Chocolate berry pots

We were entertaining an Italian friend (he is from Southern Italy) last week. It was a warm night, and we sat outdoors; we had a feeling that it would turn out to be the last al fresco evening meal for the season. Our Italian friend had brought with him a little present - he was clearing out the contents of his fridge because he has now finished his study period in Greece and is going back home soon. So he gave me all the cured meats and cheese that were left over form his last visit back home. I was in for a surprise - the cured meats were prepared by his parents. The family owns a piece of land, where they tend animals. They actually live far away from it, in an apartment block in a town. But traditions die hard among Mediterranean people and they continue to maintain close contact with ancestral land. The cured meat was particularly fascinating: it was packaged in the same way that one would expect high quality export products to be packaged, yet this was done in a private home. This kind of packaging has only recently (and I mean very recently) been adopted by Greek producers. Packaging denotes image, and this was one of the main drawbacks of Greek exports, which is slowly being rectified - Greek products often lacked image.

We served our own home brewed wine with the meal, which these days, looks quite cheap, even to me. I should not really have been worried though: our guest told us that this is the kind of wine he drinks at home too - it's the same kind of thing his father makes. The Mediterranean bond between us grew even stronger when our Italian friend told us that he was from Pisticci, which is located in the area of Italy still remembered from its past when it was known as Magna Grecia ("Big Greece").

At the last minute, I decided to prepare a dessert, something I haven't done in a while. Perhaps the cooler weather made me feel like cooking more. I invented this recipe for chocolate pots on the spur of the moment, based on another recipe for chocolate lava pots, when I realised I did not have the correct ingredients for what I intended to make. Still, it worked better than the original version, mainly for cultural reasons.

You need:
5 tablespoons of butter (Carrefour Marinopoulos is now selling a very tasty French butter under its own private label, which is also priced very well - Lurpak seems to have disappeared off its shelves)
150g chocolate (I used milk chocolate, in the form of flakes, as I had nothing else at hand; the original recipe used 70% chocolate which I have stopped buying - my family has tried it often enough to confirm their dislike of the product!)
a pinch of sea salt (as the original recipe stated - this is really unnecessary, I could hardly taste it, maybe due to the kind of chocolate that I used)
2 eggs (the original recipe stated 2 eggs and 2 yolks - I only had two eggs at home, so I tweaked the recipe)
1/4 cup sugar (as in the original recipe)
3 tablespoons of flour (the original recipe stated 1 tablespoon of flour, but I added more, together with 1/4 cup milk, to act as a binder since I had used less egg)
1/2 cup of mixed frozen berries (this was not in the original recipe: LIDL now sells them as a standard product in our local stores)

Melt the butter, add the chocolate and let it melt (and stir in the salt if you are going to use it). While it's cooling down, mix the eggs with the milk and sugar - keep beating till you can't hear the sugar crystals scraping the bowl. Gradually add the egg mixture by the spoonful, mixing well after each addition (to avoid 'cooking' the egg). Now mix in the berries, and then add the flour and stir in well.

Divide the mixture into 5 ramekins and place them on a baking tray with a little bit of water in it. I began the cooking process at a very low temperature because I was still having dinner, and these chocolate pots cook quickly, so I kept the temperature low enough until it was almost time ot serve them. Just when I thought that we had finished our dinner, I raised the temperature and let the pots cook for another 10 minutes. As long as you don't burn them, this is a very forgiving recipe.

When the chocolate pots were done (I tested one to see if it was set in the centre, by inserting a knife through it), I took the tray out of the oven and left the ramekins to cool in it. The ramekins are too hot to pick up at this stage, so I allowed them to cool before I served them. The original recipe stated taking them out of each ramekin (or throwaway single-use foil cup) and serving them in a different bowl. I couldn't fathom the idea of doing more washing up afterwards - there really is no need to serve them upside down.

The texture of the dessert was soft but not gooey and the taste was semi-sweet rather than bitter, as in the original recipe. Some recipes don't work culturally. I'm glad I have worked that one out early enough, to save torturing my family; if you like a particular taste very much, there is no real need to change it.

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Reading between the lines (Διαβάζοντας ανάμεσα στις γραμμές)

My children know I write a blog and that I have a facebook page, but they rarely follow what I do on the computer. They aren't yet at the stage of surfing the web to discover the world - they are at the stage where they want to download new music, play games and chat with friends. One day, I know they will google their parents' names; I wonder what they will discover. In my case, it will probably be information overload, which tends to make people switch off because they are bamboozled with too much data. For this reason, I do not get them to read what I write at this stage, even though I know that I am writing this blog for the purpose of keeping a record of what we are doing together.

The other day, my son watched me typing on the blogger platform, which came as rather a shock. You know people read you, but you don't think it's your own family. I felt 'discovered', so I thought that this would be the right time to ask him if he would like to read something I wrote on the blog. (Actually, he knew I had just been interviewed by the BBC4 Food Programme on the topic of frugal food, so I suppose he was taking an interest in why others were interested in me.) I wanted to see how much he understood of what I was writing: I don't send my kids to private language schools to learn English, and we don't do formal lessons together (even though I am an English teacher), so their knowledge of English is based on the exposure I give them to the language, and more importantly, the opportunities they get to use the language. 

The post I gave him to read contained a lot of what a teacher would call 'unknown words' (or phrases) in the passage, as his Greek school teachers would call them too: come of age, clientele, contribution, on her behalf, etc. So I was curious to see what he might make out of what he was about to read.

The first thing he asked me about was the person I was writing about. "Did you work with her?" That's what it sounded like in the text. But Thalia is an imaginary person, something I didn't want to reveal at this stage. (Most people think I write about a particular person, but that is not the case at all - my characters are an amalgamation of different people I have met; they don't actually exist in real life.) "Does she have a broken arm?" he asked me. I told him to check the tense of the verb that contained this information (it was in the past perfect, not the present tense). "Oh, she HAD a broken arm, but NOW it's NOT broken," he said. (Good, I thought.)

But I was in for a surprise: "Frappe and cigarettes - everyone wastes their money on this, except us, right?" He was reading between the lines. On the one hand, I was pleased to see this happening because it will have a great bearing in his future studies; on the other, I wondered how much I had influenced my kids, and in what way. By swaying them to think of smoking as a waste of money, I could actually be creating a prejudice in them towards smokers. This is something that I believe can't be helped in parenting: we have no control over the place where we were born, and the people who raised us. We can change the rest, but not those two things.

"What's drachma, Mum?" My son was born during the last year of the drachma being in use. He has no concept of the drachma except as something old and no longer in use, hence he could not immediately see that drachma was a Greek word transliterated into English. Despite this hiccup, he rarely asked me to explain other words in the passage, even the ones that I thought would be unknown to him, which possibly shows that he was comprehending unknown concepts by trying to fit the unknown ideas into the known ones and working out their meaning in this way. We all do this during times of information overload in the internet age.

But what impressed me most about his relationship to the drachma is that he has no memories of it. He sees drachma as something you read about in books or see in a coin collection. Drachma is not something real or useful in his life. It represents historical stories for him, ones that his parents tell him about from time to time. Drachma for him is like cassette recorders, vinyl records and dial telephones. In the future, he will be able to say he knows what those things are because his parents still have things like that stuck somewhere in the basement, or he may look them up on the internet, but he will not have any direct experience of them himself because they are not a part of his life. They are to do with the past - and that part is over and done with. 

"Is Thalia really going to go to New Zealand?" he then asked me. "Where you write 'Δεν ξέρει που πάνε τα τέσσερα,' you mean that she doesn't understand what life is like there, don't you?" My comment here is very subjective; again, his reading between the lines shows that he is using his experiences to understand what he is reading about. His experiences are based on what he hears being said at home. The theme of immigration often comes up in our discussions, but it is not a theme that my own children have lived through: they know that we aren't interested in emigrating, and now that I think about it, they have not lost any school friends to emigration. This fleeing-abroad business is a figment of the media's imagination to a certain extent - some Greek problems do not concern all Greek citizens; they simply concern the media, both in Greece and abroad, when news is sensationalised.

"Why do you think she wants to go to New Zealand?" I asked him. He didn't take long to think about his answer:

"She's got everything she needs here, but she wants more than that, and it's difficult to have everything in life when you're starting from the beginning, but she isn't thinking about that now, is she?" I dislike it when I realise I have influenced my kids in such a way, because, like most parents, we believe that we have allowed our children to make their own choices. But the truth is that at this age, they are making choices based on their parents' choices. That's part of parenthood; it can't be helped.

I was also surprised by what he understood when he read this sentence: 

If I bought styrofoam coffee on a daily basis, then I wouldn't be able to tell my kids that they should make their own chocolate milk instead of buying it ready shaken.

"But you don't buy us any chocolate milk, Mum, not even powder!" I was tempted to reply that I don't drink styrofoam coffee either, but I decided that I was probably being a bit harsh. So I bought a box of chocolate milk powder for them. And even I have begun drinking a styrofoam coffee here and there, in the form of a 'freddo, metrio me afrogala' when we go to the beach.

I notice that the packet of chocolate powder is still quite full. Perhaps this is because the kids have already understood that we can have all things in moderation, as a famous Greek once said; and on that matter, know thyself. That also helps.

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Best cookies (Μπισκότα)

After a sunny warm February, we are back to cold wet weather. As we say in Greek, Μάρτης, γδάρτης,  a pair of rhyming words, meaning "March strips your skin bare". When it's cold, cooking comes more easily, as you feel like eating more food and more often. It's a perfect time to bake biscuits to fill the cookie tins.

Sweet treats in our house have to be easy to make because I use up so much energy cooking other meals. I've found that the best easy-to-make biscuits are all eggless. This suited me yesterday when the weather was very cold and wet, making it a good day for using the oven over a long period.

The simplest recipe I use for making cookies is based on the traditional Greek Christmas (and in some places wedding) sugar cookie, kourambiedes. It is made with just flour, icing sugar and butter. Flavourings are not necessary if you use high quality butter; at any rate, they contain chopped blanched toasted almonds for added flavour. 

Best cookies: kourambiedes are made with a basic butter-icing sugar-flour dough with chopped almonds. Icing sugar is sprinkled over them when they have cooled. 

I recently used this basic butter-sugar-flour recipe to make a delicious white-chocolate-cranberry biscuit. The recipe was originally from the web, but I noticed how similar it was to kourambiedes in its most basic form. 

 

Best cookies: butter-icing sugar-flour, white chocolate chips and craisins; butter-demerara sugar-flour, with ginger powder and golden syrup.

The most famous chocolate chip cookies recipe includes eggs, two varieties of sugar and baking agents. But the best chocolate chip cookies I've ever made have been eggless, with no raising agents and only one kind of sugar (and not much of the latter, either). The basic kourambiedes recipe can also be used to make a wide range of biscuits, yielding a light crisp cookie which can be flavoured in a variety of ways, by adding cocoa or spice powder, chocolate chips and/or nuts.

Best cookies: butter-soft brown sugar-flour, milk chocolate chips, grated coconut and walnuts chopped small.

Although olive oil can also be used to make similar cookies, I find that using it requires extra flavouring to mask the taste of the olive oil. Although I use olive oil instead of butter in all recipes, except for kourambiedes, recently I've resorted to using it more often when making biscuits. Olive oil cookies don't use eggs, but they do need a raising agent, otherwise they will feel and taste rather heavy. But they are also included in my 'best cookies' range because they are very filling, aromatic and tasty - the perfect Greek sweet for dunking in tea or coffee.

Best cookies: ladokouloura (olive oil biscuits) rely on my own supplies of olive oil and oranges, which makes them a very economical biscuit for daily use.  

For my basic butter-sugar-flour cookie recipe, you need:
250g butter at room temperature
1/2 cup sugar - depending on the type of cookie you want to make, you need to use the appropriate variety of sugar:
     - icing sugar gives a soft white dough
     - soft brown sugar gives cookies a golden colour
     - soft brown sugar creates a burnt-sugar taste in cookies
     - demerara (crystal beige-coloured sugar) makes slightly cookies crunchy
enough plain flour to make a soft dough that is pliable and easy to knead - it all depends on what you add to the basic dough, which changes the quantities of the flour:
     - chocolate chips (~1/2 cup)
     - grated coconut (~4 tbsp)
     - chopped nuts (~1/2 cup)
     - raisins and other dried fruit (~1/2 cup)
     - cocoa powder (~4 tbsp)

Place the butter and sugar in a bowl. If you are using grated coconut and/or cocoa powder, mix it in with the sugar. Blend them together to a paste with your fingers. Now add the flour, again mixing it in with your fingers. If you are using chocolate chips, nuts or dried fruit, mix it into the dough at this stage.  Break off knobs of dough the size of ping-pong balls. Flatten slightly, and place on a greased baking tray. Place about 15-20 on a tray, leaving some space between them. Bake in a moderate oven (180-200C) for 15-20 minutes. Allow them to cool for five minutes before removing from the tray.

Best cookies: butter-soft brown sugar-flour, milk chocolate chips, grated coconut and walnuts chopped small - and some cocoa for added chocolate flavour. Yours won't burn like mine did; I cooked them in the wood-fired oven - never again, for cookies!

These frugal cookies keep well in an airtight tin. I try to make at least two batches of cookies per baking session, because they are eaten too quickly. Although they are easy to make, you don't end up doing much else other than baking cookies if you make only a small batch. Although it's not a great crime to eat more than one cookie at one sitting, I like to remind the kids that we should try not to eat them too quickly. Am I mean?

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Marble cake (Κέικ μαρμπρέ)

Life these days is always busy. The weather has been too good to keep us indoors, so we're often running errands, getting chores completed and trying to tackle the garden which is now full of weeds, save the spinach plants.

Here's the chocolate version of the old-fashioned Greek keik.

Use the same recipe in the link. Instead of pouring all the batter into the tin, pour just half of it. Then beat in 4 tablespoons of cocoa powder to the remaining mixture in the bowl. Now pour the chocolate batter over the yellow batter, scraping off the batter in the bowl with a spatula. Cook the keik in the same way as the recipe states.

One other version that I also like to make is the same as the above marble cake, with the addition of dark chocolate chips in the batter before dividing it in half. I like this version of the old-fashioned bundt cake because of the jaffa taste of the chocolate and orange mixture. Any way you make it, it is a sure winner because of its plainness.

©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.

Chocolate truffles (Τρούφες σοκολάτας)

At Greek schools, there are no restrictions on mothers bringing a home-made sweet for a celebration. So I make all the treats that my children carry to school with them for their birthdays and school functions. Although I rarely make spectacular cakes in my own home (you would have seen them on the blog if I did), I have apparently gained quite a reputation among my children's school friends and their teachers as a maker of very good cakes.

Working with chocolate ganache can be messy - I prefer to use two spoons to scoop it out once it's set. Then I press it in the tin to give it a round shape, before rolling it in coconut or sugar hail. Using your hands to make perfect round balls means you'll end up licking them a lot. 

I make (apparently, as rumour spreads) the best chocolate cake, the most amazing cupcakes, incredible muffins and the tastiest home-made birthday torte that my kids' schoolfriends have ever tried. My cakes and sweets rarely have a spectacular appearance, but they are all made with few ingredients and hardly any special techniques or tools; all the recipes can be found online.
 

I rolled the truffles in chocolate hail, grated coconut or coloured sugar hail, at the request of my daughter who thinks this will be the most popular truffle. The ganache was made using this recipe. I added crushed semi-sweet biscuits to the mixture before it set in the fridge to make the recipe go a bit further (I got 44 truffles; without the biscuits, I would probably have only 25-30). 

Most parents in Crete would be very surprised to hear that home-made sweets are banned in many schools in places like the US. They would also be horrified to know that one of the reasons for this is due (apart from allergy problems) to the fear of low hygiene standards (don't all kitchens getmessy when we cook from scratch, whether they are home kitchens or industrial ones?) and the fear of children being potentially targeted or inadvertedly affected by via food poisoning. There is still some innocence left in us here.

For a Cretan twist to chocolate truffles - click here for a recipe for chestnut truffles.

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Ginger (Πιπερόριζα)

Gingernuts hold special memories for me. They are one of the few recipes I am prepared to buy special ingredients for which I never use to make anything else, only gingernuts. Honey and cinnamon don't have quite the same effect as golden syrup and powdered ginger. Both ingredients are difficult to find in Hania; neither are stocked on a regular basis in the supermarket, not even the top-end ones.

I still use Delia Smith's recipe, with a couple of adjustments: olive oil (of course), and the last time I made them was in our wood-fired oven, which is why some of them got a bit 'over-browned'. To ensure that they didn't burn on the bottom of the very hot oven, I placed an old baking tin with some water in it and then placed the baking sheet with the biscuits on top of that.

Ginger isn't part of the Greek cuisine taste spectrum, although fresh ginger is now widely available in all supermarkets in fresh form. I keep it as a pantry staple in my kitchen, but I never use it in my Greek dishes. It's always used in my Asian cooking. Ginger's first appearance in Greece came in the form of ginger beer made in Corfu, following British influence (they still play cricket there too), but it is a heavily regionalised taste in Greece: ginger beer is not available in Crete.

While holidaying in London last month with my family, I got a chance to taste a variety of ginger-chocolate treats that no one in my family likes, which meant that I was able to eat the whole packet all by myself, like chocolate-coated ginger-flavoured Border Biscuits and chocolate-coated crystallised ginger sticks. The concept of a ginger-flavoured sweet treat combined with chocolate is definitely an acquired taste: either you are taken to it, or you don't want to go near it. Crystallised ginger is quite beyond the taste acceptability levels of the average Greek. The only time I've seen it here is in the possession of US Army officers: it is shipped into the Cretan US naval base which is stationed in Souda Bay in Hania along with all sorts of other items which I've never seen in the supermarkets (like vanilla essence, ribs, maple syrup and all sorts of other US staples that I'm not really familiar with).

If only these sweets were easy for me to reproduce, as they are definitely my kind of sweets. Maybe it's better that they aren't that easy to reproduce because I can imagine eating them all too regularly.

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Chocolate lava pots (Λιωμένες σοκολατοπιτούλες)

We've had a long spell of very cold weather in Hania. Our wood-fired heater is working every day to keep us warm. This means that the oven compartment is always working. There is now so much free cooking heat which means I don't have to keep relying on the whims and fancies of the Greek public power corporation, the infamous DEH.

The DEH bill was where the new property tax was added, in order to be collected. Those who didn't pay itwere threatened with disconnections (something I haven't seen being done yet in Hania among those of my acquaintances who insisted that they will not pay). A rise in the cost of electricity was recently announced, put into effect this month, which will be reflected in our next bill. DEH also has one of the most powerful worker's unions in the country, so when DEH decides to strike, the disruptions are felt everywhere.

 An olive grove after the harvest: the nets are lifted, the field is cleared of branches and the weeds are mulched for organic manure.

We've always used gas for cooking on an element, but DEH has always powered my oven, until just recently when the wood-fired oven began working. For the winter at least, I won't have to worry about not having an oven to work with. I don't have to worry about not being able to cook my culinary creations when there is no power. We can heat both ourselves and our food with more sustainable forms of energy.

But firewood isn't free, nor is it cheap, even when you have your own supplies. It's just like the olive oil Cretans produce from their fields: that's not free or cheap either. To produce your own olive oil, you need to give up a lot of your own time and use up a lot of your own energy by laying nets, thrashing branches, gathering the olives, sifting them to get rid of the leaves and twigs, sacking them, taking them to the olive mill, gathering the oil into containers that you can carry to your home and filling up your coffers with it.

Most people working in another job during the day (like us) don't have time to harvest their olive crop on their own, so they hire someone else to do all this work for them (these people are nearly always Albanians). If they have a suitable vehicle, they just pick up the sacks full of olives and take them to the mill to pick up the oil that is produced from them. The people who did the job for them are paid according to the harvest - they get about 40% of the oil (which they can take home for their own use, or they can leave it at the olive press and be paid for it), the olive mill gets about 10% of the oil (for the work they did to produce the oil) and the owner of the field gets the remaining 50%. One litre of olive oil costs a litre of olive oil to produce. At the moment, Greek mills are paying out about 2 euro per litre. If you are paying less than that for the olive oil you are buying in a country that doesn't produce olive oil for its own supplies, then you can guarantee that someone else is suffering.

 This olive tree is believed to be the oldest olive tree in the world - and it's found here in Hania.

Our firewood comes from our own fields. The olive trees need annual trimming to maintain them with an umbrella-like shape, which makes it easier to harvest the crop. The umbrella shape also keeps the tree healthy, allowing it to 'breathe'. If the canopy of the tree is too dense, the tree will harbour a lot of insects amidst its branches, notably the Mediterranean dakos fly which favours olive trees, and the oil produced from dakos-infected crop will not be of a very high quality, as dakos infestation rasies the acidity level, ie the olive oil risks losing its extra virgin quality.

An olive grove located on a mountain slope, which makes harvesting very difficult. Most olive groves in Crete are located on slopes.  

To collect the firewood, you need your own appropriate vehicle; to run your own vehicle, you need diesel fuel; to buy diesel fuel, you need money - it can't be bought any other way in Greece. And once you bring your firewood home, you need to chop it into small enough pieces that fit into your fireplace or wood-fired heater. If you don't have the appropriate tools to cut your wood into suitably sized pieces, your arms are going to hurt a lot (my husband was off work for a week due to an inflammation in his shoulder - he couldn't change gears or turn the sterring wheel).

Our supplies oif firewood are as plentiful as the energy required to gather the wood and chop it. If worse gets to worst, and we can't afford to buy engine fuel, we won't be able to bring it home.

There's no such thing as a free lunch.

*** *** ***

Using our own supplies of olive oil and firewood, I made these delicious chocolate lava pots. The recipe was based on a French one in Lunch in Paris by Elisabeth Bard, using butter and a conventional oven. But everything that requires butter can also be made with olive oil, as I've shown in other recipes. Even if you don't have a temperature gauge on your wood-fired oven, you can learn to gauge the heat, so that you can work out if something has been cooked and is ready to eat. You also need to know what the final product must look like.

You need: 

8 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil (use some good stuff - low quality olive oil may have a bad odour or rancid taste, which will ruin the final taste)

200g cooking chocolate (I used the 55% variety - Greeks generally don't like their chocolate too bitter)

a pinch of sea salt (even though I added just a few grains, my kids could taste it - 'don't add it next time, Mum')

3 eggs (or 2 eggs and 2 yolks - my version is more economical)

1/2 cup sugar

2 tablespoons of flour

Melt the chocolate in the olive oil on very low heat (you won't need a double boiler). Add the salt and stir it in. Put the chocolate mixture aside. In another bowl, beat all the eggs with the sugar until light and fluffy looking. Add the egg mixture to the (slightly cooled down) chocolate, and mix it in well. The result will look like a thick gooey batter. Then add the flour and mix it in evenly, but lightly, careful not to overmix.

I used an old metal baking tin to place in the oven. I'm afriad that my purex and ceramic dishes might crack if I place them in the oven without some form of protection. Metal tins may warp and discolour, but they don't break.

Pour the batter into 6 ramekins. If you want to remove the cooked deserts from the ramekins before serving, you need to grease them first. I served them straight from the ramekins, but some people may prefer to place them on a decorative plate and pour some cream over the desert - but I've had the same desert at Pizza Hit in Iraklio, and it was served in the ramekin, with pouring cream on the side. 

To cook the ramekins in a wood-fired oven, place them in a baking tin to which you've added two centimetres of water. To check the temperature of the oven, open it and place your hand insde the cmpartment, carefully so that you don't touch the walls. Ask yourself: 'does it feel warm?' or 'does it feel hot?' or 'does it feel very hot?' If it feels too hot to even leave your hand in for two seconds, that means that the oven will burn whatever you put it in it. (It's happened to me once, with a cake.) For the chocolate lava pots, you want the oven to feel 'very hot'.

Definitely done - the one that lost its shape looks as though its centre is gooey.

Place the tin holding the ramekins in the oven compartment of your wood-fired oven (this ensures that even when the oven is too hot, the lava pots won't burn). The chocolate pots will need no more than 10 minutes to be ready. You will realise that they are cooking correctly when you see the water in the tin boiling away. Not only that, but you will also see the chocolate pots rising slightly, and creating a cracked crust on the top. When you think they are done, take them out of the oven to test them for doneness. NB: don't touch anything with bare hands - the tin and the ramekins and the water will be at burning point! Use you finger to press the top of one of the chocolate pots. If it looks like a biscuit on the top and feel like a cake when you press it, then it's ready.

My chocolate lava pots could have done with less cooking time - it all depends on how molten you want the interior to be.

Allow the lava pots to cool down enough to allow you to handle them. You can cool them down more quickly by pouring some cold water in the tin. Enjoy your chocolate pots 'neat', or with some cream or ice-cream or dried fruit and nuts, or even some Greek spoon sweets, in the same way as depicted in the Greek-style custard pies I made recently.

This poverty thing doesn't mean you can't have your cake or eat it.

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Single-serve chocolate galatopita (Γαλατοπιτούλες)

The photos seem to have gone astray: you can find them by clicking on this link. Use the previous/next buttons to see more photos.

My friend Hrisida has been at it again, giving me some more ideas for using home-made filo pastry, thereby improving my technique. She mentioned how much she liked galatopita, a sweet custard pie made in Northern Greece. Here in Hania (and probably throughout Crete), the word 'galatopita' is not even heard. I had tried galatopita in Karpenisi when I visited the area last summer; to me, it tasted simply like a 'dairy' pie (it was hard to work out if it was made with milk or cheese).

Galatopita is the first pita on the left (after that, it's spanakopita, tiropita and kolokithopita). The pie looks crusty all over - just like all the other pitas - but with less filo on the top than the other ones.

When googling a recipe, I always check the images. After picking the galatopita photos that I liked, I then opened the page of whichever one took my fancy. Here's what I found:
- some use no filo at all (they're baked like a custard)
- some use filo only on the bottom (they're baked like a pie)
- some use filo both on top and at the bottom (like the one I tried in Karpenisi)
- some pour syrup over the baked (filo or filo-less) pie (in other words, they turn out like a galaktoboureko).

There were also some interesting variations, eg nuts/dried fruit in the custard, flavoured custard (notably chocolate) and variations on the way the pita is presented (eg cigar-shaped roll-ups).

Of all the recipes, I have to say that I liked the chocolate galatopita most of all, with its airy-looking crust. The combination and contrast of the pale fyllo and dark custard made it look quite pretty, and very festive. It would make a spectacular Christmas dessert, made as individual servings. It's been a while since I used my ramekin set; now is the perfect time to take them out. The following recipe is based on Asproula's galatopita recipe (in Greek); she also makes her own filo pastry for all her pitas.

For 12 small ramekins (individual servings), you need: 

3 1/2 cups of milk

1/2 cup of fine semolina

1/3 cup of butter (I use olive oil)

3 tablespoons of cocoa powder

1/2 cup of sugar (you can add more sugar if you like your custard to taste very sweet)

2 eggs 

cinnamon

4-6 sheets of filo pastry (I make my own)

Warm the milk in a saucepan, then add the semolina, stirring continuously so that the mixture doesn't stick to the saucepan, and making sure that it doesn't go lumpy, until it thickens to a cream. Turn off the heat and allow the cream to cool slightly. Add the butter, sugar and sifted cocoa and mix well. Finally beat in the eggs and whisk them into the cream, blending everything well.

Grease your ramekins (I use olive oil: you can use butter) and line each one with a small piece of filo pastry, leaving a little (but not too much) pastry hanging over the edge of the ramekins. Grease the filo well and then lay another piece of pastry on top of it. Sprinkle each ramekin with a little sugar and cinnamon (which I forgot to do!), then fill each one carefully (so as not to stain the edges of the filo, like I did!) with the creamy mixture. Try to make the filo pastry stick decoratively over the edge of the ramekins (this will be easier with store-bought filo pastry); grease these pastry bits well. Place the ramekins in the oven on the lowest rack and bake in moderate heat (180C) for approximately 35-40 minutes, until the cream has set. Turn off the oven, let the galatopita ramekins sit for a few minutes to solidify, and then remove them.

  

My home-made filo pastry turned out quite thick, which I put to good use: it made the perfect crispy wafer to dip into the custard as we ate the pie. Because I didn't add much sugar to the dessert, I added some kind of sweetener (which is completely optional): chocolate snow, icing sugar, Greek home-made spoon sweets, honey and ground nuts all make a delicious topping to this festive dessert.  

 

Serve the galatopita cool - it tastes much better at room temperature. The galatopitoules come clean out of the ramekins, but they can also be served in them (recommended if you have baked them 'naked', ie without filo; otherwise, the filo pita needs to be cut). Galatopita can be eaten slightly warm or cold and can be reheated. It's sometimes sprinkled with sugar and/or cinnamon; I served them with some red berry fruit (mulberry spoon sweet from Northern Pilio) and nuts. Another nice idea would be to crumble some tahini-based Macedonian halva over them (if this is available where you are) for extra sweetness.

My preferred way of enjoying galatopita - the day after it's baked, for breakfast. I only had enough filo pastry for 6 ramekins, so I made the remaining 6 galatopites as 'naked' pies. The result: a velvety custard treat.

Another bi-coloured festive variation to this pie would be to make chocolate-flavoured filo pastry (add some cocoa powder to the flour) and omit the cocoa from the custard. It will also surprise your guests and they will think you are a celebrity chef.

Bonus holiday recipes, from my friends:

Kiki Vagianos from the The Greek Vegan - Melomacarona Cookies

Athena Pantazatou, Kicking Back the Pebbles – Grandma Chrysoula’s Kourabiethes

Mary Papoulias-Platis, California Greek Girl - Bittersweet Chocolate Date Nut Baklava

©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. 

Olive oil cookies (Λαδομπισκοτάκια)

Every weekend, I check which of my newly-acquired cookie jars is emptying the quickest, and by Sunday evening, it will be filled with something freshly baked. My home-made ladokouloura are much cheaper than any kind of good-for-dunking medium-quality semi-sweet store-bought biscuit (unless you buy the generic LIDL or EUROSHOPPER label, where you end up with lots of broken cookies as well as many crumbs - good for making a cheesecake base, if only cheesecake were part of the traditional Greek culinary repertoire).

I was looking for a new idea for a good biscuit with which to fill my newly-acquired cookie jars, when I chanced on this grandmother's blog. She put up a different cookie recipe for a whole year. In her first post, there was no photograph to accompany the first recipe, where she gives her version of Nestle's famous chocolate chip toll-house cookies:

"My next cookie memory would be the ever famous, possibly all-time favorite, the chocolate chip cookie. There is nothing better than to bite into a round circle of baked dough sprinkled with gooey melt-in-your-mouth chocolate. A chocolate chip cookie can dry tears, heal broken hearts, mend scraped knees and elbows and solve sibling arguments. Most of the problems in the world could likely be solved by a properly baked, right out of the oven, chocolate chip cookie. The power of a cookie is underestimated."

I feel the same way when I see my children dipping their hands into one of the cookie jars.

Toll house cookies are expensive to make in Hania, where neither high-quality butter or chocolate are cheap, so I've adapted the basic recipe by replacing the butter with our own supply of olive oil. It works very well. Chocolate chips are available in Hania only as cooking chocolate drops by Samouri and Jotis (except possibly in the wholesale trade to bakers, confectioners, etc); they didn't melt when cooked. I got get cheap, tasty, nice-looking cookies that everyone really liked.

Toll house cookies are a kind of 'drop' cookie - the soft batter falls off a teaspoon onto the cooking tray. From previous experience, I prefer to bake chocolate chip cookies so that they are firm all over. Greeks don't like chewy soft cookies (that's just part of their food identity), so I use more flour than the original cookie recipe. For me (and most Greeks, I'd say), a chocolate chip cookie needn't be eaten immediately, because Greeks don't eat hot biscuits (another food identity element). Greek cookies always need sitting time when they come out of the oven. At any rate, the batter can be prepared in different ways: as a cookie, slice or even from refrigerated dough. 

The best aspect of the original recipe is that it is very versatile. You can add nuts (whole, chopped or ground), dried fruit, grated coconut, dark or white chocolate, spices and cocoa to the basic recipe and get a whole host of cookie variations, not only in taste but also in appearance. That way, no one gets bored of eating your home-made cookies. It's amusing watching the kids rummaging through the cookie jar to reach their favorite one before anyone else gets it, especially if it's the last in the jar.

For the basic cookie recipe (yields 70-75 pieces), you need:
3-4 cups all-purpose flour (~ 70 cents; I used soft, ie low-gluten flour)
1 teaspoon of baking powder (minimal cost)
1 cup olive oil (our own supplies)
3/4 cup white sugar (~15 cents)
3/4 cup soft brown sugar (~20 cents)
(or just use 1.5 cups of soft brown sugar)
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract (~15 cents)
3 eggs (30 cents)
(The basic recipe also includes a teaspoon of salt - I don't use it)

Start off by combining all the ingredients EXCEPT the flour in a bowl and mix well. The oil needs to be beaten into the mixture till it emulsifies, as it often sits on the top because of its light weight. Then beat in the flour gradually, to get the right consistency for firm cookies. The amount depends on your location and the temperature, as the original recipe (see top photo, right) correctly notes. The mixture will look like a firm batter, or a loose dough. It's the effect of the olive oil. Don't let that put you off.

 

Classic dark chocolate chip cookies and snowdrop cookies (cocoa powder and white chocolate) 

Now comes the fun part: you can divide your batter/dough (depending on how much flour you added to the mixture) to make different cookie flavours. I usually divide it into two lots, to make two different cookie flavours. For a start, you can add 1 cup of ground walnuts, almonds or coconut for extra texture. Or, you could make any of the following combinations noted in the photograph caption below. I was able to make them with just half a batch of cookie dough, being extra careful to keep the cookies a regular shape and texture, in order to cook evenly. None stuck to the bottom of the baking tray (it was greased with olive oil).

If Bertie Bott (from Harry Potter fame) produced 'every flavour cookies', this is what an assortment pack might look like: choco-mint, quince spoon sweet, halva, choco-halva, coconut, chocolate chip, chocolate chocolate chip, orange, jaffa, walnut, coco-walnut, choco-nut, fig newton, ginger-walnut, and a couple more whose precise contents I don't remember.

Once you've made up your batter, drop your cookies with a teaspoon onto a baking tray. The dough can also be rolled in balls in your hand (as with my 'assorted flavours' cookies), which you can press down a little, to make the cookies spread out evenly. I can get about 20 cookies on one sheet, with enough space to spread. Bake the cookies in a moderate oven (about 180C) for 15 minutes for firm cookies, the way Greeks like them.

Happiness is... full cookie jars, and a weekly bundt cake for school lunches.

These cookies look almost festive for me, with their many colours, textures and flavours. The festive season is upon us and it came quite soon to Hania this year: winter set in early, following our early autumn's footsteps. By the middle of October, it was cold; by the beginning of November, we were using the heating system. Compare that to last year: in early December, we were thinking that we might be enjoying an outdoor barbecue on Christmas Day.

Cost per medium-sized cookie: about 5 euro-cents, if you have your own olive oil supplies.

©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.

Pancakes (Κρέπες)

There are common themes recurrent in my teaching work, which also constantly get attention in the mass media, such as education, pollution, climate change and poverty to name a few. Most Greek children know about UNICEF, and will have taken part in some of their fundraising ventures. Before I became a mother, I was fascinated by UNICEF's range of educational toys and books, and often bought products they sold, even though I didn't have a family of my own, because I could turn them into interesting projects for discussion in an English class. These books ended up becoming a part of my children's book collections, books which I mainly bought at a time when I liked the idea of cooking for multitudes, but did not have any multitudes to feed.

It's a very satisfying feeling when children show an interest in what their parents are doing around the house. No doubt, many parents will agree with me that when children see their parents doing something constructive, creative and interesting, they will happily relinquish their toys, cartoons and games, and ask to join in the 'fun', using 'adult toys'. This is slightly perturbing when they want to hold or use dangerous objects, such as clippers in the garden or knives in the kitchen. They need to be watched the whole time, but it is worth the effort. A rainy Saturday morning is better spent making biscuit dough than watching cartoons the whole day.

I think the gloves attracted them more than the weeding...

Since my children discovered these UNICEF recipe books on the bookshelves, they often ask me to let them make something that they (think they will) like out of them.

My daughter likes to dress the part, but I notice she also has culinary flair.

The recipes are organised by country, with a diagrammatic account of the ingredients required, with pictures accompanying the instructions. Each recipe is given an origin. The recipes are simple, while most require minimal cooking. The children usually choose to make chocolate sweets, but there are many savoury recipes included too, using locally grown vegetables; I also encourage the children to help me make the Greek dishes, for obvious reasons. I've made a number of dishes from these books together with the children (the countries named below are given as the origin of the recipe included in the books). Sometimes it convinces them to try the finished meal (eg aubergine dip); other times, they simply enjoyed the process of making the finished product:

• guacomole (Mexico)
• aubergine dip (Iran)
• roast peppers (Greece)
• hamburger (Canada)
• brownies (USA)
• chocolate biscuit balls (UK)
• 'surprise' cake (Yugoslavia - some of these books are quite old!)
• pancake fritters (Holland)
• walnut crepes (Hungary)
• chocolate tart (Switzerland)
• hot chocolate (Holland)

By far, their favorite recipe ios the one given for walnut crepes from Hungary - but without the walnuts (since they're cooking, it's their choice)! The printed recipe contained a mistake, which I felt I had to explain to the children by reminding them that we live in the internet age, and can check any information for its validity. But the process of cooking is still fun, and the experience gained is worth the mistakes made along the way.

To make 10 large pancakes, you need:
225g flour
400 ml milk (the initial recipe said 40ml - clearly a typo!)
2 tablespoons water
3 eggs
100 grams sugar
butter/olive oil for greasing the frying pan

My daughter once again surprised me; after cooking all the pancakes herself, she presented me with the tolled up pancakes spread with chocolate and cut in bite-sized pieces.

Mix together the flour, milk, water, eggs, and sugar. Let the mixture rest for an hour. Make sure your mixture is runny. If it isn't, mix in some more milk to make a runny batter. Melt some butter (I use about a teaspoon of olive oil) in a frying pan, and pour two tablespoons of mixture into the pan. Let it spread all over the pan. Cook the pancakes, one by one, by melting a dab of butter in a small pan, and pouring two large tablespoons of the runny egg mixture into the pan. They need a high heat and constant watching over the element so as not to burn. Cook them on both sides (kids love flipping pancakes), take them out of the pan and lay them on a plate, one stacked on top of the other.

We like to serve them with chocolate spread, honey or jam. Pancakes are a simple fun way to get everyone involved in cooking. They are also a winning meal - no one says no to pancakes.

©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.