Tsigariasto with chili

My husband's line of work in the taxi business usually involves mundane rides from A to B. During the summer, foreign clients make the rides more interesting. Yesterday, he came home late, after spending 7 hours with an Indian couple holidaying in Hania. Sometimes, such exotic customers give away a lot about their culture. Yesterdy was no exception.

"The man and woman had been standing by the sign listing the indicative prices for rides at Square 1866 in Hania. I couldn't see what ride they were looking at. At one point, the man walked confidently straight up to my cab [E-class 2011 model Mercedes] and asked me outright: 'Can you take us to Elafonisi?'

"I explained that the ride was an expensive one. 'I don't care', he said. I feel obliged to explain this to foreign customers because sometimes they come here thinking that everythig in Greece is cheap, and they are shocked to hear the prices of some services. I even had someone remark 'that's London prices' and walk off in a huff. So I gathered that these people were wealthy. They looked like Indians to me. We usually think of India as a country with a lot of poor people, so this ostentatious show of wealth felt shocking to me. The taxi has been part of my family for over 50 years, but when I travel, I would never spend this kind of money on a taxi, not even with my whole family in the car. Idon't feel that rich.

"On the way to Elafonisi, I asked them where they were from (Mumbai), and why they chose Hania for a holiday (a friend of theirs had come here and given them a good review of the place). I explained a few things to them about the sites they were passing by. It's an expensive ride, and they may as well get their money's worth. They took a lot of photos, and they seemed genuinely interested in the scenery.

"On arriving to Elafonisi, I was really quite amazed to see so many people at the beach. It's mid-October, and the place looked like it hadn't calmed down since the beginning of summer. I let the passengers off and asked them what their plans were after Elafonisi. They told me they just wanted to to enhjoy the beach and they wanted me to take them back to Hania after a couple of hours. Obviously it was my lucky day today.

"The car parks in the area were full and there was no shade. Driving is the easy part of a taxi driver's journey: what tires you out is keeping the customer entertained at the same time. The weather in the northern part of Crete does not compare to the southern part. We've been feeling autumn setting in in the north, while the south still feels like high summer. While I waited for them, I could feel the car heating up. It had also become a dust bomb. Elafonisi is very dry.

"Two hours later, my customers stroll back to the cab at the designated meeting place. The man was limping a little. I asked him if he was OK. 'It's nothing,' he insisted. 'We walked the Samaria Gorge yesterday'. That made my day. they had ventured out of their comfort zone.

"'Where do you recommend we go for lunch?' the man asked. I was thinking the same thing, meaning I wanted to get back home and enjoy my own lunch. I suggested that they might like to pick a restaurant while we were driving back. The man looked around, and spotted the restaurant located on a small rise , just beyond the sandy area where the tarmac road starts. He could tell that it would have a good view of the sea. 'We'll go here!' He was always very confident about his choices.

"The waiter bought us the menu cards. I told him I was surprised to see so many people here at this time of year. 'So many?' he exclaimed. 'This is nothing! You should have seen what was happening here in the last week of September!' We've all had a good run this year in terms of tourism.

"My customers asked me to join them for lunch, whcih I think was very generous of them. This doesn't happen often. Naturally they wanted a bit of help with the menu. The restaurant served very traditional Cretan food with a few tourist dishes for those who didn't want to be too adventurous. I told them about tsigariasto - 'I don't think I want to eat goat' - pork roast - 'I don't eat pork' - braised chicken - 'Hm, chicken is common'. The woman ordered a pizza. 'What are you going to have?' the man asked me. I chose the tsigariasto. 'OK, I'll have that too,' he said. I really hoped it was going to be good.

"The meals came and we began eating. The tsigariasto was much as I expected it - slightly oily, well-cooked tender meat, falling off the bone, with a wine flavour to the sauce (no tomato). 'Does the restuarant have any hot sauces?' the man asked me. Hot food is being served more often in Cfrete these days... but this restaurant, it's location, the menu - hot food was clearly off limits. I asked the waiter, and he bought some commercial spicy tomato sauce to the table. 'Got any ketchup?' the man asked. The waiter bought some ketchup too. The man must have used up a quarter of each bottle, splurging it all over the tsigariasto. He reminded me of when my children were young and we were in London at a Pakistani restaurant. Except that they wanted to eat everything without the heat. Now they're used to other people's food, and they eat it as they find it.

"On the way back to Hania, the man asked me about other places to visit. I suggested Knossos in Iraklio. 'I mean another part of Greece'. Crete is a very big island, I explained. But they clearly wanted to go island hopping. So I mentioned the classics: Santorini, Mykonos. This is the most common route that first-time tourists take when comeing to Hania: after spending three days here, they go to Iraklio, then take the ferry from there to Santorini, with Mykonos on the itinerary too.

'You have a lot of mini markets here, don't you?' I asked him why he was asking this question. We had been driving mainly on country roads until then with hardly any shops. 'What are those people selling on the road?' he asked. What he was seeing was the local producers of natural products selling their wares along the road, and there were many of them. My customers were interested in the natural products, so he asked me to stop at the next seller. They bought wine, raki, rakomelo, thyme, oregano, marjoram, sea salt and honey, one of each item that the producer was selling on his stall. As we were leaving, the man asked me to stop again. 'Can we go back to the stall?' he asked. They decided to buy some presents too. And as we all got back into the cab again, the stall owner called me back. 'Come and take a present for yourself,' he said. I waited for him to give me the present. 'You choose,' he said. So I took a bottle of rakomelo. It was clearly his lucky day too.

We drove back to Hania with the cab smelling like a Cretan hillside from all the herbs tmy customers had bought. As I dropped my customers off at their hotel, I asked them if they enjoyed the trip. "Wonderful, wonderful! We will tell our friends to come too!' I suppose I coudn't ask for more than that."

*** *** ***

More and more people are coming to Greece for a holiday. 2017 was an interesting year for us in Hania. We've never seen so many Asian tourists coming here before. Tourism depends on stable politics in the general area which is generally an unknown quantity in our world these days. No one knows where the next attack will take place, ruining a country's reputation  for safety.

The tourism season in Hania ends on 29  October 2017 and starts again on 24 March 2018. We have suffered a little from over-tourism in Crete this year. But as a Cretan I can tell you that the winter is also a wonderful time to be here too. You have the island to yourself. The weather isn't always guaranteed, but you will still be blown away by Greece's beauty, history and archaeological sites are not season-dependent, and the food is still fantastic (perhaps even better). The sea is perhaps a little over-rated anyway.

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LIDL prices

My husband picked up a slab of Grana Padano cheese yesterday from LIDL. He says that the LIDL variety of Grana Padano tastes better than any other Grana Padano variety I've bought. How Grana Padano got into out house, I can't really remember. But it was definitely LIDL that started it all. he must have bought it to try it one day, and then he got hooked. Whenever we run out, he says:

"Don't forget to add some grande poutana to your shopping list!"

Since I rarely go to LIDL to do my shopping, I simply pick up some of the same cheese from another supermarket. But he can always tell the difference (which isn't very hard anyway, because LIDL sells theirs packaged, while all the other supermarkets sell theirs by cutting off a piece (the customer dictates how much) from a large wheel.

When I buy Grana Padano from non-LIDL supermarkets, I can have it freshly grated at the cheese counter (instead of buying Parmesan which is more expensive).

Every week, LIDL distributes their promotional pamphlets all over the town, including in our rural suburb; there is a LIDL located close by. I used to try to get to them first before the family got their hands on them because they are full of temptations, even for myself. LIDL pamphlets are, admittedly, a form of shopping therapy, kind of like window shopping. A lot of weird and wonderful unusual - and to us Mediterranean islanders, exotic - stuff is brought in by the German-owned supermarket. But I like to impose some limits: if you insist on buying food, make sure it's something you really can't buy anywhere else for the quality/price; and most importantly, don't buy stuff from the specials-this-week because they are always sold more expensively than the same stuff in the same supermarket chain in other eurozone countries.

Husband eventually caught wind of what I was doing when he found the new pamphlets in the box of fire starter paper. So he issued an order to the children:

"Make sure you get to those pamphlets before your mother does."

I've given up now in hiding them, and I generally don't accompany him on his LIDL excursions. I know LIDL packaging when I see it. (The garden shed is full of LIDL stuff.)

The other day, I came across those pamphlets first. I stuffed them in my bag and took them to work to chuck them in the bins there. But before I did, I went window-shopping myself: drills, water guns, air compressors - very much a man's world there! And there was also the usual exotic food - this time, it was the whole Vitasia range of Asian food products.

I've been down this track before - remember my Bami Goreng noodles post? I know I pay almost twice as much for the same packet as Northern Europeans do. I suppose it's something to do with shipping costs. All this stuff is shipped into Holland, or it's packaged somewhere around there. Then it gets transported to other parts of Europe. By the time it reaches Europe's backwaters, it's always priced about 40% more than what it costs in other European countries. We're talking about stuff that gets produced and transported in gynormous amounts, with no added value from their original packaging.

Compare the product prices below. They are exactly the same product (all belonging to the VITASIA brand, LIDL's label for Asian food), being sold at exactly the same supermarket in various parts of Europe. The only difference is the time period that they are being sold - the Greek prices are the first one given for each product, current for February 2013, but the non-Greek prices (the second price) are what the same product was being sold for in another eurozone country (ie I have not included UK prices) within the last 12 months (through an internet search today):

* a packet of spring rolls: €2.99 - €1.99 (Slovenia)
* fried noodles: €1.29 - €0.79 (Holland)
* Thai sauce: €1.39 - €1.29 (Belgium)
* bamboo shoots: €0.99 - €0.59 (Ireland)
* chow mein noodles: €0.99 - €0.79 (Germany and Belgium)
* Asian wok sauce: €1.79 - €0.89 (Germany, based on kg price equivalent given as €2.64)
* prawn chips: €1.29 - €0.99 (Slovenia)

The only price I found to be the same in another eurozone country was curry paste (€1.79 in Slovenia).

My husband went to LIDL last night to look for some of those drills and water guns and air compressors, but he came back home with just a packet of Grana Padano. The continuing ferry workers' strike this week has meant no transportation of anything from the mainland, which reminds me: time to stock up on rice, beans and pasta. LIDL's prices are, generally speaking, unbeatable at this end. You don't really need drills and prawn crackers to keep you going, but you do need a lot of carbs. Good thing we have plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables to supplement so we don't end up with scurvy.

PS: LIDL sponsors a cooking program on Greek TV with Diane Kochilas as the chef. From the snippets I've caught of it, it's really quite good. All the food products are from the LIDL range, but the recipes remain quite Greek at heart. 

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Fusion (Σύντηξη)

A month ago, on December 10, 2010, to be exact, all of a sudden, one heavy hailstorm left its mark on our garden...

 My husband has just managed to spread discarded post-harvest olive leaves over the garden when the rain started; by the early afternoon, the rain had turned into snow.

 
... in such a way that all that precious organic spinach growing in the garden was in danger of suffering severe frostbite.

Our snow-covered garden

Snow is fun to look at, but it's very damaging to vegetable gardens in the Mediterranean. We began pouring water with a hose over all the crops so that the frost damage could be minimised. But alas, the water was so cold and icy, that the snow on the crops just kept crystallising. The other alternative was to pull out the spinach, which was ready to pick in any case, and process it in any way we could.

After bringing it into the house, we put it in the bath tub to warm it up and wash it - there was no other space large enough to accommodate it!

Such high-quality fresh produce, raised purely on natural fertiliser, must be used wisely. Organically grown pesticide-free produce, grown with natural fertilisers and rainwater, without the use of any kind of chemicals, costing only the personal labour invested, is very hard to come by these days, and it's a shame to let it go to waste. After making some spinach-mizithra kalitsounia with some home-made pastry...

I always make kalitsounia in large batches because they freeze well, and they require a lot of work. Mine never really come out looking very pretty, but in home cooking, taste matters more.

... I was still left with some spinach-and-cheese mixture. Just the idea of kneading and rolling out more home-made pastry made my hands hurt. Spinach-cheese filling lasts for a couple of days in the fridge, so I waited till after the weekend to buy some filo pastry and made some strifti (twisted) pies, which freeze well.

Working with filo pastry can be a nuisance because the filo is very fragile - but this has no effect on the end result...

... which is always delicious.

 

In this way, I managed to use up the spinach-mizithra filling, but not all the store-bought filo pastry. This is a persistent dilemma in my kitchen: either there is too much pastry, or too much filling left over! Filo pastry stored appropriately (keep it away from moisture, don't leave it unwrapped as it dries out and cracks) lasts for up to ten days in the fridge.

The following week's menu contained chicken pie, prepared in a similar way to the meat pie often made in Crete at Easter. This pie uses a yeast-based dough made with the stock from the boiled chicken, whose meat is then used to fill the pie, along with a variety of cheeses. The pie was a resounding success, but once again, I ended up with leftovers: instead of extra pastry, this time I was left with some extra chicken-and-cheese filling.

Leftovers from two different pie-making rounds (the beaten egg did not end up being used in my fusion creations).

I could have baked another chicken pie using the remaining filo pastry, but that would mean cooking the same meal again, and a little too quickly after the last time I had served it. The more you have something, the more boring and common it becomes, even if it is made from fresh high-quality ingredients. My most interesting home cooking usually involves thinking up of ways to use leftover ingredients. Wontons - I haven't had those in ages - came to my mind: crisply fried bite-sized pastry filled with just about any filling that takes your fancy, made with anything at hand, and dipped in a hot sauce. With a bit of advice from Facebook friends and a whole host of graphic ideas from the internet, it wasn't too difficult to fuse a variety of culinary ideas and create an original Asian-inspired meal out of my leftovers.  

The filo pastry was cut into squares: one square was laid on top of another, as filo pastry is thinner than wonton pastry, and it would not have been strong enough to withstand the weight and density of the filling.

A teaspoon of filling was placed in the centre of each square, which was then sealed like a 'pouch'. This formed a sturdy packet when deep-fried. The cooked wontons were then placed on a bed of spicy tomato sauce. When I presented these photos on my Facebook page, my favorite comment was from a Greek-Chinese Facebook friend: "These look SO Chinese!"

I often find myself fusing local ingredients with various culinary techniques because this is the closest I can get to my favorite tastes, the kind of food that I once used to order from a take-out before I lived in Greece. Leftovers also work very well in Asian-Mediterranean fusion meals, as in my spring roll kalitsounia and pad Thai creations. Possibly due to the wide variety of fresh food grown on the island, such meals aren't difficult to recreate in a Mediterranean kitchen or adapt them to Cretan cuisine; most herbs and spices from all cuisines are available in various forms, and local herbs and spices can also replace them, giving a more homely taste to a new culinary creation.

The Indian samosa is generally a spicy vegetarian filled fried pastry triangle. Due to time constraints, I decided to stick to my regular half-moon shapes when I made mine (rather than learn a new way to filling pastry). I made my Indian-flavoured pasty pie using leftover boiled chicken, with cubed par-boiled potato, chopped onions, crushed garlic, and a mixture of appropriate spices (crushed fennel seeds, crushed cardamon seeds, chili pepper, cumin, fresh ginger). Samosa dough is not much different to Cretan pastry; a firmer (and darker) dough is made by adding vinegar and wholemeal flour. Although not strictly a samosa, my Indian-flavoured kalitsouni (or Cretan samosa, or even Indian-flavoured Cornish pasty) creation could be used as the basis for a Greek-style samosa by changing the spices. 

On a funnier note, my son (whose culinary preferences are very limited) grabbed one of my samosas without a second thought: he had no idea of the contents, but the shape, to him, was unmistakeable! I knew what would happen after he tasted it: and it did happen - can you blame him?!

My Mediterrasian creations are a bit of a tease for my eaters: To the average Greek, such offerings are difficult to place for one of two reasons: at first sight, their appearance may look quite different to the way Greek food is usually presented, but the aromas and flavours are recognisable, as in the case of my wontons; or vice-versa - the food may 'look' Greek, but on the first bite, the difference in taste will be pronounced, as in the case of my Asian-flavoured souvlaki, or my samosa-flavoured kalitsounia. I suspect that my own versions of pad Thai and spring rolls will look enticingly recognisable to Asians, but I wonder what they will think when they taste them.

*** *** ***

The idea behind fusion in cuisine is, generally speaking, the combination of the culinary traditions and ingredients of two or more cuisines to create a novel dish rather than a whole new cuisine, with its own set of rules. Wisegeek and Wikipedia both define the term just as loosely as the creations that often come out of fusion cuisine. My own examples of fusion cuisine are founded in Wikipedia's third definition: foods with a form based on one cuisine, but prepared using ingredients and flavors inherent to another cuisine. The most important aspect of successful fusion cuisine is that it is based on cultural groupings of cuisine, and not just the whims and fancies of a creative chef: the latter is often jokingly referred to as 'con-fusion cuisine', which to my mind is a good term to describe some crazy recipes that use a mish-mash of ingredients and techniques that do not seem to blend together. Food bloggers are the biggest culprits of this kind of creative cuisine: since when did white wine, saffron, whipping cream, Greek yoghurt, harissa, fennel seeds, paprika, cocoa powder and mastic gum ever come together to form a chicken mole served with fettuccine*?!

Permanent fusion cuisine is more likely to take place when different cultural groups are in constant contact with each other. An inter-racial marriage can unknowingly become an instigator of a more successful fusion of cuisines, possibly out of a desire to please a spouse, by marrying the cooking skills one possesses with the availability (or not) of ingredients. Such cuisines do not always become documented if they stay in the home at a personal level, and the home is where they may stay. Just like the most fluent bilinguals, the most fluent 'bi-cuisinals' will probably have been immersed in the two (or more) cuisines that they work fluently in and out of. That's basically why I'm not bi-cuisinal in New Zealand and Greek cuisine. I grew up in a household that used the food products grown and imported by one country, which were prepared and cooked in the manner of another culture. I haven't a clue how to make gravy. Why should I? My mother never made it, I probably ate it less than half a dozen times in my life, and I don't think my family feels the need to discover it.

I found these Mediterranean-filled spring rolls on the menu of a local pizza-pasta restaurant, the kind of place one would expect to see fusion/global food trends; we all take delight in seeing something new in our food when we eat out.  

Fusion cuisine is not actually a new idea; it has been happening since time immemorial as groups of people invaded new territories and discovered new ingredients as well as picking up new cooking techniques. The fusion of culinary regimes is probably how various modern-day cuisines developed, even though they are never called 'fusion' cuisines; for political purposes, we like to name our cuisines according to the name of the country or race we associate ourselves with. Cuisine fusions have continued right up to the more peaceful contemporary times with migration. Hawaiian local food sounds like a good example of a harmonious form of fusion cuisine. But the development of new cuisines is now increasingly disappearing, with the inevitable move towards global eating habits: as the world develops, there are few places left where people can't generally eat anything, anywhere and at any time these days.

The Christmas menu at this taverna (located in an area where there are many resident Brits) represents a fusion of Greek cuisine with foreign ingredients, veering towards global eating trends, presented in the style of a French menu: curry pork souvlaki, chicken strips cooked with cheddar and bacon, pork and apple cooked with prunes, roast potatoes with mustard and bacon, brownies and martini for dessert; this menu is specifically geared towards the foreigners living in the area, but it may even be an enjoyable experience for the locals that attended with them.

Various internet sources will tell you that the fashion in fusion cuisine began with the blending of European (Western) and Asian cuisine, two radically different cuisines in taste, technique and texture, whose common ground is based on the wealth of fresh ingredients used in their traditional food. Modern Greek restaurant cuisine as the West knows it (as opposed to the personal kitchens of the modern-day Greeks) is probably a fusion development of some kind between Mediterranean and Asian-Minor cuisine; neither are purely European or Western cuisines in the first place, and they were both originally developed from their own roots and conquerers. One of the more interesting and more recent fusions I've heard about is the Chinese-Indonesian restaurant tradition in Holland, due to the occupation of Indonesia by the Dutch, which has altered Chinese restaurant food in the Netherlands, giving rise to novel dishes like Chinese kebabs with peanut sauce. It's easy to argue that this kind of cuisine is more like a 'dialectal' version of the original cuisines used in the fusion, rather than a new whole cuisine, but that depends on the way the words 'fusion' and 'cuisine' are understood. Some would even argue that there is no such thing as cuisine, in the same way that they may argue that there is no such thing as a separate Greek cuisine, claiming instead that it is Turkish/Ottoman in its origins.

Fusion works well with the kalitsouni, what we call our small pies (pasties) here in Crete. All over the world, pastry (made from the ground grain of choice, mixed with water, maybe a small amount of fat and salt/seasonings) can be rolled out into any thickness, moulded into any shape, and filled with any available ingredients. There are few cultures in the world that do not have some kind of small filled fried (or baked) pastry dish. Call it a samosa, call it a kalitsouni, call it a pasty: it's one of the most secure ways of sealing your food without too much excess weight and undesirable waste, as all parts of a pasty are eaten. What would street food be like without it?

*I have purposely omitted the link here.


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Cook the Books: The Last Chinese Chef by Nicole Mones (Μαγειρεύοντας τα Βιβλία)

This post is part of the Cook the Books blog event running until August 28, 2009. Read Nicole Mones' The Last Chinese Chef and cook something inspired by the book. Post your inspiration on your blog and link to Cook the Books.)

WARNING: contains spoiler - if you don't want to know about the story till you read it yourself, don't read the post!!

I will never forget the first time my family ate at a Chinese restaurant. We were staying at the Hilton Hotel in Singapore, en route to New Zealand. We wanted a taste of authentic cuisine; although there were a variety of eateries available on Orchard Road, the one that grabbed my attention was a place close to a bus stop, which was located underground. All we could see from the street level were local people walking up and down the steps that led to this cellar-like room. My husband thought I was mad to want to go down those steps, when there were many places at ground level that we could choose from.

"Can't you see, Maria," he tried to warn me, "only Chinese people are walking in and out of that place!"

That's exactly why I wanted to go there. Although we found ourselves in the midst of the tourist zone, it seemed that only locals were entering this place. We walked down the steps straight into a dark steamy room full of very quiet people (as opposed to my Greek family's rowdy nature), none of whom resembled us in our European looks. There were two kitchens, each one cooking different kinds of food. On one side of the room, there were cooked fowls of all sizes on display under incandescent lights, while the other side seemed to be filled with cauldrons of steaming rice and noodles.

I knew I had chosen the right place to eat something close to an 'authentic' Chinese meal, but there was only one big problem: I had absolutely no idea how to ask for it. We finally ordered by pointing (knowing how rude it might appear) to dishes other people were eating at the nearby tables. My efforts managed to procure a bowl of a very clear consomme-type soup which was filled with noodles, shrimps and vegetables; we also managed to get some fried chicken (or was it duck?) and another plate with plain white rice, which I flavoured with the soup for my children.

"Pilafi and makaronia," I said to them.

"Mmm," they replied, waving their chopsticks in the air.

"What does this bowl contain?" my husband asked. In the centre of the table, there was a bowl of warm water with lemon slices floating in it. He was about to pick up a spoon and try it when I stopped him just in time; I suddenly realised that it was for dipping your fingers into to clean them after enjoying a finger licking good meal. Some kinds of food are simply not meant for knives and forks.

The second time we ate as a family at a Chinese restaurant was none less than at Wong Kei's in London. The children were a little older so they were harder to fool; up to that point in their life, they had been eating only what their mother cooked, namely Greek food. Our Londoner host ordered egg pancakes ('oh, look,' I said to them, as I explained the food, 'pita bread!') and crispy fried duck ('mmm, doesn't that chicken look good!'), which we were instructed to fill the pancake with ('wow, this souvlaki yiro tastes wonderful!'). A 'children's menu' is completely unnecessary when children are raised to eat the same food as their parents in an appropriate setting.

*** *** ***

All our early experiences of Chinese cuisine were based upon the idea of toying with food: you see one thing but it may not be what you expect. Good food should be able to be enjoyed by all, regardless of the ethnicity of the cuisine or the diners' age. The Last Chinese Chef is supposedly about authentic Chinese food and the way it is enjoyed in China. But the author Nicole Mones has surpassed the country border with her food writings in this book, since many of the ideas expressed throughout this novel can also be applied to other non-Western cultures and the way they view food, as opposed to the Western idea of what constitutes a good meal. The Cretan cuisine is based on many of the ideals of Chinese cuisine, as discussed by Nicole in The Last Chinese Chef, from the way animal carcasses are regarded, to the possibilities of taste combinations, and most especially to the way eating is a kind of cultural bonding experience, something that is never done alone or in secret.

Despite the abundance of Asian restaurants all over the world outside China, authentic Chinese cooking is rarely found in them. The truth, unfortunately, sometimes hurts much more than fiction; finding the authentic tastes and flavours of international cuisine is not always easy. In The Last Chinese Chef, Nicole Mones relates the grievances felt by great Chinese chefs cooking in America at the way their food is viewed by their customers:

"... a great dinner always managed to acknowledge civilisation on levels beyond the obvious. The Western people did not understand this... When it came to the food of China, they had their own version, a limited number of dishes that always had to be made the same way with the sauces they would recognise from other restaurants.... Liang Yeh said he had met other chefs who'd tried to offer real Chinese dishes in their menus too, but each said the foreigners wouldn't order them, and each, in time, gave up... discriminating diners demanded real food, but these diners were always Chinese, never American."

In his book Sour Sweet, Timothy Mo also alludes to the 'fake' Chinese food that Chen and Lily, Chinese immigrants to London and owners of a Chinese takeaway, serve to their customers:

"The food they sold, certainly wholesome, nutritious, colourful, even tasty in its way... bore no resemblance at all to Chinese cuisine. They served from a stereotyped menu, similar to countless other establishments in the UK. The food was, if nothing else... successful... "Sweet and sour pork" was their staple, naturally: batter musket balls encasing a tiny core of meat, laced with a scarlet sauce that had an interesting effect on the urine of the consumer the next day. Chen knew because he tried some and almost fainted with shock the morning after, fearing some frightful internal haemorrhaging... "Spare ribs" (whatever they were) also seemed popular. So were spring rolls, basically a Northerner's snack, which Lily parsimoniously filled with beansprouts. All to be packed in the rectangular silver boxes, food coffins, to be removed and consumed statutorily off-premises. the only authentic dish they served was rice, the boiled kind; the fried rice they sold with peas and ham bore no resemblance to the chowfaan Lily cooked for themselves..."

In Bad Food Britain, Joanna Blythman further points out that in areas of the UK where there is a large immigrant Chinese community, the Chinese people will be given a menu card written in the Chinese language, while the non-Chinese customers get the English language one: the menu cards list different dishes.

This is more or less the situation in tourist towns in Greece. Similar stories have been recounted to me by friends who live and work in seaside resort towns on the south coast of Crete: tourists want to eat Greek food the way they themselves prefer it rather than the way it is cooked and served by the locals for themselves. Here's my friend's story (taken from a post I wrote last year about moussaka):

"I was well versed in the Greek cuisine, having worked elsewhere in the restaurant trade for many years. Coming to Paleohora, I realised that what the mild-mannered English and German tourists wanted when they came to Paleohora in the summer was to savour what they thought of as the authentic Greek lifestyle: the slow-paced ignorant locals, the alluring sun and sea, along with authentic Greek peasant cuisine (if those two words can go together). So my wife and I decided to serve only traditional food in the restaurant.

"I found a wine merchant who supplied me with the best marouva (a local variety of wine) you could find in the area, a more expensive variety than others available on the market at the time. The tourists would order it, but they wouldn't drink it, and I'd be chucking away gallons of it sitting undrunk in their glasses. I realised that they were used to classifying wines into reds and whites, something totally foreign in the Cretan wine sector. As soon as I bought in second grade varieties, which could only be distinguished by their colour, the tourists started ordering a second carafe. 'Very good local wine,' they'd say to me, and I'd just answer back, 'Yes, I made it myself from my own grapevines,' and of course they believed me!

"Then there was the salad oil. We used only local olive oil in all our food, and Paleohora olives make some of the best grade of olive oil in the whole country, not just Crete. But Northern Europeans aren't used to mopping up sauces and oil from their plate with freshly baked bread - they were used to sliced bread anyway - so the oil would just remain in the salad bowl, uneaten, wasted. I stopped buying the best grade, and found a cheaper alternative. It too went to waste in any food that required olive oil as a dressing. So I stopped dressing the salads, and just left a small bottle on the table. I watched the tourists pouring a couple of drops of oil over their salad, and I realised that they simply weren't used to using oil any kind - as much as we are. Olive oil only started to be sold relatively recently in their supermarkets; they used to buy it as an exotic highly priced item from pharmacies in their own country.

"We cooked all the traditional Greek foods: pastitsio with spicy mince and creamy sauce, yemista doused in tomato and olive oil, boureki with staka butter, moussaka with fried potato and aubergine slices. In the beginning, I couldn't understand why most people left most of their meal on their plate. Were the servings too large? Was there something wrong with the food? I realised after a couple of seasons that those tourists had been seeing pictures of Greek food in books, and they knew what to expect, but what they didn't know was that it would be so heavy on their stomach. I dry-cooked the mince in the pastitsio; they licked their plate. I stopped dousing olive oil over the yemista and just cooked them in water; they loved them. I stopped adding staka to the boureki: 'yum yum', they kept telling me. I didn't bother frying the aubergine and potato slices in the moussaka; 'mmm, delicious,' they exclaimed, and I'd tell them that the recipe was a very old one from my mother-in-law. That's the kind of bullshit they wanted to hear because it made their holiday take on an exotic appeal. They had no idea what authentic Greek food was; when they were served it, their stomachs couldn't take it."

These days, tourists (and locals alike) are more likely to seek out 'authentic' restaurants, where the cooking reflects what the locals are eating, with the genuine flavours of the area rather than a globalised cuisine to suit all tastes, all part of the more politically correct and sensitised move towards ecotourism, the latest fad in travelling. Having said this, the opposite extreme is also making its presence felt: the hamburger lifestyle has invaded the lives of the younger generation of Cretans, and has already done enough damage (similar to the effect of Western civilisation on the 'little emperor' syndrome in China).

*** *** ***

This discussion leads one to the conclusion that authentic ethnic cuisine is hard to find commercially, and this just might be the case for Chinese cuisine in the little summer resort town that I live in, in the middle of the Mediterranean, even though there are two (or is it three?) 'Chinese' restaurants in the town (one of which is called 'Suki Yaki'; no more need be said on the topic). But this is not the case at all, judging by Nicole's website recipes, specially written up for Cook the Books participants. Authentic Chinese cooking uses the same kind of locally grown or foraged produce that local Cretan food uses. Moreover, due to the sharp rise in the numbers of resident foreigners in Hania, Asian bottled sauces and fresh root ginger are now being stocked at most supermarkets all over the town; had I been making trying to cook authentic Chinese dishes in my Mediterranean kitchen a few years ago, it wouldn't have been possible to find ingredients like oyster sauce and chili paste.

Two ingredients that Nicole tells us are used in rustic Chinese cuisine are highly prized in Cretan cuisine, namely squash flowers and snails. Tavernas all over the island serve them, but few tourists know about them or even how to ask for them: locals ask for squash flowers in the same taverna that the tourists are eating the classic stuffed vine leaves cooked in the same way, while only the locals will ask for snails.

Anthous and Hohlious; zucchini and pumpkin flowers are classically stuffed with rice or cheese, and fried, braised or roasted, while the snails are boiled and served in an aromatic sauce or stewed with vegetables. In summer, squash flowers are readily available; we even have access to our neighbour's glut of these delightful flowers for our cooking needs.

I decided to make some stuffed squash flowers with Chinese flavours. Nicole gives a very simple recipe that can be easily replicated in my Mediterranean kitchen. Instead of pork mince, I used finely chopped leftover chicken meat, with some onions and garlic mixed into it, which I marinated in oyster sauce and soya sauce and steamed bain-marie style on the stove top in a covered pot. I could also have replicated the snails recipe that Nicole gives, but decided against it; snails are difficult to source in great quantities, and when they are available, they are cooked according to traditional recipes that have evolved on the island over many centuries. My husband would not be amused at all if I told him that I changed the recipes 'slightly' for the 'hohlious' he so laboriously foraged from our citrus orchards!

My experiments in Asian cuisine do not look very Chinese; only if one can smell the food will they realise that this is Asian cuisine - otherwise, it looks very Cretan.

Nicole also describes a recipe using spare ribs and lotus leaves. Spare ribs as the Americans and Chinese know them do not exist in Crete - meat cuts are different, so are animal husbandry techniques. Pork ribs are always sold as part of a steak, while beef ribs are never seen, even though Crete is one of those places where the dead animal is seen in all its glory before it becomes meat.

When I found an overlooked and forlorn lone goat chop in my deep freeze, I decided to use it in a Chinese cuisine experiment: I marinated it in the remaining mixture for the stuffed zucchini flowers, and then wrapped it up in vine leaves, in place of lotus leaves (which again don't exist in the Greek market). The vine leaves perfumed the meat in the same way that a lotus leaf does. It is clear that there are similarities in the rustic cuisines among different cultures of the world which rely heavily on foraging of local products. Lamb or goat meat wrapped in vine leaves , slow roasted in the oven or over a spit, is also a classic Greek dish for special occasions. Although oven roasting and baking are not really part of authentic Chinese cuisine, I added this meat cut to a baking tray of stuffed aubergines, to save cooking time and cleaning up.

I presented the cooked goat chop and pumpkin flowers with the stuffed vegetables, Asian flavours disguised as a classic-looking Greek dish: You see one thing, but you taste another.

Speaking of aubergines, there is a glut of them in the garden at the moment, so I used them to make the country eggplant dish from Yangshuo, as Nicole again described. When ingredients are easily sourced, cooking authentic rustic food from any culture becomes as simple as 1-2-3. You can also improvise by using the utensils you have on hand in your own kitchen; as I don't own a wok, I simply used my heaviest shallowest frying pan. As Nicole points out, eggplant needs a lot of oil to cook through; don't skimp on this, because you will only end up making an inedible dish. Aubergine needs a lot of oil, and in Crete, we have plenty of olive oil and use copious amounts in most of our food; even the Chinese are acquiring a taste for it!

My Yangshuo eggplant dish looked like the Greek version of ratatouille (tourlou tourlou), but had a heavenly Chinese aromatic taste! Zucchini could also be added to it. I served this on a bed of organic Chinese noodles (available from the organic food coop, GAIA).

My husband - a stickler for traditional Greek food - liked my Asian flavoured souvlaki (made with chunks of chicken) most of all; they have a very Mediterranean look to them, but he just couldn't work out the flavours, which is all in line with the toying of one's mind and the artistry involved in authentic Chinese cooking: "You see one thing, you taste another."

I'm not a fan of filling my house with bottled sauces that we hardly ever use, but I imagine that these particular tastes will blend well into my Mediterranean kitchen; the dishes I cooked for this month's Cook the Books event have made economical use of them.

The essence of the cooking and eating customs as presented in the The Last Chinese Chef purvey the idea to the reader that cooking is an art, taste combinations should be balanced and the finished meal should be enjoyed in company. I decided to cook a common-looking Greek meal in our house using Chinese flavours, something that I knew the whole family would enjoy, introducing, in a subtle way, the flavours of a foreign culture into our house, whose food customs are not at all as foreign as they sound.

Thanks to Joy in Philadelphia who managed to secure a copy of the book for me.

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Mediterrasian kalitsounia (Καλιτσούνια ασιάτικα)

Last count, there were half a dozen cabbage heads in the garden. In Greece, we often use cabbage raw in salad, but cabbage is also very tasty cooked. There were no takers for another round of lahanorizo, so I turned to fusion cuisine to help me use up our environmentally-friendly garden-grown cabbage. Asian cuisine uses a lot of cabbage (and many other Brassica varieites), in stir-fries, soups and one of my favorite snacks, something I haven't had in ages, spring rolls, which I'd say is the Asian version of kalitsounia. Now is my chance to use the spring roll wrappers I had bought a little while ago from the meagre foreign produce section in my local supermarket (I don't need to tell you which brand they were).

Sadly, after being moved and shuffled about for the last month, they were rendered unusable the day I got round to wanting to use them (the dog got them instead). I always have filo pastry in the house, the kind made by my local pastry maker, so I decided to use that instead.

I made vegetarian spring rolls, but the ingredients can easily be changed around according to what is available in your pantry, freezer or vegetable bin in the fridge. I love being able to alter recipes using seasonal ingredients, even though my family isn't very appreciative of this. They complain that the same recipe never tastes the same when I make it a second time, and they are probably saying the truth. I tried to present these spring rolls as another form of kalitsounia, but the children weren't impressed. As their father says, 'they don't know hunger' and 'they haven't been to the army yet'.

My spring rolls were very spartan: carrots, cabbage, onions and mushrooms. Canned mushrooms. I can imagine a friend's face as he reads this: "Oh my God, canned mushrooms!" he exclaims. "There are so many fresh ones available, why can't you use those instead, and you had to buy canned mushrooms?"

Canned mushrooms are just like anything canned - they are picked in their best form and preserved in a way that makes it easy for someone to store them for use when they want. They are environmentally friendly in that they don't require power to be stored (in the way that frozen goods do). If canned mushrooms sound perturbing to you, just think of fresh mushrooms grown hydroponically (tasteless), or maybe fresh mushrooms grown in a field sprayed with a lot of chemical fertilisers (toxic), or - the most perturbing of all to most of us - fresh mushrooms whose DNA has been changed (Genetically Modified Organisms). The mushrooms I used were canned by KYKNOS, a Greek canning company mainly known for their tinned tomato products, which has now expanded to preserving fruit, beans and okra, one of their more exotic preserves. So canned mushrooms it is. Just pretend the mushrooms were fish and you lived in the mountains: you'd be stocking up your pantry with salt cod and tinned mackerel.

Spring rolls made with three kinds of pastry: paper-thin filo pastry (top), thick filo pastry (bottom centre) and some salvaged mass-produced rice-based pastry (bottom left).

These spring rolls were very good; I made them a second time and served them at the cutting of the Vasilopita at my workplace. Needless to say, they were a hit.

For the filling (this made about 25 pieces), you need:
half a head of a small cabbage, shredded as finely as possible
a carrot, finely grated
an onion, thinly sliced
125g finely chopped mushrooms
2-3 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
a knob of fresh ginger, finely grated
1/4 cup soya sauce
a few drops (or tablespoons) of olive oil

Mix all the ingredients and let the flavours blend by setting aside for ten minutes before using.

Use squares (or rounds) of filo pastry and roll up the spring rolls just as you would do with spring roll wrappers. Fry in very hot oil in batches, so that the oil doesn't cool down too much while you are cooking them. Turn them over to cook on both sides. Drain on absorbent paper.

These spring rolls need a saucy dip to accompany them, along with a cold beer. I used a Thai hot chili sauce and soya sauce. They make great snacks, but are preferably served warm.

This is my entry for Weekend Herb Blogging, hosted this week by Susan from The Well-Seasoned Cook.

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Greek humour and Pad Thai Singlina (Γέλιο α λα Ελληνικά και σύγκλινα α λα Ταϋλάνδη)

I'm not too hot on TV cookery shows. They seem to be full of advice that isn't feasible, ingredients that aren't readily available, complicated recipes made to look simple, and overly slim cooks (for someone constantly involved with food). Their pantries are full of jars and bottles containing items you've never heard of, the meat they cook never looks like it came from an animal (but from saran-wrapped styrofoam dishes), and the cooks seem to have a strangely distant relationship with their object, their kitchen aprons too clean for the use intended.

The Greek equivalent of 'Ready, Steady, Cook' was quite enjoyable, but didn't last long. People at the time were probably not ready for such radical changes to their regularised cooking methods and ingredients. Some of the more entertaining food shows in Greece these days are those which report on regional cuisine cooked by locals with a hands-on approach to food. The presenters of such shows are rarely cooks themselves, acting more like facilitators (or 'glastres', flower pots as we call them in Greek, meaning not very well-informed female TV announcers).

An actor recently came on a 'morning coffee' program, and showed us how to cook a pear tart. His 'kitchen' was located in a restaurant. "That looks nice, Maria," said my husband. "We (the royal one) could try making one of those some day." Yes, we certainly could - it would be bigger, the crust would be thinner, and the fruit wouldn't look pureed; quite frankly, it looked like something made by someone who rarely spends time in the kitchen on a daily basis, has most of their cooking needs performed by restaurants and/or family members, and simply wants to impress his/her friends by cooking haute cuisine.

This is why I love Ilias Mamalakis' shows (and Jamie Oliver's for that matter). For a start, they both cook food suitable for all ages. Ilias knows food at the grass roots level. In his travels around the country in search of regional specialties, he targets real food made on a regular basis by the locals, using locally produced specialties. His shows are foodalogueamentaries: a mixture of armchair travel, documentation and hearty meals prepared for eating in social environments, a very important characteristic of Greek cuisine. He also takes trips abroad showcasing foreign cuisine, at the same time teaching us how to adopt it into our Mediterranean kitchen using local food items. He did this very well last weekend with a food trek across Thailand, interjected with plenty of Greek humour, which may sound slightly insulting to the uninitiated. It takes a little getting used to, but it is genuine, and there is no intention on the part of the entertainer to offend. Sometimes, it's just a case of stating the obvious, which is not always done in the politically correct world. But honesty is the best policy, and it doesn't hurt to laugh.

When Ilias arrived in Thailand, the locals probably thought he was Buddha reincarnated. A short, stout man with his big fat cuddly teddy bear looks, and a constant smile on his face, he epitomises contentment with the world around him. Ilias was infatuated with the exotic sights and sounds of Thailand, as any open-minded person would be upon entering a new environment:

of the tropical rain: "when it rains here, γίνεται ο χαλασμός του κόσμου" (it's like the end of the world).
of the local people: "if you want to hear them, ask them to talk to you as if they need to be heard through a tropical rainstorm" (that χαλασμός του κόσμου that he was talking about above).
of the elephants: "finally, someone who eats more than I do."
more on the Thai people: if you smile and speak softly, you'll be guaranteed a pleasant reception from them (ελπίζω να μην μας έβρυσε, he also added - "I hope he wasn't swearing at us").

Ilias explained some of the new flavours he was lucky to try in their authentic home environment while he was there, and gave us an idea of how we can substitute local items if we don't live near Evripidou Street in Athens, where most of these items are readily available (the largest variety of non-Greek food items in the country are located here):
dried hot radish - "use freshly grated Daikon radish which has a spicy flavour"
palm sugar - "use plain sugar, adding it little by little to suit your taste buds"
tamarind - "it tastes of sour lemon"
fish sauce - "σχέτη λύσσα" (so salty it will make you rabid); use salt or extra soya sauce
rice vinegar - use a mild Greek wine vinegar for a similar effect.

We all take delight in the sensation of trying something new, but if you live away from the main centres (Athens and Thessaloniki), these exotic ingredients will be hard to come by. My local supermarket stocks a good range of BLUE DRAGON products, but if you use only one mass-produced brand of Asian bottled/canned/packaged food, in this case you will end up making a meal that resembles a blue dragon rather than a real Asian meal. It's better to make an effort to find local products that you can substitute for the real tastes to re-create this meal in your own home, and this can be done. There are few cuisines in the world that do not have a range of herbs and spices that can be used to create a desired flavour.

So where's the humour? Here's how Ilias explained some other ingredients to his Greek viewers:
tofu - μια σχέτη αηδία (absolutely sickening): no matter how dairy-free or vegan or healthful tofu is, it is usually tasteless;
tomatos - as ripe as a stone - you're better off using Greek ones (he's probably right).
sesame oil - ha ha, very funny, olive oil can't be beat (of course, he's right);
dried shrimps - OK, they have so much shrimp available that they run out of storage space in their freezer;
chili - έχει βάλει αρκετό ώστε να εκτοξευθεί ένας πύραυλος - they use enough to fire a rocket into space.
Not funny to you? Lost in translation...

The 15 minutes dedicated to making pad thai was not enough to really understand the technique involved in making this dish. The internet features a short but very descriptive video of pad thai being made on a floating market (pretend you didn't see the cook rinse her cleaning rag in the river) but the best account is given by Chez Pim. She explains how ridiculous it is to give precise instructions on making a dish often made with whatever is on hand, and whose success depends on the taste buds of the eaters. She also notes some abominations in recipes available on the internet for pad thai that will guarantee failure - no doubt, we could all mention a few gems of this sort for other recipes...

It goes without saying that pad thai was on the menu during Ilias' trip. As my husband watched the Thai chefs deftly shaking their woks, his mouth watered at the range of items being constantly added to them, layer by layer. "Can you do that?" he asked me.

Men will be men. The last time I did that was when the children complained that this kind of makaronada was not to their liking. Not being very sympathetic to fussy eaters, I hate cooking more than one meal for lunch to suit different tastes. It isn't feasible. Good thing there was some leftover spag bog for them today.

My kitchen benchtop was fast running out of space as I laid out all the ingredients needed to create a Mediterranean version of pad thai. Packaged goods, left to right: mild Cretan wine vinegar, olive oil, sugar, hot thai chili sauce, soya sauce, rice noodles, sambal oelek. In the bowls: shredded cabbage, cauliflower florets, thinly sliced singlina, grated onion, garlic and ginger, lime (available here occassionally), lemon, egg, slivered bell pepper, peanuts. The unsightly large empty plastic canister on the right is simply my way of reminding Mr OC to fill it up with olive oil...

I won't be giving you my recipe for the pad thai I made; the photo says it all. I used Pim's advice (not her recipe), and if you want to successfully make some yourself, it's worth reading every single word. I had no suitable meat or seafood available as it is used in pad thai, but I was very fortunate to have on hand some traditional Cretan preserved pork (known locally as singlina, smoked pork with sage, thyme and Cretan oregano, ) and a bottle of sambal oelek, a fresh chili paste which I had bought on one of my past trips to Evripidou Street. Although I don't own a wok, the low pan I used with a heavy metal base was perfect for all the quick mixing required so that nothing stuck to the bottom of the pan.

Both packets contain smoked preserved pork made in Crete. Singlina (left) are made according to a Haniotiko tradition, while apaki (right) comes from Rethimno, the neighbouring province to Hania.

.

Fusion cuisine suits the globalised world we live in to a tee, so my creation - using traditional Mediterranean flavours and ingredients to produce an Asian-style dish - would make this an excellent example of MediterrAsian cooking, using the two healthiest cuisines in the world, according to the figures for longevity in the countries where these or similar cuisines (Crete and Japan) are commonly practiced.

Then again, pad thai singlina could simply be a case of salmon kleftiko...

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