Plantain

It isn't just foodies who like to browse through food stalls when travelling in foreign lands, as we are all, to some extent, attracted to the unusual. When in London, I like to look at the fresh food stalls in Lewisham, which display quite a few imported species of fruit and vegetables that we do not see in Hania, and I wonder how they are prepared and what they taste like.

Apart from the tomatos, bell peppers and avocados, everything else looked quite foreign to me. Our supermarkets stock only one kind of mango (always imported), and one type of okra (only when it's in season). Taro (κολοκάσι) is now making an appearance, but potatos,onions and garlic continue to be the only root vegetables we see in our fresh markets. Ginger is now a staple in supermarkets, but it's still only imported.  

This year, I decided to buy some plantains to take back and cook at home. I bought them in a very unripe state - they were bright green, with no black markings. At first sight, of course they look like bananas, which often confuses the uninitiated. My family couldn't believe that they could be anything else.

I bought the plantains at the same time, but they all seemed to be at different ripening stages after nearly three weeks sitting on the kitchen work bench.  

Plantains don't really look any more exciting than bananas. Plantains are always cooked (the German word for plantain is Kochbanane - 'cooking banana', which expresses it succinctly), unlike bananas which are eaten raw, even in their unripe state. But even bananas were once an exotic species for Crete/Greece, and they haven't even been around for a century here:

In the early 20s, a monk from the area, returning from the Holy Land, brought with him a few banana plants and planted them in the Monastery of St. Antoniou of Arvi (in Iraklio, Crete). When the plants fruited, nobody tasted them despite their nice fragrance, since they knew nothing about them. But a few plants were planted in gardens and fields as ornamentals. A few years later a doctor who was in the area and knew the fruit, not only tried it before the astonished inhabitants, but bought a bunch of bananas. In the early 30s the first crops were a fact. Bananas, grown in sacks with straw or paper, were transported by animals to Viannos, and from there by truck to Iraklio and then by ferry to Athens. The Cretans were still not eating them. Ten years later the banana cultivation started in Malia, on the north coast of Crete. At that time the price was 25 drachmas per oka (old measuring system) in the winter which fell to 5 drachmas in the summer. At the same time the price of olive oil did not exceed 7 drachmas per oka. In the early 50s the Cretans 'discovered' banana as a fruit and began placing the product on the markets of the island. Demand is great, but is not covered by production. In the late 50s, banana imports began during the winter from African countries and South America. (For more information, click on this link.)

Bananas only became a common commodity in the Greek market after entry into the EU. Before that, they were considered exotic and expensive. When I was teaching in Athens in the early 1990s, a student recounted this story to me: her parents had been to London to visit friends, where they purchased a large bag full of bananas which they took on the plane back to Athens. At the airport, they took a taxi to take them home, where they unloaded their suitcases and bags - but the driver didn't see the bananas on the ground and he squashed them with the wheel by accident, much to the dismay of my friend's parents, who had transported them to Greece like precious cargo!

Post by Organically Cooked.

My plantain dishes, all cooked with our own olive oil.

After nearly 3 weeks of having the plantains sitting on my kitchen bench, I decided that the time had come to try cooking them. My recipes come straight from the internet, my first source for anything I don't know. Apparently, you can eat them both as a savoury and a sweet. The green ones are better as a savoury, while the riper ones are better as a sweet. I chose to use one less ripened plantain to make tostones which are very popular in the Americas, eaten with rice and beans, and a simple sweet plantain dish with the most ripened plantain, similar to the fried banana dessert in Asian restaurants.

My family's reaction to the plantain recipes was as could be expected of people eating unusual food for the first time. They said that it wasn't the most exciting thing that they had ever tasted. Perhaps it's true that plantains aren't the most exciting food species around. But they are forgetting something. I told them to imagine that this was a common meal in their home, like it is for many other people around the world, and also to imagine that the plantain is all they may have had to cook with. I know that they enjoyed the meal much more than they would have, had we not had this little talk.

The last plantain was eaten last night, and I can tell you that it brought back memories of our recent trip to London, knowing that there won't be any more plantains to eat for quite a while...

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Computer lessons (Μαθήματα Η/Υ)

About a month ago, my workplace decided to offer the staff a subsidised computer training course - you are paid for attending lessons. It meant staying at work for a few hours after you finish, something very few working wives and mothers really want at a time in their lives when they are already too busy. I was roped into taking part because the minimum attendance number had not been reached. The five 3-4 hour-long lessons are now keeping me at work until 7-8pm on the days that the course runs.

My evening work at MAICh gave me a glimpse of the evening meals enjoyed by the students: soup is always on the menu, followed by meat or fish, with at least one carbohydrate, and the ubiquitous salad and fruit.

Kitchen and ground staff, as well as some of the younger members of the administration staff, were all taking part. They are generally people who do not spend all their time sitting at a desk with a computer on it. I wondered what I really needed to learn about computers that I didn't already know. In the first lesson, I thought the answer to that was 'nothing': one of the first things we did was to 'learn' how to turn a computer on, and then we learnt that the Windows screen kept the same things on it that our office desk would have, were we not to be using computers. OK, I thought, as I silently read 'other material from my secret cache.

 


  The family still have to eat: I prepared the dough, and some instructions on how to cook a pizza.

The next day, I realised I had lost a memory stick where I kept some files I was working on at the time. Luckily for me, I did have back up copies of my work, but admittedly, like all people, we are sometimes lax about things like that, and my files weren't completely up to date in terms of back up. I fretted a little. Maybe that's why I need computer lessons, I thought.

The second lesson proved much more exciting - the very well informed info-tech instructor advised us about how we can jaz up our WORD files. WORD is a program I use regularly, and if I had time, I could make all those graphics discoveries that I learnt about in the lesson all by myself. But time is of the essence and I don;t have time to much around on such things. After the lesson, I went home to download some files that I had sent to myself through my workplace's intranet. Alas, I was to discover that the internet wasn't working.

 I specifically reminded them to take photos for me.

What to do now? I fretted, much more than the last time. I had lost the memory stick, the internet wasn't working, so I was now stuck. The next day, I noticed there was still no internet at home. I went into work early, frantically downloaded/uploaded/saved whatever I could onto a new memory stick. It was then that I noticed the black memory stick, wedged between the computer tower and a black file box. I still had time to write a little post about how my kids had their first no-adult-supervision cooking session while I was away. To my horrors, Blogger did not seem to be working. I gave up and got on with 'real' work.

I was pleased to see that the house hadn't burnt down when I arrived back home, and I was equally pleased to see the results. The kids have seen me roll out filo pastry dough, so perhaps this is why they made a mistake with the pizza dough -they were trying to roll it out too thinly. But if they hadn't made this mistake yesterday, they wouldn't be better pizza makers today. I called their pizza creation 'omelette pizza' because it turned out to be much easier to eat it folded up.

So here I am back at home. I've backed up my file register, the internet is now working, but I found I still couldn't write anything on Blogger. I did a quick internet check, although I admit that it took me a while to find an appropriate search string to give me the information I wanted: for instance, 'blogger down' led me to some entries about similar problems that took place over a year ago. The best one was 'can't (WITH the apostrophe, take note!) write a new post blogger', where the latest entry had appeared only half an hour ago. The 'best answer' to the question had already been posted: 'turn off draft blogger'. And sure enough, it worked.

Despite being too tired to do much, I still found the time to show the kids how it 'should' be done.  Life doesn't get much better than this in our tiny small quiet part of the world.

Next week, we'll be focussing on Excel. Powerpoint will follow, and the last computer course session will be based on the use of the internet. I clearly have a lot more to learn than I thought. There will always be something for everyone to learn, no matter how long they've been using a computer for.

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Knitting (Πλέξιμο)

It had been about seven years since I last knitted anything, as there didn't seem to be any need to knit anything. New Zealand, like the UK and the US, is knitter's paradise; people love showing off their craftwork and complementing others for it. I used to knit a lot when I was living there, but I noticed how unnecessary most of my works were in Greece, because it is simply too hot for woollen clothing. I've kept a good number of my woollen creations, mainly because of the great amount of work I had put in them; it didn't feel right to give them to a charity shop or leave them in a bag outside a church, because these kinds of items are not appreciated by locals. They aren't really useful, and they are generally not worn these days.

Mittens made with 4-ply pure wool, and a scarf being made with Greek BONSAI yarn

Now that my children are becoming more fashion conscious, they are asking for accessories like scarves and gloves. In my time, I've knitted countless pairs of the latter. Among the material possessions I transported from NZ to Greece were a few of my favorite knitting patterns and my knitting needles; I'm really glad now that I did because equipping yourself for hobby purposes can be quite a costly outlay. In my youth, I knew them almost off by heart; when you knit a pattern very often, it's like a recipe that you don't need to consult a cookbook to make. Nevertheless, patterns for making just about anything are now available not just on websites, but even on youtube videos, to guide you through the whole process.

Keyhole scarf made with eyelash yarn

My kids' interest gave me a chance to survery the yarn market in Hania. There are only two shops in Hania selling various yarns, which may say something about the popularity of yarn crafts. At the same time, it should be mentioned that local radio is now advertising knitting lessons, no doubt one of the side effects of the economic crisis. These kinds of novelties followed on from sewing lessons which teach ot just how to sew your own clothes, but how to give your old clothes a makeover.

Although beautiful soft non-scratch woollen yarns exist, they are not so popular here because they are more expensive, but the yarn market has also grown in the last decade due to advances in technology. Polyamide yarn mixes, available in a wide variety of forms, are now very popular all over the world. Although they cannot be described as very cheap, you usually need only one ball of wool to make a fashionable scarf or a pair of gloves, for instance. In terms of prices, Hania is not much more expensive than a small town in Holland, for example, where I picked up some interesting yarns while holidaying there, but I notice that similar yarns are also sold in Hania at similar prices.

Ruffled scarf yarn, thanks to technological advances

Knitting has similar therapeutic qualities as reading a book that isn't very demanding, like chick lit. As I waited for my daughter's basketball session to finish, I sat in the small gymnasium knitting a very colourful scarf in simple garter stitch (for the uninitiated, knitting doesn't get any easier than that). The stares I got were enough to make me move to a more isolated spot away from the team's eyes, which were more often centred on the scarf rather than the game - I don't know what intrigued people more: the yarn or the knitting process.

Once you know the basic stitches, knitting requires patience and a determination to finish a project; both virtues are highly essential in a society that is trying to rebuild itself after suffering a fast-paced domino-like path of destruction. Athens and New York share a similar plight, in the sense that they need to rebuild something that took decades to construct and only a very short time to annihilate. But they don't share the same theory on how to resolve these problems, as the following paragraph, written in Greek in the original, shows:

Anti-capitalists may be pleased to see the hub of capitalism being hit so hard by something it could not control. I am happy for what I saw happening for another reason: I saw a city and its citizens learning from past events, I saw the wider state infrastructure in the face of a black president who took action despite the pre-election period, I saw people knowing how to judge which channels, which photos, which blogs they should believe. I saw homeless people being removed from the area of danger, shops being protected, neighbours helping others, I saw firemen and police officers in their posts, people accepting humour at their expense, even directing sarcastic comments at themselves, with the self-confidence that you can only have from the security of the knowledge that you can rebuild what is being destroyed. I saw a city that works, one which we don't want to be like.

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Aubergine with spicy yoghurt, onion, herbs and pomegranate seeds (Πολλά και διάφορα)

Tavernas (ταβέρνες) and restaurants (εστιατόρια) are two quite different things. A taverna is an informal eaterie which serves traditional Greek meals, while a restaurant often has a more formal atmosphere and the food served there may not be recognisable in the Greek culinary spectre. Tavernas are usually cheap, although I haven't been to one since the price hikes (we haven't been to one since last September). A full meal would cost my family no more than €12 euro a head, alcohol included. The food served for this price is mainly fresh, local and seasonal. Last year, I went to a pricey restaurant in my town; the meals there used ingredients not normally associated with Cretan/Greek cuisine.

Why must restaurant food be expensive? Fancy decor, high rents and plush furnishings don't warrant a high price for a meal. Not even the service counts: waiters should always be courteous, chefs should always cook decent food, and service should always be reasonably quick wherever you go.  People go out for a meal for different reasons. I never include eating local food at the top of my list when choosing to eat out, because that's what I eat most of the time. I'm not a locavore in the modern sense: I eat what there is to be found out of necessity, not necessarily by choice. My primary reason would be to enjoy myself, so if I have to pay a high price for the meal, I want to be sure that I am paying for the quality of the food, not the surroundings.

 In summer, I prepared some eggplant rolls filled with mint-flavoured mizithra cheese. To make the eggplant recipe I found ιn the Ottolenghi menu, I defrosted six pieces, scraped off the mizithra into a bowl, and pan-fried the eggplant. The minty mizithra was used to make the yoghurt sauce. 

Having recently used an Ottolenghi recipe, I checked out other items on the menu of his restaurants. The average cost of each dish was about £10. The dishes do not have names as such: they are described by their ingredients. The restaurant has a Mediterranean focus, and the ingredients are all fresh, but they aren't all British: according to the website, 'local' food is both British and European.  Judging from the reviews posted by different diners, you would order about three dishes per person (they are mainly vegetable-based, which means that they don't fill up your stomach too easily), with an average cost per head of approximately £30, which translate to about 40 euro per head. That is not at all cheap.

The description of the dishes goes something like this:

 Roasted aubergine with turmeric yoghurt,

crispy onion, basil, rocket and

pomegranate

£9.00

Some tweaks to the original description: I shallow-fried (instead of roasting) the eggplant slices to save time and energy; I didn't have fresh basil available, so I used fresh oregano instead; I preferred to use fresh ginger to flavour the yoghurt rather than turmeric because I had that only in powdered form; the rocket I used is a Greek variety with large leaves (small-leafed rocket is available, but it's imported and bagged - probably subjected to bleach for the purposes of cleansing). The pomegranate was the last local one I had managed to secure for the season (and I mean from Hania) - there won't be any more locally grown pomegranates until next year. That's what it means to eat fresh, local seasonal food - everything is eaten or preserved in its time.

It's not difficult to imagine what I'll be getting from such a description. But it's hard to work out if the ingredients are truly seasonal when they are found from a range of different sources. In Greece, aubergine is usually associated with summer, and pomegranate with late autumn or early winter; this was supposedly a February menu. At least one of those ingredients would have to come from a greenhouse or outside Europe (ie not local, according to the restaurant's definition). The cooking techniques sound quite simple - the final taste and quality seem to depend on the appropriateness of the combinations of the ingredients.

 

My initial idea was to photograph the finished dish with an olive grove in the background. Then I remembered the plants that actually gave me the aubergines: now in winter, they are dry stalks. They continued to produce eggplant up until early January, but the fruit was not the best quality.

The roasted aubergine with turmeric yoghurt, crispy onion, basil, rocket and pomegranate seeds was the first item I saw written on the sample menu card. My first thought was "I can easily recreate a dish like this in my kitchen", because all the ingredients are available to me: in fact, we grow most of the fresh ones ourselves - but not all at the same time! My second thought was: "Oh my God, so many different ingredients." It's freaky to rush around trying to find obscure items that can't always be located at one stop-and-shop place, especially when you really don't need to use them in great quantity; a lot of your purchases will probably not end up being used again for a while, kind of like bottled Asian sauces sitting in your fridge for a long time. And finally: "There's a lot of preparation involved in this dish." You need a lot of hands to create this kind of meal, as well as quite a wide variety of pots and pans and kitchen utensils.

Pomegranate and eggplant are two of my favorite natural foods (in their season). They are also messy to deal with. Skin contact with the white flesh of an eggplant (and the yellow inner flesh of a pomegranate) makes your fingers black. I should know: I have cut a lot of aubergine in my lifetime.  How to peel a pomegranate is the subject of many web discussions. At this particular restaurant, pomegranate is overused. Someone at Ottolenghi's must be peeling pomegranate for a good part of their day. I guess that's what you pay for when you go to an expensive restaurant: imported unusual ingredients, exotic looking food, a lot of manual labour and imaginative decor, whether it's in the premises or the food styling. The plating of the dishes is quite unlike serving a 'piece' of something from a pot or pan, like I do at home: a dish like roasted aubergine with turmeric yoghurt, crispy onion, basil, rocket and pomegranate seeds is all about food styling, artistic effect and detail.

 Plating the same dish at at a restaurant must feel like an assembly line at times. PS: This dish doesn't really need the pomegranate seeds - it would probably work better with a sprinkling of dried crushed nuts to complement the sweetness of the sun-kissed Cretan summer-grown aubergine.

The cost of making this dish in my kitchen was less than €1 (for both portions). This does not include a payment for the cook, leaving me unpaid. To recreate the roasted aubergine dish (together with the purple-sprouting broccoli dish), I needed to spend well over an hour in the kitchen. But I had all the fresh ingredients available to me. When I decided to make this dish, it was a Saturday morning, and I didn't feel like leaving the house. I had everything I needed to make it without having to spend time or money sourcing it. That's the advantage of living in a food-centric society in the Mediterranean. Although I wasn't paid for my own work in producing the dish, I can safely say that my kitchen fun turned into a very rewarding experience, judging by the comments I received from my 'diners': the plates were licked clean. 

A visitor from Iran recently landed on my blog with the search string: "why people prefer to eat out". Good question: cultural norms for eating out differ markedly between east and west, especially between underdeveloped and technologically dependent nations. When I want to eat out, I definitely want to eat something different to what I cook at home, which isn't as easy as it sounds in my own town; most local tavernas offer home-style food, using similar recipes to those of my own. The food doesn't have to be exotic or imported; the atmosphere needs to be fun and the food tasty. It should definitely be an accessible meal to all ages and pockets. The meal out needs to be an enjoyable way to spend time in good company. I'm looking forward to some Asian food in London soon...

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Internet cafe (Ιντερνετ καφέ)

What am I doing on a Sunday afternoon in this dark room, with walls painted grey, the ceiling painted black, and neon lights hanging from drainpipes fixed to it? Why am I staring ahead of me at three TV screens, all playing different football matches, with ads for cars and cellphone companies? Why am I tolerating the illegal thick plumes of other people's smoke, and listening to Greek terms of endearment (ρε μαλάκα) being hurled around the room as often as the ball is being kicked in the matches on the screens? Why am I in a room full of men with ponytails, boys with shaven carvings on their scalps, girls with skinny legs wearing drainpipe jeans and Ugg boots, where everyone dresses in black as a rule, as they sit on black chairs looking at black screens? Why am I writing a blog post while listening to fast loud techno-pop music?

I'm sitting at an internet cafe (even though there are three computers in the house) because I'm a mother, and as mothers, we do things that we don't always want to do. They haven't sene anything I've just described.

The cappuccino was very good, taking taste as the only factor to be considered. But if I also took into consideration capacity, then I'd have to say it was only just enough to keep me awake in the drowsy atmosphere I find myself in, and if I also take temperature into account, it was just hot enough to drink in three large swallows before it became tepid (it was on the verge of doing so when it was brought to me).

It's moments like these when I recall life in New Zealand, a place I now believe I was born in by some lucky accident. No one makes cappuccino as well as Espressoholic. Do they still make them the same way they did two decades ago? Just wondering...

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International Cuisine Saturdays (Διεθνή κουζίνα)

I have the travel itch, but I won't be travelling quite as soon as I would like. If travelling is in your plans, you might be in need of a new suitcase. CSN's luggage stores have offered me a $45 gift voucher* to give away to one of my readers, valid at any of their online stores. Leave a comment on this post and you will be in for the draw. The winner will be announced in 10 days' time. Good luck and have a safe journey!

As I'm writing, I'm dreaming of going on a mini-break to an urban centre where I could browse through the shelves of bookshops with multiple floors, feel the veins of history by visiting well-known monuments, admire architectural feats while sitting by the window of a train, and eat my choice of any kind of international cuisine that takes my fancy. This time last year, I was in the midst of planning an exciting trip to Paris and London. Holidays abroad aren't possible every year, even without an economic crisis, so this year, I'll content myself by browsing through our holiday shots.

What started off as a creative way to use leftovers has now become an institution in our home. I began presenting regular Greek tastes in unknown forms, as with the wontonson the left. It's riskier to present regular Greek forms with unknown tastes, as in the samosas on the right; the appearance fooled my family into thinking they were Cretan pasties, kalitsounia.

Travelling for pleasure was not quite as common for Greeks as it is now, even though Greece has generally been (and looks set to continue to be) a land of emigrants. Popular holiday destinations for Greek people were Dubai and Thailand before the economic crisis; till recently, Greek students formed one of the largest foreign student groups in the UK. But even before Greece joined the EU, Northern Greeks (in particular) regularly travelled in and out of neighbouring countries, both for business and pleasure: they set up firms in many Balkan countries, they get cheaper medical care in FYR Macedonia, they take daytrips to Turkey to acquire cheap goods, and they go on skiing holidays in Bulgaria, now an EU member with euro currency, where a sizeable number of Northern Greeks are also retiring, due to the more affordable lifestyle (Bulgaria's cost of living is lower than Greece's, which stretches the Greek pension well beyond the limits of its Greek value).

Spring rolls are now becoming more popular in global food outlets in Hania, like pizzerias. The spring rolls I ordered at such an outlet were made with Mediterranean tastes. When I made them at home, I used bottled Asian sauces to add a bit of foreignness to my otherwise Med-flavoured filling.

Apart from seeing some of the greatest monuments of the world from close up, travelling outside the limited environments of our island home also means the possibility for my family to try new tastes and for me to indulge in some old favorites, the kind of international cuisine I was used to eating out when I lived in Wellington. Trying new food doesn't just mean eating something you haven't tasted before, and it's not only about seeing the differences in the cuisines of the world. Eating 'other people's food' familiarises you with a new kind of eating style; and as you eat your way around the world, whether it's in an unfamiliar environment or the comfort of your own home, you realise that there is a great deal of similarity involved the food we all eat. For example, which culture doesn't have some kind of small 'hand-held pie', made with some kind of pastry containing some kind of filling? Is there any country in the world that doesn't eat any kind of 'bread', no matter what grain it's made of? Does a society exist that doesn't eat a 'sandwich' in some form, even if it doesn't actually call it a sandwich?

Pita with falafel resembles the Greek souvlaki filled with bifteki instead of meat slivers, but the taste is very different.

Global food outlets in Hania exist in both Greek and multi-national forms: there's Starbucks cafe, Domino's pizza, Goody's burgers, Roxani's pancakes, Grigori's sandwiches, to name but a few, but they all sell roughly the same kind of food: some kind of bread, filled or spread with similar fillings, which always include a milk-based product. There are very few international cuisine outlets in the town, apart from a couple of Chinese restaurants, which don't actually seem to be gaining ground (which may also have to do with the price). This frightens me somewhat: eating foreign cuisine is an educational experience, it helps break the racial divide. It also helps to know the sometimes subtle, sometimes major differences involved in other people's food to alleviate the initial 'shock' factor usually involved when experiencing the unknown. For example, I got a big shock when I tried wasabi paste for the first time, nothing like the exhilaration of a hot curry...

Some international cuisine looks, smells and tastes almost exactly the same as the Greek equivalent, eg lasagne and pastitsio; on the other hand, a Greek lahanosalata (cabbage salad) has little to do with sauerkraut, which I made by wilting the cabbage and adding various spices to give it a sour taste (it was not one of my more popular dishes). My cottage pie was very successful - the mince was flavoured with well-known Greek spices, while the potato layer provided similar carbohydrates as pasta does in a Greek makaronada. Cottage pie could be described as the English version of pastitsio or lasagne. 

At some point in their lives, my children will probably leave their island home and go abroad, whether for study or work. I won't be around to provide Cretan cuisine for them. I doubt that I'll be one of those mothers that will cook meals for them and fly them by courier to their student address abroad (like some people do, packing them together with ION chocolates and cigarettes, as if they don't have access to similar products where they are, and/or they are vital to their survival). We learn about the history and geography of the world, foreign languages, the importance of global technology in our lives, the necessity to acculturate to global norms and trends, but we rarely learn about the food of the world, only about our 'own', as if the food we eat is the only kind that everyone will recognise.

If I could cook whatever I want whenever I want, I would cook stir-fries. They can be as vegan or carnivorous as your preferences deisre, and they take little time to cook (they need more preparation time for chopping ingredients into small pieces). My stir-fry beef and fried rice was a winner. 

What started off as a way to use up leftovers during one of my freer moments over the Christmas holidays has now become an institution in my home. Since the beginning of the year, I've launched International Cuisine Saturdays. Every Saturday, when I have more time available to cook a meal creatively (as opposed to during the week when I cook on automatic pilot), I prepare a meal that veers away from Greek cuisine (what I typically cook at home), either in taste, texture or appearance, in the hope that one day, when my children become ambassadors for their countries in their circle of foreign friends, they'll be knowledgeable global citizens, accustomed to eating other people's food.

To date, I can only make blueberry muffins (and pancakes) when friends from abroad present them to me as a gift; apart from strawberries, berry fruits are not easy to grow in Crete due to the dry climate.

International Cuisine Saturdays doesn't involve buying novel ingredients or new cooking equipment (although I will admit to going through my supply of soya sauce rather quickly these days and have now resorted to buying it in 1-litre bottles). I usually don't know what I'm going to cook until the actual day, when I look into my fridge to see what's available, and make a decision according to my energy levels. Today's 'foreign food', for example, will form part of our dessert, blueberry pancakes, using a present I received in the post yesterday from a Canadian friend yesterday. We generally eat the same food all over the world; it's the preferred processes, combinations and flavours that differ. It's an educational experience on the most part for my family, and it also gives me a chance to cook food that I have always enjoyed (and greatly miss) eating. These are the times I feel gratified that I am able to cook well.

*CSN delivers to the US, Canada, UK and Germany; postage and packaging costs apply outside the US. 

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Cafe World (Καφέκοσμος)

This is probably how most migrants entering the catering business (a popular migrant occupation worldwide) feel when they move to a new country and enter the food trade: no doubt, my parents felt like this too, as owner-operators of a fish and chip shop in New Zealand.

It all began as a bit of fun and what seemed like a profitable venture. It was never my intention to enter the catering business, nor did I have any idea about how to cook the food that was on the menu at the particular establishment that we took over. It certainly felt weird being asked to cook sliders* and French onion soup, when I'd been used to cooking things like fasolada and yemista. In fact, it was the first time I tried this food when I started cooking it in our cafe!

The most popular dishes were the ones that needed very little cooking and preparation time, like the bacon cheeseburgers and guacomole. They also tended to spoil easily if business was slow or we forgot to check the cooker. A chunky fruit salad was wholesome and you could get many servings out of one preparation round, but it was also cheap, and you couldn't make a large profit from it.

Due to favourable climatic conditions, Crete has become a prime Greek producer of avocado, which is mainly exported, both to the mainland and abroad. For a long time, however, the locals had no idea how to eat this particular fresh product. They initially treated as a fruit, sprinkling sugar on it because it wasn't sweet; now they also use it as an addition to salads.

The best money to be made was from the dishes that needed long cooking periods, like the oven roast chicken and homestyle pot roast. We'd get them going from the evening and they'd be fresh and ready to serve the next day. These meals also yielded a lot of servings, and I didn't feel that I was slaving away in the kitchen all day.

Mama's taverna will always be fondly remembered;
fasolada and oven-cooked rice-stuffed Swiss chard (silverbeet) dolmades.

Customers are very predictable: they like to stick to old favorites. Spaghetti with meatballs and classic pizza are always sure to please. Follow this by a triple berry cheesecake or pumpkin pie, and they'll leave you a good tip, telling you that it was the best meal they ever had in their life. Didn't they ever have the home-made versions of these? I often wondered what food they had been brought up on, and what their mothers cooked for them.

Italian cuisine has practically become a staple in most restaurants, which makes it sound all too common. To attract the customers with better-padded wallets, we added a few other 'ethnic' dishes to our menu range. Chicken tikka masala and tandoori chicken have a distinct Indian ring to their names: who would have believed that tikka masala wasn't even cooked by the Indians, who invented it for the more sensitive foreign palate! To vary the menu from one week to another, we alternated between Indian and Chinese meals: crackling peking duck and kung pao stir-fry were among the most popular choices among the Chinese specials - and to think, I've never even been to China!

To cook Greek food at Cafe World, you need to have been playing for a long LONG time...

There's never a day off in the restaurant business, even during the holidays. We would often tailor some few recipes to suit the season. For instance, in the period leading to Halloween, I offered vampire steaks and toffee apples. How these two paired well in the customers eyes, I shall never understand, but it kept us in pocket, as the customers turned up in hordes.

Yemista and yiro will always make popular wholesome meals, no matter what you call them.

In due time, I even added my own cuisine to the regular menu, choosing dishes that were seemingly unobtrusive, as though they had always been a part of the standard menu card: instead of 'yemista', I called my herbed rice "overstuffed peppers", while I left out the word 'souvlaki' and just called the sandwich a "chicken gyro" instead. Somehow, Greek-labelled cuisine had fallen out of favour with the general public, but as soon as you served the same food under a different name, everyone would be rushing to try it, even if they couldn't pronounce the name of the meal properly!

My attempts at fusion cuisine have been met enthusiastically by most family members - above: Mediterranean spring rolls; below: pad thai singlina.

Over time, I learnt that the melting pot culture that had become my new home had put aside their traditional meals, not necessarily forgetting them entirely - Mama may not be cooking any longer, but she could never be forgotten - but adding new ingredients to an old traditional favorite. Fusion cuisine was a dangerous field to experiment with, but some meals did manage to become popular, like fiery fish taco, which was also regarded as a healthy alternative to the regular meat version. As long as it sold, I wasn't too fussed over how much better it was for you; we simply wanted to make a profit.

Cafe World, a Facebook application (a euphemism for 'game')

The best moment would have to be when we finally retired. We had been longing to go back and live in Greece, but decided against it when we realised how different life was there and how much we had gotten used to living in another world. But we had managed to amass a small fortune by working so hard for so long, as long as we have our health, we'll be cruising back and forth, playing ping pong between the Old World we left behind and the New World we made our home. Even if we can't go back to the old Greece that we knew, it's a nice feeling to know that we can sit at a Greek taverna a few times a year and enjoy the same food we grew up with.

How many immigrant Greeks envisage retirement...

For more standard and not so standard American restaurant favorites, visit Cafe World on Facebook, which is where I doodle whenever I have a minute to twiddle my thumbs. The inspiration for this post comes from a popular online game; the food it served could be said to be based on some standard truths about food and the restaurant trade.

* all italicised words are names of dishes mentioned in the Cafe World Facebook application.

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