Braised summer greens with corn (Χόρτα τσιγαριαστά με ξενικόστερα)

Every day during our getaway break in Paleohora, we ate at the same taverna, Χουμάς, by Grammenos Beach, near Kountoura.  Houmas serves freshly prepared, mainly seasonal delicacies on a daily basis, all cooked by one of the sons of the original owners of the taverna, who is a trained chef. It is one thing to know how to cook the local dishes of your region, which you may have watched your mother prepare on a regular basis for your family, and quite another to to cook these same dishes as a chef who is trained to standardise these meals so that they taste the same whenever they are cooked. In our house, the same dishes that I cook on a regular basis do not always come out with the same taste!

Our favorite dish at Houmas was braised summer greens, χόρτα τσιγαρισατά, in colloquial terms, which basically means what has been left over in the garden, all cooked together. Beans, vlita greens,  zucchini and corn (which are colloquially known in Crete as ξενικόστερα) go amazingly well with a tomato-based sauce flavoured with some onion or garlic and olive oil.

Braised greens is a favorite dish for many Cretans: it represents the abundance of a great variety of crops, and wealth in terms of a rich feast provided by the scraps that nature yields, even when the growing season is at its end.

You can guess what I cooked when we came back home, straight after our holiday:

Xenikostera, of course, with what was left over in our summer garden, plus the one game bird my husband caught during our holiday - a tsihla (Turdus spp.).


At Houmas taverna, a plate of braised greens cost 4.50 euro; at home, it cost us the labour and toil of a summer garden.

You can find the recipe for tsigarisata horta here.

©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.

Kids cook

I've tried to get my son to write a blog, but he much prefers writing and sketching.



A couple of days ago, instead of writing about his day, he wrote up the recipe he cooked.

And we used the  corn from the cobs that grew in our garden.



Although my kids are able to cook a few basic things, I still supervise them - being independent in the kitchen takes a certain amount of practice; they still need to remember to load the washing machine. (and I don;t really want to come home to a kitchen fire).

©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.

Food for thought (Φαγητό για τον εγκέφαλο)

They just arrived in the mail:

When I finish reading them, I'll tell you how the Cretan cuisine relates to them.
After all, we are what we eat.

Snacks from New Zealand and Crete (Μικροφαγητά)

There are a couple of days in the week, when I am away from home all day. It's important on these days for everyone to find something to eat when they get home. You might say that cooking is not necessarily a woman's job alone. Given the forthcoming global Woman's Day (March 8), I may agree with you, but only for argument's sake. Ask a man to work all day, pick up the children from school, help them with their homework, and cook a meal on top of that; he'll probably cook eggs and chips or plain pasta with grated cheese on a daily basis. There are very few kalofagas types in Crete in the true sense; those who have found one should be very grateful, for they are few and far between. Women's rights activists may not like what I'm saying, but hearing the truth about an issue isn't always easy to digest. I don't actually work many hours outside the home, so it's only natural that the family expects me to provide the meals. I don't mind being expected to do this, I love working with food.

But today is going to be a rather difficult one. After dropping off the children at school, I have to run a couple of errands in town, which is close to my first teaching hour for the day (which starts at 11.30am): a private English lesson at a student's home. He is studying at university, and didn't manage to obtain an English proficiency certificate while he was a school student, so now, in his free time, he is preparing to take an English proficiency test, which he will use in conjunction with his computer engineering degree to make him more marketable for future employment. After that, I have a couple of hours to kill, before my next lesson is due: a three-hour advanced English skills class, with Masters' students from all over the Mediterranean at a European-funded research institute in Hania. These classes are held once or twice a week as a method to improve the students' writing skills, as they must write their Masters' thesis in English at the end of their studies. There will be hour to kill before the final pitstop: another three hours of English proficiency test preparation to high school students at a private language institute for children of all ages. Learning English is compulsory formt he third year of primary school in Greece. Only the basics are taught through the state system, and most children attend a private language institute to gain greater proficiency in the language. Fortunately, in Hania, English is regarded as a vital skill, due to tourism playing a central role in the survival of the island's economy. Without knowledge of a second (and all too often nowadays), third language, one's employment opportunities are greatly reduced.

Luckily, each lesson is located within 5-10 driving minutes away from the previous one, so I don't have to worry about road rage. I suppose you've been counting the number of hours I'll be working, and how many I'll be killing on the road or in an office waiting for my next lesson: I come home at 10.15pm.

In any case, my freezer is always well-stocked for these difficult days, but there are also some other alternatives to deal with this mini-crisis:

1. Cook a meal on the previous night (which I have no recollection of; either I was too tired, or I was blogging...),
2. Give them leftovers (the leftover pastitsio went into the children's school lunch; I doubt they would want to eat a third serving of pastitsio over a period of three days this week),
3. Warn everyone that they have to provide their own meals today, and get them to promise to clean up afterwards (which of course will induce them to order home-delivered pizza or take-out souvlaki).

Neither one of these options suits me today; if anyone would like to enjoy some junk food, I should be entitled to enjoy it with them. Which leads me to the last option:

• Prepare some healthy snacks for them to peck on all day.
  

I like this one best because I love snacks myself. Snack food is often associated with bad eating habits, hardly surprising since most snack food these days is bought, mass-produced, fatty, high-calorie junk food. On Monday night (my other long working day), in relation to an article on obesity, I held a discussion with the school students about their eating habits, and here's what I discovered about the group of ten children in the class:

• only 1 eats crunchy raw vegetables,
• only 1 student's parents refuse to provide other food if some members of the family are fussy eaters and refuse to eat the main meal provided,
  
• 1 child sneaks out to the mini-market in his area to buy chips and chocolates when his parents are having a midday snooze,
• 1 prefers to eat meat on a daily basis if she can get it,
  
• most children said that they never ate fish or beans,
• a few children refuse to eat any vegetables whatsoever.

On the day I conducted this little survey, not one of the the children in the evening classes had beans for lunch. A few had salads with mainly a spaghetti meal; only one ate green vegetables for lunch. There was a major football match on television that night; most said that they would be eating pizza, souvlaki or pasta for dinner. It is said that Crete is where the Mediterranean diet originated from, but it's obvious that it won't be survived by the Cretans themselves at this rate. It will have the same fate as the Olympic Games; they started and ended in Greece, whereas it took a foreigner's foresight to revive them outside of Greece.

Even though I make a conscious effort to practice what I preach, this is not to say that junk food does not come into our house at all: we keep a few cans of soft drink in the house for visitors (we usually use them past their sell-by date); there are also a couple of packets of potato chips in the pantry (I notice that I bring them out when I'm experiencing a psychological 'downer'; crisps really do make you feel better); we do have chocolate in the house (which I keep away from the sight range of the children, in the highest drawer of the fridge - chocolate melts easily in a sunny Cretan kitchen). When I go to the organic food shop in Hania (GAIA), as I pass the counter to pay for my purchases, I must necessarily pass the chocolate bars, muesli bars, biscuits, cakes, etc by the cash register. If the children are shopping with me, they always ask me if they are allowed to take one. Most times, I let them because they don't get this 'junk' (no matter how organic it may be, it is still junk food).











Today's' snacks are the traditional Cretan dakos salad and a New Zealand teatime favorite: corn fritters. They represent my ambivalent feelings towards cooking and providing meals for the family, a mix of traditional and liberal attitudes prevailing in this household concerning food and lifestyle. These snacks were prepared in a very quick amount of time. They may be kept at room temperature if they are going to be eaten on the same day. They'll be left out on the kitchen benchtop with a cloth covering to keep away UFO's, both animate and inanimate. The benchtop is the most obvious place for snacks, especially the area close to the biscuit tin. Next to the fresh cooked snacks, I will also leave a couple of apples and bananas, a bag of oranges from our trees in the village, and some dried fruits (raisins, almonds and banana chips). That's plenty for everyone to snack on throughout the afternoon. They may not even remember to ask for a glass of warm milk before bedtime, which they like to dunk semi-sweet cheap shop-bought biscuits. The children will be sleeping by the time I come home. If I'm lucky, there'll be some snacks left over for me to eat while I watch the third series of Desperate Housewives...

(9 hours later - 10.15pm)
When I arrive back home, I find that all the fruit has been remained untouched, exactly where I had left it. Next to it, there's an open packet of crisps, and I find another (empty) one in the rubbish bin, along with the packaging from a chocolate bar. A couple of paximadia and corn fritters are missing from the trays; there are also two shot glasses in the sink.
"Where did the chips come from?" I asked my husband.
"Nikos came round to prune the grapevines," he replied.
Oh well, more leftovers.

And if you can't get hold of Cretan rusk to make dakos, here's another healthy alternative: the good old cheese (Cretan gruyere - graviera) and crackers, a favorite of Wallace and Gromit, who we watch a lot of in my house; had we not encountered them on DVD, we wouldn't have given a toss for this old favorite. Now my children love them, too.

©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 HEALTHY SNACKS:
Banana cake muffins
Banana lassi
Apple cake
Carrot cake muffins
Chocolate walnut pancakes
Kalitsounia
Ladenia pizza
Marathopites
Prasopita
Fruit crumble
Sfakianes pites
Spanakopita
Tiropitakia

Corn and tuna pasta (Μακαρόνια με καλαμπόκι και τόνο)

Here's a favorite lunchbox meal of my children's. I prepare it in the evening and pack it for them to eat at school the next day, but it's so quick and easy that you can even prepare it in the morning so that the children can take it fresh with them. Both the kindergarten and the primary school have refrigerators and a conventional or microwave oven, so I'm not concerned about food going off in their bag before lunchtime.

Open a small tin of tuna, and drain it of the oil or brine. Likewise with a small tin of corn (not the creamed variety). Boil some pasta (enough for two servings) till al dente. When cooked, pour in the tuna and corn. I don't add salt, but that's up to you. Add two full tablespoons of mayonnaise and mix everything together. Voila!

This lunch snack reminds me of the Marks and Spencers sandwiches we ate while on a train journey from Cambridge to London: buttered wholewheat bread triangles filled with corn, cheese and tuna. Yum yum!

©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 PASTA RECIPES:
Puttanesca
Bologanise
Stir-fry noodles
Stir-fry beef
Blue dragon
Octopus stew
Pastitsio
Pizza carbonara
Mussels sauce

Corn fritters (Τηγανίτες με καλαμπόκι)

All children will go on as adults to remember one dish that their mother made so well, that they could never eat someone else's version in the same way. My son will always remember my corn fritters. I got this recipe from an old but very good NZ vegetable cookbook by Digby Law. At one point, I read his obituary in a New Zealand newspaper, which referred to his sexual leanings. We often read about the surviving members of one's family in an obituary, but I didn't think that a famous cook's sexuality needed to be revealed in an obituary, especially in a country that practiced political correctness fervently. (I'm sorry, but I can't find the article which contained these 'facts' about Digby Law, so you'll have to take my word for it.)

People's attitudes to corn have come a long way in Greece. When my friend Philippa from New Zealand first arrived in Hania, her Cretan husband told her to prepare a meal for a dinner party. She made a rice salad with corn and other mixed vegetables. She was rather taken aback when one of the guests, who had never been out of the environs of the island, exclaimed in horror that Phillipa was serving them 'chicken-feed'. Corn cobs are a regular part of the Greek menu in the summer; admittedly, when corn has come off the husk, it stops being a part of the traditional Greek diet.

Like many informed citizens around the world, I like to check the labeling on packaged food. You have to be particularly careful with corn. Among the different tins on the shelf at the supermarket, one of them claimed to be a product of the Monsanto company. I know that GMO products are forbidden in the European Union, so what is Monsanto's name doing on our supermarket shelves? I used to buy tinned corn that clearly states it is not GMO - until it stopped bring stocked. I now buy the Green Giant brand, believing it is 'sans GMO' as the other tin used to clearly state on the packaging.

Corn fritters were one of the customers' favorite fritters, along with paua fritters and potato fritters, in my parents' fish shop. In our house, we have them as an evening snack.

You need:
1 egg
salt, cumin and pepper
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
a cup of corn kernels (you can use creamed corn)
1/2 carrot and 1 small onion, finely grated (these are not in the original recipe; I add them because it is one way of getting children to eat their vegetables without realising it)
1 cup of flour
1/2 cup milk
Mix together the egg, salt, cumin, pepper, baking powder and the corn. I like to put them in the blender so that the corn mashes up a little. You can keep the kernels whole, or use creamed corn instead. I use the blender to make these as I find it less messy. At this point, add the extra vegetables if you are using them; I include them to make the corn fritters more healthy. Pour the mixture into a bowl (if you were using the blender to make them), add a cup of flour and 1/2 a cup of milk. Mix well; add more milk if the batter is not runny enough to pour spoonfuls into a pan (ie it is like a dough), OR add flour if it is too runny (it is like oil).

Heat up some oil (enough to cover the base of the pan) on medium heat in a shallow pan and pour spoonfuls into the pan. Turn the fritters over with a spatula when you can see the edges browned, to cook them on the other side. They do not break up easily. My kids eat these as a dinner snack, instead of our usual dacko, kalitsounia or sandwiches. They also get them as a morning snack at school if there were some leftover from the previous evening.

©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 HEALTHY SNACKS:
Banana cake muffins
Banana lassi
Apple cake
Carrot cake muffins
Chocolate walnut pancakes
Kalitsounia
Ladenia pizza
Dakos rusk
Marathopites
Prasopita
Fruit crumble
Sfakianes pites
Spanakopita
Tiropitakia