Simbetherio - Mixed marriage stew (Συμπεθεριό)

The moment to rid ourselves of the aging zucchini plants came: the plants had overgrown leaves, the zucchini was sprouting but not growing, it was shrivelling up as soon as it sprouted.. Before I dug them out from the root, I snipped off the most tender part off the plant, which makes a tasty summer stew.

The meaning of 'simbetherio' comes from the relationship of the parents-in-law of the two members of a marriage; the families become related to each other through marriage (they are 'simbetheroi' to each other). The simbetherio dish uses the extended family members of various similar species, cooked in the same pot. The term is usually given to summer-autumn dishes, and not winter meal.

Simbetherio (συμπεθεριό) is the Cretan term for this dish, but it is also known as tourlou-tourlou (= mix-mix, from Turkish). It is really a stovetop briam, a Greek-style ratatouille. In my simbetherio, I used whatever vegetables had been grown in our garden: together with the zucchini tops, I added peppers, onions, tomatoes and eggplant. 

For seasonings, I added some salt, pepper, purslane leaves (known here as glistrida or antrakla) and two sprigs of fresh basil leaves. I could also have added vlita (amaranth) and some stifno (black nightshade), as both grow in our garden, but the pot was already full of sweeter greens and veges, so I left them out. 

Simbetherio is a really simple dish to prepare, and it reminds me of the end of summer, which we often look forward to in Crete, because it's always too hot at this time of year. It hasn't rained since early June, and we're completely parched here, especially since a drought has been declared in the region. 

The most frugal dishes I cook are often the tastiest, because the recipes are based on cheaply produced garden produce.

Well, if you  are having a record-breaking year for tourism in your country, and your hometwon just happens to be one of the most popular summer resort towns for domestic tourism, that means that more and more people need to have showers 2-3 times a day to cool themselves down in the blazing heat, more sheets and towels need to be washed, and more tomatoes need to be grown - and washed! - for making 'Greek' salad. 

This photo was used in the local press today to illustrate the problem of water shortages in Hania.

No wonder there is a drought right now, things will right themselves when the summer tourist season is over. There are talks right now of extending the tourist season by one month each end - ie, to include the whole of March and November - which is great news of course in economic terms, but just how prepared are we for this? Just for the record, there is plenty of water available in the region, but it was planned to be used in dire cases of water shortages. I personally don't classify this case as dire; this is simply a case of άρπα-κόλλα - it could have been prevented if there was any serious planning taking into consideration, given the early forecasting of the record-breaking tourist figures for this year.

Bonus photo: simbetherio, cooked by Ntounias last weekend.

©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.

Local, seasonal, fresh

I had a rather busy time last week, mainly enjoying friends' visits, and hosting work guests. A Mediterranean function, whether work or home related, is always experienced with food, some of which I cooked, and some of which I ate out. As I dined with my diverse range of guests, I explained the food to them.

At the moment, local food in Hania consists of a lot of zucchini recipes. Restraurant cooks and home cooks alike are cooking a lot of zucchini and vine leaves. The reason for this is quite simple: that's what is abundant at the moment! So when my friends from Holland came to visit me, I served them  boureki and dolmadakia.

When we went out for lunch the next day to Dounias, my friends wanted to try the dolmadakia there too, and Stelios, the owner of the restaurant, treated us to some zucchini cooked with eggs.



Later in the week, I went on a work function with Spanish, Italian, French, Albanian and Portuguese colleagues, to the Milia resort in Hania, where zucchini was the main ingredient in most of the dishes: boureki, boiled horta and kolokithokeftedes. Fava, a popular bean dip, was aklso on the menu.





And at the end of the week, when some friends from New Zealand visited me, I decided to cook the same food that the Milia resort served, which wasn't very hard, since our garden is producing a lot of zucchini at the moment.



On the one hand, it may sound boring to eat the same food all the time; on the other, it's sensible to be using local seasonal fresh produce in your food. If it's mainly zucchini, then you;ll be eating mainly zucchini, I guess! Eating fresh, local and seasonal is a mainstay of Crete's hidden economy. You eat what you have, and you don't go hungry.

©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.

Strolling (Βόλτα)

I took my Nebraskan charges for a stroll through Hania today.


A Greek shopping experience cannot be complete without a walk through a street market. The biggest one in Hania is, naturally, the Saturday morning one, because people are more likely to do their shopping at the weekend. But a walk through a street market is also a leisure event for many of us. What's more, it takes you outdoors, and the Saturday laiki is located in the most picturesque area of Hania, in the old town, near the Venetian harbor. I got there a little earlier than my group, so I could buy 4kg of tomatos (€2.50) and 1kg of cucumbers €1), and get them back to the car before we went on the stroll.

The tour started off at the crumbling Venetians walls near the street market, which was our meeting point. The walls at this time of the year are full of caper bushes. Then we entered the street market, where I talked about the three different categories of sellers: producers (they sell what they grow), wholesalers (they sell what they buy), and non-food sellers (where you can buy cheap used/new clothes, bags, shoes, curtain fabric, etc). The market is very busy throughout the whole selling period of the day; there isn't a moment it isn't at its peak.



Apart from the regular fruit and vegetable offerings,



... every now and then, we'd stop and try some honey, cheese, olives and desert alcohol that the sellers themselves simply dish out to the visitors. They can tell apart the tourist from the local.



They bought a bunch of chickpeas to peck on while we were walking through the market,



... and they also watched the basket maker doing a bit of on-the-spot weaving,



... while some sellers proudly discussed their wares with the group.

The street market ends at Koum Kapi, where you can take a left turn and end up at the marina near the Venetian harbour.



There's a sponge seller here most days. Note the baskets in the photo - they are the same ones that the man above was weaving.



My Nebraskans enjoyed the harbour most of all, as can only be expected.



And I really enjoyed showing off Hania to them.







We also passed the site where The Two Faces of January was filmed (it's screening now in the UK).




And there were other lovely Greek things to look at apart from the food: they bought Made in Greece sandals, and we passed a unique jewellery store where we found the most exquisite pendants, all made in Iraklio, from shells and precious stones (for my next personal purchase, when I'm rich).



I know my Nebraskan charges were surprised by many things they saw here, but I was also surprised by one thing they told me: the soda/pop/soft drinks and ice-cream here have a better taste than back home, and they taste more natural because they contain real sugar. Come on, America, you can do better than that, surely!

©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.

All things pass (Όλα περνάνε)

While clearing out my desk recently, I came across a paper issue of locavores.gr, a local food site. The May 2013 issue contained a poem by Pavlos Polychronakis, entitled The crisis has its good moments, which reads as follows (scroll down for the translation):

During the occupation, thousands died of hunger,

for under those past circumstances, times were much much harder.

Though many goods we did produce, like every other place,

to carry it from A to B, we did not have the ways.

And thus did many people die of malnutrition sadly

and due to lack of vitamins, as one more reason maybe.

But now that goods reach all of us in this world as we know it
in such short time and they are cheap, with more than enough of it,
a damned one as this crisis is, but no one here should fear it
despite the fact it threatens us, no matter how we feel it.
To put it simply, once again, our belts we all will tighten,
and from our body we will drop the excess weight that fattened.
The Cretan diet's where we turn, as we will all remember
in terms of health and money that it's good for people's welfare.
We'll go towards the pulses, peas and mama's fasolada
and lentils, chickpeas and broad beans which kept fed all Ellada.
The fruits we'd turn up noses to will come back to the table
and for our sweets and medicine, it's grape must to the rescue!
Just one spoonful of olive oil from our own Cretan produce
will feel like ten steaks bon-fillet on our developed torsos.
We'll go back to our olives, greens, whatever we can forage,
our askrolimbous, onion bulbs and spinach pies we savoured, 
dakos, xinohondro and pasta which all were home- and hand-made.
Towards fried snails with rosemary, a hint of vinegar,
and to the sweet and fiery taste of onion from Mesogeia.
With all this and some home-cured olives, cucumber and tomato
mizithra, rocket, cardamon, and lettuce and potato, 
And barley rusk made in Sfakia, we will get through with bliss
without so much as one hint of the hunger in crisis.
And when God feels like ending it, the crisis comes to pass,
but may that pseudo good life scram
and Crete's nutrition last.

All crises pass; in the more connected world that we live in, they pass more quickly.

©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.

Peppers (Πιπεριές)

Peppers are great in the freezer: you can freeze them whole (especially good if they are hot small peppers like chilis - they slice well too), or as shells (for filing in various ways, eg yemista in Greek cuisine), or in strips to add in stews (I like themin this form for my weekly soupy bean or lentil stews). We had a good run of peppers this past summer, and only recently cleared the garden of the last pepper plants. There are only so many peppers you can use and freeze, and I stil had plenty left over.

So I set about making a pepper sauce, from an idea that I got in a Greek blog: I let cook till soft some chopped peppers, onion, garlic, herbs and spices, with some sugar, vinegar and tomato paste (as we are now clean out of tomatoes which didn't do so well in our garden this year for some reason). This pepper sauce makes a great addition to stews and soups, adding a stronger flavour similar to the way stock gives an extra punch to them with a vegetarian twist.

But as you can see, there were still quite a few peppers remaining in my store, so I had to think up of another way to use them: what about a spicy muhammara?! Muhammara is a fantastic spicy party-winning dip, made primarily with red roasted peppers and ground nuts, that can be eaten with crispy snacks like toasted bread and carrot sticks. In some ways, it's very similar to the Greek eggplant dip (melitzanosalata). But it's also fantastic as an accompaniment to meat and fish; I made it to go with Saturday's meal of fried sole fillets which were on special at the supermarket, at €6.34/kg.

The muhammara recipe I used mentioned pomegranate molasses, which I didn't have (I used a little cider vinegar mixed with some home-made grape molasses, which we call 'petimezi' in Greece), but I topped it off with some pomegranate seeds which gave the muhammara a bit more texture.

I always find it a challenge to use up ingredients or preserve them in unusual ways. These two little projects kept me busy at the weekend.

©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.

Braised summer greens with corn (Χόρτα τσιγαριαστά με ξενικόστερα)

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

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

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

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

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


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

You can find the recipe for tsigarisata horta here.

©All Rights Reserved/Organically cooked. No part of this blog may be reproduced and/or copied by any means without prior consent from Maria Verivaki.

Crete in one dakos (Όλη η Κρήτη ένα ντάκο)

Last night, an attempt was made to assemble the biggest dakos ever at 1.80m x 8m for the Guinness Book of World records. Dakos is a favorite Cretan snack which is often turned into a vegetarian meal when accompanied by a salad. It often forms our own evening snack throughout the summer when we have an abundance of fresh tomatoes growing in the garden. The base of the dakos is made of double-baked bread, usually wholewheat, that becomes hard and can last for a long long time in storage, to be used when needed. The rusk has been eaten in Greece since ancient times and it was one of the foods that soldiers often carried with them, as they were easily transportable.

The giant dakos was presented at the small forested park near the beach at Ayious Apostolous in Hania. Whereas a decade ago, the dakos was known as a Cretan specialty, it is now widely known all over Greece, having entered the mainland restaurant menus. The wholewheat rusk is now made to suit a multitude of different tastes, with white flour, brown flour, multigrain, etc, and most bakeries produce their own version. Dry bread doesn't sound exciting, but once you try the dakos, you will probably be hooked. Dakos can be made vegan or vegetarian, depending on whether you use the cheese - but generally speaking, Cretans associate dakos with the cheese.

The giant dakos event is not going to be remembered just for the dakos that was shaped in the form of the island of Crete (it was baked in smaller parts that fitted together like a puzzle). I preferred to see it as a celebration of the Mediterranean diet. The event was not characterised just by a food presentation. It started with a group of people who had an idea, which was taken up at the community level. The choice of the bakery, the cooking of the rusk, its transportation to the site, the setting out of the tables and chairs, the makeshift kitchen for the assembly of the dakos, the grating of the tomato (by hand, of course!), the choice of olive oil and mizithra (soft white cheese), the designation of the kitchen assistants and how each one would take part, the assembly of the dakos (layer by layer), the congregation that came to the event, and finally, the sharing out of the giant dakos to the audience (children were treated first) all formed a significant part of the event.

The dakos base was baked in a commercial baker's oven, but the grating of the tomato and the  spreading of the cheese was all conducted at the park. In about half an hour, the dakos was assembled; there was a bit of a scramble for photographs (I got a 6 1/2 foot man to take my shot from the dais set up for musical component of the event) after which the dakos was immediately distributed to the public.

Any food celebration in the Mediterranean area does not start and stop with food, so this was not the end of the event - music and dance followed, completing and marking the event as a whole and complete one. The Mediterranean diet cannot be divorced from the lifestyle component:

"The Mediterranean Diet as a unique lifestyle, determined by the climate and by the Mediterranean area, is also manifested through related festivals and celebrations. These events become the receptacle of gestures of mutual recognition, hospitality, neighborliness, conviviality, intergenerational transmission and intercultural dialogue. " 

Our piece came from the Rethimno part of the dakos.

Without a community base and a musical accompaniment, there would be no Mediterranean diet; it would simply be called 'Mediterranean food'. The food of the Mediterranean can be found in other parts of the world, but not the lifestyle - it is actually the lifestyle that UNESCO wants to protect as Intangible Heritage under the general title of the Mediterranean Diet.

©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.

Purslane (Γλυστρίδα)

I posted this photo of purslane on my facebook page without realising it would become an instant hit. I suppose it is the serene look of this wonderful weed and the way it grows wildly and spontaneously, without any help apart from some irrigation. Purslane, Portulaca oleracea (in Greek, αντράκλα - antrakla, or γλυστρίδα - glistrida) is a common edible weed in Greece during the summer months. It has long thick juicy stems and grows around tomato and zucchini plants. For those who are familiar with it, it has a light refreshing taste, and is especially good in tomato and/or potato salads.

Purlsane is an edible weed. The tiny buds produce a small yellow flower. The seeds of the plant are tiny and black - they look like fine dust. You can see them all over the worktop. 

You can use the tenderest parts (like the ones I've cut off on the left) for salad, or you can place the whole (cleaned) plant in a jar of wine vinegar with a little salt sprinkled into it, which can be used in the same way as capers or the kritamos weed (samphire). Even if you don't use it all up by next year, it will remind yo throughout the colder months of winter of the warmer months to come. Since it is renewably annually, you don't need to keep it - you'll just pickle some again more next year.

Pickled capers and pickling purslane

Although purslane grows literally everywhere and anywhere during the summer, for the last 3-4 years, it is being sold at the market these days, a sign that it is quite popular. For me, who lives in a house with a large garden, in a village, it was quite a scary sight. It made me feel that this could possibly be a sign of how busy people seem to be these days, distancing themselves from nature despite being so close to it. Then again, they may not live near a clean source of purslane, and they find it easier to pay 50-60 cents for a cute little bunch of purslane (shipped form Athens). Let's hope, for my judgmental sake, that it is the latter; you know what Greeks say about people who eat a lot of glistrida, don't you? They talk too much.

My favorite recipes for fresh purslane are: orzo pasta salad, artichoke and purslane salad, and cucumber/zucchini and purslane salad. Pickled purslane is good in tomato and potato salad.

©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.

Drakonas (Δρακόνας)

I was supposed to cook boureki yesterday. I had laid out all the ingredients on the kitchen worktop to be prepared to start working on it as soon as I woke up on Sunday morning. I got up, I made myself a cup of coffee, and then - I don't know how it happened, but I found myself lying on the couch, reading A Casual Vacancy (on the dichotomy of the modern western world: we are required to think in a politically correct manner without prejudices, while successful writers use them to create characters in best-sellers; I should start working on a novel about my immediate neighbours - it will shed great light on the Greek identity). Instead of busying myself in the kitchen, I was flaked out on the sofa, reading.

By the middle of August, I get tired of the sand, tired of the sea, tired of the beach, tired of tending the garden, tired of souvlaki, tired of cooking meat, and tired of cooking with aubergines. It must have been written all over my face when my husband saw me: "Let's go out for lunch," he suggested (it didn't take long to convince him, after seeing some mouth-watering photos on the internet from a friend's recent visit to a taverna).

  

What was special about this trip was the drive to the taverna which was located in the mountain village of Drakona, a place we had never been to, mainly because we never really needed to, and we chose to drive there using a route that we had never taken before, and we returned via a different route too, making a full round-trip. We passed roads lines with grazing goats and dry stone walls, abandoned stone houses, paths carved out of forests, dry streams waiting to fill up in winter, and μαντριά, enclosures for sheep and goats which graze there when the weather permits. The scenery was awesomely beautiful; Crete is filled with majestic landscape features which are easily accessible these days with the developed road system - there are few places that cannot be reached - yet few of us have taken all the roads there are to take on this island. It is not as though I have not seen other similarly beautiful places on my island, but I am constantly surprised at what the road hides. If Crete were a flat island, you could probably drive everywhere in a day or two - with all our mountains, it could take an hour to drive over a small hill or through a short gorge.

  

Even more inspiring are the people you meet along the way. The residents of these once large villages - now just tiny communities - remind you of the Cretan people's resilience to continue living the way their ancestors did. They are all inextricably linked to agriculture and a subsistence lifestyle, which is now suddenly in vogue, an attraction worth visiting: real people living in the middle of nowhere, observing how they are now able to stay where they are, however remote or old-fashioned it may seem to live in such places, isolated from all the trappings of modern life, without even a store to buy their staples. They eat what they produce, and they produce a lot, sharing a great deal of it. Drakona is only half an hour away from my home, but the two different worlds seem far apart form each other.

Tavernas specialising in old-fashioned roasts, using local ingredients and very little else, are now all the rage. These establishments are doing well, mainly due to their low costs of operation: if you raise the meat, vegetables and olive oil in the area where you run the restaurant, living and working at the same place at the the same time, your costs are going to be very low and the quality of the food (given the location and climate, in Crete, you cannot go far wrong) is going to be very high.

"According to Prof. Lindley M. Keasbey, “Europe is made up of two parts: the beer and butter civilisation of the North, and the wine and oil civilisation of the South. The beer and butter people are made up of Nordics and Alpines, the wine and oil people are predominate of Mediterranean stock.” On a global level, people have already realized the true characteristics of Mediterranean civilization, trying to adapt the wine and oil culture into their own home, region, and country." (something i helped write at work to hopefully make us the seat of UNESCO's Mediterranean Diet as Intangible Heritage in Greece)

Hors d'ouevres (grated tomato with olive oil and oregano) as a pre-lunch treat on the house, with our choice of a white house wine - it is not just the food that looks natural, but the colours too.

Home-made bread made the day before we came - my friend who had visited the same restaurant the day before took the photo of the loaves that had just finished baking in the wood-fired oven; one of those loaves was cut to form the slices of bread pictured above.

Vegetarian starters (staka dip, fried zucchini stuffed with cheese and braised greens in olive oil) ...

... and meat mains (lamb roasted over grapevine stems, rooster in wine sauce and pork cooked with cheese, all served with roast or fried potatoes) ...

... with a view of where the food and fuel comes from...

... topped off with dessert on the house (coconut cake, watermelon and tsikoudia). 

We drove through the Therisso gorge on the way back home. 

 Of course the food was all very good, but if I could suggest an improvement, I would say that servings are very large, a common problem in such establishments (we ordered three mains, not four, and we left one piece of meat from each dish, after realising that we could not stuff any more down, having already force-fed ourselves on the last bite we took). For a price comparison, see how much it cost us (4 diners) to eat out (left) and how much it cost me to cook a roast meat dinner at home for 10 people, with some healthy lunch leftovers that fed another 8 people the next day only four days ago. Our little day trip recharged our batteries, so it's back to lentil soup for lunch today - and I do believe I have got back into blogging again, after a fortnight's rest...

Drakona now boasts two Eat Crete tavernas: Ntounias and Tzaneris and Arhontissa (where we went). Make sure you get there and leave from different routes - the sights are different on each side.

©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.