Curried cauliflower (Κουνουπίδι με κάρυ)

When you grow your own vegetables, there will be many times when you realise you cannot keep up with the growth rate of your own garden. Even if you live in a country where the cool climate isn't conducive to gardening, what you plant will often ripen at the same time, so that for a long time you will have nothing to harvest, and suddenly you find yourself giving it away.

When you allow ripened/mature crops to keep growing in your garden, you are allowing the soil to keep feeding them, which isn't good for the soil. It works in a similar way to obesity: the soil's nutrients are sucked up by the overgrown crops, so that the plants start to spoil in some way, and the soil becomes poorer. The best thing to do is to harvest crops when they are ready and store them appropriately.

Only the broccoli head is harvested. I watched this field  (and at least two more) full of broccoli over the past 2-3 weeks forming new broccoli heads, similar to the sprouting broccoli variety, but they were never harvested because few people here attach value to these delicious morsels.

We plant too many broccoli and cauliflower to eat them all ourselves, so I often give away or swap produce with friends (one gives me freshly laid eggs from her chickens). But the plants still grow too quickly to be used at their prime. This is especially noticeable with the cauliflower and broccoli plants: the heads are now blossoming. This doesn't render them inedible - they just become more fibrous and less tasty.

At any rate, growing plants in your garden is different from growing plants for the market. In your own garden, you won't use the same kinds of chemicals that are used for market-grown produce. Overgrown market-grown produce doesn't sell, but garden-grown produce is still useable. It may simply need a longer cooking time than what you would normally cook it for if it hadn't been allowed to overgrow.

Our cauliflower is looking a bit like this at the moment:

Very pretty, still tasty, but not what you'd expect a grower to be selling you! The long flower-like stems are not the tastiest specimens, but they can still be used for cooking, although they will need a longer cooking time. They are too fibrous to eat raw.

About a week ago, I picked one that hadn't quite got to the blossom stage:

From this photo, you can see that it was ready to get to the flowering (and seeding) stage. I simply chopped off all the small sprouting parts and left the head as it is. In today's meal - a curry, to use the imported canned coconut milk I bought a while ago to try - I have used only the little sprouts. The remaining cauliflower is still waiting for its time to be used in some way.

I based my curried cauliflower dish on a recipe I found on the internet, which uses whole spices rather than curry powder. I could only get runny coconut milk, and I didn't use a whole garlic head, as stated in the recipe. The cumin seeds lent a nutty flavour to the dish (nicer than cumin powder). To thicken the stew, I mixed in a little bit of flour at the end of the cooking time. Coconut milk is a great addition to stew, lending today's meal a very foreign aroma.

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Curried Greek pancetta (Μπατζέτα με κάρυ)

It's BBQ day today - porkchops, sausages, chicken and pancetta pork cuts, which are not strictly pancetta, but the cuts of meat resemble strips of this Italian cured meat, and have adopted their name. We cook them as any Greek would do: marinated in a lemon, salt, pepper and oregano mixture, BBQed till well done (no pink meat for the Greek, thank you), all on a charcoal grill. It's good value meat, but it can get a little boring (unless you're a Greek, and you'll never get bored of eating the same food over and over).

I thought I'd try something different with a few of the pancetta cuts. I love working with different spices, but I hate the word 'curry'. It reminds me of mass-produced packaged ground spice mixtures. When using foreign spices, there is always the problem of combining the wrong spices, something that wouldn't be compatible in the cuisine of the culture that uses them regularly. For example, in a Greek kitchen, it is rare to use turmeric and ginger. To understand what they go well with, I decided to try something that sounded genuine to a particular region. I have come across an Indian recipe from Kerala which marinates lamb chops in a mixture of spices common to curries before cooking. This is not much different to what we do, except that the spices are Mediterranean (as stated above). The recipe is repeated below for convenience (with the slight changes that I made to adapt it to my kitchen):


To marinate the meat of your choice, you need:
1/4 cup olive oil
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 teaspoon coriander
1 teaspoon turmeric
1/2 teaspoon cumin
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 teaspoon crushed red pepper
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
salt to taste


Mix the dry spices and salt together. Heat olive oil in a heavy pan. Turn off the heat. Add the garlic followed by the powdered ingredients. When it cools, add lemon juice. Marinate the meat in this mixture for at least an hour. Grill the meat till it is done to your liking.

It made a nice change to the regular Sunday BBQ. We had it with a tomato salad, some fried potatoes, and a few lovely cold beers. If I were making this again, I would definitely combine some fresh minced ginger into the spice mixture to give it a more genuine 'curry' flavour. This meal would have been digested even better if our son hadn't hit his head on a bathroom tile and split it open, just as soon as we had finished licking the last bone, washed down with a few beers. With alcohol on our breath and our clothes smelling of charcoal meat, we rushed him to hospital. Thankfully, he only needed two stitches. All is well.

©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."

Pumpkin soup (Κολοκυθόσουπα)

I've been making pumpkin soup since I started living on my own, and started taking charge of my own kitchen, cooking things I never ate at home, mainly due to a lack of interest on the part of the chief (and only) cook in our traditional Greek home. Mother didn't want us meddling in her kitchen. It was her 'myspace'. Now that I'm a mother myself, I understand my own mother better; I hate it when someone takes charge of my kitchen. My husband gets an earful when he chops bread and doesn't clear the crumbs, or when he drags in garden produce and strews soil all over the worktop.

I've always had a love for spicy food, so when I was given a pumpkin recently by my uncles (bachelor experienced farmers), I couldn't wait to turn it into pumpkin soup. My last round of soup-making involved a recipe by a famous chef turning leeks and potatos into something delicious called 'potage', so I was willing to give Gordon Ramsay another chance. I found a Gordon Ramsay recipe on the bfeedme website.

One thing that must be pointed out is that Gordon Ramsay's name has been used by a food blogger, who obviously hasn't tried the recipe themselves. The recipe was actually copied straight from a timesonline food article, which obviously had been misprinted: one of the biggest problems with the recipe (both timesonline and bfeedme) was that it listed apples in the ingredients, but didn't mention what the apples were doing in the recipe. Do they get browned with the onions, or boiled in the stock? Were they not supposed to be there at all? (In any case, I am not a great fan of mixing my sweet with my savoury, so I left them out all together.)

I did a quick check of other pumpkin soup recipes (as I have always called orange squash myself), and found that they were all roughly the same as Gordon Ramsay's poshly named 'lightly spiced butternut squash soup'. PumpkinPatches does a nice job pointing out that it's easy to boil and mash pumpkin rather than buying canned pumpkin mash, elise adds more heat to some mass-produced curry powder, myhouseandgarden adds potato (instead of carrot, as PumpkinPatches did) and so on, and so forth. Gordon's soup is just another variation of the others.


My next quibble is with the callous manner which cooks use the word 'curry', meaning curry powder. For a start, authentic South Asian cooking does not use a ready mix of spices, nor do they use the word 'curry' in the way we have associated the word with any spicy-hot Indian dish. In actual fact, meals are prepared with individual spices, not a general melee of cumin-smelling (as mild curry is usually made of) or chili-tasting (as hot curry is usually made of) powders. And for the real taste of a good 'curry' (pardon my use of the word), it is important for the cook to grind the actual spices into powder before using them. This is the reason why I never have mass-produced curry powder in my kitchen and why I like to have a well-stocked spice cupboard. It sounds so labour-intensive making your own spice mix; I've tried this before, and it really is worth the effort.


Here's a basic recipe for spicy pumpkin soup, without resorting to mass-produced powders or tinned products procedures.

You need:
2 tablespoons of olive oil
15g butter (the mix of oil and butter gives the soup a spicier taste, but you can use oil only for a lenten meal)
2 onions, peeled and chopped
3 cloves of garlic, chopped finely
2 bay leaves
a small piece of minced fresh ginger (thanks to the influx of economic migrants into Crete, this is available in most supermarkets; you can use powdered ginger if you don't have any fresh stuff)
1/2 teaspoon of turmeric powder (fresh turmeric root is not available in Crete)
1/2 teaspoon of ground cumin seeds
1/2 teaspoon of ground coriander seeds
1 teaspoon of ground dried chili peppers
salt and freshly ground black pepper (here's a tip: grind all the spices together in a pestle and mortar; it will save heaps of time)
1 litre hot chicken stock (I use stock cubes because chicken stock in our house is always turned into pilafi)
250g peeled cubed pumpkin, cut into cubes
a handful of parsley leaves, chopped (it would be great to have fresh coriander instead, but this is not readily available in Crete)
Heat the oil and butter, then add the onions, garlic, ginger and ground spices. It is important to sizzle the spices in the oil because it adds more flavour to the dish. Stir well, then cover the pan with a lid and cook over a low heat for a few minutes until the onions begin to soften. Tip in the squash and stir it around, being careful not to let it stick to the bottom of the pot. Cook for about 10-12 minutes over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until the squash is tender and lightly caramelised. Pour in just enough hot stock to cover the vegetables and gently simmer for another 5-10 minutes. Fish out and discard the bay leaves. In batches, purée the soup in a food processor or liquidiser until smooth. Return the soup to the pan to reheat. Taste and adjust the seasoning. Ladle the soup into warm bowls and garnish with the parsley.

Pumpkin soup doesn't look like much, just a bowl of orange-coloured goo. That's why the flavour of the spices is so important. Some people also add cream to this soup, but pumpkin is so creamy in itself that it seems like a waste of extra calories to do this! And you know you can also freeze it in small servings, too. This soup goes really well with some roast meat - Gordon apparently serves it with pancetta, a kind of fatty rasher of pork (similar to a bacon slice). In Greece, this is a small fatty pork chop, readily available at the supermarket meat counter.

©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.

MORE SOUPS:
Chicken stock
Poached fish soup
Fennel soup
Avgolemono
Leek and potato potage
Lentil soup
Bean soup
Black-eyed bean soup
French onion soup
Fish soup

Lazy Saturday meal (Κοτόπουλο με κάρυ - Λαχανοσαλάτα)

There are many days (plenty of them) when we can't be bothered with food. Today was one of them for me. A cabbage salad with grated carrot and slivers of pointy red peppers was dressed with salt, olive oil and wine vinegar (the common variety used in Greece). This was the accompaniment to some free-range chicken browned in olive oil with chopped onion, minced garlic and some more thinly sliced pointy red peppers, all doused with a bottle of ready made tikka masala sauce poured over it, in which it simmered for an hour - free-range chicken meat is tougher than indoor-reared chicken, so it needs a longer cooking time. Crusty bread is a must for the thick sauce that is produced by the various fats in the pot. We also had a choice of rose and white wine. A very simple, and very satisfying meal.

©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.

MORE SALADS:
Summer horta
Winter horta
Lettuce salad
Salad advice
Greek village salad
Cretan salad
Beetroot salad