Cauliflower and chickpeas (Κουνουπίδι και ρεβίθια)

I like to believe that the food I present in my blog is honest, simple, frugal, cheap, tasty, nutritious, sustainable and respectful, food that is within everyone's reach. The simplest meal combinations turn out to be the ones most well remembered by my eaters, who are my family, of course. I don't use any special techniques or ingredients and I try not to waste, especially anything we grow ourselves, to show respect not only to Mother Earth, but also to my husband who spends a good deal of his time in the garden, making it a fertile one all year round.

Here's a dish I recently prepared for our evening meal. Because of the curry flavour, the kids didn't try it, so maybe it's for more mature tastes; as Mediterraneans, they are not quite up to curry flavour. The addition of the chickpeas was last minute - but I thought they paired well with the cauliflower because both these ingredients are curry staples. The addition of a form of bean to a vegetable dish makes it a complete meal that includes protein, carbohydrates and roughage.

The quantities given for the ingredients are vague; it depends on how spicy you want your meal to be, and how many people are eating. You'll notice that i'm using ready-prepared ingredients, which have been prepped myself before I need them, eg boiled soaked chickpeas (so I must be preparing a chickpea stew for these to be hanging around) and finely chopped wild aromatic greens (so I must be preparing a spanakopita at some point soon), and

You need:
some par-boiled cauliflower florets: the amount of time you cook the cauliflower depends on your taste preferences (to be honest, I overcooked mine, which made it mushy)
1 small onion, sliced thinly
a few mixed greens, finely chopped (optional - it lends a nice flavour to the dish)
curry spices: I make my own with crushed garlic, cumin seed, chili pepper, turmeric and freshly grated ginger, something I learnt to do in New Zealand and have not changed my mix since that time
some soaked boiled chickpea
salt and pepper
some olive oil




Heat some olive oil in a low frying pan. Add the curry spices and cook till the garlic is translucent (about 1 minute). Then add the onion and allow it to wilt. Add the cauliflower and allow to heat through. Then add the mixed greens (if using) and chickpeas. Again, allow to heat through before seasoning.

Enjoy the dish with some crusty bread, some cheese and olives and a bit of wine. What could be simpler - as long as you have done your homework, that is!

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Curried cauliflower (Κουνουπίδι με κάρυ)

When you grow your own vegetables, there will be many times when you realise you cannot keep up with the growth rate of your own garden. Even if you live in a country where the cool climate isn't conducive to gardening, what you plant will often ripen at the same time, so that for a long time you will have nothing to harvest, and suddenly you find yourself giving it away.

When you allow ripened/mature crops to keep growing in your garden, you are allowing the soil to keep feeding them, which isn't good for the soil. It works in a similar way to obesity: the soil's nutrients are sucked up by the overgrown crops, so that the plants start to spoil in some way, and the soil becomes poorer. The best thing to do is to harvest crops when they are ready and store them appropriately.

Only the broccoli head is harvested. I watched this field  (and at least two more) full of broccoli over the past 2-3 weeks forming new broccoli heads, similar to the sprouting broccoli variety, but they were never harvested because few people here attach value to these delicious morsels.

We plant too many broccoli and cauliflower to eat them all ourselves, so I often give away or swap produce with friends (one gives me freshly laid eggs from her chickens). But the plants still grow too quickly to be used at their prime. This is especially noticeable with the cauliflower and broccoli plants: the heads are now blossoming. This doesn't render them inedible - they just become more fibrous and less tasty.

At any rate, growing plants in your garden is different from growing plants for the market. In your own garden, you won't use the same kinds of chemicals that are used for market-grown produce. Overgrown market-grown produce doesn't sell, but garden-grown produce is still useable. It may simply need a longer cooking time than what you would normally cook it for if it hadn't been allowed to overgrow.

Our cauliflower is looking a bit like this at the moment:

Very pretty, still tasty, but not what you'd expect a grower to be selling you! The long flower-like stems are not the tastiest specimens, but they can still be used for cooking, although they will need a longer cooking time. They are too fibrous to eat raw.

About a week ago, I picked one that hadn't quite got to the blossom stage:

From this photo, you can see that it was ready to get to the flowering (and seeding) stage. I simply chopped off all the small sprouting parts and left the head as it is. In today's meal - a curry, to use the imported canned coconut milk I bought a while ago to try - I have used only the little sprouts. The remaining cauliflower is still waiting for its time to be used in some way.

I based my curried cauliflower dish on a recipe I found on the internet, which uses whole spices rather than curry powder. I could only get runny coconut milk, and I didn't use a whole garlic head, as stated in the recipe. The cumin seeds lent a nutty flavour to the dish (nicer than cumin powder). To thicken the stew, I mixed in a little bit of flour at the end of the cooking time. Coconut milk is a great addition to stew, lending today's meal a very foreign aroma.

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Cauliflower soup (Κουνουπιδόσουπα)

It's almost Christmas and the Greek Orthodox winter fasting season is about to begin. The cold weather has set in; despite many sunny spells, I can't remember so much rain so early on a regular basis, all these years I've been living in Hania. It's the perfect time to be thinking about soup, a kind of food I can't even stand to think about in the warm weather that we are used to in Hania. The winter garden is growing but it isn't ready for harvesting. The freezer needs to be emptied of last year's stored winter products, one of which was cauliflower. This soup used up the last of my frozen cauliflower florets, and it was a winner for taste. It also used up some leftover ingredients in my fridge, helping me to clear it of little bowls of this and little bowls of that. Soup is a really good choice for helping the cook to clear out the kitchen; now you know what 'soup of the day' might entail on a slow Monday evening in a bistro or cafe.

Showing off Mr Organically Cooked's garden: broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage and lettuce

You need:
1 tbsp of butter
4-5 tbsp of olive oil
1 onion, finely chopped
2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
half a cauliflower cut into florets
a few sprigs of Greek celery, finely chopped
1/2 teaspoon of dried thyme
2 cups of chicken or vegetable broth (I had none available but I did have one lonely cooked chicken drumstick from a leftover meal, which I threw into the soup for flavour)
2-3 tablespoons of cream (this can be omitted if you want to keep the soup light in taste; I had an open carton in the fridge and used it up in this soup)
a fistful of strong flavoured grated cheese (I used regato, but Cretan graviera would also have been a good choice)
salt and pepper, paprika to garnish

This creamy soup was very spicy without the heat, perfect for our first truly chilly day just a little while ago.

Heat the oil and butter together and lightly saute the onion and garlic. Add the celery and cauliflower, mix everything to coat in olive oil, then add the stock, thyme salt and pepper. Bring to the boil, then turn down the heat and simmer until the cauliflower is cooked through (about half an hour). Let the pot cool a little, then puree it to make a creamy soup. Add more water or stock to make it more runny, if preferred. Add the cheese and cream, and mix in well. Heat the soup (but don't let it boil), serve and sprinkle some paprika over each individual dish.

The recipe is based on a post in Katie's blog, where you'll find lots of other tastes from rural France, as well as plenty of French bureaucracy tales; if you substitute the word 'Greece' for 'France', and all the derivatives of both words, you will find that pretty much the same applies in Greece for most aspects of the Francais lifestyle. 'Ti Ellinas, ti Gallos?' a Greek might say...

The winter garden, three weeks later

How the garden does grow quickly in this weather: humidity and sunshine are perfect for leafy greens. We're already planting a second lot of lettuce.

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Other people's food: Sicilian cauliflower pasta (Σικελιανή μακαρονάδα με κουνουπίδι)

We were recently treated to a meal so extravagantly different to the kind of food we usually cook. My neighbourhood does not seem very multicultural at first sight, but one of our neighbours is not actually Greek; she settled here with her Greek spouse, after leaving her native Italy. Eventually, her parents moved out here too, after leaving their native Sicily, although they moved to Rome at a young age. Susanna enjoys looking at our thriving garden while she herself is pottering about in her own. She reminds me of my own gardening interests before I moved out of my bachelor pad (some would say it was an old maid's house); she's into flower gardening, while we are pretty much vegetable gardeners. We often give her aubergines which she uses to make pasta alla Norma, her favorite summer pasta dish, and no wonder, given its Sicilian origins.

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Sicilian food and culture is incredibly similar to Cretan food and culture. The Mediterranean diet, well known all over the world, was based on the diets of both these islands. Read what Diana Serbe has to say about Sicilian food and culture, and simply replace the words 'Sicily' and 'Italy' with Crete' and 'Greece': the statements will have exactly the same ring of truth about them:
"To have seen Italy without having seen Sicily, is not to have seen Italy at all" (Goethe). They came, they saw, they conquered: the Greeks, Romans, Arabs...When the Greeks saw the island of Sicily, they fell in love, sent their fleets, and set up colonies. The Romans saw what the Greeks had, fought them for it, and became the new conquerors. The Arabs saw what the Romans had, fought them for it, and put the island under their dominion...
Who would not fall in love with a country where even at night vegetables are "gleaming forth on the dark air, under the lamps." (D. H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia)? But what effect did such varied conquest have on Sicilian cooking? On the habits of the people? On the language?
Sicily is a large island of varied climate. There are subtropical areas growing prickly pears in abundance; every form of citrus is grown in Sicily - lemons, oranges, blood oranges... The quality of the vegetables gives a clue to the dishes of Sicily. Since their vegetables are of superior taste and quality, no Sicilian would defile them by creating complex dishes that mask the fresh flavor of their ingredients. Simplicity allows the pure taste of the vegetables to emerge. This is a key attitude to cooking, prevalent all over Sicily."
When we see each other from our own side of the fence, Susanna and I often talk about the food we cook with the garden produce. She recently asked us what all the new green plantlets are: broccoli, spinach, cabbage and cauliflower. Cauliflower, she tells me, is the main ingredient in her favorite winter pasta dish. She made some the other day and offered us a plate. The range of ingredients used in this pasta is really quite incredible. I would never have thought to combine these ingredients in one meal, and I would never have put it in my mind that such a dish could exist.

I googled the ingredients she told us she used to make this pasta sauce, and sure enough, a number of Italian recipes came up using exactly the same ingredients that she herself used to make this exotic-looking dish: cauliflower, anchovies, saffron, pine nuts and raisins. And of course, like all good Italian cooks, she made the pasta herself.

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Cauliflower braised with XINOHONTRO (Kουνουπίδι γιαχνί με ξυνόχοντρο)

Organically grown crops may be healthy for you, but they don't have a long shelf-life, whether they are products from your own garden, or from recognised organic producers. Those cauliflowers we have growing on our plot won't last long - they've already been invaded by little green caterpillars, big brown slugs and baby snails, all looking for a comfortable place to hibernate, away form the wet damp climate that Hania has been experiencing lately (we have not seen any sun for seven days, despite our prime spot in the middle of the Med). Cauliflower in Crete is traditionally eaten boiled or braised in a red sauce. My cauliflower cheese didn't go down that well with the mister (he is so Cretan), so I've reverted to something more traditional today: cauliflower cooked in red sauce.


Because there is no meat or fish to accompany the vegetable, I'm going to add an old-fashioned locally-made product, something produced through another dying trade: the art of making xinohondros, a kind of dry rusk that is reconstituted in soups and stews to make them more filling when there is no protein added to them. A more commonly known form of xinohondros is trahanas, the mainland-Greece equivalent of xinohondros. Trahanas is pronounced tarhanas in Turkish. Laurie has visually captured the making of trahanas in a small island village. All I can do is recall my late grandmother (by the name of Calliope) making this about 15 years ago. She seemed to boil up a mixture of cracked wheat, milk and salt (the milk coming from her own goats and sheep), and when she deemed it cooked and ready, it was pressed into large baking tins, about 1cm thick. She then left it on the roof to dry in the sun for a few days. When, again, she deemed it sun-dried enough, she broke it up into little rock-shaped biscuits the size of a walnut, and together with the crumbled bits, put it aside for adding into stews and soups in the winter. I don't know how well it kept - this stuff can ferment and grow mould on it if kept in the wrong conditions. These days, I know that xinohondros (a Cretan specialty also found in other islands in Greece) is oven-dried, reducing its moisture even more.

Even my suburban Cretan village supermarket has started to sell organic produce. I have very few tomatos now with the cold weather - everything has automatically stopped growing in the garden - but the other day when I picked up the second-rate filo pastry in the supermarket, I found a new shelf of products which claim to be completely organic, hence their high price. It's worth trying something new, so I bought a tin of tomatos (1 euro per tin, as opposed to 50 cents for non-organic ones), which I thought I'd add to this very organic dish; the organic xinohondros cost 6 euro for a 400-gram packet, bought from GAIA. Another brand is also available at the supermarket at a cheaper price. Eating organically is expensive; even if you don't buy it, you spend a lot of your time growing it.






















You need:
1/2 wineglass of olive oil
1 cauliflower head, broken up into
1 large onion, minced
2-4 cloves of garlic, minced
400g pureed tomatos (canned tomatos do fine)
1 teaspoon of tomato paste
150g xinohondros (add as much as you like; the more, the crunchier)
a few sprigs of parsley, finely chopped
salt and pepper to taste
Heat the oil in a saucepan. Stew the onion and garlic in the oil. Add the cauliflower florets into the pan, and stir them about to settle them. Cover the pot, and let them stew for about 10 minutes on medium heat, so that they reduce their bulk. Stir them a couple of times during this time so as not to stick to the pan. Add the tomatos, salt, pepper and a small glass of water; stir this mixture evenly into the cauliflower. Cover the pot, and let the cauliflower simmer over low heat till it has cooked till nearly tender - it will probably need no more than 15 minutes. Now add the xinohondros and stir that into the cauliflower, taking care not to break the florets. Add up to half a glass of water if there is not enough liquid in the pot; the xinohondros will absorb quite a bit of the remaining liquid in the pot. Cover the pot, and let the xinohondros cook with the cauliflower for another 10-15 minutes on low heat. Now add the parsley, mix it in, and switch off the heat. The parsley leaves will wilt in the heat, and the meal is ready to be served.

There isn't anything better than to watch a child fine-dining over a simple peasant dish like this one, with a slice of feta cheese. Cauliflower is not the only vegetable that can be cooked in this way - we have cooked this with potatoes and eggplant, which could still be growing up until the middle of winter in the Med, and I've also seen it added to tomato soup. Xinohondros is an acquired Cretan taste, something I never knew while growing up in New Zealand, but then, so is cauliflower cheese, something a Cretan would put aside for his chickens.

This post is dedicated to my late grandmother.

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

MORE CAULIFLOWER RECIPES:
Cauliflower cheese

Cauliflower cheese (Κουνουπίδι με τυρί)

This is the first year that we planted cauliflower in our garden. To our delight, four of the five plants turned into big white flowers, and are now waiting for us to use our culinary skills on them. We often eat cauliflower boiled, dressed with lemon, salt and olive oil, just like our horta. I remember coming across a dish called cauliflower cheese numerous times in Women's Weekly magazines and basic cookbooks when I was in New Zealand. I had never eaten it when I was living there, so I thought I'd give it a go now that the cauliflowers are abundant in our garden, and if the rest fo the family liked it, we could make it again (or never waste our time on it ever again if they didn't).

Time is always a pressure , and today there was simply not enough of it to make a very creative meal. Whichever recipe I used, I decided it would have to be something that sounded simple to make. As usual, I consulted Google for a quick look at various recipes; when you run out of ideas, another person's food blog is always a good solution. When I'm looking for a recipe, I usually go no further than the first ten links. This may sound a bit prejudiced; after all, I have realised that some people have found links to my own website by looking much, much further than the first page with the top 10 links. Time is of the essence here once again. I'd need a research assistant to surf the 250,000 sites mentioned in the google-search of "cauliflower cheese". The first ten sites will do. In fact, as the list proves below, once past the first six sites, the recipes become variations of the traditional one.

No. 1: thefoody.com - no photo. Skip it.
No. 2: tesco.com - very simple, no strange ingredients. Bookmark it.
No 3: waitrose.com - there is an over-use of the word "organic" in the recipe; sounds suspicious. Skip it.
No. 4: recipezaar.com - no photo. Skip it.
No. 5: weightwatchers.co.uk - nobody in my family is on a diet; the photo looked wholly unappetising. It reminded me of a boiled cauliflower, not something cooked in the oven. Skip it.
No. 6: cooks.com - this site provides a list of recipes to choose from; I haven't got time to check their list. I just want one recipe. Skip it.
No. 7: bbc.co.uk - the recipe listed mentions salmon. No need to read further. Skip it.
No. 8: aww.ninemsn.com - looks similar to No. 2. Bookmark it.
No. 9: allrecipes.com - uses the words "pie" and "crust". Not the traditional recipe. Skip it.
No. 10: cook.dannemann.org.uk - looks superb, but has the same problem as Nos. 7 and 9. It goes way past the traditional recipe; since when were pasta and ham included in cauliflower cheese? Skip it.

The more sites you eliminate in the first round, the less you will have to compare. The two sites that I am left with to compare list similar ingredients. aww includes mustard and nutmeg, even though tesco has a more appealing photo. I go for aww. Both recipes sounded too milky for my liking. I decided to jazz them up a little. Now that I have made and eaten this dish, I realise I should have been more creative in choosing alternative ingredients to suit local tastes. It is always a temptation to follow the instructions to the letter the first time you try making something, even if the recipe does sound rather dull. Look at the photos and compare them with a meal like soutzoukakia or gigandes. You can't expect much from a cauliflower cheese; after all, it is a British dish, and we all know what they used to eat before the Indians and the Chinese emitted aromas that caused the Brits' nostrils to seep and their eyes to water. Here is my version of the traditional English favorite of cauliflower cheese.











You need:

1 medium head of cauliflower
50g butter (I should have used olive oil, which is the Mediterranean (and healthier) alternative to butter, but I don't know if it works well for bechamel sauce, which is obviously what I'm going to make)
1 onion, chopped small (I need to hide the milky taste of this dish. I know my husband won't like it if he doesn't smell tomato, onion or garlic in a cooked dish) 2 cloves of garlic, minced (I already added onion, so I may as well add the garlic)
50g plain flour
2 ¾ cups milk
1 tablespoon dijon mustard (whatever mustard you have in the house will probably do)
1 cup of grated tasty cheese (a down-under's way of describing nameless, mass-produced cheese made - most likely - by the national milk company; tasty cheese had a slightly saltier, spicier taste than mild cheese. Europeans - including Greeks - never buy cheese labelled in this way. The equivalent of an Australian-New Zealand tasty cheese is something like Regato)
1 cup parmesan, grated (I used Regato in both instances; now that I think about it, I should have used the local cheese - mizithra - for a creamier, more local taste)
½ teaspoon salt
white pepper (a cook's ploy: cauliflower is white, so if black pepper is used, it may give a 'dirty' look to the cauliflower. Use black pepper if you don't have any white pepper)
freshly grated nutmeg
Cut cauliflower into small florets. Bring a large saucepan of salted water to the boil. Add cauliflower, cook 4 minutes or until just tender; drain. Cauliflower doesn't cook till tender in four minutes. It all depends on the size of the florets. Cook it till it is soft, otherwise you may as well leave it raw.
Pre-heat oven at 200°C or 180°C fan-forced. Butter (better still, oil) a pyrex dish (not a metal tin; the cheesy sauce will stick to it, and it will be difficult to scrape off) large enough to fit the florets in tightly. Melt butter in a medium saucepan, and stir in the onion and garlic. Don't wait for them to brown, just draw out their aromas. Then stir in the flour and cook over gentle heat, stirring continuously with a wooden spoon. Gradually add milk, bring to the boil. Add the mustard and 3/4 of the cheeses. Stir until melted, season with salt, pepper and a little nutmeg. To assemble, place cauliflower in the dish gratin dish pour sauce to cover, sprinkle with parmesan and dot lightly with butter. Bake in a preheated oven for 15 minutes (that's why you have to make sure that the cauliflower is soft-boiled) or until a light crust forms.

©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."