of our 25-year-old house became apparent this year. It rained so much, that the iron-reinforced support beams cracked and the concrete and stucco work had to be redone, now in the summer when it's very dry, so that the rain won't seep intot he house this winter and make the walls mouldier than they already are. But the house won't be painted or redone indoors - until next summer, we will have to be content with a clean exterior while the interior mould stays on the walls, to give the bad weather a chance to for us to see if we actually did re-concrete the exterior adequately.

During times like these, one needs to be able to cook easily and thriftily - renovations are not cheap during this time, when we are being asked to pay a new and/or high tax every month till Christmas...
Like yesterday's meal, today's came straight out of the garden.

The bean stalks produced a ton of snake beans this season. Most of these I shelled, adding some coloured bell peppers, onion, garlic and potatoes, which were all cooked in my rich spicy tomato sauce. The stew took a couple of hours on low heat to cook.

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Cheap 'n' Greek 'n' frugal: Ugly ducklings

The price of crisps may rise soon in the UK, if it doesn't stop raining; the wet weather is affecting the potato harvest. This is devastating news indeed - during the Olympic games, no doubt many packets of crisps will be bought, and if the potato harvest fails, this will result in a shortage of the all-time favorite crispy snack in the long-term.

The potato harvest in Greece this year is anything but a failure. Beautiful potatoes are making their way to the fruit and vege stands everywhere in my town. I am still surviving on a gift from my uncles: they gave me a large bag full of medium-sized potatoes, good for chipping, and a crate full of baby potatoes, which they used to feed their animals with, but now keep aside for me, because they know I have more patience when it comes to peeling them. These dirty little babes are some of the ugliest edible vegetables you may have seen in your life, and they really are a pain to prepare for eating. Few people realise that by removing so much dirt from their diet, they are prone to more allergies, exacerbates by the over-use of hand sanitisers, wet wipes and Caesarean births:

"Nature’s dirt floor has been replaced by tile; our once soiled and sooted bodies and clothes are cleaned almost daily; our muddy water is filtered and treated; our rotting and fermenting food has been chilled; and the cowshed has been neatly tucked out of sight. While these improvements in hygiene and sanitation deserve applause, they have inadvertently given rise to a set of truly human-made diseases."

This kind of food is not available for sale in places where hygiene plays an important role. Dirt clinging to one's food is regarded as below certain standards, hazardous to touch, full of bacteria. But potatoes need to be dug out of the earth, so somebody must have touched that food to get it to a place where it would be washed and sanitised, then prepared in all sorts of non-toxic (as the wording will probably state on the packet) chemical mixtures, before it was processed into something that is edible and extremely clean.  

My dirty little spuds are excellent for roasting (peeled) or boiling (unpeeled) whole, without cutting them. Because they were covered in a lot of dirt when they were given to me, I can't roast them whole unpeeled. But if you scrub their exterior with a soft sponge...

... place them in a pot of water, ...

... and boil them till tender in the middle, ...

 ... you will be able to peel them effortlessly, and will end up with a beautiful soft clean potato, perfect for your summer (or monsoon, depending on your whereabouts) salads.


This heavenly salad contains a simple mix of boiled baby potatoes, a sliced onion, some banana peppers and a bed of purslane, dressed in olive oil and salt.. Everything has come from a private garden - the amount of money that I would have needed to buy these ingredients from a store has been spent instead in the time that I needed to process the ingredients.

*** *** ***

Speaking of crisps, Greek preferences mainly tend towards the plain salted variety, or flavoured with oregano. Salt and vinegar is sold in multi-national supermarket chains, but it's not really a Greek preference. A flavour which is very slowly catching on is cheese and onion (my personal favorite, marketed by Crunchips), while barbecue flavour (whatever that means) is usually the third option available at the supermarket. Then there are also the quirky flavours like feta cheese, tomato, tzatziki and Mediterranean herbs (etc), but they never really last long on the shelves, often replaced other quirky new flavours, as in the international market - who would really want to eat fish and chips, chili chocolate or squirrel-flavoured crisps?! Apart from Greek brands, you can also get Lays, which are often on sale, but I find that they are too flaky and don't crush too easily; while Ruffles (also a Lays product) are thicker and chunkier, they don't have the right combination of taste and salt that I want in a potato crisp, like Kettles and Boxer crisps, which aren't sold in Greece (my personal favorites).

But crisps are also easy to make at home, and when the potatoes are as good (albeit dirty) as the ones I have access to, they are a good cheap alternative to store-bought crisps.With just four not-so-medium potatoes and a mandolin slicer, I made enough crisps for the whole family.

 

You generally need one potato per person, thinly sliced. Pat each slice dry (to make crispier crisps), place in batches in very very hot oil, one by one, and watch the crisps form. Drain in a colander with large holes (don't place them on absorbent paper - they will simply soak up more oil and lose their crispness), then flavour as you want - I did the Greek classic salt and oregano, and served them with tzatziki. Now there's no need to worry about a shortage of crisps. And how much does one potato and some olive oil cost you? Much much less than a bag of store-bought crisps (which are slightly more expensive in Greece than they are in Northern Europe).

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French fries or Vlaamse frites? (Τηγανιτές πατάτες της Βόρειας Ευρώπης)

During our recent travels, we got as far north to try the famous Vlaamse frites, the Belgian version of French fries (which we ended up eating in Amsterdam instead of somewhere in Brussels, due to the circumstances we found ourselves in at the time).

Vlaamse frites in Amsterdam, from the Manneken Pis outlet near the Central Station. The cone is a traditional way to serve fried potatoes in Northern Europe. 

Most of the ready-cut potatoes for frying or oven-baking are not actually cut as thickly as Vlaamse frites - most of the time, they resemble French fries instead, if being used for frying, or potato wedges, if they are destined for the oven. Vlaamse frites are not so well known as French fries.

The tastiest fried potatoes are those that have been fried twice. My parents owned a fish and chip shop, and throughout my teens, I watched my father preparing potatoes for deep-frying in the vats. Vlaamse frites (apparently the original French fries) are closer to the kind of fried potatoes we used to cook at the shop - thick cut, double-fried, in beef tallow. After the fat had been used two or three times, my father would empty the vats and store the used fat in large drums which were then towed away by a company that worked in the processing of such products.

Naturally, I don't use beef fat in my cooking; we only use olive oil because it's cheap and plentiful here in Crete, not to mention healthier. You can make really good French fries or Vlaamse frites by double-frying freshly cut potatoes and using olive oil.

Although I don't own many single-use kitchen gadgets, since our Northern Europe holiday, I invested in a poffertje pan, a waffle maker, and just recently, a potato chipper. This little gadget is something I picked up for a friend in the UK (after he couldn't find one there), so I bought one for myself too. It is appropriate for making French fries which are cut into little sticks...

These potatoes have been cut by hand. My very small friteuse - a remnant of my single days - is perfect for cooking a single serving.

... but they don't make good Vlaamse frites, which are cut more thickly. I prefer Vlaamse frites to French fries, as they are closer to the size of Greek freshly-cut potatoes for frying.

Patates tiganites (fried potatoes), sprinkled with oregano, served at a souvlatsidiko in Rethimno.

So far, I haven't found a potato chipper that cuts fries more thickly, but the thought of filling my kitchen cupboards with more single-use objects makes me feel uncomfortably materialistic. I shall just continue to cut them by hand.

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Cheap 'n' greek 'n' frugal: Potato mash (Πατάτα πουρέ)

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.

At the supermarket in a small town in Holland, I was astounded to see so many packets of potatoes in the fridge section. The potatoes were all ready to be cooked. No dirt, no skin, no eyes, just pure white raw potato gleaming in the packet, cut in all shapes and sizes. Similarly, in the home of my London friends, the only potatoes to be found were the bagged ready to heat and eat type.

If you peel potatoes and don't place them in water, they lose their white colour. The surface will turn a dirty grey and the potatoes will look rotten and wholly unappetising. Something must have been placed in those packagings (or the potatoes will have undergone some kind of treatment) that allows them to remain lily white.

As yet, I haven't got myself round to picking up bags of ready to cook potatoes. It doesn't sound natural or even cost-efficient. Since the Potato Movement started in Greece, the potato has dropped in price considerably. Nevertheless, Cretan supermarkets stock mainly ready to cook potatoes, some in the form of fresh boil-in-the-bag (cleaned, with their jackets, from France), as well as frozen potatoes cut as chips that are ready to fry or seasoned potato chunks that go into the oven as is. Potato mash powder is also widely available, even though potato mash is very easy to make.

I had a delicious mash flavoured with spicy horseradish mustard at the Ladywell Tavern in London, with leek and onion slivers incorporated into the mash, which I wanted to recreate in my own kitchen.

Gravy is not a Greek culinary phenomenon. My rudimentary gravy was made with a piece of leftover lamb roast, mashed into a water-and-oil mix. The sausages  

You need:
600g of potatoes (~ 0.30 cents)
1 teaspoon of mustard (optional - you can buy really good cheap Greek ones now)*
1-2 glugs of olive oil*
salt and pepper*
a few slices of crisp-fried onion*

Mustard made in GR, NL and F (left to right)

Peel the potatoes (for a cleaner whiter look to your mash; if you boil them with the jackets on, the potatoes will discolour slightly on the surface). Cut into even medium-sized chunks and place in a pot with plenty of water. Make sure there are at least 5cm of water above the top of the potatoes. Boil till tender.

When the potatoes are cooked, drain them well and place them in a bowl. Add the oil, mustard and seasonings, and blend all the ingredients with a fork till the mixture is smooth and lump-free. Finally, mix in the onion.

Bread isn't really necessary with this meal, but bread is never missing from the traditional Greek home. While in Germany, we bought some Krakow sausages (the packet contained 5 for €5.95). 

Mash can be eaten on its own, drizzled with some lemon juice and olive oil. It makes a good evening meal. My kids especially like it after they come home from their basketball sessions. As a lunch meal, it's perfect with sausages (LIDL sells good quality cheap Greek-made German-style sausages). And some more crispy fried onion (slice them in thin rounds and cook them in a frying pan with very very little olive oil, stirring constantly until they become crispy).   

Total cost of the meal for four people: about €3, together with the sausages; about 75 cents per serving.

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Frugal frying (Οικονομικό τηγάνισμα)

I never deep fry anything. Although Greeks do often own a 'friteza' (friteuse - domestic deep fryer with wire basket), I don't bother with such devices, because of the waste involved. Too much olive oil will remain in the fryer, which inevitably means that you will be re-using the same oil that has already been heated on previous occasions (it may contain odors from different foods), or you will throw it out.

We use only olive oil in all our cooking, and it is never thrown out. So when I need to fry something, I prefer to shallow fry only. I use a small frying pan, which means that you won't use a lot of olive oil, even when I need to fry a lot of something, like fish. Everything is fried in small batches, which means a lot more work in the kitchen, but there is little waste. This is especially good with fish, because the oil that remains after frying fish can't be re-used due to the heavy smell it's acquired. The remnants of my frying oil are used to coat bread or pasta for the dog's food. So in effect, nothing is thrown away.

The other good thing with frying in small batches is that the food fries more quickly and more evenly: when frying, it is always important to remember that adding too many items to be fried at once into the hot oil cools it down, so the food intended for frying ends up soaking a lot of olive oil and 'boiling' in it, rather than frying quickly. As the oil runs out in the pan, you simply top it up and wait until it has become smoking hot - it doesn't take long, as the oil that remained in the pan was already hot. 

I recently made a very frugal batter for frying fish (bakaliaro - salt cod), using a simple beer and flour recipe with a little salt. I was cooking partly from memory, as I remembered how my parents used to fry fish in their fish and chip shop in New Zealand. My father would make a large batch of batter (using water and baking powder instead of beer) in a tall deep plastic bucket. My mother would fry hundreds of fish fillets every day which my father had sliced into small pieces from a large filleted piece of fish with the bone still intact.

The consistency of the batter was thin and runny. When my mother dipped the floured pieces of fish into it, she'd then wipe them down the sides of the bowl to get rid of the excess, and then dip the fish into a deep vat full of hot beef dripping. This was all done very quickly, so that about 40 pieces of fish were frying at the same time in the vat. Everything ended up being fried twice: once to pre-cook, and another time when the customer ordered it. It sounds unhealthy, but it was very tasty, and most customers would come only once a week for fish and chips, so they weren't really eating it that often.

To  make a light runny batter for frying fish (or other vegetables), use 1 cup of beer to 1 cup of flour, and add desired seasonings. Mix the batter quickly until it contains no lumps (you can use a mixer for this if you want). If it feels thick, add water and keep stirring. The batter will be ready to use after a quarter of an hour. 

To cook chips in the oven, cut chips into an even size. Place the chips in a bowl with some salt and as much olive oil as you prefer. Mix everything very well using your hands. Then transfer the chips onto a baking tray, sitting them side by side, preferably without touching each other. Pour any excess oil remaining in the bowl over the chips. Cook in a moderate oven for 20 minutes, then use a sturdy pancake turner to turn the potatoes over and cook on the other side. It needs to be metallic because the potatoes may stick to the baking tray and will need to be scraped off, so a floppy silicone one will not work.


My fish and chip meal tasted quite different to what I remember of fish and chips, because of the olive oil I used for frying both the fish and the potatoes. I didn't have enough time to fry both the potatoes and the fish at the same time, so the potatoes were oven-fried, which uses much less oil and doesn't involve any fuss and bother, especially with cleaning up afterwards.

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Cheap 'n' Greek 'n' frugal: Pommes frites (Πατάτες τηγανιτές)

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.  

Potatoes used to cost around 70 cents a kilo. But lately, people have been able to secure them for as little as 25 cents a kilo, straight from the grower, after a movement started by a group of farmers in Nevrokopi, an area well known for potato production. They decided to cut out the middlemen who were buying their produce for a low price and selling on to the retail sector who sold the potato at often three times the original price. Through the internet, they advertised and sold their product. Consumers were able to buy the quantity they wanted, print their receipt of payment, and pick up the potatoes at a scheduled delivery point by showing the receipt.

The potato movement (known as Το Κίνημα της Πατάτας in Greece) also paved the way for other producers to sell their produce directly to the consumer, cutting out the middlemen, who then had to fight for their own place within the system: to this end, they claimed that the products being sold directly through the producers were of low quality, uncertified, and therefore unsafe for human consumption.

When I produce my own olive oil, or I buy it straight from another producer known quite well to me, and I store it fresh in our basement, the last thing I need to worry about is its quality. I don't need to test it for being organic or chemical-free or pollution-free, since I know where it's produced. I know it's the best; the same thing goes for fresh meat from a small-scale local farm, my own home-grown vegetables and anything I forage or am given by friends and relatives.



The last time I bought potatoes at the supermarket, I found varying prices: potatoes from Nevrokopi were being sold at 35 cents (a direct result from the potato movement), while potatoes form Cyprus (Spounta variety) were as high as 1 euro/kilo. I chose the 70cent/kilo variety; everyone is allowed to choose what they want to buy and eat, according to their pockets and tastes. That's what the free market is all about.

The lower cost of potatoes now makes home-made fried potatoes a very cheap and Greek and frugal meal. Not that it ever wasn't in our house, with our own olive oil supplies. Admittedly, fried potatoes are just a little messy to produce, but the end result is worth it.
 

If you really can't be bothered frying anything in a pan, you can oven-fry freshly cut potato sticks, using much less olive oil than you need for frying, and they still taste good too. I sometimes cook them in this way to save on cleaning-up time. But nothing beats home-cooked fried potato chips in olive oil. Serve with a garden-fresh salad, and some home-brewed wine. Cheap, Greek, frugal, vegan - and delicious.

For a round of fries for four people, you need: 
up to a kilo of potatoes, peeled and sliced into chips (~35-70 cents)
enough olive oil to nearly cover the potatoes in the frying pan*
salt*  

Wash the chips to drain away the amylase from the potato. When the water starts to come out clear, drain the potatoes and pat them dry. Add the salt (unless you prefer to salt them after they are cooked). Heat the olive oil till it is smoky hot, then add the chips and allow to become crispy and golden. They will need to be turned once so as not to stick to each other. Preferably use a gas element; whatever you do, don't cook them in a deep fryer.

For oven fried potatoes, lay the drained dried chips on a large baking pan. Drizzle olive oil (and salt) over them, and then lay them in one layers, taking car that they don't touch each other. Cook on high heat till the potatoes become crispy and golden.
 
Total cost of meal for 4 people: about 1 euro; that's 0.25 cents per person. 

I've heard that the Belgians invented the pommes frites. Hmm, I wonder if beef fat can beat olive oil...


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Cheap 'n' Greek 'n' frugal: Stifado (Οικονομικό στιφάδο)

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. 

Making a beef stifado in Greece illustrates how one country's frugal meals may actually form another country's luxury meals. Meat is quite expensive these days, especially beef which now costs over 10 euro a kilo for Greek-raised beef, and about the same for French beef (and a little more than that for Dutch beef), so I wouldn't call a beef dish frugal in Greek terms. Since we aren't vegetarians, we still indulge in the classic meat-based meal for Sunday lunch. The trick to making a frugal meal out of expensive meat is to find ways to stretch the dish and keep it filling and tasty.

Classic Greek stifado is basically a stew made from chunks of (usually) beef or rabbit, slow-cooked in a light tomato/wine sauce, with spices and lots of onions. I usually make this dish with rabbit, which I'm given every now and then by farming folk living in the area... but I haven't been given one in a while. I made stifado recently with some Greek beef, which takes a long time to stew to make it very tender. You can use a pressure cooker if you have one; I let my stifado slow-cook for about three hours on the element, just checking it constantly to make sure there are enough liquids in the pot.

To make stifado frugal, I cook a bit more than I need for a Sunday meal, so I can have some leftovers to use in a more frugal meal the next day (serves 4-6)
1 large onion, finely chopped* 
1-2 fat cloves of garlic, finely chopped*
a few glugs of olive oil*
1kg beef cut up into golfball-sized chunks (~11 euro)
half a wineglass of home-brewed wine*
~150g tomato sauce* (a third of a store-bought tin costs about ~30 cents)

2 bay leaves*
1 teaspoon of allspice berries*
salt and pepper*
20 small onions (~50 cents)

Pour some oil into a shallow heavy-based pan, and cook the large onion and garlic till translucent. Add the beef chunks and brown them well all over. Then pour in the wine, and let the beef cook in that (uncovered) for about 20 minutes. Add the tomato sauce, spices and seasonings, together with a cup of water and turn the heat down to the lowest point. Cover the pot and let the beef cook for about 45 minutes. It will need to be checked at this point, and you will add more water to it, but never too much: I added two more cups of water at regular intervals. If you add the water altogether, it will feel like the beef was boiled rather than stewed. Test the beef for doneness by checking if a knife goes through a chunk without too much trouble. As soon as you think you are nearing this point, add the small onions (peeled, with a small cross incised on their root side) and let them sit on top of the meat, half soaking in water. Close the lid and allow the beef to continue to cook until it is done.

Stifado is traditionally served with fries in Greece, but only with freshly-cut potatoes - don't use pre-cooked ones because you'll ruin the taste. You'll need about 4-5 medium-sized potatoes, cut into French fries and (~70 cents for the potatoes) some olive oil for frying.*

Serve 3-5 pieces of beef and a 3-4 onions per person, sitting in a good amount of sauce on the plate, and place a few French fries next to the meat. Serve the stifado with a plain green salad. Keep about 3-4 chunks of meat (with sauce and onions) for tomorrow's frugal meal...

Total cost of meal: about 13 euro; 2.50-3 euro per person.

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Bedtime story (Πες μας μπαμπά μια ιστορία)

"The past is a different country; people did things differently then." The Go-Between by LP Hartley.

I never lived in a village when I was your age, I always lived in the town, and I never lived in a big house like you did, I always lived in the old cold dilapidated houses that my parents used to rent, so it was a dream of mine to build a big warm house one day and live comfortably in it, like you do. And because I didn’t have any brothers and sisters like you do, I felt very lonely. So I would look forward to the end of the week on Friday, and I'd get all my homework done, and I'd be a good boy because then I'd be allowed to go to the village in Fournes to stay with Yiayia in her house. Every Saturday morning, my father would put me on the bus by myself and send me off to Yiayia where I would stay for the weekend. The bus would stop outside the kafeneia, and Yiayia was always there, waiting to pick me up. I'd always tell her that it wasn't necessary for her to wait for me, and that I could get to the house by myself, it was only a short walk, but she was always waiting for me at my stop, and when I got off the bus, we'd walk back to her house together.

"It's traumatic to rub old wounds, but if you don't know where you came from, you won't know what heights you can reach."

 

This photographic video sequence depicts scenes from my husband's family's roots in the village of Fournes, both past and present. The narrative is told in a very old-fashioned style, but the photos depict very well the old grandeur that once characterised this village, the last one located on flat terrain on the road to Samaria Gorge before it begins to bend and turn.
Segment 5.00 shows a war memorial with all the names of the villagers of the region who died in WW2.
Segment 5.23-5.35 shows two brothers whose bodies my mother-in-law first found in a ditch, killed by the Nazis.
Segment 7.07 shows what malnourished Cretan children during WW2, after all the island's food was confiscated by the Nazis.

My cousins lived in the village too, so I'd have someone to play with whenever I visited. There was never any shortage of company, and time flew by so quickly that before I knew it, it was time to go back home. I was a little older than D, but just a little younger than G, so we all played together in Yiayia's yard. It always felt like a big yard to me because I was so small then, just like you, but the house was very big, it had many rooms on two different floors, so it was really like two houses in one. That's where G and D lived with their parents, my uncle and aunt. We played hide'n'seek in the different rooms, we played games in the yard, we visited other children in the neighbourhood, we kept ourselves warm by the open fire in the winter, we went for walks to the orchards, we picked fruit straight off the trees and ate them there and then. I loved going to the village. It was my second home, and all my cousins lived there, like most still do now.

My husband's mother's family lived in this house; below the house is a basement, which was his grandmother's home. The entrance opened to the kitchen and stables, where the hearth (παρασιά) was located. Another small room, with an indoor staircase, lead to the οντά, the top room of a Cretan house (οντά is a Turkish word); to get there, you open the hatch door (known as a ρεμπάρτα - probably another Turkish word).

In the evening, whenever I went to stay with her, Yiayia always cooked a batch of fried potatoes in the parasia especially for me. Potatoes fried in olive oil in the parasia taste so good, better than how we cook them on a gas stove. I don't know why they tasted so good. My parents used to say that the air was better there, and it gave the fried potatoes a better taste. The parasia also kept the house warm, because in the past, winters were much colder than what they are now. So the fire cooked our food and kept us warm. Yiayia's house didn't have electricity when I was very young. Even when electricity came to the village, she still preferred to use a λυχναράκι for light. She'd light one up with olive oil when it got dark. There was no television, so at night, we'd all go to sleep. There wasn't anything else to do after that, anyway.

The παρασιά is usually an outdoor fire used for cooking, although it can also be found indoors as in the photo set above.

At night, I slept in the οντά, which is what we called the upper room of a village house, if it had a second floor, and most did. Some houses had stairs inside the house to get to the oda, but Yiayia's house had indoor stairs. To get to the top floor, we had to climb up the stairs and then open a hatch, which is where Yiayia had her bedroom. She always told me to sleep on the bed, while she slept on the floor, but I never wanted to sleep on the bed. I loved sleeping on the floor in her house. I never remember it as uncomfortable. It's just like how I sleep in the mitato when I go away for hunting weekends in the mountains.

Mother and son

One day, I was playing with my cousin S at his house. S was born and raised in the village. He was a bit of a rough boy, as most boys are when they grow up in the countryside, where there aren't a lot of people, and the neighbours aren't close by, and you can shout all you like, because nobody will hear you. S was also a big boy, he was a bit stronger than I was. On that day, we played a little rough, and he ended up throwing mud at me. I didn't get to throw any mud back onto him, because, as I said, he was bigger than me, and when he squeezed my hand, it felt like he was kneading it into bread dough, really!

Cousin S, watching me take his photo at the Botanical Park Restaurant on the village road out of Fournes.

So after he threw the mud at me, I left his house and went back to Yiayia's, and I remember G came out and saw me crying, and when she asked me why I was crying, I told her that S threw mud at me, and I got my trousers dirty. I always liked to keep my clothes clean, because in those days, we didn't have a lot of clothes like you do in your wardrobes, and we didn't even have washing machines to keep them clean regularly. My mother – your yiayia – had to wash all my clothes by hand. So when I got my clothes dirty, I got very upset about it because I didn't have any other clothes to change in. G was very good to me, just like she still is to all of us, and she told me she’d clean my trousers for me. But I told her I wouldn't take them off because I had no others to wear. But she said it didn't matter, she'd give me some clothes to wear, and she'd make sure my trousers dried very quickly. So I took off my trousers and G took them and began washing them. Then D came in carrying a skirt. She told me to wear it, because neither of the girls had any trousers. Girls never wore trousers in those days in the village. So I had to wear a skirt until my trousers were dry! G washed my trousers and hung them out to dry. D went outside to play in the yard and told me to come out with her, but I said to her "Are you nuts?" If I went out to the yard to play with her, S might come by and see me wearing a skirt, and then I'd be dead meat, so I stayed in the house that day.

My husband's yiayia cooked like my children's yiayia still does, even now that she's in her eighties.

On Sunday morning I’d go to church with Yiayia and then when we came home, we’d eat roast meat with potatoes which she'd cooked in a wood-fired oven. That was my favorite meal of the week - it still is! - even more delicious than the fried potatoes we'd have the night before. On Sunday afternoon, I’d take the bus back to the town, and go back home to my parents. And then, for the rest of the week, I always looked forward to Friday, so that I could go back to Yiayia's house and play with my cousins at the weekend.

As promised today, the winner of the CSN gift voucher. I used random.org to generate a number from 1 to 9, and the lucky winner is No. 7, Debbie! Thanks to all for taking part.

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