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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The perfect Greek roast meat (Το τέλειο ψητό στο φούρνο)

Our New Year's meal - much to my chagrin - was cooked in the conventional oven. I was looking forward to using our wood-fired oven heater for cooking on New Year's Day, but my husband decided against it. The rain started before we could install a T-pipe on the outside flue pipe, so there is simply what looks like a spout coming up like a chimney. As the smoke comes out of the flue pipe, some condensation is returning into the chimney and running back down into the oven. It seems like only a trickle at the moment, and it certainly isn't making its way into the oven... but any liquid being made by mixing the cold outside air with the hot inside smoke will be mixed with smoke and dust and anything else that may be produced in the chimney spout. This could be dangerous for our health - until we get a T-pipe installed outside, so that any condensation, however minor, runs out of the vent instead of dripping back into the heater, we won't be cooking in it.

Our New Year's lunch consisted of a roast, cooked with tomato sauce, and some orzo pasta added towards the end of the cooking time. This very simple-sounding dish is known in Greece as γιουβέτσι (yiouvetsi). It does not look or sound like a gourmet dish, although in Greece, it's very popular. Tourists often see this dish on taverna menus; it's usually served in a clay pot. Food looks enticing when served in an exotic way, kind of like a sizzling Szechuan hotplate.

Our New Year's Day meal - roast pork cooked with orzo rice to soak up the juices, green salad with pomegranate and cheese, eggplant risotto and feta cheese (it goes with everything).

The current popularity of Greek cuisine is due in part to the freshness and high quality of the ingredients. All of these can be found/bought in other countries too, so that a dish can be recreated outside Greece. But there is something else about traditional Greek cuisine that cannot be bought, and that is the cook's know-how. Although Greek cuisine is known for its simple cooking techniques, there are some skills that require experience. It's true that anyone can cook, but you also need to know what your eaters are expecting. Here's how a home-cook in Greece would go about making sure that this dish meets the expectations of her eaters.

Yiouvetsi - serves 4-5
1 kg of pork, chopped into large chunks
1-2 cups of pulped tomato
1-2 cups of water
1/2 cup olive oil
salt and pepper
200g orzo rice pasta

Let's start with the meat. Not all meat is the same. Depending on how it was raised, it will have different cooking times. Free-range meat raised in Crete (like this pork) is tougher than the meat of animals raised in an environment where the animals have less space to move around. So the cooking time in a recipe for yiouvetsi can only be approximate. We used free-range pork. It took a long time to slow-cook it (between 2-2 1/2 hours). Speaking of which: pork isn't the only meat that could go in here. You could use beef, lamb, goat or chicken, all commonly used meats in the Greek kitchen. A Greek home cook would use whatever is available.

It's better to keep some fat on the meat since this meat is going to be slow-cooked, otherwise your meat will come out too dry. You can remove it after it's cooked. If you remove it before, the meat will dry out too quickly as it's cooking, so that it won't reach the tender stage. This is why I prefer meat cooked in large chunks: it stays moist throughout the cooking time. It doesn't matter if the meat is boneless or not. Too many bones just will take up too much space in the baking vessel.

If you're growing your own tomatoes, you can use as much pureed tomato as you want. Yiouvetsi can be made with tinned tomatoes if fresh tomatoes are too expensive or not seasonal. We use a lot of tomato in our food throughout the year because, even in January, we still have tomatoes growing (under cover) in the garden.

If the meat is fatty, you might say that adding olive oil isn't necessary. A Cretan wouldn't agree with you. 

To cook the meat, I simply placed it on a baking dish and seasoned it well. Then I added the liquids, whose measurements are only approximate. (Only the orzo rice isn't added at this stage.) The amount of liquids depends partly on the size of the baking dish. The meat chunks should be sitting in water, half-way up. That way, they'll be soaking up the liquids and tenderising on the bottom, while they brown on the top. But as the liquids are taken up, more liquid needs to be added so that the sauce doesn't dry out. If you add all the liquids together, the meat won't be given the chance to roast; it will look oven-boiled.

To slow-cook a roast, you don't need to turn the heat up too high. Once the pan goes into the oven, for the first hour or so, it doesn't need checking. After that, I check it every 20 minutes to see if there is enough liquid in the pan. When there isn't enough water, the tomato puree will start sticking to the pan, and the meat will start burning. When adding liquids to a roast, it's better to use hot water, so that the roast isn't cooling down every time you add liquid to it. At the same time that you check (and add) the liquids, the meat chunks will need to be turned so that they are all given a chance to brown all over. In this way, the side of the meat sitting on the bottom of the pan rises to the top, and the browned meat doesn't burn. This is very important for a consistent look.


Greeks like their meat to fall off the bone. Because meat isn't raised in uniform ways, as mentioned above, and the cooking was done slowly, in moderate heat, my roast took about two hours to cook. Every time I checked on the meat, I prodded it with a knife. If the knife isn't going through with ease, neither will your teeth. At the same time as prodding and turning the meat, I would add just enough water (or tomato juice - this is costless for us, as we find ourselves at the source) just to keep the meat roasting without boiling/burning. 

When the meat was done, I pushed it to one side of the pan and covered it with a piece of foil. Then I tilted the pan and placed a thin piece of metal (the cover of the electric elements) under the place where the meat was to keep the pan tilted. I added the orzo rice and as much water as I thought would be needed for the pasta to cook. Oven-baked pasta needs about 20 minutes to cook when the oven and the liquids are both very hot. 

But the pasta also needs checking time, because it's difficult to gauge how much liquid is already in the pan. I checked the pasta every 5 minutes, adding more water, so that the orzo cooked and soaked up all the liquids, and left only the oil/fat in the baking tray. When the pasta looked ready, I switched off the oven and took away metal that was keeping the pan tilted. In this way, the juices and pasta settled again evenly throughout the dish. 




I would have taken more photos, but the meal was scoffed down very quickly. Leftovers (if there are any, and in our case, there was this little little ramekin-sized portion, which is how I ended up with one more shot of this meal) make a good meal the next day. Baking pasta with olive oil ensures that it doesn't get soggy. 


It looked like a simple meal, and it still can be, as long as the cook gives it the necessary attention.

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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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Baby potatoes (Mίνι πατάτες )

The first time I saw mini potatoes being flogged off as a special product was in Moore Wilsons in Wellington, when I visited my former hometown in 2004. Those small potatoes had only just started being sold at about the time I left in 1991; now they were all the rage. I knew those potatoes looked very special, even though I knew that they were just like their bigger counterparts, only that they looked small and cute. They were packaged in (equally) cute little boxes, the kind that we often reserve for sweets and pastries in Greece. The people buying them (I may not have been blogging back then, but my instinct for observation was never lacking) looked as though they never fried chips at home, and ate mainly raw food; they had a vegetarian health-freak look about them (read: foodies).

When I came back to Greece, I looked around for those small potatoes, but those runts could never be found in our shops. The only time I had the chance to delight in mini-potatoes (prior to my recent purchase, that is) was when one of my relatives presented me with the babies from his potato harvest. Being the Greek that he is, he told me that they should be cooked like regular potatoes. This is true, to a certain extent. They can be cooked like the normal big-size potatoes. But they can also be cooked differently.

My uncle had no clue as to what ideas westerners had for those cute-looking baby potaotes. In Crete, mini potatoes are popular with foodies (read: big spenders of brand-labelled food). They are packaged separately from large potatoes and sold for a higher price (they all come from the same place, he would have told me). The foodies cook them unpeeled, with the excuse that the skin is good for you (he would have simply taken that as a sign of slovenly laziness); in any case, the skin practically rubs off them without much effort when they are very fresh. They are even marketed as 'fast food', as I was to discover recently: "Take bag (of mini-potatoes) and place as is without opening in the microwave. Cook on high for seven minutes." Voila; they even came from France.

Plating is very important in the dining-out trade - Greek restaurants could do with a few lessons in the usefulness of baby potatoes for this reason. Any other potato in this context would have looked out of place: paleron de boeuf, Le Chartier, Paris.

My uncle viewed these potatoes as second grade. He asked me if I really wanted them and could make use of them! He has no idea that they are so highly marketable - but not amongst our own local environment. This has to do with the marketing tactics of the locals; if baby potatoes were presented differently, I think people would learn to appreciate them more. They need a special marketing approach, in the same way as for Pink Lady apples; they also need a special target group, like, for example, working mothers in the 30-50 age group, with helpful healthy advice and recipe leafelts showing how to use them, which incorporate ideas from Greek cuisine. Telling Greek consumers that baby potatoes don't need peeling and can be cooked as is in the microwave won't win over many prospective customers...

Marketing mini potatoes in Greece: the French ones 'look' better than the Cypriot ones. The real problem (in my opinion, which, over time, you've come to know and love), is the wording on the packets: Ιδανικές (ideal) για βράσιμο (boiling) και σαλάτες (salads)"; "Μαγειρεύονται (cooked) σε φούρνο μικροκυμάτων (microwave oven)." The words 'boiling' and 'salads' do not collocate well in Greek cuisine, while the microwave oven is not known in Greece for 'cooking', just 're-heating; a change of wording here would be appropriate.

Mini-potatoes are (sometimes) available in the high-end supermarkets (the same ones that sell frozen imported baby potatoes), which suggests that they are bought mainly by foreigners. Their packaging makes them stand out like a special product. The ones from France (with the English labelling and the stickers giving Greek "usage instructions") are more expensive than the Cypriot ones. No guessing why: the latter (that come in a box covered in plastic that tears easily) look as though they were freshly picked off the field that very morning (dirt intact), while the French ones look as though they have undergone a course of spa treatment. The Greek ones looked - no, they didn't, because there weren't any; potatoes, as well as other products like garlic and lemons, are among the fresh produce that are often imported into Greece, as the local production levels are not enough for the demand. Potatoes come from Cyprus and Egypt, garlic comes from China (yes, you read that correctly) and lemons come from South America.

The flattened yellow field in the centre of the photo has been used for the last few years to grow the prized leafy spiny chicory (stamnagathi). This is grown with all the latest technology, including a 20-strong team of women picking, sorting and cleaning the horta, as well as surveillance cameras - nothing is safe these days. In the background can be seen the alluring snowy peaks of Lefka Ori. 

Marketing is very important, even at the local level. A local grower of stamnagathi (spiny chicory) recently told us that because the price of cultivated stamnagathi has decreased considerably before the abundance of the plantations away from the wild, he now prefers to sell as much of his produce off the island of Crete, its native habitat, and up north as far as Larissa (Central Greece). In order to do this, he has produced a recipe leaflet for sellers to disseminate as they sell the plant. Stamnagathi is very much a local product in Crete, so it needed some kind of introduction to others away from the island. In Athens, stamnagathi sells for nearly double the price it sells for in Hania (where it hovers around 3.50 per kilo); further north, the price is more than double.

Coming back to the baby potato, for selling purposes, it needs to be differentiated from the common potato in a marketable manner which will provide benefits both to growers (higher profits) and consumers (easy to cook with).

*** *** ***

When I visited London recently, I was very blessed to meet up with some of my readers (it constantly amazes me when I meet people who read my posts and make the effort to meet an unpublished writer). It was also a wondrous experience to meet them in the confines of their own neighbourhoods (when possible), because it means we can see a bit of every day life in a foreign place away from the main tourist attractions. By seeing how people live in the suburbs of a global city like London, we know why we should be grateful for what we have when we return to our own small Mediterranean island town.

Lovely book, interesting ideas: it has a clear focus on growing your own veg in Britain's climate, so a lot of the advice in this book is not appropriate for Crete. I could also re-write a few parts of it, like the advice about feeding the soil: compost and leaf mould are mentioned by the vegetarian author, but not animal dung...

My lovely reader presented me with the gift of a cookbook that focussed on growing and cooking one's own vegetables. It's been a long time since I bought a cookbook myself, and had almost forgotten the pleasure of seeing new photos presenting similar ingredients to the ones I use but cooked in a different way. The cover of this book pictures a luscious bowl of those special-looking baby potatoes, roasted and seasoned, and my mouth has been watering ever since. The book was the motivation for me to go out and buy those rather expensive mini-pots.

Even when they are cooked, it's easy to tell which potatoes came from which packet...

I didn't follow the microwave instructions on the mini-potato packaging. Those French babies deserved better treatment. Carol's recipe brought out their soft sweet taste.

Leaving the skin on the cooked potato is still a little risque in Cretan households - but these mini potatoes just wouldn't taste the same without their skins.

I tweaked the original recipe to incorporate Cretan cooking techniques and tastes. Steaming requires equipment that I don't own, while rosemary isn't commonly added to potatoes (it's mainly used with fish and liver).

You need:
700g baby potatoes
olive oil
freshly grown rock salt
oregano

Heat up your oven to 200C. If the potatoes are dirty, scrub them well. Boil them for 5-10 minutes, then drain them well. Place them on the baking tray that they will be cooked in, season them and pour a few tablespoons of olive oil (I must have used about a third of a cup). Mix them well, preferably with your hands, so that they are well oiled. Place them in the oven, and cook them for 20 minutes. Then turn them over and let them cook another 10 minutes so that they brown on both sides. 

Left: I recently picked up a new batch of baby potatoes from my uncle's farm: "I know they're delicious," he told me, "but they're too much trouble for me, they need so much cleaning..." Right: This potato grew in the shape of a Cycladic art figurine.

We enjoyed these baby potatoes with some beetroot yoghurt dip and a fresh green salad dressed with home-made vinaigrette. This kind of simple food matches my simple lifestyle quite well. The common potato took on a special look, like the unpublished unknown writer who was made to feel special, by an unknown reader who was special to her. At this point, allow me to thank all my lovely readers, because if you didn't tune in regularly to read me, then I would not have met so many interesting people around the world.

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Aryiroupoli (Αργυρούπολη)

Deep in the heart of Crete lie mountainous regions which divide the northern part with the southern part. These mountains are the main reason why Crete has remained so undeveloped in the greater part. There are little villages nestled in the folds of these ranges which do not form part of the known tourist routes. Located away from the sea, they are little known and hardly accessible to the tourists, as bus routes do not go there.

View Larger Map
The Argiroupoli Springs are located just beyond the Prefecture of Hania, in the Lappa region of Rethimno.

When the signs on the road begin to welcome you into the Prefecture of Rethimno, turn right at the village of Episkopi, and don't stop till you find the sign for the Argiroupoli Springs. This village doesn't give away.

As you drive into the area, you will notice that it is quite arid looking; the roadside is filled with tinder dry grasses. This is surprising given the spring waters which the area contains. Lush vegetation is found where these waters spill over man-made waterfalls, but the fields close by all look as though they need to be irrigated. The residential areas lack a canopy of trees, leaving their rooftops exposed to the harsh summer heat.

The dry grasses on the roadside do not point to any water source.

Google 'Aryiroupoli Rethimno' (using various spellings of both words) and you'll find lots of information about the significance of the area - something about an ancient site called Lappa, created by Agamemnon, allies with Knossos, and of special significance in Roman and Byzantine times. Some very important archaeological digs have taken place here, but this is not the crowd puller nowadays: Aryiroupoli is popular with locals and tourists (who hire a car or come on coach trips) for its natural springs. The water has been routed to create mini-waterfalls, around which tavernas have been built, bringing in the crowds right throughout the spring, summer and autumn (in the winter, it is too cool to sit so close to the water). This phenomenon makes Aryiroupoli a cool retreat in contrast to baking under the sun on a hot sandy beach (which is only less than a quarter of an hour away from the village).

All the restaurants in the area use the spring waters to raise trout, which can be ordered freshly cooked on the grill. We managed to secure the best position near the waterfall.

On a hot day, you just want to be near the water. The Aryiroupoli springs are an off-the-beaten-track alternative to the sea and sand culture of a Cretan summer holiday.
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The tavernas serve mainly local traditional meals. The Rethimno area - and most of Eastern Crete - is known for its use of an upright barbecue grill, known as 'antikristo' in Greek, used to roast lamb and pork (I much prefer the traditional grill myself - the meat needs longer cooking time on the antikristo and the fire creates excess heat in an excessively hot summer atmosphere). Another specialty of the area is freshly grilled trout (the combined smells of meat and fish can be off-putting); the springs run into catchment tanks where trout is bred exclusively for the tavernas.

The antikristo barbecue grill isn't commonly seen in Hania; it's a specialty of most other parts of Crete.

Kokoretsi (offal wrapped round intestines and grilled on the spit) was on the menu of Ellanion Fos Taverna where we chose to sit, perfectly positioned by the waterfalls. Vlita (amaranth) is the summer horta variety. It's a healthier alternative to the common Greek salad. We chose kalitsounia (those Rethimniotes were trying to pass them off for mizithropites) drizzled with honey for dessert.

We also ordered a serving of antikristo lamb (sorry about the photo) and stuffed bifteki.

We were entertained by a Romanian musical troupe who was touring the area, going from one taverna to the other. They must have had insider knowledge of the area (not to mention transport facilities) to know where the crowds were today. They played three songs, then went round the tables collecting donations in the tambourine .



Take a look at the burly black-shirted chap (the taverna owner) in the foreground. He has the typical Cretan looks: height and bulk, dark facial features with piercing blue eyes, premature grey hair. Compare him with a couple of other typical looking Cretans: my dad and Alex.

Be sure to get to the area early for prompt service without too many hassles, as most Greeks like to arrive at the same time just after 1pm, slowing down service considerably after that point. We beat the rush and ate our lunch leisurely over two hours, leaving just after two o'clock, the time when the hordes of Athenian travellers who had just begun their summer holidays were arriving (as well as two double-storeyed coaches), creating a traffic jam in the narrow windy streets of the village. We had parked at the entrance to the village, knowing well what we would find if we tried to park right outside the taverna, a common Greek trait (to secure a parking spot right outside the place you want to go, especially since Greeks have a love affair with their four wheeled possessions). No one could move forward or back at that point, bringing a bit of chaos to the place, but we wouldn't be Greeks if we didn't live up to the meaning of the word; after all, we invented it, didn't we?

For the four of us, we ordered a serving each (for two) of antikristo lamb and kokoretsi, stuffed bifteki, two servings of fried potatoes, vlita salad, fried cheese pies (mizithropites) with honey, 2 tap beers (plus 2 more) and 2 lemonades. Cost - 48 euro (we couldn't eat it all in one go, so we took the leftovers home).

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Marinated pork chops (Πικάντικες χοιρινές μπριτζόλες)

The little laughing olive tree
came to Crete and cooked for me.
While I went about my weekend chores,
she rampaged on my kitchen floors.

When I asked her 'Whatcha cookin?'
She exclaimed: 'It's what you're lookin'.
"I just wondered if you please,
will my husband eat any of these?"

Come dinner time the kitchen smelt
as if a fire had been put out,
with mustard and some Worcestershire sauce,
a bit of onion chopped up coarse.



"What's for salad?' she insisted.
"I't's cooking now," I promptly answered.
She doesn't know my eggplant pizza,
but now she's here, I'm gonna teach 'er.

I picked the last tomatoes growing
and some peppers green as string beans,
and with the omelette that was leftover,
that made our lunch one of the best ever.

©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.

Okra - bamies (Μπάμιες στο φούρνο)

When he left the family nest, he didn't realise that he had just eaten his last cooked meal and had left home cooking behind for life. No more Sunday roasts, no more pastitsio, no more T-bone steaks marinated in those Cretan herbs his parents had carried in seed form in their coat pockets on the aeroplane, a reminder of their holidays back to the homeland, to make their way into the lawn of their Wellington garden. It took him a long time to recall those home-brewed smells and tastes because the food he was now eating in London was quite satisfactory: exotic tastes, covered in colourful gloopy sauces, nothing of which resembled his mother's home cooking, but at least it was cheap and edible.

He was now picturing her in the kitchen of the family home, opening the back door to go into the garden. He watched her in his mind, climbing the stairs to enter the raised garden bed. Her first stop would be the greenhouse, a roughly constructed shed made with the old doors and windows of their renovated house. She'd pokes in its undergrowth for any sign of a tomato, maybe a cucumber, or some parsley, being careful not to disturb the overgrown zucchini that was left to seed. Around the greenhouse grew all the horta - weeds to the average Joe Bloggs - which she used for spanakopita fillings and yemista herbs. How he missed those garden fresh salads oozing with the olive oil she drizzled over them from a metal canister.

He once tried to make a Greek salad in his flat at Clapham Junction. While shopping at the ASDA across the road, trying to decide if he should buy the 2-for-the-price-of-1 packaged beef mince or the heat-and-serve meat patties, he came across the fresh produce section and spotted some firm red tomatoes. They looked as though they had just been picked off the tree. He placed a 4-pack in his basket. Everything seemed to be packaged using this number, the magic number for the perfect family, the perfect number of flatmates sharing a house, the perfect number of meal portions: 'serves 4'.

Back at home, as he began to prepare the salad, he noticed that the label on the tomato packet stated that they were grown in the Canary Islands; not that it made a difference to him if they were from Kenya or Spain, but he couldn't picture in his mind where the Canary Islands fell on the map, despite having travelled extensively. It annoyed him that he didn't know where his food came from any more.

The salad was a disaster. There was only sunflower oil in the house, so the dressing didn't even look right. Olive oil had a green tinge to it, not like the sunflower oil on his plate which resembled children's cough medicine. The tomatoes were overly-firm; despite their red exterior, their innards were still green and seedy, and they contained no juice, which is what gives a Greek salad its flavour. Worst of all, they were completely tasteless. He could have been eating unripe apples, such was the sensation in his mouth; the tomato felt like sandpaper. There was not a hint of sun-kissed flesh, the kind of smell a tomato emits as it is sliced. Only the feta cheese seemed to have any decent taste to it. His girlfriend had bought it at a gourmet cheese store at Notting Hill on one of their recent Sunday strolls there. He regretted crumbling it into the salad, and tried to fish out the chunkier pieces so that it would not go to waste. This was one of the reasons he had stopped cooking at home; the whole exercise seemed pointless when the fresh products lacked taste.

It was much more enjoyable to eat out, since he could savour a different culture's cuisine every night of the week at a reasonable price. He now had a list of a dozen of his favorite restaurants and would rotationally frequent each of them on a fortnightly basis. One day it was Chinese, the next Pakistani, the following gourmet hamburgers, and so on. He was spoiled for choice in his dining habits, never ordering the same meal twice.

Now that he was on vacation in Crete, his appetite had swelled. His uncles and aunts always asked him what he would like to eat, and cooked whatever took his fancy. He felt as though he was being doted on, but never said no to a second helping, whether it was oven-roasted meat or aubergine cooked in tomato sauce. Everything tasted like he remembered it in his mother's kitchen. As his aunt Antonia would say: "Eat it now that you've got it in front of you, because you never know when you'll get the chance to try this again."

As he entered his cousin's house (she had invited him for Sunday lunch), memories of his childhood home kept flashing in his mind. She was setting the kitchen table. "Hey, these plates look familiar. I think we had the same ones."

"They were Dad's," she replied, as she opened the oven to check the roast. He noticed that some of the plates were chipped, but he could sense the sentimentality that his cousin felt for them now that her own parents had passed away.

A familiar scent caught his nose. His cousin had lived across the street from him in Wellington, and both their mothers cooked roughly the same kind of food. He was sure of it, but could not see any pots simmering on the stove.

"Are you cooking bamies?"

(fresh okra - shaven sundried okra; click here for the recipe)

"Yeah, but don't worry," she began to explain, "I've made plenty of roast potatoes if you don't like them."

"No!!!" he shook his head wildly. "I love bamies! Mum cooks them with chicken."

"Oh, I remember," she said, like the expert cook her mother was. She was beginning to look like her now, short and bulky in a matronly way, busying her way deftly around her kitchen, bringing out the cutlery, glasses and paper napkins to lay the table. This was what eating was like in his family home, a ritual associated with the appropriate equipment, with every item taking its place ceremoniously on the dining room table. He could not recall the last time he saw a table in London high enough to sit at on a chair, or large enough to seat a family. Although he had been working for many years in London, he still could not afford to rent a flat of his own. He and most of his acquaintances lived in digs, tiny bedsits barely large enough to house a bed and chair, if a writing desk could be fitted in somewhere, then the room was considered 'large'. Apart from the usual arguments over the phone bill and the cleaning arrangements, cooking a meal in the communal kitchen also created feelings of distrust: should it be shared? if so, how much money should each flatter fork out to cover the meal? who cleans up afterwards? does the meal cater for everyone's taste, needs, idiosyncracies? low-calorie, carb-free, kosher, gluten-free, vegetarian, vegan, environmentally friendly, politically correct?

"Bamies from a tin, right?" she asked.

He looked at her somewhat confused. "Yeah... canned in tomato sauce."

She started laughing. "I couldn't understand how our parents even liked the stuff, it all came out like goo."

"But you used to eat it, too, didn't you?" She ate everything, and it showed.

"Yes, I did," she replied regretfully. "But now I know how much they missed the real thing. Now that we eat them here fresh. They grow on gigantic tree-like shrubs and they're covered in prickly fur, so they aren't easy to pick."

"You picked these yourself?"

"No, I bought them at a fresh produce market in the Agora. But I've seen the trees. Okra looks fresh when the pod is firm and bright green. You have to shave them a little on the top and let them dry in the sun for a couple of days so that they don't turn into goo..."

He had no idea what she was talking about now. The discussion about food was getting too technical. He couldn't remember if he had ever seen fresh okra on sale at the supermarket. He made a mental note of going to Brixton market when he got back to London to see if he could find them. Not that he was planning to buy them himself; for a start, where was he going to find any sunlight in London to let them dry? When he left Gatwick airport, it was pouring heavily and the temperature was 14 degrees Celsius: all this is mid-August.

"... we like them in a lamb roast with potatoes," she was still talking. "They go crispy, like french fries, but with a meaty taste, kind of like that jerky meat Australians like to eat. We never eat them mushy, and I don't think our parents ate them mushy when they cooked them here in Crete. They just weren't available fresh in New Zealand. They're kind of an acquired taste."

An acquired taste. What Londoners would say of potted shrimp pate, boar terrine layered with chestnuts, olive oil infused with black truffles, whisky-flavoured seville marmalade. When asked to give their opinion of okra, most wouldn't know what it was, let alone have tasted it. If they were shown what it was in a photo, they might think of it as a 'native's' choice of vegetable, associated with a community whose skin was dark. They probably couldn't place it in any of the mongrelised versions of international dishes in the average Londoner's repertoire.

Roast okra - made all the more delectable with garden fresh tomato pulp and virgin olive oil. He had one serving, with tender-cooked lamb and roast skin-blackened potatoes. The okra was firm, chewy and juicy. His cousin asked him if he would like a second helping, which he obliged to. Then she asked if anyone wanted the last scrapings off the tin. He took those too. Like his aunt, he wondered when he would get another chance to savour a meal like this one.

This is my entry for Weekend Herb Blogging, this week hosted by Katie from Thyme for Cooking.

(Dedicated to PH, who licked the tin clean)

©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.

Roast New Zealand leg of lamb (Ψητό μπούτι από αρνάκι Νέας Ζηλανδίας)

What does it mean to be a Kiwi? For some reason, the flightless bird, native to New Zealand, gave us the name that the rest of the world now associates with a native New Zealander. No matter where Kiwis are, their hearts will miss a beat when they hear a buzzy bee, eat pineapple lumps, see a pohutakawa tree (the New Zealand Christmas tree which flowers in the antipodean summer), smell afghans cooking in the oven or touch a paua shell.

You know you're a Kiwi when you own certain bits and pieces that resemble junk to other people. I couldn't carry everything with me when I moved away from New Zealand, but here are some things that I did manage to bring, which still stump my Greek visitors when they see them in my glassware display case. "Why do you keep these things?" they always ask me, "your parents were Greek, so you're Greek too." Forgive them, said a wise man once, for they do not know what they are saying. My collection of Kiwiana (a way of describing classic New Zealand icons) includes the following:

• the Edmonds cook book (every New Zealander's first guide to cooking)
• a paua shell, an oyster shell and a scallop shell
• a buzzy bee (ever New Zealand child's first toy)
• Crown Lynn plates (a New Zealand ceramics brand)
• a Kiwi-shaped paua-shell clock
• kiwi, weta and tuatara figurines
• a pestle and mortar set made of New Zealand wood
• a 'tree' family ornament
• a packet playing cards which has 'Made in New Zealand' printed on the box- these days, the word 'Made' is replaced with 'Designed' (while it's made you-know-where)
  
• among many other bits and pieces

We like our Kiwi food, too. Try any one (or all) of pavlova, afghans, chocolate fish, and pineapple lumps. You'll love them all. How about a refreshing lemon and paeroa?What about puha - what all Greeks know as horta. Fancy something carnivorous? Go no further than New Zealand lamb. Pure grass-fed meat, no added flavours. When I remember the green green hills of Aotearoa, I always have an image of a moving cloud of sheep covering them.

To roast a leg of New Zealand lamb (a 3kg leg of roast lamb will easily feed ten people), you need:
a whole bone-in leg of lamb (this one was close to 3kg)
a mixture of freshly ground black pepper, salt and oregano
Rub the whole leg of lamb with a mixture of the spices. (Rosemary can be used in place of oregano.) Place it on a baking tray, fat side up. Pour a cup of water into the tray (to create a runny sauce at the end of cooking time. Let the lamb cook in a moderate oven. The New Zealand lamb export company allows half an hour per 500g of meat. New Zealand lamb always comes out tender at the end of cooking time, with a brown crusty skin and crimson-beige meat.

If you don't eat the whole roast in one sitting (we didn't), it makes fantastic - and I mean the best - filling for sandwiches (as an alternative to luncheon meats) and home-made souvlaki, as well as an amazing filling for a traditional Cretan meat pie. You can also add lemon potatoes to roast together with the meat for a more substantial meal, but the cooking time must be synchronised. I added them 90 minutes after starting to cook the lamb, and they came out done, together with the meat.

©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 NEW ZEALAND FOOD:
Afghans
Apple cake
Banana cake
Corn fritters
Gingernuts
Potato fritters
MEDITERRANEAN KIWI

Free-range chicken roast and pilafi rice (Χωριάτικο κοτόπουλο κρασσάτο με πιλάφι)

Cooking for a lot of people, all with different tastes, is a time-consuming challenge, especially when the cooking method is demanding or unusual; for example, more than one pot is required, the ingredients need special care, the cook isn't experienced. Sunday is always one of those days when cooking is a challenge; the question of what will be cooked on Sunday is always discussed on Friday evening, in time to visit the butcher on Saturday morning. There is a lot of negotiating involved in Sunday's meal: after deciding what meat (always on a Sunday, not much likely on a weekday) will be cooked - the choice is usually among chicken, goat, sheep, pork or beef - there follows a briefing of the dining preferences of the eaters with a short barrage of questions to the cook, to ensure that the desired menu is within her culinary knowledge. Alternative options are suggested if the cooking method is beyond the skills of the chef.

Today's meal shouldn't have turned out so well. On the menu is free-range fatty chicken, not the kind that goes for 2 chickens for 5 euro - the kind that cost 5 euro per kilo of chicken. It was a beautiful looking yellow bird, covered in fat, the kind that makes scrumptious wedding-style pilafi rice. Pilafi is made by using the fatty stock that the chicken was boiled in. But nobody wants to eat plain boiled chicken afterwards, even if they do like to eat plain pilafi. I had to devise a way to cook the chicken so that we could all have the cake (ie the pilafi rice) and eat it too (ie make sure the chicken gets eaten and doesn't have to be turned into chicken pie).

A suggestion was made about cooking the par-boiled chicken with a recipe we had once used as newlyweds - an oven casserole, with mushrooms in the oven topped with feta cheese; the chicken needed to be browned in the pan, then added to a thick red mushroom sauce stewing away in a pot, after which it was put in the oven to cook away, the grand finale being feta cheese crumbled over it for the last fifteen minutes of cooking time. Although it sounded complicated, it didn't sound unusually illogical, so I took it up. First mistake. "Have you still got the recipe?" Who needs recipes when the internet offers endless possibilities for recipe creation? I decided to google it instead. After checking the first 20 'chicken feta' recipes, I realised that none matched the recipe my husband remembered, which annoys me greatly; if someone can remember the recipe, why don't they cook it themselves?

In any case, this chicken had to dealt with, so I decided to pull out a coq au vin recipe which usually requires browning chicken pieces, adding vegetables, and finishing off the cooking in the oven. I printed out the recipe and decided to start it on Saturday night, to give the chicken a chance to marinate in wine, as the recipe stated. Second mistake. I usually cook when my husband is at work during the day. He came into the kitchen just as I had just finished browning the chicken pieces. "Aren't these pieces just a little too big?" he asked helpfully. I suppose he was worried they may not cook well enough for the fussy eaters in our house. He helped me to cut them into smaller bits. To my delight, the knife went through the meat like a loaf of sourdough bread. It wouldn't need too much cooking time in the oven, always a problem with free-range roast chicken.

The recipe called for pearl onions, the kind used in Greek stifado. When I don't have any, I just use ordinary onions, with a small cross-slit on their root side to make sure that they cook right through without falling apart. "Are you going to leave the onions whole? I've never eaten chicken with whole onions before," said the gourmet in a worried tone of voice. Not wanting to upset Mr Gourmet, I cut them in half, which of course, I knew was a (third) mistake, since most of them started falling apart the moment I placed them in the pot.

Chunky fresh cap mushrooms look beautiful, like a forest floor scattered with dry brown leaves, I thought, as I was browning them in a saucepan. "You didn't cut those, either?" exclaimed my husband, his face now showing anxiety. I won't say it was my fourth mistake when I cut them into smaller bits, making them look like pizza topping. I suppose they would disintegrate in the casserole. Tant pis, as the French would say.

After placing the chicken in a pot with the wine and seasonings, I suddenly realised that the mushrooms and onions, according to the recipe, were not supposed to go into the marinade together with the chicken. Had I tossed them in, I would've made my fifth mistake, which I had already made, in any case, by not reading the whole recipe before starting to cook. The whole charade reminded me of Ruth Rendell's A Judgment in Stone, in which the characters were doomed to die through all their careless (or overcareful) actions and reactions to the antics of their hired housekeeper.

The next day, there was no one to watch over me while I continued the cooking process. I threw away the recipe, placed the chicken in an oven dish with the onions and mushrooms, added some seasonings and a little olive oil (to replace the lost fat which was in the pilafi stock), and heated up the oven to get it going. The result was a beautiful wintery meal that matched the dull weather of the day. The mushrooms and onions gave the sauce a dark English-gravy look, a suitable liquid to drizzle over the pilafi. The vegetables were crunchy rather than mushy - my only regret is not adding any bell peppers. The chicken was aromatic and tender. Margaret was thrilled to be eating mushrooms in a roast, a popular vegetable in her homeland). As for that pilafi, it'll be remembered for a long time. Fat-covered chicken is the best way to make this traditional rice dish dish from Crete.

The moral of the story is: When preparing gourmet meals, cook behind closed doors. All's well that ends well. At least I wasn't doomed, like the characters in the book.

You need:
1 large free-range chicken, covered in yellow skin, with pockets of fat
30 pearl onions (or 15 large onions), peeled, with a cross shape cut on the root side
20 large mushrooms 'cap' mushrooms (pleurotus types would also work), cut in large chunks
2 large bell peppers (preferably red and yellow, to enhance the decor) cut into large chunks
1 glass of wine
1 teaspoon of tomato paste
3 cloves of garlic, sliced into large chunks
3 bay leaves
1 teaspoon of thyme
salt and pepper
a little olive oil

To make the stock:
Boil the chicken in a large pot for about 15 minutes. The fat will melt, and you will be left with a very an oily stock, and par-boiled fat-reduced chicken. With a slotted spoon, remove the chicken form the stock and place onto a frying pan. Strain the stock into another pot (by this time, the kitchen sink will not be able to hold any more dirty pots and pans!) CUP BY CUP; you need to know exactly how much stock you have. Place the pot with the stock in the refrigerator until you are ready to cook the rice.

To prepare the chicken and vegetables:
Without adding any oil, brown the chicken on both sides, to give it a slightly scorched look. You may have to do this in two stages if the chicken is very large. When the chicken is ready, remove it and place it in a pot with the tomato paste mixed in with the wine, garlic, thyme, bay leaves, salt and pepper. Cover the pot and place it in the refrigerator overnight, or at least for a few hours for the marinade to seep into the chicken.

In the same pan that was used to brown the chicken, without adding any oil, brown the onions whole. If they are large, they can be cut in half and browned on the cut side. Pearl onions fare better, as they don't break up so easily, but I found that neither the large onions broke up. When they are done, put them into the baking tin that is going to be used for next day's roast. Then do the same with the onions (and pepper, if using). These may need a little oiling; the grease in the pan will have been used up the onions. Place them with the onions when they are done, and store them in the fridge until it's time to cook the chicken.

When you are ready to cook the roast, strain the chicken and place it in the baking tin with the vegetables. Strain the marinade and pour about half of it into the baking dish. Drizzle everything with olive oil. Add a final shake of salt and pepper, and place the tin in a moderate-high oven to allow the chicken to cook and take on a golden colour. The cooking time depends on the chicken; ours needed two hours from the time the oven was turned on to bake to tender golden perfection.

To make the pilafi rice you need:
chicken stock
long-grain rice
salt
the juice of one lemon
Warm up the measured chicken stock so that the curdled fat sitting on top melts. This is the essence of pilafi: the fat is not discarded. Set it to boil, adding salt to taste. The amount of stock that you have will determine how much rice will be used: for each wine glass of rice (which is equal to one serving of cooked rice), 3 wine glasses of stock are needed to cook it in. If the stock is not enough for your eaters, add more water. If it is too much, you will not use it all. As an experienced cook, I used 3 large cups of rice, enough for 9-10 servings of pilafi. Pilafi rice heats up well the next day, although the taste is not the same as freshly cooked pilafi, so you don't really want too much left over. When the rice is done, it should NOT be bathing in a lot of liquid; the rice should be grainy, not soupy.

Wash the rice in a colander to get rid of excess starch (it make the rice sticky; good pilafi should be grainy). Pour it into the boiling stock. Now stand over the pot, and stir the rice every now and then to make sure it will not stick to the bottom of the pot, keeping the heat moderate to high. Don't over-stir, as the rice will then get mushy. From this point on, it will not take more than 15 minutes for the rice to be done. Add the lemon juice just before the rice is done. You will see the broth congealing, and it is at this point that you must decide when the rice is done to your liking. This dish needs a little practice to get the rice cooked well! If the rice tastes uncooked and it's starting to stick to the bottom of the pot, add some more water, and mix it in. If it's crunchy, it needs less cooking time; if it's grainy, it needs more cooking time. Do not let it go mushy.

Pilafi rice needs to be served immediately. This is why many Cretan hosts wait until the final guest walks through the door before they start cooking it. Now you know why they eat so late; it's all their guests' fault! Serve the rice topped with the chicken, vegetables and sauce; a green salad complements the colours of this meal. We also had it with a good beer. Everyone had a bit of everything, and the cook was complimented on her versatility. As for the feta cheese, the chicken didn't really need it.

This dish sounds a little complicated. That's why we cooked it on a Sunday; never never on a weekday. If you don't eat a lot of meat during the week, you will savour this meal, which may seem a little heavy fat-wise. Keep in mind that the chicken stock does not have to be turned into pilafi on the same day that you serve the chicken; it can be kept for another meal, or turned into soup (with the fat skimmed off). If you boiled free-range chicken just to make pilafi, a fantastic way to use up the boiled chicken that nobody wants to eat is to make a chicken pie.

©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 CHICKEN RECIPES:
Pilafi
Chicken pie
Chicken curry
Yiouvetsi
Stir-fry noodles
Sunday roast
Chicken roast

MORE MEALS THAT GO WITH PILAFI RICE:
Bolognaise sauce
Chili con carne
Stir-fry beef and vegetables

MORE RICE RECIPES:
Simple pilafi rice for children
Spanakorizo
Dolmadakia - dolmades
Yemista - ayemista