Chicken soup with broccoli (Κοτόσουπα με μπρόκολο)

Yes, broccoli again. I've uprooted all our broccoli plants, but I still have a freezer-shelf full of the stuff. It has occurred to me that we have been eating a lot of broccoli this winter, but this is for economy more than anything else. Instead of buying winter vegetables, I use our bumper crop of broccoli wherever I can. We have so much broccoli from the garden, that I par-boil a large pot of broccoli twice a week (yes, really), which gives me a chance to use it in different ways when I come home from work, eg stir-fries, soups, fritters, etc. I'm so glad I'm a really good cook, because I can cook broccoli this often and make sure that my while family still manages to enjoy their meal. We have had it in so many different forms, that they never complain. I'm that creative. Even the dog eats broccoli mixed in with her food. And if you know a thing or two about broccoli, it is regarded as a superfood.

The broccoli season is over - my neighbour's broccoli plants (the ones with the yellow flowers) are going  the way mine did and they need uprooting.

I knew that from a long time ago, when one of our Algerian students at the Institute researched the "Genetic and epigentic control of glucosinolates pathways synthesis in broccoli", whatever that means (I proofread a lot of stuff which I don't always understand), a thesis which contained a lot of research on the benefits of broccoli in the diet. Since then, broccoli is described in the internet press as a nutritional show stopper, an anti-cancer agent, a tumour reducer, an age suppresor, a vitamin-packed agent with more Vitamin C than an orange, among others. Well, I'm glad to hear all that, because we really do eat a lot of broccoli, and it just might help us all to keep up our good health, now that Greece has no public health system (just yet, apart from hospitals). We don't lead the kind of life that gives us the privilege of making proclamations like "I'm President of the United States, and I'm not going to eat any more broccoli!" like George Bush did. But lucky for us, broccoli keeps us healthy.

This broccoli soup was made on the go, with little time to spare for 'real' cooking; I was harvesting and processing celery for the freezer, at the same time as picking spinach from among the tall and rather overgrown nettles that have now surrounded all the spinach plants. But don't take my soft whinge seriously: the winter garden is really easy to maintain. The plants seem to grow by themselves, they rarely need much care, and all I do is harvest. It's really not as difficult as it may sound. I just wish I could be doing something else instead, like work on the project, which is underway - slowly, slowly...

I made this amazing soup last Friday, despite my aching bones, after a very tiring week, as I thought about the three-day weekend that we are now in the middle of (it's Kathara Deftera tomorrow). Perhaps everyone loved it so much because it was a cold night, but I have a feeling that they liked it because it was really delicious. it has a pungent taste because fo teh way I used the garlic. Normally I cook it in some way, eg sauteeing in oil before being added to a meal. In this recipe, the garlic is not cooked at all, so it has a strong but fresh flavour.

You need:
4 chicken backs, with necks
4-5 medium potatoes
about 3 cups of broccoli cut into bite sized individual heads
2 large cloves of garlic
salt, pepper and oregano


Boil the chicken backs, broccoli and peeled potatoes in a large pot of water, till the potatoes are soft. Remove the chicken, broccoli and potatoes from the pot. Puree 3 potatoes with the garlic and some of the stock water (strained to remove impurities from the chicken) in a blender. Pour the puree into another pot. Strain all the remaining liquid into the pot with the puree. Add the chicken meat (which you shredded from the chicken backs and necks), and all the seasonings. Chop the remaining potatoes and all the broccoli into small pieces. Mix well to form a blended soup. Heat through.

Serve the soup piping hot, with crusty bread. It will not make you feel poor as you think that you are cooking again with broccoli which you grew yourself; it will make you feel somewhat superior, having so much superfood at your disposal.

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Chicken soup (Κοτόσουπα)

I used to cook mainly with plant-based foods, and there wasn't much meat in our meals. Meat was left for the weekends, with maybe a mince dish in the middle of the week. But that's not working much these days - the children are growing fast and they seem to want to eat much more than they ever ate before. Not only that, but I can tell that they want to eat more meat. I started adding chicken to many of our meals just for them, which they appreciated. As they grow older, they are also more open to eating a wider variety of dishes, which means I am freer to cook more creatively.

Last week, when we were all feeling very poorly due to the cold weather, I made the kids their first chicken soup. In many countries, chicken soup is a staple meal for winter, cold weather and sickness. But soup has never been regarded as a 'proper' meal in Greece, and the main kinds of soup made by Cretans were never really very satisfying (they were generally very smelly, and terribly boring-looking). Fish soup is still widely popular, but it's a smelly business. Chicken soup is much less hassle - and it is really cheap to make, now that we can buy chicken backs.

I've been buying chicken backs for a while now. We are still lucky to be able to get the necks too. In more developed countries, the necks are no longer sold because they are used in the food industry to make canned/frozen/bottled stock. In Crete, I have yet to find ready made stock - and it doesn't sound like something I would want to buy anyway!

In pre-crisis Greece, chicken backs were thrown away - literally. Anyone who wanted to cook for their pets (like I did) could pick up chicken backs (with the necks attached) for free from the supermarket. I used to do this all the time. Not only that, but I would cook them, remove the meat and add it to chicken pie or a stir-fry, and voila, I would be feeding the family cheaply (the dog would eat the bones, and some rice/macaroni cooked in the broth, if I didn't need the stock for making pilafi or soup).

An old photo, dated 25/3/2011 - discarded supermarket chicken backs, turned into dog food, stock and pie meat. What made me feel embarrassed to blog abut this photo was that I would be called stingy, cheap, μίζερη. But that was simply other people's mistaken perceptions - I was simply ahead of them when it comes to survival skills. I suppose they know this now - I had a feeling people would eventually see things my way...

I would never tell anyone what I did (I am only telling someone now, by writing it) but I don't understand why my compatriots would attach so little importance to food that was fit for human consumption. They had no idea of the true value of something that they were paying for. In fact, I couldn't understand a lot of things about pre-crisis Greece, but those days seem to be over. Greeks seem to be understanding the rest of the world better these days, and trying to catch up with the way the modern world is going - showing compassion, sympathy and solidarity with poorer people. One could say that we are now living in the post-crisis period. This suggests that 'the crisis' is over, and in essence, it is: Greeks are now learning to live within their means, they accept their new reality, and they know there is no going back to the past:

"The crisis is changing Greece for the better, he told me. The bloated, clientelist public sector that employed unqualified people in return for political support, is being reformed. Greeks are learning to live within their means. Tax evasion is no longer accepted. A new culture of solidarity has emerged: a feeling of "we are all in it together". There is even a spirit of entrepreneurialism being born. It is, he said, a painful transition - but a necessary one. Psychiatrists talk of the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Maybe Greece, which has known much grief, is edging towards the final stage. I meet far more now who tell me that if they could choose between going back to 2004, when Greece basked in the Olympics and European football victory and felt wealthy - or now, pushing on, out of all this - they would take the latter. The realisation has dawned that pre-crisis Greece was an illusion: it was a party which just had to end."(Mark Lowen, 23/12/2013, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25431288)

We need to remember what kind of crisis we are talking about - the state of the economy may still not be good, but the real crisis was never the economy: it was in the Greek identity.

My chicken soup was based on the ingredients list in the BBC link. I tweaked it a bit to make the soup more suitable to my family's taste. The whole family loved this soup, even my husband, who thought he'd had enough of chicken soup in his youth (I can imagine what his mother was making - it was never as good as my version), and cheap chicken while he was serving military duty.

You need:

a few glugs of olive oil
2 roughly chopped onions
2 finely chopped sticks of dark green Greek celery (it resembles lovage and is far more common than regular celery as it is known in western countries)
2 roughly diced carrots
2-3 boiled potatoes
4 chicken backs with necks attached
salt and freshly ground pepper

Boil the chicken backs in a medium pot with plenty of water with the potatoes till the meat is very soft and close to falling off the bone. While the pot is boiling, heat the olive oil in a pan or pot and add the carrots, onion and celery. Saute till slightly softened.

When the chicken is ready, remove the chicken backs and potatoes from the stock. Strain the stock clean. When cold enough to handle, remove the meat from the bones EXCEPT the necks, and add to the strained stock. Add all the cooked vegetables, including the potatoes, broken up into chunks. Now puree half the soup in a blender. Pour the blended soup back into the pot with the rest of the soup and mix well. Add as much water as needed to fill the pot. Mix everything till well blended. Season with salt and pepper.

Serve in individual bowls with a chicken neck for decoration.

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Frugal chicken and broccoli pie

The broccoli season is now in full swing in our garden. I cut no less than 8 perfect heads of broccoli from the garden at the weekend, and chopped them into perfect florets before puting them in the freezer. Having just used up the very last of our frozen spinach from the previous season in a spanakopita the other day, I felt that the broccoli made up for its loss.

Here's my first broccoli meal for the season, from a Betty Crocker recipe for self-crusting broccoli and chicken pie.

I didn't add more grated cheese on top of the pie - there's more than enough protein in it already.

We don't have Bisquick in Crete (or maybe we do at AB supermarket, where all foreign tastes and imported Western staples seem to be found), so I made a substitute, as stated on this wikihow site. My pie is not gluten-free, as stated in the original recipe.

The recipe yielded a medium sized pie (about 6 pieces) and 3 muffin sized pies.

There was some mixture left over, so I also got three muffin-sized pies, made in separate ramekins. With all the specials going these days on chicken, eggs and cheese at various discount supermarkets, this was turned into an incredibly frugal meal to make. It was also very easy to whip up for an evening meal.

Because I was in a bit of a rush, I stuck to the original recipe. But if I make this again, I would add a spicy agent to jazz up the taste. I had my piece with some sriracha sauce to go with it, for some extra spunk.

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Cheap 'n' Greek 'n' frugal cuisine (Και φτηνό, και Ελληνικό)

Most Greeks these days buy their food according to the way their pockets are feeling: we look around for bargains, but at the same time, we look for food that represents our Greek tastes and eating style. There is a greater insistence on buying Greek products on the part of Greek consumers: some chicken wings and legs. despite the crisis in their pocket, they actively seek out Greek products. I was at LIDL the other day where I came across what looked like cheap fresh chicken. I did my sums, and realised that this chicken was slightly more expensive (only slightly) than the frozen chicken legs that I had bought from another supermarket. "The other supermarket's were probably not Greek though," another shopper said to me when we were comparing prices together. She was right - they were packaged in Belgium, which doesn't necessarily mean that the chicken was Belgian. LIDL often comes under fire for selling sub-standard food, lacking taste and quality. But it's selling Greek food, and that's really important to Greek citizens at the moment.

Last night's dinner consisted of 10 chicken wings (800g for €2.17: about €0.55 per person among the four of us), which I fried buffalo-style, each cut into two pieces, with some of my summer-preserved tomato sauce. To simplify things, the antioxidant properties of olive oil are not lost when it is heated; the antioxidant properties of tomato (carotenoids) break down, unlike in olive oil which resists, but it has been verified that they too are still not lost (from some recent research from MAICh).

LIDL also sells a lot of pre-packaged food that does not require a long cooking period. Cheap convenience food is also being sought in discount supermarkets, not just as a way to keep the food budget of a household down, but also to help people to get a meal on their plate in quick time. Many of these products do not originate from Greece, but Greek people's food choices are no longer necessarily Greek in nature; they are more likely to necessarily be cheap. The consequences of unemployment have led to rapid detrimental effects in the home environment. Unemployment does not give people the luxury of preparing the slow-cooked traditional Greek meals that they may have been raised on. People are on the move in such a way that they do not necessarily spend so much time at home in this way, even if they are not employed. Suddenly, they find themselves in new situations that are constantly changing. And if they are one of the lucky ones to be still working, they are working longer hours than before - sometimes, there is little time available to cook.

While I was shopping at LIDL, I picked up this frozen paella (€3.29). I had no time to cook a meal for the next day, so I told my 11-year-old to follow the instructions on the back of the packet, and she cooked this for lunch yesterday for the family (they said they liked it - but  at €1.10 per person, it wasn't as cheap as I normally cook, from scratch).

Despite being a foreign supermarket chain, originating in the country that many Greeks blame for the country's woes, LIDL.gr cannot be chided for its efforts to sell their Greek customers what they want: putting aside the gimmicky food (eg the festive desserts and posh-looking black sepia-flavoured pasta it is selling at the moment in the run-up to Christmas), it has a lot of Greek-flag labels on its food products. Under its own private label, it sells beans and rice grown in Greece, pasta made in Greece with Greek flour, Greek fruit and vegetables, Greek eggs, and Greek chicken. What's more, it sells all this food cheaply, the main consideration these days when people go shopping, which is obvious from the move to private label shopping in Greece in recent times, at unprecedented rates. It's a matter of finding the magic combination of cheap 'n' Greek 'n' frugal - and it is still possible to eat cheap 'n' Greek 'n' frugal, but you need to be well organised and well informed to take advantage of the offers available at the supermarkets, as I've mentioned before in previous posts.

Egg and potato omelette (30 eggs for €3.33 at LIDL, small potatoes for €0.38/kilo at INKA), bagged rocket for €1.19 at LIDL, some pomegranate from our tree, and for some indulgence, locally produced wine (Kudos, Dourakis) for €6.50 at INKA; our evening meal two nights ago.

Greeks eat like most Westerners these days, with a Greek twist. During the 2nd Symposium of Greek Gastronomy: Food, Memory and Identity in Greece and the Greek Diaspora, I spoke about Greek cuisine, Greek identity and the economic crisis. My conclusion was as follows:

"As Greeks, we all share a common concept of what constitutes Greek food, but we are Western Europeans at heart and our food and lifestyle choices reflect this. The economic crisis has westernised us even more. Despite having less money, we all still eat - we are not starving."

The economic crisis means our pockets are not so full of money these days, but there is still cheap locally produced food to be found in Greece, and non-Greeks know this - they like our food too.

If you would like to be in for the 100% Greek food giveaway I am organising through my blog just leave a comment on the Dakos in a jar post. 

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Greek-style simple comfort food: Orzo pasta rice with chicken and peas (Κριθαράκι, κοτόπουλο και μπιζέλια/αρακά)

Here's a picture that won over many people's hearts on my facebook site:

The vegetables were cooked separately from the pasta and chicken: I cooked them in this way, because some of us prefer the vegetables and the others prefer the meat and pasta. If I combined everything, it wouldn't have had the same effect on the family. It looks like double the work, but it gave double the pleasure. Both dishes are made in the same way - and it was terribly easy to make.

For the orzo dish, you need:
some chicken (I used about 500g of chicken with the bone, in small pieces)
1 onion, finely chopped
2-3 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
1 tablespoon of tomato paste
1 large fresh tomato, grated
3-5 glugs of extra virgin olive oil
350g orzo pasta rice
2-3 cups water
1 large red bell pepper (optional), finely sliced
salt and pepper

For the pea dish, you need:
500g mixed peas and other frozen vegetables
1 onion, finely chopped
2-3 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
1 tablespoon of tomato paste
1 large fresh tomato, grated
3-5 glugs of extra virgin olive oil
1 large red bell pepper (optional), finely sliced
salt and pepper

Proceed in the same way as described below, for each dish: Heat the oil, add the onion and garlic, and cook till transparent. Add the grated tomato, red pepper, tomato paste, salt and pepper. Mix till smooth. Lower the heat to minimum, then add the chicken/mixed vegetables. Cook till done with the lid on - the chicken will need about 30 minutes, the peas etc about 15. Add only a little bit of water if needed, to ensure the food has enough liquids to cook in and won't stick to the pan.

For the orzo, now add the water to the chicken and then pour in the pasta, mixing carefully so that the pasta isn't clumpy. Let it cook slowly on minimum heat, with the lid off. The water will be absorbed by the pasta - turn off the heat just when the water is almost absorbed, and you can still see some liquid in the pot.

You still have time until Sunday to add your name to the draw for a natural beauty package from Aphrodite's Embrace. 

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My son's first roast

My kids are starting to take an interest in cooking meals. My daughter has always been a good eater so this is no surprise for me, but my son, who is a picky eater, is now also showing signs of wanting cook his main meals. I think he likes this because he knows that if he shows willingness to cook, I am willing to allow him to cook what he chooses. He won't cook beans or greens (neither are particularly popular with most kids). So to get them interested in cooking, you have to allow kids to cook healthy things they like.

I bought some chicken pieces to let him cook his first roast. Roast chicken and potatoes sounds so simple:

"Place chicken in a baking dish, chop potatoes and place around chicken, season with salt, pepper and oregano, pour some olive oil, lemon juice and water into the pan and place in the oven. Allow to cook, covered, in a moderate oven for two hours. Remove the cover, turn the heat up high and allow the food to turn golden and crusty on the top."

For a child, more instrcutions are needed for all those things we adults take for granted:
- Wash the chicken pieces by rubbing them with your hand under a running tap to get rid of bones, blood and other impurities.
 - To peel a potato, hold the potato in one hand and the peeler in the other. Then place your thumb (from the hand with the potato peeler) at the bottom of the potato and the peeler at the top, and firmly run the peelr down the potato to remove the skin.
- When seasoning food, you have to mix things with your hands to coat the ingredients well, otherwise the seaosnings will stay in one place.
- Good food needs time to cook. If you don't prepare things early, you won't have your dinner on time.

I got a lot of satisfaction when I saw his smile after we took the chicken out of the oven to see how it was cooking. "This looks good," he said. I feel sure that this is a sign that he will want to repeat the experience.

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Rip-off

As yesterday's post showed, it's easy to get ripped off in Greece, and this often involves food-related businesses: σου πιάνουν τον κώλο, as we say in Greek (they grab your ass). Last Saturday, while we were on a family shopping trip, my kids spotted a packet of fresh chicken wings next to the butcher's counter at the supermarket, where my husband and I were looking at the meat array.

"How about some fried chicken wings for Sunday's lunch instead of pork steaks?" my son asked me. Nice idea, I thought, but got a bit worried when I noticed the price on the packet: €3.19 for less than 1kg of (Greek) chicken wings; the by-the-kilo price was stated in finer print at the bottom of the sticker, €3.99. So I checked the frozen counter where I thought they would be selling cheaper chicken wings. Not a chance on that day, which I would think is highly unusual at a supermarket on a Saturday - I would have thought they'd be fully stocked. There were no chicken wings in the freezer, unlike other times when there usually is.

 Broccoli with tahini sauce, fried chicken wings and lemon potatoes

"Let's buy some meat from a butcher rather than the supermarket," I suggested. After we left the Carrefour, we stopped off at the 108 ΚΡΕΟΠΩΛΕΙΟ, a local butcher run by the Motakis-Tzougrakis partners, which has various branches in different locations around the town. There was a mountain of Greek chicken wings in the display selling at €2.30/kg - that's nearly half the price of the supermarket.

Supermarkets in many western countries have forced independent butchers to close down, but in Crete, and I'd say the whole of Greece, butchers never closed down due to competition with supermarkets. They have successfully competed with them, mainly because Greeks are used to seeing meat in its whole form. Although meat is now often and regularly sold in vacuum-packed portions in supermarkets, there is always a butcher's counter in the stores too, which shows that Greeks are not squeamish about seeing their meat in this form. Furthermore, most Greek meat speciality dishes cannot be made from the meat in vacuum packs. Meat has also become an expensive commodity these days, so it pays to have a good idea of the value of something before you get your ass grabbed.

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Baked chicken and eggplant (Κοτόπουλο και μελιτζάνες στο φούρνο)

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

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

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

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

4 large pieces of boiled chicken

2 large aubergines

1 large onion

2 cloves of garlic

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

salt and pepper

oregano (optional)

olive oil

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

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

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

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

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Chicken salad (Κοτοσαλάτα)

A bit of meat added to a green salad makes a complete meal. You don't need much more than some sourdough bread to go with it, and if you are a drinker, a glass of wine. A salad with a little bit of meat can also constitute a light meal. It all depends on the dressing you choose to add to your salad. I like to make meat-and-greens salad with the chicken that I boil to make stock for pilafi (creamy Cretan rice). Boiled chicken always gets left over, since it's usually viewed as a sick person's food (light, good for the stomach, etc); at least that's how my husband thinks of it.

I wouldn't call chicken salad a wholly Greek kind of salad. The basic ingredients for a classic chicken salad can easily be found in Greek cuisine, but it is actually a recent addition to the culinary range in our kind of cooking. It is becoming more common to find meat added to a salad of leafy greens, like for example pork with spinach, rocket and lettuce leaves. Creamy dressings of the type often associated with chicken salad are also a novelty in Greek cuisine. Mayonnaise dressings have not really caught on in the dining-out trade, except as a dressing for something called 'chef's salad' (σαλάτα του σεφ) and 'Russian salad' (Ρώσσικη σαλάτα), which in Greece are both made with pretty much anything (you can empty out your fridge and larder this way), and dressed with so much mayonnaise hiding the ingredients that you'd think you were being served vanilla ice-cream rather than a salad. They are mainly served in pizzerias and fast-food chains. Such salads and dressings form a part of globalised cuisine than Greek cuisine.

One type of creamy dressing that seems to have caught on, if somewhat in trepidation, as it is not seen very often (people's taste buds are very much culturally attuned here) is the one containing Greek strained yoghurt. If you had some of the chicken salad I recently made, you would probably never go back to the classic mayonnaise dressing for a chicken salad. The yoghurt dressing is light and has a healthy taste. This chicken salad makes a complete meal, with the added bonus that it involves very little cooking, making it very easy to prepare.

To make enough salad for 2 large servings, you need:
1 large chicken breast, boiled till tender (I use the leftover boiled chicken after I make Cretan pilafi)
1 medium-sized head of lettuce (I like to use curly red and green lettuce, a type called 'lollo')
1 carrot, peeled and grated
a few rocket leaves (arugula)
100-150g Greek strained yoghurt
2-4 tablespoons of olive oil
1 clove of garlic, chopped finely (optional - if you do use it, your salad will taste a little like tzatziki)
salt and pepper

Chop the lettuce into shreds into a bowl. Tear the rocket leaves and add the carrot. Chop the chicken meat into small pieces and add it to the salad. Season with salt and pepper, and add the garlic if using. Add the yoghurt and mix well into all the salad ingredients. Then add the oil and mix well again. You don't want too much olive oil, just enough to help the salad take on an oily look.

This chicken lettuce salad is ready to eat as is, but it tastes even better if you leave it in the refrigerator for an hour so that all the tastes blend together. If you really want to keep things vegetarian, instead of chicken, add mushrooms (even better if they are lightly sauteed), walnuts and/or raisins/pomegranate seeds.

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The little red hen (Η κόκκινη κοτούλα)

I heard it's really cold in my former hometown (something like 5 degrees Celsius, but feels like 1); here's a dish to warm everyone up a little. 

On a cold dark day in winter, when no one felt much like going out and the house felt warm and cosy, a little red hen asked her husband, the big brown rooster: "What shall we have for lunch today?"

The big brown rooster thought a little bit about that question and answered: "Oh, I don't know, whatever you like." He was keeping his toes warm on the pouffe under a blanket as he sat in the big green armchair watching television.

The little red hen asked him again: "Something meaty or something vege?"

And the big red rooster again answered: "Whatever, you know I;ll have anything."

That did not give the little red hen any firm idea to start with, but at least it gave her a clean slate and she could place anything on it, as long as it fitted into the general taste spectrum of the big brown rooster's preferences. So the little red hen looked into her cupboards and pantries and refrigerators, where she noticed a bag of artichokes which she had picked and cleaned (at the risk of getting thorns stuck in and discolouring her claws) and blanched and frozen the previous spring.

The bag was lying on top of a big bag of broad beans which she had picked and cleared and partly shelled and blanched and frozen at about the same time as the artichokes.

And the little red hen then thought how wonderful it would be if she could start emptying her fridge of last season's fresh frozen vegetables, to make way for the new season's produce.

So she set to work cooking a pot of agginarokoukia for the midday lunch. As she sauteed the onion in the olive oil, she noticed that there were no more lemons in the house, and it being such a cold dark dismal winter's day, she decided not to make agginarokoukia lemonata, but agginarokoukia me tomata, the latter of which she had picked and cleaned and pureed and turned into tomato sauce from the previous summer, in sealed jars which made a 'popping' sound as she opened each one every time she wanted to use one.

When the onions were done in the sauce, she added the artichokes and let them stew a bit, before adding the broad beans which didn't require so much cooking time, and in less than half an hour, she had cooked a hearty stew, which admittedly didn't look as good as it tasted, because it looked rather grey in colour, but tasted like a fresh spring breath amidst the dismal cold of the dark winter's day that had beset them.

And when lunch time came, she set the table in her usual way, with a little bowl of olives, a chunk of feta cheese in olive oil on a plate, and some freshly toasted slices of yesterday's bread, before she set a plate of hot warm agginarokoukia stew before the big brown rooster, and then she sat beside him to keep him company while he ate his lunch, not dining with him because she had already had her fair share of agginarokoukia during the cooking time, as she tasted it here and there to check for doneness and seasoning, just to get it perfect for the big brown rooster.

She was feeling quite full with the hefty aroma that filled their small kitchen.The big brown rooster had almost finished his meal; he was wiping the plate down with a piece of bread to mop up the sauce left on it. It being rather quiet, she decided to start a little chit-chat.

"That WAS delicious, wasn't it?" she asked for confirmation. 

"Hmm," the big brown rooster replied, wiping his beak with his napkin. 

The little red henwas wondering whether he really didn't like the meal, but had been too polite to say so all that time.

"See how good it is to save some of that fresh food for a rainy day like this one when there's no fresh food to be found?" she beckoned him encouragingly.

"Well," the big brown rooster started, "it's not as if you did anything special."

The little red hen was startled. She looked on the planning and preparation of every meal as a special event, and she knew that if she didn't do that, then the meal would be missing the most important ingredient in it, which was love, and no one would want to eat it, and she'd have to treat the meal as leftovers for the dog's dinner.

"Well," the little red hen was taking on a huffier tone, "would you have preferred it if I had cooked the agginarokoukia in a lemon sauce instead of a tomato sauce, then?"

The big brown rooster grimaced and said: "No, no, not at all, I'm just saying, it was a bit of an άρπα κόλλα sort of meal, wasn't it?"

"Arpa kolla?" she repeated. "Whatever do you mean?"

"Well," now the big brown rooster was almost smirking, "all you did was take everything out of the deep freeze and throw it in the pot, didn't you?"

The little red hen had now become a shade of crimson. "Are you trying to say," she began, in a voice that could be heard over the thunder and lightning that was striking at that very minute, "that this was one of the easiest meals I have ever prepared in my life, and I hardly had to DO anything to get it onto your plate?"

The big brown rooster swallowed hard. That last bit of bread almost got stuck in his throat. He knew he was in big shit.

"Yes," she began slowly, as she always did when she she began her spiel about how much she does around about the house, "it didn't take much at all to make, didn't it," she continued. "It's a good thing I cut those thorny agginares before they became a blooming purple thistle good enough for a flower vase,

and pricked my hands cleaning them and getting the furry choke out of them, and getting my nails dirty - do you REALISE just how DIFFICULT it is to clean ARTICHOKES and keep your HANDS CLEAN??!!"

And she didn't stop there. "And it's also a good thing I picked all the koukia before they started resprouting, and cleared the black eye off them and blanched them for a minute in scalding water, and let them drain and cool before I put those in the deep freeze as well?"

The big brown rooster began to smile now. He knew that she had beaten him, but in order not to feel outdone, he put on a big happy contented face, so that the little red hen would know that he appreciated her efforts. But she was not quite done yet. 

"And if I didn't turn all those tomatoes you were growing all summer long into pulp," she said, waving a wing in the air, "they'd STILL be rotting on the TREES, wouldn't they?!"

"Ahh, that was a good meal, wasn't it?" the big brown rooster said, in an attempt to appease the situation.

The little red hen was now standing by the stove, ladling the stew onto a large plate. "I'll let you know how good it is once I have some, then!" she said, and with that, she sat down and proceeded to gobble up her plate. Even though she wasn't really hungry, she dipped some thick sourdough bread slices into the sauce, and thought about what she'd cook for the next day's meal, because today she would make sure that there would be no leftovers, and not even the dog was going to get any of them if there were.

Cluck, cluck, cluck.

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Egg and lemon soup (Σούπα αυγολέμονο)

Five minutes: that's about the amount of time I would say I spend washing my hands and face, brushing my hair and teeth, and applying a dab of perfume and maybe some lip balm on a cold morning, before going to work. That's after I've spent 10 minutes toasting bread, warming up milk and serving it all up for the kids' breakfast. So Xanthe Clay is way ahead of me when she makes the classic Greek soup, avgolemono, in just five precious minutes:

(Thanks for link, Peter)

Is chicken stock really truly that kind of brown colour? Is pre-cooked rice an ingredient or a fast food? Maybe this is the way soup is served in a fast food restaurant; it needs five minutes to cook, and if not eaten in the next five minutes, it will go off. To cook such a soup from scratch, admittedly, it would not take 5 minutes to make, but whoever heard of a whole meal being cooked in 5 minutes, except in fast food restaurants?

This kind of video is supposedly an attempt to get people cooking some kind of 'real food', which is all the rage these days, judging by discussions among 'top chefs' like Alice Waters and Anthony Bourdain:

(Thanks for the link, Elissa)

And I congratulate Xanthe's effort in this direction. But let's not forget, as Alice Waters says: where did each of Xanthe's ready-to-eat ingredients come from and how easy is it to actually cook the same food from scratch without wasting, beg your pardon, spending too much time in the kitchen? Xanthe's version of avgolemono soup serves 2 people and can be made in just 5 minutes. She probably needed a longer time buying her ingredients from the supermarket; in how much of a rush can 2 diners possibly be?

My mum used to make avgolemono soup very often on cold winter nights in New Zealand, especially after she came home with my father and her children from the fish and chip shop my parents owned and operated. It would be 7.30 at night, and she'd go into the kitchen as soon as we came home. She'd tell us to take our baths or finish our school homework, while during this time, she'd whip up the evening meal. Even though convenience foods were widely available in 1980s New Zealand, she hardly ever used them. Nearly everything she cooked was related to the food she remembered from Crete, and it was cooked from scratch.

I can still remember how she made avgolemono soup. As I write this, I remember our house in Wellington, the kitchen table, the cutlery and crockery; most of the time, I used to help her mix the hot stock with the egg and lemon sauce. "Pour it in drop by drop!" she'd tell me. "Wait till I've blended it in well!" she'd ask me. "Don't let the egg cook!" she'd warn me.

This soup took longer than five minutes to cook; by planning ahead, it is never a toilsome soup to make.

Here's my version of quick and easy avgolemono soup, using Xanthe's ingredients list as a base, which you can make for dinner after you've come home from work, to feed your family a nourishing winter warmer in the cold days that are ahead of us - and making use of all the fresh ingredients available around you. Making chicken stock does not require the luxury of time; you can make it in the 15-20 minutes it took Xanthe to buy her ready-to-gloop ingredients from the supermarket (and if time really is a hassle, then make your stock 1-3 days before: it keeps this long in the fridge).

For a family of 4, you need:

2 fresh chicken drumsticks (We usually buy whole chickens - I reserve the wings and neck to make really good stock, but you won't get much meat out of them if you intend to add bits of chicken to the soup)

the juice of 1-2 lemons, depending on how tangy you want it to be, placed in a medium sized bowl

2 eggs (we like our avgolemono less eggy and more lemony)

a fistful of raw rice (I am using Asian egg noodles today instead, for a more kid-friendly meal)

salt and pepper (you can add some chopped parsley as a garnish, like Xanthe did, but this is definitely not what the average working wife and mother who lacks time would feel the need to do when serving up a nutritious meal right after she's been at work...)

Place the chicken parts in a medium-sized pot and cover with cold water. Let the water boil away for about 15 minutes. Depending on the kind of chicken used (ie how the chicken is reared), it may require more or less cooking time (which is why I prefer to use chicken wings and necks for stock making). Strain the stock into another pot. If the use of too many pots in the kitchen perturbs you, then it's best to make your stock the night before so you can maintain control over the dirty dishes; my urbanised friends always freak out when they see the detritus of my kitchen - that's before they've tasted the food of course, after which they've forgotten about the kitchen chaos. Maybe they realised it was worth the effort. But they probably wouldn't invite me to cook in their kitchen.

My chicken stock always comes out golden, never brown, in colour. I only ever watched my mother make chicken stock in New Zealand, and her Kiwi chicken also gave her golden, never brown, liquid. The stock in the above photos looks fatty, but you can skim the fat off before you use it, like I did for this soup. This pot produced 4 servings of hearty chicken soup.

Make sure your chicken stock is very hot, then add the washed rice (or noodles). Let it boil away, without stirring (which will make the rice go mushy), for as long as it takes to cook the rice/noodles. At this point, start making the egg and lemon sauce. Break the eggs into the bowl containing the lemon juice, add some salt, and use a fork, whisk or hand-mixer to blend everything together. Remove the meat in small bits from the chicken and set aside. Switch off the stock pot.

Making a hearty chicken egg and lemon soup; even the dog gets her share today (bottom right-hand corner: the tub contains the chicken bones and skin).

Now comes the tricky bit. Stir a shotglass-full of the hot stock (clear liquid is preferable - strain away the rice) into your egg and lemon sauce and whisk it in really well. Keep doing this until at least a third of the stock liquid has been added to the egg and lemon sauce, which should be cool rather than hot at all times. Now turn up the heat for the soup pot to very low, tip the egg and stock mixture back into the soup pot and stir it gently but constantly, so that the egg does not 'cook'. Add the chicken meat and stir till the soup has warmed up, and has a thick soupy texture, but don't let it boil because the egg may start to cook, and that's highly undesirable.

Avgolemono soup with all the trimmings: a selection of cheeses, two different kinds of olives, extra lemon for tanginess, and paximadi (Cretan dry rusks) for dunking.

Serve hot, ladled into soup bowls, and sprinkle (read: garnish) with pepper. I had also added a carrot to the chicken as it was boiling, so I could make this soup more nourishing; the carrot was sliced into thin rounds, and added at the same time as the chicken pieces (along with some tinned corn - remember, we're making this soup kid-friendly).

Real food, for real people.

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Cook the Books - French Lessons: Adventures with Knife, Fork, and Corkscrew by Peter Mayle (Μαγειρεύοντας τα Βιβλία)

This post is part of the Cook the Books blog event running until November 8, 2009. Read Peter Mayles' French Lessons: Adventures with Knife, Fork, and Corkscrew and cook something inspired by the book. Post your inspiration on your blog and link to Cook the Books.)

What with the French being so close to Greece (both countries class themselves as Mediterranean, since they share the sea of the same name), I have always felt Greece has more in common with them than most people are prepared to believe. For a start, they both love smoking and find it frigging hard to obey the recently introduced smoking bans in their countries. Then they both love their long extended lunches and siestas. They both also take pride in their institutions, which may sound a little old-fashioned in some ways, as if they have not moved on with the times, but hey, that's the Greeks (or the French) for you. ANd only recently, we found out about how politically nepotistic they can be, when Mr Sarkozy's son wanted to become president of Paris' CBD (depsite not having finished his degree and being only frigging 23 years old).

The French invented the restaurant, and it seems that they always loved dining out, which must have something to do with the development of their 'haute cuisine'. Peter Mayle describes his adventures in France as he travelled to various foodie (to use the modern word) celebrations. Such events are celebrated all around the world by cultures that are strongly linked to their food. Greece is no stranger to such occasions. I have participated in (or seen advertised) the Celebration of the Cherry, the Olive, the Sardine, the Kalitsouni, The Wine, and the Tsikoudia (the Cretan fiery spirit), to name a few.

Well, I think it's amusing...

Frogs' legs being out of the question (we can't buy them here) while snails are a bit deja vue for a Cretan cook like myself, I decided to make a dish that Peter Mayle described in his book when he went to Bourg-en-Bresse for the annual celebration (or more likely commemoration) of Les Glorieuses, in the elite chicken zone 80 kilometres north of Lyon, 'the greatest chicken show on earth'. Despite the many food events that take place in Crete regularly, I don't think I've ever heard of one of those being organised here.)

My inspiration to choose chicken as the main ingredient of my French dish comes from a recent discussion that developed from one of my Flickr photo posts. As we find out from Peter, not all chickens are the same, and this certainly applies in Crete too; different kinds of chicken are raised for different purposes. You don't just pick up the first chook you see in the supermarket deep freeze or butcher's counter: you buy chicken according to the dish you want to cook with it.

Choosing high quality ingredients and simple cooking styles assures success. The chicken I chose was lined with blobs of fat which I removed for this dish - I put all the fat into a plastic bag and stored it in the freezer to be used for stock making (it makes a good pilafi).

Peter provides a detailed account of a chicken and mushroom dish that he enjoyed just before the chicken show. I used this description for my Cook the Books creation. The cream and mushrooms give that rich taste often associated with French cuisine.

"First into the pan goes a generous knob of butter, followed by the chicken breasts and legs, a large onion cut into quarters, a dozen or so sliced champignons de Paris - those small, tightly capped white mushrooms - a couple of cloves of garlic en chemise, crushed but not peeled, and a bouquet garni of herbs. When the colour of the chicken has turned to deep gold, a large glass of white wine is poured into the pan, and allowed to reduce before half a litre of creme fraiche is added. The bird is cooked for thirty minutes, the sauce is strained through a fine sieve, the dish is seasoned to taste, and there you have it."

Et voila, it's as simple as that; or so it seems, if you have the appropriate ingredients at hand. My only problem is that most ingredients from foreign cuisine are not often easily available in my small Greek island town; I replaced them with their closest Cretan counterparts, and found that the dish could still be kept genuinely French. When your ingredients are of the highest quality, then French cooking need not be a difficult task, even outside France.

I followed Peter's instructions as closely as possible...

The chicken played a very important role in making this dish. I chose a fresh fatty chicken which would cook at the same rate of time it took to cook the mushrooms. Very lean chicken (the kind we often buy frozen) would begin to disintegrate before the mushrooms were ready, while an "old" hen (or rooster) would require more cooking time because it is tough. out olive oil in Crete is akin to anathema, which is why I chose to add some and reduce the amount of butter. Creme fraiche isn't available in Crete (neither is sour cream), so I mixed some double cream with Greek strained yoghurt, to give the creamy slightly sour taste that creme fraiche contains. My bouquet garni was made with one sprig of all the herbs I could find in my kitchen: mint, parsley, fennel, bay leaf, and the top of a leek. Finally, I chose the most tightly capped mushrooms that I could find; since they were small, I decided to leave them whole.

Exact quantities are always a problem when cooking in this very vague manner. Peter did give approximate amounts, but the truth is that being able to guess correctly without being provided exact quantities takes a bit of experience. I think I managed it very nicely. The only part where I swayed from the original recipe was the moment I chose to strain the sauce. Peter tells us that the sauce must be strained after the addition of the creme fraiche, but I chose to do this just before I added the cream, mainly out of the fear of the unknown: I've never cooked meat with cream or yoghurt before, and I wasn't sure how the cream would turn out. As it was, I realised I could have done this after the dish was cooked with the cream; I don't think this affected the taste of the final product.

Et voila! Bon appetit!

So, bon appetit, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this foray into French cuisine as much as I did. The woody mushroom smell aromatised my kitchen in that magic way that country cooking always manages to do when high quality ingredients are fresh and cooking styles are simple; I felt as if I was in the middle of a forest!

If exact quantities are important to you, this BBC recipe comes very, VERY close to the recipe that Peter describes in his book.

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

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