Ajvar - Eggplant and pepper sauce (Αϊβάρ)

Sorry, folk, I don't know where the photos went - I had borrowed them from the web, and they seem to have been taken down since I used them. For more ajvar photos, see this post. 

After reading my Peppers post, a reader told me about another dish I can make with peppers: ajvar (pronounced 'ay-var' or 'ay-ver') from Eastern European cuisine, which uses peppers and eggplant. It's not an unusual combination, as these two summer vegetables often grow together, and this is a great way to use up my remaining eggplant, which is not such a popular vegetable now, as other vegetables have taken its place during the summer-winter transition. The name of the dish comes from 'caviar'; ajvar is poor man's caviar. It is used as a dip, a spread and an addition to casseroles. I found a simple ajvar recipe and made just enough to last us as a side salad. It was a very tasty salad, unbelievably good for such a simple dish.



Ajvar looks simple on the surface, but it is not generally made in a small home kitchen like mine, nor is it made by one person. Ajvar has a very social role and is a village affair in parts of former communist states that were once part of Yugoslavia, like Serbia and Makedonija (often written as Macedonia in English). Take my friend Fidanka's recipe for ajvar, as she explains it to me:

"We use florina type peppers (long red sweet peppers), seeds removed, and eggplants: 50 kg peppers, and 50 big size eggplants [yo need more peppers than eggplants] The vegetables are roasted over fire, peeled, ground and placed in huge pan. We add 3-4 liters oil and we cook it over fire, outdoors for 4-5 hours, continuously stirring. This is my family's recipe, but it varies from family to family, in terms of the pepper/eggplant ratio, oil, addition of parsley or garlic, shili pepper, etc. It is usually flavoured with just salt. The hot ajvar is placed in hot jars and then the jars are placed in a big pot all together, wrapped in old blankets. The next day, the jars are cold and the sauce can last for several years like this without changing the flavour. But of course, it never stays longer on my shelves than April the following year..."

Fidanka's ajvar

I'm tempted to make ajvar again and bottle it in jars, to use in my stews and soups, and as a spread. Something so simple can create so much satisfaction, as well as the feeling of security that always comes when you see a pantry full of jars of food that you prepared yourself and you know will tide you throughout the winter months.

Making ajvar (left) and yufki (right) in the former Yugoslavian republic of Macedonia. 

The yufki photo is as recent as 2012.

Making ajvar is a once-a-year thing, and only when the vegetables are in season. This blog gives you some idea about the importance of making ajvar in its social context. Communally made storeable food, like making yufki (a kind of egg and milk based pasta that can be kept all year round and is used in a variety of dishes), is still popular in the former communist countries which border Greece - this is quite a world apart apart from their neighbours (ie us), who never really performed culinary tasks collectively: apart, perhaps, from keeping a pig, or making wine and raki, virtually everything else is prepared for an individual family to enjoy. The barriers of politics once ensured that not even neighbours could learn from each other.

The regular pepper variety used for ajvar is Kurtovska kapija, although other pepper varieties are now also used (eg Slonovo uvo, Palanecno cudo), but Kurtovska kapija is considered one of the best because it contains low water content and high dry matter. Fidanka should know about this: the pepper photo is from her PhD pepper experiment, although the PhD was not connected to ajvar-making (!) Her brother likes to joke that her ajvar must be the best in Macedonija because it's made by a PhD pepper expert!

Fidanka tells me that in her home town of Strumcia, which is known for growing vegetables in open fields, plastic tunnels and greenhouses, the municipality has for several years now been organising the AJVERIJADA, where housewives get together and make ajvar. A committee tastes the results and competitors are awarded.

Ajvar-making in Strumcia, October 2013

In recent years, ajvar (as well as yufki) has been commercialised, as all home-made food has been around the world, which has to do with the easy access to technology and more people working outside the home, lacking time to take part in traditional activities, but there is still the deep-rooted belief that 'my mother's ajvar is the best' (a bit like hearing a Cretan saying 'my mother's kalitsounia are the best') especially when there many variations to each dish depending on region, taste, etc.

My own version of ajvar preserves is made with onion and garlic. I prefer my sauces to be chunky rather than smooth, so I didn't grind the vegetables. I intend to use these sauces in winter stews. Ajvar is often eaten as a spread on bread, accompanied by things like feta cheese. 

Even though ajvar is widely available commercially, in Macedonija, there is still a great sense of pride in continuing the tradition of making it communally. The taste of commercially made ajvar - as with any food product - is nearly always distinguishable from the home-made one. It all has to do with the future of food, or the food of the future, and how we see our future being shaped by world food trends.

©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.

Melitzanopita - Eggplant pie (Μελιτζανόπιτα)

I was buying some (French) beef the other day, which I asked to be turned into mince. The woman at the supermarket counter asked me what I was going to make.

"Bifteki for the freezer," I told her, "and I will also leave some to make a makaronada for tomorrow's lunch."

"If you have some cooked mince left over," she said to me, "use it in a melitzanopita." She explained that aubergine/eggplant pie was her favorite pita. Her mother in law introduced her to it recently, making it into a large pie (made with filo pastry) which she served up as a main meal with salad, as well as on a buffet table for a party. These days, her daughter in law makes it into little pies enclosed in thick pastry (made with puff pastry sheets) and she takes them to the beach as part of a picnic lunch. "They freeze really well, too," she added.

I'd never made eggplant pie before, although I have heard of eggplant used in similar ways, eg vegetarian patties and fritters. Looking it up in my Greek cookbooks, I came across a couple of recipes for eggplant pie, made by some famous old-school Greek TV chefs. They were labelled plainly - melitzanopita - but neither used mince in the recipe: they both used dairy products (cheese and cream). One version (1990) - made by Ilias Mamalakis, who stated that the recipe was given to him by Dimitris Bliziotis, a Greek food historian - was made into a large pie while the other (1999) - made by Vefa Alexiadou (no history of the origin is mentioned) was made into individual fat cigars. Both versions used different thicknesses of Greek filo pastry and the recipes were very frugal in nature, with a clear focus on simple Greek flavours. Ilia's pie contained just coriander seeds to flavour it, while Vefa's used parsley and mint. The basic idea was to make an eggplant filling for a simple pastry casing, which could be rolled up in any way that the cook felt like making them.

Ilias' (left) and Vefa's (right) melitzanopita recipes

I thought this sounded like a nice novel way to use up the eggplant that is rolling into the house from our summer garden at the moment. It also sounded like something I would really like to make - when we hear of a new kind of food, we are open to it as long as it suits our taste spectra. Before looking up 'melitzanopita' (or 'eggplant pie', 'aubergine pie' etc) on the web - my first stop for anything that I don't know these days - I decided that it had to be a very Mediterranean taste combination, something that decidedly fits into the Greek taste spectrum. Melitzanopita sounds unusual, but the ingredients needed to make it are actually very common. Although the pie is not a well known Greek recipe, I bet that it must have been tried out at the very least on one of those morning TV shows that housewives watch, which screen while I'm at work. (By the time I come home, old Greek re-runs are playing, and then it's Turkish soap opera extravaganza time, as Greece can no longer afford to make her own.)

Sure enough, I came across a number of youtube videos from the private Greek TV channels, which often contain a mixture of make-you-feel-good topics for ladies of no particular occupation: a bit of fashion, some celeb gossip, a recipe by a home cook, with the show being hosted by strappy-dressed peroxide blondes. This kind of light-entertainment program features on most of the private channels, unlike the former Greek state broadcaster, still doing a pirate run on ebu.ch, which is now featuring no entertainment, and only political discussions, operatic music and other very politico-socio-cultural  formal types of Greek-style urban-context amusement. (I am hard pressed to understand if the operatic bits are what rural Greeks expected to suddenly be bombarded with on the pirate ERT - then again, they probably don't use internet to watch anything, ergo... pirate ERT is broadcasting not for the masses, but the minority. And let's not talk about the new public but not-quite-legal broadcaster that hit Greek TV screens a couple of weeks ago - it's quite simply an embarrassment.)

Vegetarian filling for melitzanopita

The melitzanopita was made into what looked like a delicious vegetarian pie using soft white cheese and home-made pastry (ALPHA -  June 2012). Admittedly, Vasilis Kalilidis made a really hash job of his pastry, but as I mention on my blog how trivial it is to worry about how perfect your filo pastry sheets come out: when you cut it, it's gonna get scrappy anyway, so the most important thing about making pastry is that your pie remains in one piece after it's cooked and you are serving it, whether on the plate or as finger food.

Melitzanopita with mince cooked eggplant and mince (made in the same way as for makaronada) 

The next link I found came from - yet again - another TV morning show recipe featured on the web, only a week after the previous one (ANT1 - 12 June 2012). Argiro Barbaridou's melitzanopita did contain mince, but it was quite a 'heavy' recipe: it also contained eggs and cheese, which didn't entice me to make it, as I prefer my pies simpler. Eggs, cheese, mince and eggplant, covered in carb-filled pastry, all in one dish reminds me of very rich meals like moussaka, which are better eaten during the winter in colder weather.

But the chef who started this eggplant pie craze appeared a whole month before the vegetarian and meat version (SKAI - 8 May 2012) - George Gounaridis' melitzanopita is vegetarian (it contains cheese). That's what I love about cooking - making the same food in different ways, to satisfy different tastes. The well known restauranteur made his own thin (perfect) filo pastry which he layered into a baking tin with a simple filling of cooked eggplant, tomatoes and onions. The finished pie looked very light and very appetising.

Don't worry about how scrappy your pastry looks; it'll break up easily at any rate once it's cooked.

So you get the picture: eggplant pie can be made any way you want - vegetarian or with meat, even vegan, with the addition of perhaps a binding agent (eg breadcrumbs, semolina or crushed nuts). The pastry can be home made or store bought, in any thickness. But the most important aspect is to make sure that the eggplant is prepared in some way before adding it to the pie. Either it is cooked in cubes, or it is cooked whole and the skin is scraped away before being used for the filling. Eggplant is one of those vegetables that needs a lot of olive oil to cook well enough not to taste like cardboard (which is probably why Gwyneth Paltrow doesn't like eggplant). To avoid the oil, it needs to be roasted. Either way, it needs some preparation time before being used in meals such as pies.

I decided to make my melitzanopita in the shape of a 'snail pie.'

After deciding what kind of filling you want, and what kind of filo pastry you will end up using, you can then choose which shape of pita to use. Whether you make a large pie to cut into pieces, or you make individual pies is up to you. I decided to make my melitzanopita into 'snail pies' - an idea I found from yet another recent melitzanopita recipe from a well known Greek TV chef (no date is given for Dina Nikolaou's pie, but I suspect it was as recently as 1-2 years) - as I really like shaping filo in this way, and it cuts up nicely into smaller pieces, for good portion control.

Sarikopita, Strifti, Kihi - they are all names for a round pie made up of pieces of filled pastry made in the shape of a snail's shell. 

While there is no shortage of melitzanopita recipes in Greek, eggplant pie is found in just a few non-Greek recipes. I have heard that Martha Stewart has some kind of Greek background, so I wonder if it was this aspect of her identity that drove her to make individual eggplant cheese pies in 2010. I think her vegetarian muffin-shaped melitzanopitakia look dreamy. Her recipe is not far off the one I used: I added strained cubed tomato, I didn't use coriander and I used crushed walnuts instead of pistachios. Crushed nuts are a great addition to pie fillings because they give pies an added texture, the nuts soak up excess liquids in a filling (the same job breadcrumbs and rice do) which often makes pastry soggy, and nuts act like protein in a vegetarian dish. The walnuts also had a sweetening effect on the eggplant, which can sometimes taste bitter, depending on the quality of the eggplant.

The cooked pies - vegetarian (top) and mince (bottom) melitzanopita

The important thing in an eggplant pie is not so much what you add to the filling, as much as the texture of the final filling. The creamier and firmer, the better, because it's easier to work with, and it cooks better. The fillings should be pre-cooked before being added to the pastry. I used Dina Nikolaou's recipe to make my vegetarian melitzanopita, while for the mince version, I simply fried some small cubes of eggplant in olive oil, drained them and then added them to some leftover makaronada mince. That constituted my meat-eggplant filling. Both pies worked well because the eggplant was paired with classic Mediterranean tastes. It all depends on what you want to make, how you want to make it, and the desired finished look of the pie.

Vegan melitzanopita for the 2nd Symposium: Food, Memory and Identity in Greece and the Diaspora taking place this weekend. The filling contains the same ingredients as the Gounaridis pita without the cheese; instead, I added some green peppers (with the onion), and a mixture of breadcrumbs and walnuts to bind the (cooked pureed) filling. It smells like mince - very cheap, very Greek and very frugal (the whole thing can't have cost me more than €1.50 to make - all the ingredients are found in most Cretan homes, and half would come from a small summer garden).

Melitzanopita, as it is made by Greeks, from the recipes available on the web, fits well within the taste spectrum of Greek food, using commonly associated combinations in Greek cuisine: eggplant and mince or eggplant and tomato, spiced up with parsley and mint, dressed in olive oil and encased in classic Greek filo pastry. It is an aromatic pie and makes a full meal, coupled with a green salad and some wine. More importantly, it's not an acquired taste and it is very versatile; these two aspects will make it popular among a wide variety of people.

©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.

Imam baldi (Ιμάμ μπαλντί)

A dish dating back to Ottoman times; don't forget to read the story about imam baldi before you learn to how to cook it.

Eggplant is one of those vegetables that, together with tomatos, have established themselves as firm summer favorites. Most recipe websites instruct you to prepare eggplant for cooking by slicing them and sprinkling salt over them to make them sweat, to remove their bitterness. In all my years of cooking the eggplant we grow in our Cretan garden, I have never really needed to do this. They are rarely bitter.

Eggplant has one inherent problem - to make them tasty, they need to be cooked in a lot of olive oil. If you don't like the idea of frying them (which is the quick way to cook eggplant in oil), you can roast them in the oven, using less oil, but that takes so long and uses so much heating energy that it works out too epensively. Even when I bake eggplant, I always fry them lightly first.

This version of imam baldi uses both frying and baking, giving a perfectly cooked eggplant that isn't too oily.

You need:
5-6 eggplant (both the long and the round versions work well here)
1 large onion, roughly chopped
2-3 cloves of garlic, finely minced
1 large green bell pepper, finely sliced
1 large red pepper (preferably the long variety, known as Florinis in Greece), finely sliced
2 large tomatos, cut into small cubes
1 teaspoon of tomato puree
the leaves of 2 sprigs of mint, finely chopped
salt, pepper, oregano

Slice the eggplant lengthways and scoop out a small amount of flesh to make a cavity in each eggplant half. Put aside the flesh. Fry each half in very hot olive oil, turning to cook each side 3-4 minutes. Place each fried piece, cavity side up, in a medium baking tin.

Cut the eggplant flesh into small cubes. Ladle some of the olive oil you used to fry the eggplant (the amount you use is at your discretion) into a saucepan, and add all the ingredients excpet the eggplant halves. Cook on high heat for 10 minutes, stirring constantly to avoid the sauce sticking to the pot. Spoon the filling into the cavities. Don't worry if all the filling doesn't fit into the eggplant halves - it will reduce during the cooking process. Carefully pour a cup of water into the baking tin, without upsetting the filling in the eggplant. Place the baking tin into a moderate oven and cook for an hour.


A vegetarian instead of a vegan version of this dish can be made by adding some crumbled feta or mizithra cheese over the filling. I made a vegan version to serve with fried calamari and fried potatoes. I never feel guilty serving too many fried foods at once - we only use extra virgin olive oil in all our cooking.

©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.

Summer (Καλοκαίρι)

Stormy weather is beating down all over the world. Central Europe was under water at the beginning of this month, India is counting her dead after the early monsoons, Canada is evacuating resident in the flooded Calgary, and New Zealand saw the biggest storm in Wellington since the Wahine disaster (my mum told me stories about that storm, as I was too young to remember it). My NZ aunt just informed me that her green house has just become an open-air one - it lost its corrugated iron roof. Κουράγιο to all those affected.

Despite living in a country with a high fire risk and seismic activity, in Greece, we have many problems now, but nature doesn't usually cause ours:

“When you watch the news abroad you get the impression that a revolution could break out at any minute,” Delpy said when asked about that scene. “But when you come to Greece you see that it is all happening in one small part of Athens. We know that the crisis is real and that people are suffering, but this is not a country on the brink of collapse.”

While I'm enjoying the predictably pleasant calm weather, here I am, in the Middle-Earth, cooking imam bayildi with my freshly picked tomatos, peppers and eggplant. No matter what problems we have here, we still cook!

©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.

Eggplant cheese rolls at Aithrion (Μελιτζανομπουρεκάκια στο Αίθριον)

This year has been annus horribilis for most people right around the world. It is no different for us either. The economic crisis meant we could not stray too far away from our home for a summer holiday break.. I am left with memories of last year's summer holiday, and the wonderful meals we savoured in Northern Greece. 

Summer was never my favorite season. I always liked the rain. Good thing, as I lived in New Zealand for a long time, and had to put up with it on most days. Since living in Greece, I've spent every single summer in Hania, and hardly ever saw a drop of rain throughout the summer months. Last year was the first time I saw a really rainy summer, when I visited Halkidiki. It felt strange walking on the beach in our swimwear, watching the rain falling down. It first started to spit before heavy raindrops began to splatter onto the sand. The beach-goers were all scrambling to get their gear packed and they were gone in seconds.

Cassandra, Halkidiki, Northern Greece

We made it back to the car just in time before the rainfall turned into a heavy downpour with thunder and lightning, the likes of which I had never seen. We were driving in the rain in a place unknown to us. We had been harbouring dreams of driving up and down the first two legs of Halkidiki (the third one isn't open to females) to look at the scenery. We were already impressed by the unusual scenery (to us Cretans) that we had come across: mechanically-rolled haystacks, patchwork quilt fields and forest-lined coastlines. Now all we wanted was to find a safe place away from the storm to get some lunch.

 

On our holiday up to that point, we had been dining out on a lot of barbecued meat, and we were all tired of this, craving, instead, for something cooked in a pot with an oily sauce.We passed quite a few fast food places before we came across Aithrion. Even in the driving rain, it looked very, very pretty - the overgrown greenery made us feel closer to nature.

We parked the car across the road from the restaurant and waited for the rain to retreat a little. It didn't. It just got harder and harder. It's really frightening trying to cross a busy road in the rain with two children in tow!

The atmosphere at Aithrion may be described by some people as rather kitsch: old-time trinkets from yesteryear hanging on the walls, traditional handcrafts, odd one-of-a-kind furniture with no set pattern. We liked it a lot. I guess we're a bit old-fashioned! The owner was also a musician (he told us he often came to Hania and played music in the taverna of a friend!), so there were a lot of music memorabilia such as photographs of songers and song verses pasted around the restaurant.

It wasn't just the atmosphere, but the food was also fanstastic: home-made bread, soutzoukakia, makaronada, gigandes, rabbit stifado, and the specialty of the house: deep-fried cheese-filled aubergine rolls. At the end of the meal, we were treated to donuts in chocolate syrup and sweet wine. What a way to finish our stay in Northern Greece.

 

This year, I decided to try making my own version of melitzanobourekakia at home; here's what I came up with.

You need: 
1 large eggplant, sliced thinly (I used a white eggplant which yielded 8 large slices - white eggplant is sweeter and is ideal for frying)
creamy soft white curd cheese (I used Cretan mizithra)
some Greek strained yoghurt
a sprig of fresh mint, chopped finely
salt and pepper
thick runny batter made with a simple flour-water mixture
oil for frying

This eggplant looks shrivelled. It had been lying in the shade for a few days after it was picked. It's actually perfect for frying because it is less juicy. The texture of the uncooked product doesn't affect the taste of the cooked dish. The slices, in retrospect, should have been thinner. To make them more pliable, maybe they need to be boiled slightly, and left to cool before using them.

You may want to prepare the eggplant slices by salting them and letting them run their excess juices out of the flesh. I don't do this because home-grown Cretan garden eggplant is generally very tasty rather than bitter. Season the eggplant slices with salt and pepper. Allow the eggplant to drain away its excess juices. Mix the curd cheese (I used about a fistful of mizithra) with the yoghurt (I used about 100g), and add the salt (if you did not use it in the eggplant preparation), pepper and mint.

Take a slice of eggplant, and place a tablespoon of mixture at one end. Roll up the eggplant slice, trying to cover the filling as well as possible. Secure it with a toothpick, or a long souvlaki skewer (kebab), which will make frying them easier.

When you are ready to cook the eggplant rolls, heat a large amount of oil in a small deep saucepan. (A friteusse works even better in this case, as it is less messy, but it uses a lot of oil.) Then dip the roll into the flour-and-water batter, covering all parts well. The batter acts as a seal. Deep fry until the rolls are well browned all over. Remove from the oil and drain on absorbent paper. Take out the toothpick or skewer.

I couldn't achieve the runny texture of Aithrion's melitzanobourekakia filling; I suspect that if more yoghurt is added, the the filling will be runnier.

Serve these rolls as an appetiser, or as a main meal with a green salad. They are very filling!

It was still raining when we left the restaurant. The staff taught us a new use for the traditional Greek plastic-lined paper tablecloth: it could also become a raincoat! The rain did not stop us from venturing further into Halkidiki, where Cheryl warmed us up with coffee, cake and chocolate chip biscuits.

If you are in the area of Halkidiki, you might like to try Aithrion on the Cassandra leg; the total cost of our meal (including drinks) was 43 euro (at last year's prices).

©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.

Eggplant risotto (Ριζότο με μελιτζάνες)

I’ve been keeping a blog for three years. I started out writing about my limited view of the world, sharing an opinion about some news item that took my fancy. It was all quite random, but there was always a related food  photo uploaded with each post, mainly to add colour to a rather dull looking page full of words. I didn’t know who would be reading what I was writing, nor if anyone was really interested in it. I was just writing for the sake of doing something that looked productive in a world where most of the time life is routine and productivity is achieved by superficial means, pushing a button to start an machine, doing the daily shopping and cooking a meal with all the mod cons of the average kitchen.

I got the wacky idea to start recording all the food I cook for my family as a way of entering the writing world. I methodically and meticulously recorded every detail of the recipes I prepared in my kitchen: sensing my own mortality after the shortened lives of my parents, I wanted to ensure that my children would be able to remember to do some of things I did for them, or at least they could learnt to cook (or show someone else how to cook) their mother’s food, some of which they may even have acquired an affection for. To increase my readership, I entitled all posts by the name of a recipe or food item, so that people searching for a recipe would be able to land by chance onto my site. My first readers were food bloggers interested in the intricacies of Greek cooking. Comments ranged from ‘Delicious!’ to ‘Could you add garlic to this?’. This was not the intended response – I make no effort to be an outstanding cook – but it was a welcome start to a reader's circle.

I was enjoying being read, but I also knew that I would eventually reach an upper limit in such a venture. I cook to feed, not to create or to excite. And since most of what we eat in our house is seasonal, this means that I could only blog about food for a period of up to twelve months. We eat pretty much the same food from one week to the next, depending on what is in season. For example, fasolada is not a once-a-year affair: it’s a weekly winter entry, whose consistency does not change from one time I cook it to the next. I may have such a glut of zucchini in the garden that I can create all kinds of new recipes, but the truth is I don't. There is only so much you can do with eggplant, for instance, which the whole family will eat.

To beat away the boredom, I started a city daily photo blog, with the intention of evading the drudgery of the kitchen with its precise measurements, specialised terminology, detailed methodolgy and focus on hygiene. Instead of worrying about ingredients and cooking methods, I was now worried about running out of photos of my daily surroundings, some of which I thought of as commonplace. How many similar beach photos can someone tolerate seeing on the same blog? How many times can I photograph different olive or orange trees and say something new about them?

After three years of blogging about the traditional seasonal food we grew, cooked and ate, I find that there is very little to write about on this topic. I'd be fooling you if I were to start cooking food that is not seasonal or traditional in the area where I live. The only time we eat out of season or away from tradition is when we travel or I get nostalgic for foreign food (sourcing my ingredients from supermarkets that cater for tourists rather than locals cooking international cuisine). I'd be repeating myself if I were to continue to describe the food I cook in my house on a daily basis.

In the knowledgeable light of the coming of the end, I started throwing in an anecdote or two in the recipe and photo posts, turning them into stories and photographic exhibits. I played with cooking terms, I mixed in jokes, I tossed in a spicy word or two. And thus, my story-writing was born. The food blog eventually started taking on a new shape, confounding my readers in the process. What was I doing – cooking or story-telling? Some shirked away from the madwoman that I had become while others remained endeared to the blog, enjoying the hilarity of the scenes portrayed and the dry wit of the author or the poignancy of the feelings provoked. All I can do is update my food blog with a restaurant review or maybe a kinky food-based story that I know will delight many.

It is the final set of readers that I owe the development of my writing skills: without their continued interest in what I write, my food blog would probably have fizzled out long ago, accelerated by a lack of new dishes being cooked in my kitchen and the general boredom of any rote task, which of course I continue to perform in the kitchen. Of course I'm still cooking; I'll be cooking for a long time yet, but there must be light at the end of the tunnel. I never set out to be a cook; in fact, I'm surprised I ended up cooking such superb meals as my (often-copied) photographs attest. As I look back over my blog, I ask myself: did I really cook that? I hope my children remember that indeed I did. With two young ones, I still have a good many kitchen years ahead of me...

I've cleaned up my kitchen for all of you to see: not a pot boiling, not a dirty dish in sight, no garden glut to deal with.

Through this post, I praise those of you who continue to read me despite my many shortcomings as a cook and writer, which will have become apparent over time. I hope to continue to entertain you. Year 4 of Organically Cooked starts here.

*** *** ***

The glut of aubergines has not ended, and from previous experience, I know that it won't end until the end of September. Our eggplant trees are our most loyal garden plants. They keep on producing until Christmas, but by then, the shrub is looking a little worse for wear. Thankfully, aubergine freezes well too; one of the most popular posts on my blog (apart from fasolada) is all about how to freeze eggplant. 

Last year's eggplant was waiting this year for me in the freezer.

As I was clearing out the freezer I found last year's batch of frozen eggplant, which is sad because I couldn't really use it now that the new season's vegetables had started to grow. I couldn't just throw it out, so I decided to cook it for our pet dog, who basically eats what we eat, because she gets our leftover. So I heated some oil in a pan, and added the eggplant. That eggplant had been frozen at the height of the season so that its Mediterranean summer aroma was wafting around the room; even I realised that this food was not yet fit for doggie consumption at this point. When the eggplant had softened, I added some rice and poured in enough water to make what looked like a risotto. As I stirred the pot and watched what was taking shape in it, I began wishing the dog's dinner was mine. 

The dog's food looked so good...

Here is the eggplant risotto remake, originally modelled on the dog's dinner.

... that I made an improved version for myself.

You need: 

3 medium-sized eggplant, chopped into small cubes

1 medium-sized onion, chopped small
6 banana peppers, chopped roughly in small chunks (optional)

2-3 cloves garlic, finely chopped

a few glugs of olive oil

a cup of white rice, preferably basmati

salt and pepper

Heat the oil in a saucepan. Add the onion and garlic, and cook till translucent. Then add the aubergine cubes and cook till just soft, so that they don't lose their shape. If you are using the banana peppers (we have a glut of those too), add them together with the aubergine. You will need a lot of oil, because eggplant soaks it all up very very quickly. It sounds quite fattening, but if it's only olive oil, don't forget that it's an anti-oxidant and will keep you looking young. When the aubergine is done, add 2 and a 1/2 cups of water to the mixture. Add the washed rice and then the seasonings, and stir everything together to blend. When the water reaches boiling point, turn down the heat to the lowest point, and let the risotto cook away on its own, without stirring it (or the rice will break up).

Serve this risotto with a green (or garden-fresh salad), and some red wine. Bread is superfluous today!

©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.

Baked chicken and eggplant (Κοτόπουλο και μελιτζάνες στο φούρνο)

Having a summer garden in Crete means that you do not need to go food shopping very often. Apart from the money you save, the dishes you cook can be as creative as you want them to be. You sometimes don't know what will come out of the cooking vessel, because the combination of ingredients used may be unique, even to the cook, and the dish won't even have an internationally recognisable name to it. It'll just be a creative part of the Cretan kitchen.

I had recently made some papoutsakia and moussaka with the fresh harvest of eggplant from our summer garden, which all went into the deep freeze for that rainy winter's day when there won't be so much fresh food or time to cook these fiddly dishes. There were some eggplants left over and I really needed to clear the fridge to make some more space for more fresh harvest, zucchini, as usual, being the most productive. Kiki recently helped me out in making an aubergine specialty from Zakinthos, but there are still too many aubergines leftover!

I had already boiled some chicken to make some stock for pilafi, a favorite Greek children's meal (whereas eggplant doesn't win so much favour among children until a later age). Plain boiled chicken is never very appetising on its own; it is usually used to make another dish. As I was toying with some ideas about how I was going to use up the boiled chicken and the excess aubergine crop, I came up with this winning dish, which I made up as I cooked.

To make enough to feed 2-3 hungry people (or 4 small portions), you need: 

4 large pieces of boiled chicken

2 large aubergines

1 large onion

2 cloves of garlic

half a can of tomato pulp (I used my own home-made tomato sauce)

salt and pepper

oregano (optional)

olive oil

Chop the onion and garlic finely. Slice the aubergine thickly and chop into cubes. Heat some oil in a wide pot and saute the onion and garlic till transparent. Add the eggplant and saute on high heat. Eggplant soaks up olive oil faster than other vegetables, so you will need to add more to the pan (unless you don't want to for health reasons - but beware: the sticky aubergine will cause a burning mess in your pan). Cook till the eggplant is brown but still firm. Add the tomato pulp and season with salt and pepper. Let the sauce cook away for 15 minutes. 

Place the chicken in a small tapsi (a round roasting pan often used in Greek cooking) and season with salt, pepper and oregano (if using). When the sauce is ready, pour it over the chicken and add some more liquid (an oil/water mix in the ratios you prefer; a veritable Cretan adds more oil than water) to make a sauce as runny as you like. I probably added 2/3 of a cup. Place the dish in the oven and cook for half an hour, which is just enough time for the flavours to blend.

It would have been nice to have a photo of the plated dish, but it was so delicious, it just got eaten too quickly - nevertheless, look at who it inspired!

To serve, ladle out a piece of chicken and place it on a bed of rice (like pilafi). Then pour some of the vegetable sauce over the rice and chicken. Serve with crusty bread, a green salad and some chilled white wine. Pure ambrosia.

©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.