Frugal living

That fridge looks rather bare, I thought, as I opened it up to find something to nibble on. It wasn't really empty, but I wanted something 'fast' and 'tasty' - and there really was nothing  in there that I could just grab on the spot and eat as is. Most of what was in my fridge last Tuesday (the day I was contacted by the BBC4 Food Programme to discuss frugal food) was unprocessed fresh food grown in our or another person's garden. If I wanted to eat anything from there, I'd have to process it - eg clean, peel, cut the fruit or veg. It wasn't quick enough for me at that moment.

The contents of my fridge, 17/7/2013 - I was surprised at how little processed food the shelves contained (the door shelves always contain more processed food, mainly in the form of my Asian bottled sauces).

Taking the shelves from the bottom upwards, there were:
1)  a range of different kinds of garden-grown peppers, and cucumbers (gherkins and Asian cucumbers which are popularly grown in Crete, known as atzouri)
2) some leftover vegetables, home-made tomato sauce, the last of my home-cured olives, an unopened pottle of yoghurt, some mizithra cheese and some home-made spoon sweets - bitter orange (made by my mother-in-law from our own fruit supply) and kumquat (which I made from a gift from a freind)
3) eggs - loads of them, due to generous friends whose chickens are laying in great profusion at the moment due to the breezy summer weather (free-range chickens don't like very cold and very hot weather, when they stop production), a bottle of water, 2 cartons of milk, and some dark chocolate flavoured with orange bits (I could have scoffed that, but it is not my favorite taste, so I just left it)
4) some melons and watermelon (more gifts from someone else's over-producing garden), and finally
5) a few bottles of beer, some corn husks (I have a craving to make tamales one day, so I saved the husks from our garden-grown corn), some butter spread, my home-pickled capers, a couple of cartons of cream, and some more jars of bitter orange spoon sweets (to last us to next season).

I may not have found exactly what I was looking for, but I was still quite amazed to find so much food in my fridge that was grown by us or someone we know, so much fresh, unprocessed food. (There were also some zucchini and eggplant waiting to be stored on the kitchen worktop.) In other words, most of that food came free - I did not have to spend money on it. But that only tells half the story. To procure that food, I spent a lot time. It didn't cover all my wants, just most of my needs. We sometimes lack variety when eating mainly in this way (using a lot of local fresh seasonal food), so our wants also show signs of lacking. I didn't have what I wanted to eat ready for me to eat it, so I had to make it myself.

By careful substitution, using some frozen and fresh vegetables, and the addition of some leftover meat from a feast we had attended, I made these delisious dumplings (I also made the wonton wrappers myself - recipe to follow). One dozen dumplings cost me not much more than €1.

Most people I speak to about food issues don't believe that it's feasible to rely on home-grown food, and they think I don't do my sums properly when I passionately describe the savings that can be made if food could be sourced as cheaply as possible. They insist that the quantities of such cheaply sourced food would not be enough to feed a family nutritiously. I can proudly tell myself now that what these people say is actually a good excuse for NOT making the effort required to source their food cheaply in whatever way they can. I live in the countryside, hence I have cheap sources of fruit and veg. Urban people will not have these cheap sources of food (I won't say 'free' - nothing is free in this world, it all comes with some kind of effort). My very cheap sources of food allow me to save a lot of money by using a limited variety of foods whcih are turned into an endless variety of dishes. My cheap food saves me a lot of money, because I can process it and make it good for eating at a later date too; I don't waste or throw it away, or spend money on food items that would render my cheap sources unnecessary. Most importantly, the food I have in my fridge at the moment keeps my family very healthy, and it keeps me in pocket.

The day after the BBC interview, I did a big shop at the supermarket and stocked up on things we don't produce ourselves, which complement our fruit and veg food. Kids want a ham and cheese sandwich every now and then, a bit of grated cheese is a nice way to round off a weekly pasta dish, and some ready-to-eat meat (in the form of smoked pork steak) is a good addition to a quick stir-fry, home-made souvlaki or any other meal where just a little bit of meat makes a mainly vegetarian meal so much more exciting. These cheap cured meat cuts go a long way - most will be frozen for later use. I know which supermarkets offer which specials, so I plan my shopping trips accordingly. On this shopping trip, I was accompanied by my husband, who snuck a packet of feta cheese into the shopping basket while I wasn't watching; I could have bought this feta more cheaply from another supermarket - he was obviously not prepared for the wait. 

Another thing those people say (the ones who think that cheap food sources are not easy to find) is that it is time-consuming processing food to make it edible, and then cooking from scratch. I won't contradict them - they are right, it does take a lot of time. But when that is all you have, and you don't make it a habit to buy processed food whose contents you cannot trust or do not know, then you need to do this - you need to think creatively, spend some time looking out for quality cheap ingredients, process them appropriately and find some interesting recipes to turn that food into delicious meals that your family will remember. It doesn't make a difference where you live - there is cheap food to be had. For example, I came across some 100% Greek fatless pork with very little bone for €3.05/kg - I picked up 5 kilos and stored it appropriately in the freezer in meal-sized parcels. That's all you need - you'll be able to save a lot of money by freezing bits and pieces here and there.

 I was a little annoyed with myself for not buying any chocolate on my last shopping trip; I think that;s what I was craving. Then again, the fewer chocolate bars in the house, the less chance there is of their disappearing as soon as they enter the house. To make up for the lack of chocolate in the house, I made the family's favorite chocolate cake instead, to use up some of the eggs. 

During the BBC interview, I was asked if I thought it was indeed possible to eat very frugally. And of course, I said it was. I did keep in mind that I live in a rural area (which helps), and I know I have a keen gardener in my family (which is also useful), but I also mentioned one more thing that is true for anyone who suddenly finds themselves with less money in their pockets and greater financial responsibilities: you have to change your way of thinking. You can no longer continue to live like you did in the recent past, no matter where you live, and you have to make new sacrifices that you thought you would never have to make. If you can't do that, then no matter where you live, you will eventually find yourself in difficulty, whether it's related to money or to your own sanity.

Living frugally - food- or otherwise - is possible ony if you want to make it happen. It's a matter of balancing my wants with my needs. If I can keep my needs down, I can choose which of my wants I can have. One thing I know for sure is that I cannot have everything.

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Yemista for the freezer (Γεμιστά για την κατάψυξη)

Yemista are a popular Greek dish in summer. They are a taverna favorite for vegetarians. Yemista consists mainly of rice, which has herbs and spices added (home cooks sometimes add mince, as an alternative to the basic recipe). This mixture is used as stuffing for summer vegetables: mainly tomatoes, eggplant and peppers. Rice doesn't freeze well; although you can freeze it uncooked, the texture will be different to rice cooked freshly. The best way to do this is by preparing the stuffed vegetables and freezing them in the same baking vessel that they will be cooked in. This may take up a lot of space in the freezer.

Stuffed zucchini flowers - from the freezer straight to the oven.

As an alternative, I prefer to carve out the vegetable shells and freeze them empty. The shells are frozen upright, tightly sitting next to each other, in a baking tin, to keep their shape. Once they have frozen solid, they can be taken out of the baking tin and placed in bags, in free spaces in the freezer. The tops of the vegetables, which are used to cap the yemista after they have been stuffed, are also frozen for the same use in the dish.

Frozen pepper and tomato shells - I freeze them upright in a tray, then I place them in a bags.

The tomato juice and flesh can be chopped very finely (I always use a mini food-processor for this) and mixed with some finely chopped onion, parsley and mint. Some (but not all) of the eggplant flesh (again, finely chopped) can also be added to this mixture. To avoid the eggplant flesh browning, you need to work quickly. The quicker eggplant gets frozen after it's cut, the less browning will occur. This mixture is frozen altogether, in appropriate quantities, separately from the vegetable shells.

Frozen yemista mixture - only the rice, olive oil and seasonings need to be added.

When you want to make the yemista (which can be cooked either in the oven or in a pot on the element):
1. Take out the tomato mixture and defrost it.
2. When it has turned liquid, add the appropriate quantity of rice, olive oil, salt and pepper.
3. Take out the vegetable shells from the freezer and place them in the (pyrex or metal) baking vessel.
4. Start filling the vegetable shells immediately, without waiting for them to defrost.
5. Cap each vegetable with its top and continue to prepare the yemista for cooking as for the 'fresh' recipe. 

Yemista made from frozen shells

Don't forget that the shelled vegetables should be of an even size, for best results, in order for them to cook evenly when the time comes to use them. I used a local heirloom variety that produces tennis ball sized round tomatoes.

All the timatoes in this bowl came from the plant on the left hand side.

The basic recipe for yemista can be found here. This recipe can be used for freezing (without the rice, olive oil and seasonings) if you have a large garden that produces excessively, or you like to buy fresh seasonal produce in bulk from a farmer's market, especially towards the end of the season, when the prices are cheaper.

This kind of freezer food makes cooking for the whole family in the winter very easy and painless. 

©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.

Boureki for the freezer (Μπουρέκι για την κατάψυξη)

My most popular posts have remained stable over the years that I have been writing this blog (which is five this month - happy blogoversary to me!): fasolada (bean soup), Roses (a story about the chocolate brand) and how to freeze aubergine (see sidebar on the right-hand side). The latter has become the most popular post this month, given that it's summer and the aubergine season is in full swing.

I freeze everything that grows in our summer garden: eggplant, zucchini, peppers, tomato, beans, corn and herbs (as well as winter garden produce, in season); my biggest forte is freezing a meal that I have made from such produce, at a stage where it is ready to cook without defrosting. My freezing techniques have been learnt by experimentation, mainly borne out of the desire to preserve a great amount of excess produce. Some of my techniques sound quite unusual, and they probably aren't well documented in other sources, because they seem to go against what we take for granted.

Eggplants, like potatoes, turn brown when their peel is removed and their flesh is revealed. You need to work very quickly to stop this from happening when you want to freeze them. If they are left to go brown, they are useless in terms of freezing. The most important aspect of freezing any vegetable is to freeze it at its freshest, in the same form that it will be cooked when it is to be used.

Boureki, a Chania specialty containing potatoes, zucchini and mizithra cheese, with herbs and olive oil added, is a self-crusting pie. I freeze it at the point where it is assembled in the tin with all its ingrdients, except the olive oil, which is poured over the top. Some cooks make boureki with the addition of pastry, but I never do this - it's too time-consuming.

The tins go into the freezer at the ready-to-cook stage - all they need when I decide to cook them is to pour some olive oil over them. Because I freeze a lot of boureki every summer (6-8 family-sized tins), I place them very carefully, one by one, in the freezer. I never freeze one tin on top of another - they will stick together (even when the bottom tin is frozen solid and you place a fresh tin in top). They can be stacked on top of one another once the tins have all frozen. This goes for all my pie-type freezer meals: moussaka, pastitsio and spinach pies.

Sometimes I mix the ingredients together in a large mixing bowl, other times I make the boureki in layers. At any rate, the potatos don't discolour. The thin slices of frozen potato are visible in the photo. To avoid freeze-burn, it's better to keep them in a plastic bag.

When it's time to cook the boureki, I take a tin out of the freezer, pour 1/2 cup of olive oil over it and stick it in the oven - WITHOUT DEFROSTING! That way, the potatoes do not have time to discolour. The boureki cooked from frozen does not need extra water added to it - it will have accumulated enough liquids from the freezing process.

Boureki is always beter the next day, as Laurie says, who made boureki in Alaska with a mixture of feta and ricotta cheese, as mizithra is unavaible there. My frozen boureki is always made to be eaten in this way: I cook it in the evening (last year I was cooking them in the wood-fired oven), and it is left overnight to set. The next day, it comes out of the tin like a piece of pie. It makes a very fresh nourishing meal in the winter when everyone comes home from school or work very tired, and there are other activities to attend to in the evening, leaving no time to cook meals 'from scratch'!

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Aubergine with spicy yoghurt, onion, herbs and pomegranate seeds (Πολλά και διάφορα)

Tavernas (ταβέρνες) and restaurants (εστιατόρια) are two quite different things. A taverna is an informal eaterie which serves traditional Greek meals, while a restaurant often has a more formal atmosphere and the food served there may not be recognisable in the Greek culinary spectre. Tavernas are usually cheap, although I haven't been to one since the price hikes (we haven't been to one since last September). A full meal would cost my family no more than €12 euro a head, alcohol included. The food served for this price is mainly fresh, local and seasonal. Last year, I went to a pricey restaurant in my town; the meals there used ingredients not normally associated with Cretan/Greek cuisine.

Why must restaurant food be expensive? Fancy decor, high rents and plush furnishings don't warrant a high price for a meal. Not even the service counts: waiters should always be courteous, chefs should always cook decent food, and service should always be reasonably quick wherever you go.  People go out for a meal for different reasons. I never include eating local food at the top of my list when choosing to eat out, because that's what I eat most of the time. I'm not a locavore in the modern sense: I eat what there is to be found out of necessity, not necessarily by choice. My primary reason would be to enjoy myself, so if I have to pay a high price for the meal, I want to be sure that I am paying for the quality of the food, not the surroundings.

 In summer, I prepared some eggplant rolls filled with mint-flavoured mizithra cheese. To make the eggplant recipe I found ιn the Ottolenghi menu, I defrosted six pieces, scraped off the mizithra into a bowl, and pan-fried the eggplant. The minty mizithra was used to make the yoghurt sauce. 

Having recently used an Ottolenghi recipe, I checked out other items on the menu of his restaurants. The average cost of each dish was about £10. The dishes do not have names as such: they are described by their ingredients. The restaurant has a Mediterranean focus, and the ingredients are all fresh, but they aren't all British: according to the website, 'local' food is both British and European.  Judging from the reviews posted by different diners, you would order about three dishes per person (they are mainly vegetable-based, which means that they don't fill up your stomach too easily), with an average cost per head of approximately £30, which translate to about 40 euro per head. That is not at all cheap.

The description of the dishes goes something like this:

 Roasted aubergine with turmeric yoghurt,

crispy onion, basil, rocket and

pomegranate

£9.00

Some tweaks to the original description: I shallow-fried (instead of roasting) the eggplant slices to save time and energy; I didn't have fresh basil available, so I used fresh oregano instead; I preferred to use fresh ginger to flavour the yoghurt rather than turmeric because I had that only in powdered form; the rocket I used is a Greek variety with large leaves (small-leafed rocket is available, but it's imported and bagged - probably subjected to bleach for the purposes of cleansing). The pomegranate was the last local one I had managed to secure for the season (and I mean from Hania) - there won't be any more locally grown pomegranates until next year. That's what it means to eat fresh, local seasonal food - everything is eaten or preserved in its time.

It's not difficult to imagine what I'll be getting from such a description. But it's hard to work out if the ingredients are truly seasonal when they are found from a range of different sources. In Greece, aubergine is usually associated with summer, and pomegranate with late autumn or early winter; this was supposedly a February menu. At least one of those ingredients would have to come from a greenhouse or outside Europe (ie not local, according to the restaurant's definition). The cooking techniques sound quite simple - the final taste and quality seem to depend on the appropriateness of the combinations of the ingredients.

 

My initial idea was to photograph the finished dish with an olive grove in the background. Then I remembered the plants that actually gave me the aubergines: now in winter, they are dry stalks. They continued to produce eggplant up until early January, but the fruit was not the best quality.

The roasted aubergine with turmeric yoghurt, crispy onion, basil, rocket and pomegranate seeds was the first item I saw written on the sample menu card. My first thought was "I can easily recreate a dish like this in my kitchen", because all the ingredients are available to me: in fact, we grow most of the fresh ones ourselves - but not all at the same time! My second thought was: "Oh my God, so many different ingredients." It's freaky to rush around trying to find obscure items that can't always be located at one stop-and-shop place, especially when you really don't need to use them in great quantity; a lot of your purchases will probably not end up being used again for a while, kind of like bottled Asian sauces sitting in your fridge for a long time. And finally: "There's a lot of preparation involved in this dish." You need a lot of hands to create this kind of meal, as well as quite a wide variety of pots and pans and kitchen utensils.

Pomegranate and eggplant are two of my favorite natural foods (in their season). They are also messy to deal with. Skin contact with the white flesh of an eggplant (and the yellow inner flesh of a pomegranate) makes your fingers black. I should know: I have cut a lot of aubergine in my lifetime.  How to peel a pomegranate is the subject of many web discussions. At this particular restaurant, pomegranate is overused. Someone at Ottolenghi's must be peeling pomegranate for a good part of their day. I guess that's what you pay for when you go to an expensive restaurant: imported unusual ingredients, exotic looking food, a lot of manual labour and imaginative decor, whether it's in the premises or the food styling. The plating of the dishes is quite unlike serving a 'piece' of something from a pot or pan, like I do at home: a dish like roasted aubergine with turmeric yoghurt, crispy onion, basil, rocket and pomegranate seeds is all about food styling, artistic effect and detail.

 Plating the same dish at at a restaurant must feel like an assembly line at times. PS: This dish doesn't really need the pomegranate seeds - it would probably work better with a sprinkling of dried crushed nuts to complement the sweetness of the sun-kissed Cretan summer-grown aubergine.

The cost of making this dish in my kitchen was less than €1 (for both portions). This does not include a payment for the cook, leaving me unpaid. To recreate the roasted aubergine dish (together with the purple-sprouting broccoli dish), I needed to spend well over an hour in the kitchen. But I had all the fresh ingredients available to me. When I decided to make this dish, it was a Saturday morning, and I didn't feel like leaving the house. I had everything I needed to make it without having to spend time or money sourcing it. That's the advantage of living in a food-centric society in the Mediterranean. Although I wasn't paid for my own work in producing the dish, I can safely say that my kitchen fun turned into a very rewarding experience, judging by the comments I received from my 'diners': the plates were licked clean. 

A visitor from Iran recently landed on my blog with the search string: "why people prefer to eat out". Good question: cultural norms for eating out differ markedly between east and west, especially between underdeveloped and technologically dependent nations. When I want to eat out, I definitely want to eat something different to what I cook at home, which isn't as easy as it sounds in my own town; most local tavernas offer home-style food, using similar recipes to those of my own. The food doesn't have to be exotic or imported; the atmosphere needs to be fun and the food tasty. It should definitely be an accessible meal to all ages and pockets. The meal out needs to be an enjoyable way to spend time in good company. I'm looking forward to some Asian food in London soon...

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Lunch in Paris by Elizabeth Bard (Γευματίζοντας στο Παρίσι)

Do you, perchance, need any ramekins, or a double boiler, or even a Dutch oven? Cookware.com*  is offering a $35 gift voucher* in this post that you can use to buy one! 

Since I moved to Greece, I lost many of my earliest material memories that I grew up with in New Zealand. Above all, I lamented the loss of my book collection. At first it pained me to recall all those books sitting on the shelves of my bookcase, which I had painted myself in bright colours. They had been bought mainly at second-hand bookshops. I couldn't keep them all, so I decided to give them away. Most ended up being returned to the bookshops that I had brought them from. In essence, I never really got over this loss, until the arrival of the internet, which meant that I could find cheap copies of the same books, as well as add to my collection with well-priced new ones.

What I was mainly left with from New Zealand was my mother's crockery and kitchenware collections. After my mother's death, my grieving father packed up and left NZ, carting everything from his old home to his new one in Greece via container-ship; even the rubbish bin came with him, as he wasn't in a good state of mind to sort things out. He moved out of a 3-bedroom double-lounge kitchen-dining room suburban bungalow into an inner-city apartment with just three (very small) rooms; of course, not everything could be accommodated! I ended up with enough plates and glasses and knives and forks to last me a lifetime. I never really needed to buy anything new for my own kitchen; my mother's kitchenware took up all the available space in my cupboards. This made me look good when I got married; even though my mother had passed away, my acquaintances could see that she had taken care of my προίκα adequately.

Mother's china, passed on to me; this is some of the stuff that I do actually like and use, perhaps 2-3 times a year.

Some people like to treat such items passed on from one generation to another as family heirlooms; I just called them 'stuff'. My mother suffered from stuffomania. She'd buy crockery and kitchen gadgets on sale, stuff she never used. Some of it was on show in glass cabinets, but most of it was stored away, never to be used or seen, until she died and my dad had to deal with it when he decided to sell the house. Western households have larger storage spaces and 'stuff' accumulation doesn't just become a habit, it becomes a way of life. Kitchen cabinets and wall units are often stocked with items that will be used only once a year (like a Christmas plate), while some are never used at all (like a set of fish knives). With the advances in nanotechnology, kitchen gadgets that once took up a lot of space in a kitchen while only being handy for a very small range of kitchen tasks (the food processor is a classic example) have now been replaced by smaller all-purpose gadgets.

If you don't drink coffee all day, and the last time you used a steamer was when you were trying to fit into your wedding dress, and your culinary heritage does not include fondue, and you own a multi-purpose blender/chopper/hand-held mixer, then you probably won't be needing any of these items...

After 11 years of marriage, I decided that if I had used some of this stuff less than one time during that period, then it would probably end up never being used. This past summer has been the most cathartic period in my life. Always with my mother's stuffomania fetish in mind, I got rid of a lot of unused items (including wedding presents) that had been hiding in the darkest parts of my wardrobes, cupboards and drawers. Finally I could find things more easily in my de-cluttered storage spaces. Now my tidy kitchen cupboards have enough room to accommodate a set of items that my mother never owned: ramekins.

My new ramekins

Ramekins don't figure in Cretan cuisine, unless you want to make glorified versions of basic Cretan dishes like boureki or hortopites - nice ideas, of course, which I could use in the future when Jamie Oliver or Nigella Lawson come to dine with me on my sunny balcony with a view over my town, but right now, I need them to make a delicious-sounding dessert that Elizabeth Bard, an American living in Paris, describes in her book Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes. Elizabeth's story begins with a hot date at Le Chartier Restaurant - and where did I dine with my family when we visited Paris?!

Le Bouillon Chartier, Paris

It's rare for a cookbook to interest me much these days, because in my humble opinion, most new cookbooks are more the coffee-table type, with enticing food porn and recipes that require difficult-to-source ingredients (for Crete), special cooking equipment or special skills. Elizabeth Bard's book contains no photos, while the recipes simply sound enticing and guaranteed to make an impression. Even though Elizabeth lived in Paris when she wrote this book and her kitchen and refrigerator were both tiny, she seemed to cook a lot like me: she sought out seasonal ingredients whenever possible, her cooking techniques were simple and she used the freezer to her advantage. She now lives in Provence, so I can imagine her growing, cooking and preserving a lot of food too!

Elizabeth also discusses the love of stuff accumulation that her compatriots have, which did not suit the lifestyle of the Parisian that she eventually became. She touches on other ex-pat dilemmas, similar to what any person making the move from the New World to the Old World goes through, which again endeared me to her novel even more: meeting pompous ex-pats who try to maintain their old life in a new country, constantly comparing lifestyles 'here' and 'there', always complaining about how life is 'not the same' with the mis-notion in their brain of gauging everything that happens in one's life by how 'successful' it makes them. Her compatriots were all living the American Dream back in the home country, and wondering why she didn't care if she was leaving it behind. If you have ever left a materialistically-inclined status-conscious capitalistic country for a more relaxed one where the quality of life plays a greater role in society, then you will understand what Elizabeth is trying to say in her book.

*** *** ***

The seductive recipe I fell in love with from Lunch in Paris was a molten chocolate dessert made in individual servings. Elizabeth is very effective in her multiple uses for various kitchenware, but I felt that I couldn't make these delightful desserts without investing in a set of ramekins.

Pots de chocolat: Elizabeth says "this recipe makes you look a teensy bit like a culinary genius in front of guests." Ideally, they are cooked just until the outer part forms a cakey crust, so that the centre is molten and syrupy. I cooked half the batch in this way, and the other half until they formed a firm cake; both taste great, especially with ice-cream or fresh berry fruit to accompany them. This dessert is not only easy to make, but you can also freeze it to cook when needed. Having tried this, I can tell you it cooks better this way.

But I didn't buy ramekins just to make one recipe, did I? I used them to individualise Elizabeth's charlotte recipe, too, using some well-known high quality Greek export products (the recipe will be posted soon in another post).

I made the charlotte according to the recipe Elizabeth gave in her book, and then modified it to make it just a tad more glamorous, by making it in individual portions with the help of the ramekins. 

I am looking forward to individualising Elizabeth's profiterole recipe too. And what about my kids' favorite - creme caramel, here I come!

The recipes for these delicious desserts can be found in Lunch in Paris. And if you don't own any ramekins (or a double boiler, or even a Dutch oven!), Cookware.com* has given me the chance to give away a $35 gift voucher* through my blog, with which you can order from their site. Just leave a comment on this post, and I will draw the lucky winner in ten days' time!

*Please note that Cookware.com only ships to the US, Canada, the UK and Germany. International shipping charges will apply.

©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.

Fast food is good food (Το γρήγορο φαγητό είναι καλό φαγητό)

My husband and I were recently talking about moving house and building a new one a few kilometres away from where we currently live now, in a countryside setting.

Left: The view we have now. Right: The view we want in the future.

It may sound like we have suddenly come into a windfall. Fortunately or unfortunately - depending on the way one views the saying 'money can't buy happiness' - this isn't the case. One day, we'd like to be able to move house for a change of lifestyle: we'd like to live on a large tract of (family-owned) land, closer to our orange orchards and olive grove, giving us more flexibility to grow more of our own produce, including the possibility of raising animals (something we aren't doing now) for our own use.

Our closest neighbours at the moment near the olive grove live 1.5 kilometres away - they are retired Germans! We often see them foraging along the road heading towards our grove. Living in the countryside is not as difficult as it seems in modern times, since the roads are now tarmacked, and basic services (water, phone, electricity) are more readily available.

Keeping animals carries with it a huge responsibility - it means that you can't leave your home without making arrangements for someone else to carry on your work while you are away. (This way of life is not much different from how we live now - living with an elderly person who has lost her mobility means we still do pretty much the same thing.) Since we'd both be closer to retirement, we would have more time on our hands to do this. And as I look out from the window of our new house that looks down onto our olive trees and up to the Lefka Ori, I would then be inspired to type up that novel that I've been writing in my head for the last year or so...

Another view of Lefka Ori from the olive grove

But it seems that I am coming in too late to the game. Food from the earth is old hat; according to Rachel Laudan, I'm a Culinary Luddite!

The article presented in the above reader was written almost a decade ago, and was recently revised for publication in the Utne Reader, which provides a number of links to other food-related debates. It received some attention in the NY times blog; the comments there share similarities in their misunderstanding about modern food with some of Rachel's ideas about slow food. In essence, one could say that humans now all eat processed food, whether they like it or not, but the notion of 'processed (ie fast) food' needs to be distinguished among categories of food and not confused with 'junk food'.

One of the recurrent themes in the article is that "Eating fresh, natural food was regarded with suspicion verging on horror, something to which only the uncivilised, the poor, and the starving resorted."* If this has some measure of truth, it is only because refrigeration wasn't invented until relatively recently, and even then, most people (in the case of Greece, as recently as less than 40 years) wouldn't have had a refrigerator in their house, so they would have spent a lot of time foraging fresh ingredients and eating what they could there and then before finding other ways to preserve or store it before that fresh food - both raw and cooked - went bad.

 

It is difficult to understand the feeling of euphoria that a farmer has when he plants a successful garden...

The availability of refrigeration ("egalitarian, available more or less equally to all, without demanding disproportionate amount of resources of time and money") has obliterated any revulsion against eating fresh food; it's helped many of the still "uncivilised" and "poor" to be able to preserve their own fresh produce easily and make it available to them in less abundant times - so long as there is regular power supply in their area. We don't usually starve in this day and age due to lack of food; it's usually war, politics and mismanagement that keep food away from the needy. How many times have we heard about supermarkets and the ordinary public that throw away edible food?

The evolution of mankind has constantly improved living conditions for people and animals, and even for plants. Through evolution, we went from milk to yoghurt, from dry crackers to soft raised bread, from freshly caught fish to salted cod. Through evolution, we went from being primitive nomads foraging their food daily to civilised settlers with "a securely-locked storehouse jammed with preserved, processed foods."

Some people buy their processed food; some others process their own produce. We generally live in abundant times, with the luxury to do both at whatever cost we can afford.

But these ample supplies of preserved food were not actually enough. As Rachel admits: "the rich, in search of a varied diet, bought, stole, wheedled, robbed, taxed, and ran off with appealing plants and animals, foodstuffs, and culinary techniques from wherever they could find them." In other words, fresh food really was the key to the tastiest meal for both the rich and the poor, but for the former, it put them out of their routine in their quest to procure it, while for the latter, it was all they had. Food rationing during WW2 in Britain put the lack of fresh food (with a heavy reliance on preserved imported food) in the spotlight:

We all think and talk about food eternally, not because we are hungry but because our meals are boring and expensive and difficult to come by... what I wouldn't give for orange juice or steak and onions or chocolate or apples or cream. (1941 diary extract, quote from the Ministry of Food exhibition)

Boring. That's how they regarded the "modern, fast, homogeneous and international" food that was being imported into the country during the period the UK was subjected to food rationing.

I spend a lot of my time preserving fresh produce, especially in the summer. Two of the most important products in our Cretan kitchen are tomatoes and olives.

"Traditional societies," Rachel reminds us, "were aristocratic, made up of the many who toiled to produce, process, preserve and prepare food, and the few who, supported by the limited surplus, could do other things." Throughout the world, there was, is, and always will be, a divide between the rich and the poor. The world survives on this kind of separation of the people. The rich will always have access to better quality food in a greater variety than the poor, while the poor will constantly be working to provide food and other services for the rich. Some people will continue to "get on with their lives", while others will continue to provide the basic services the former group needs to continue with their lives.

Despised products like corn syrup and GMOs will continue to be hated while, at the same time, be considered more acceptable elements of the food chain for certain elements of society (the poor is an obvious one), besides bringing in great profits for their makers. Discount supermarkets will probably always sell the cheapest canned tomatoes, while placing an organic label on the packaging will always give added value; you buy the quality that you pay for. The range in prices for food is there to remind us that we all have different pockets and different priorities. No matter how the world changes, people will always need to be fed, and the food people generally want to eat still comes from freshly grown produce that is processed, preserved and prepared into an edible form, not from chemicals or glass tubes. Fresh food will continue to form the basis of fast food.

We were recently invited to dinner at the country house of some friends who spend their summers on the island. When it was time to serve the meal, the first thing the hostess did was to tell us what each dish was, and the origins of the ingredients: "The chicken is from the village, the rabbit is from my mother's farm, and the artichokes (in the tart) were freshly picked and refrigerated by my mother in the spring." None of the food was processed by the hosts, and some of meal wasn't what I'd call traditional Greek cuisine, but they took pride in knowing the origin of the fresh ingredients.   

"City dwellers, above all, relied on fast food." No surprise, and they still do, since they are the ones most likely to live in small dwellings with tiny kitchens and no gardens; they are also the ones who are most likely to work not just outside the home, but for long hours away from home and quite a distance from home, so they need to have easy-to-store (or -buy) food that can be cooked or reheated quickly. There are times when these townies differ little from mountain dwellers who need to have a bit of salt cod in their pantries (or frozen fish in their deep freeze) if they want a taste of fish every now and then without putting themselves to the trouble of procuring it the day they want to cook it. That's what evolution has given us: time-saving technology and the ability to store safely preserved fresh food that doesn't go off quickly.

Boureki in 15 minutes, with the help of a mandolin slicer, then into the freezer it goes, with a note attached: "Just add oil"; 'fast food' that my grandmother would have recognised. The aspect of "servitude" is now performed by technology.

That's why I can send my kids away to study without worrying what they'll be eating**, because no matter how 'bad' the food is wherever they are, no matter how much of that notorious 'bad food' they pour into their bodies, food safety can generally be relied upon by keeping in mind a few general rules. And that's the idea that I have about that village house: while my kids are away eating 'bad food', I'll be growing fresh produce and turning it into 'good food' (just like I do now), so that when my brood comes home for the holidays and we want to spend quality time together as a family, I won't need to slave away in the kitchen preparing their favorite pastitsio or boureki or order take-out food because I had gotten used to having more me-time and don't want to give it up. I'll just pop a tin of freshly preserved food out of the fridge and get on with life, and my kids won't even know it wasn't prepared on the same day - they are eating the same food cooked in the same way now.

Apart from the refrigerator and deep freeze, my right-hand man in the kitchen when I preserve/prepare fresh produce is my instant mixer/cutter - can you see it? It's a tireless servant, cheap to buy and lasts for ages. 

I take exception to the idea that slow food is just a notion of bygone times: "... it is easy to wax nostalgic about a time when families and friends met to relax over delicious food, and to forget that, far from being an invention of the late twentieth century, fast food has become a mainstay of every society." My experience of eating in Crete goes wildly against this: people take great pride in the food they grow, cook and eat, and they always share it among family and friends. It is unthinkable to do otherwise. It is also difficult to believe (for a Greek islander like myself) that most people do not partake of a delicious meal in a relaxing environment with their family; they are missing out on one of the greatest moments in life. A common prejudice is that people who are very involved in food production live a simple isolated life and do not have a good grasp of modern life; in short, they show signs of a lack of progress. How far away from the truth that is in Crete.  

Vegetarians aside, I pity those who cannot savour the taste from the tapsi in the photograph below. Everything (literally, including the salt) was harvested/raised/produced by the man (he's my age) in the top left photo, while his wife (sitting next to him, 10 years younger) cooked everything shown on the table in the top right photograph. You might be wondering if they live a peasant lifestyle: he's a carpenter, she's a school cleaner, and they live in the town in a semi-detached suburban house. Their land and their food is very important to them. Their 3 children go to school in the town, and take part in urban activities. They are no different to the teacher and the taxi driver who visited them.

The idea that home-cooked food is 'slow' will never have occurred to some Cretans, since they often assume that this is the only kind of food that can be called 'φαγητό'. When they eat 'fast food' (don't confuse this term with its modern meaning of 'junk food'), they'll tell you that they didn't cook any 'φαγητό' (food) today, because they didn't have time, eg during the olive harvest, but even though it wouldn't be as appetising or appealing as their slow food, it would still have been somewhat tasty and delicious, maybe a boiled farm-fresh egg and a potato, served with whatever fresh seasonable salad vegetables are on hand, all doused with olive oil, and a few slices of bakery bread, with maybe some tinned tuna or luncheon meat for extra protein.

This kind of meal is touted as Cretan breakfast - it is what tourists look out for on a tourist menu. Most of the food in the photo involves requires a minimal amount of processing; it can also be said to be 'fast food' as it is very quick to prepare.

This kind of meal is called 'πρόχειρο φαγητο' (Google translates this phrase as 'snack'), nearly always made with slow food, not a supermarket TV dinner or a can of baked beans. Fast food to those people is a boiled potato without the horta, a salad without the roast meat, the ubiquitous slice of bread and hunk of cheese that children carried to school with them for 'κολατσιό' reminiscent of the post-WW2 era when Greece was rebuilding herself from the ravages of war.

 
As I was writing this post, I went about on my normal daily food-preparation duties: cooking the Sunday roast (using granny's recipe), watering the garden, and harvesting fresh produce. My daughter made me a (classy) glass of orange juice using oranges from our own trees, and at the end of the day, I ate some of my home-prepared 'fast food' on a slice of bakery bread and thought about the different ways I was going to prepare/preserve my produce (the eggplants were turned into moussaka (frozen in portions), while the zucchini were made into boureki for the next day's meal.

One thing I particularly like about the food customs in Crete is that they haven't quite yet reached the completely globalised point as they have in other cultures. Nearly all global foods are available on the island, but you will have to visit  the high-end supermarkets to find (to put it more politely) acquired tastes. For instance, don't look too hard to find chili-flavoured strawberry jam in Crete. Not that people shouldn't eat chili-flavoured strawberry jam, but here, they don't need to, nor do they demand it, and if it were available, given that people's tastebuds are culturally attuned, it probably wouldn't be popular. Again, only the high-end supermarkets make the effort to sell outlandish food, eg, of all things, Mexican blackberries! Of course, outlandish food calls for outlandish prices: imported Dutch strawberries (off-season) are now available for over 11 euro a kilo!

Peruvian asparagus spears are available in the local supermarket (at absurd prices), but it's highly unlikely a local will buy them. This kind of food is generally bought by tourist residents, ie Northern Europeans who have retired here. 

In Crete, people can still find a great variety of good quality affordable locally produced food. In the prefecture of Hania alone, I counted at least 15 varieties of locally produced cheeses (the French would relish in the sight!), each made in a different village of Western Crete, less than 100 kilometres from the main town, ranging from 10 to 18 euro a kilo, in the local supermarket. This range does not include the imported cheeses which are also available, eg Edam, Cheddar and Gouda, to name a few of the well-known mass-produced global cheeses. Local, national and imported cheeses are eaten with a different purpose in mind; convenience and choice are available for all.

Cretans generally demand a high degree of traceability in their food. Origin and degree of processing are just as important as price and taste in their decision to buy fresh produce. The range of graviera cheeses (starting from the white block where the woman is standing, right up to the green round on the other side) available at the local supermarket shows just how much variety there is in a small town like Hania - these cheeses are all made in villages within less than 100 kilometres of the main town; they all have their own distinct taste and cannot be confused with each other. These cheeses are rarely available outside Hania, and each region in Crete has its own local cheesemakers. In the summer, Athenians holidaying in Crete buy cheese rounds in their hordes, as variety in Cretan cheese isn't easily available there - transport costs make it unfeasible to send such products even to the mainland...

The food industry is a profitable one in Crete; people still look for quality and ask about origin. Does this make us culinary Luddites? Are we eating in an unsustainable or old-fashioned manner that does not bode well for our future progress? Is it just a waste of time to teach the next generation about this old-fashioned food chain, because in the hi-tech, wireless world that they'll be living in, they won't have the time to cook and eat in this way? I really don't think so. From my own family's experience, where I try to ply them with non-Greek favorites, I have come to the conclusion that people will continue to eat the way their culture has brought them up to eat:

An American needs food but wants a hamburger, French fries, and a soft drink. A person in Mauritius needs food but wants a mango, rice, lentils, and beans. Clearly, wants are shaped by one’s society. (A Framework for Marketing Management, by Philip Kotler, 2001).

*** *** ***

Just like the average Greek, fast food (of the type referred to in the article) is everywhere in my own life - but not necessarily in the form that we normally associate with fast food. Fast food allows me, the person who cooks for the whole family, to get on with my own life: I usually buy our daily bread from the bakery; I buy fresh meat ready chopped in the way I want it to cook a meal; I keep a small piece of ham to slice for sandwiches; I buy fruit and vegetables that I don't grow from the supermarket; we always buy our cheese. They are my fast foods - but they were prepared/grown/raised in appropriate facilities with the latest technology that the producer can afford (this is especially the case with bread), using as many locally sourced ingredients as possible. When we process our own food, this shows 'choice', not a lack of progress. But there is also a lot of fast food in my house that I have prepared myself. For a start, there are tins of boureki, pastitsio, moussaka, papoutsakia, home-made pizza and spinach pasties in my deep freeze throughout the year, made with the fresh produce from our garden, which I processed, prepared and preserved. That's how I can have a 'fresh' meal on the table every day even though I didn't have time to cook.

Aubergine cubes, bell pepper shells, tins of prepared Greek meals (the one you can see is moussaka), all waiting in my deep freeze for their turn to be eaten in less abundant (and busier) times.

A (foreign) friend of mine once asked me if I had a once-a-week takeaways night in our house. I admitted that I didn't. This is not because we don't like takeout pizzas or souvlaki - they are both regarded as treats, not 'πρόχειρο φαγητο'. I can produce my own version of fast food in the same time that it takes to order it over the phone and wait for it to arrive to my house: a slice of bread or some bakery rusks, topped with a piece of cheese, cured olives from our fields, a piece of roasted pepper preserved in its own marinade, a freshly marinated anchovy, et voilά, I've got myself a pizza (albeit in deconstructed form). When we eat food that wasn't prepared by ourselves, it usually feels like our own because there is traceability in the ingredients used. Having access to a variety of nutritious safe fast food shows 'progress'. It isn't necessary to resort to the masses of verified junk loaded with sugar or fat. 

When I met up with Kalofagas recently on his first visit to Hania, we (his friends in the area) decided that the best meal Peter could eat was a home-cooked one, because that is what truly represents the taste of Crete, not a standard uniformly Greek tourist restaurant meal. My "ethnic" dishes of "peasant origin" may have been "invented" for the "urban aristocrats" but they probably never tasted as good as when they were cooked in a farm kitchen!
The menu was as follows: ορεκτικά - marinated sardines, roasted peppers, eggplant dip; κύρια πιάτα - pilafi, boureki, eggplant imam, yiahni green beans, pork steaks; επιδόρπια - orange pie, kalitsounia with honey. 

A question often asked of school pupils to discuss in the classroom is what technological innovations they would like to see in the future that haven't yet been invented. When they've all finished telling me about aeroplane cars and cleaner-robots, I then tell them what I'd like to see invented some time: an oven which will automatically prepare my choice of meal where my only input is the provision of the raw ingredients. Now that's what I call tasty freshly prepared fast food, made with as much fuss as the way the dishwasher gets my plates spanking clean.

*** *** ***

Rachel insists that, as a historian, she can't accept the sharp divide between good and bad food, in the way that the Culinary Luddites claim. She makes a plea instead for Culinary Modernism:

"We need to know how to prepare good food, and we need a culinary ethos, As far as good food goes, they [the Culinary Luddites] have done us all a service by teaching us how to use the bounty of delivered to us (ironically) by the global economy. Their culinary ethos, though, is another matter. Were we able to turn back the clock, as they urge, most of us would be toiling all day in the fields or the kitchen; many of us would be starving. Nostalgia is not what we need. What we need is an ethos that comes to terms with contemporary, industrialised food, not one that dismissed it, an ethos that opens choices for everyone, not one that closes them for many so that a few may enjoy their labour, and an ethos that does not prejudge, but decides case by case when natural is preferable to processed, fresh to preserved, old to new, slow to fast, artisanal to industrial. Such an ethos, and not a timorous Luddism, is what will impel us to create the matchless modern cuisines appropriate to our time."

In other words, food in this day and age has to come fast, otherwise we won't be able to cope with the other demands made on us by modern life. There is an assumption in the article that most people are (or should be) living urban lives, even though some of us have made a conscious choice not to be urban. It all depends on priorities. For rural people however, it is anathema to suggest that the emphasis on fresh food produced on a small scale is a misconceived notion; it can be equated with removing the very means that allow them to survive. In order to use 'fast food' instead of producing/preparing their own 'slow food', not only will they have to buy their food, but they'll have to be in paid employment to achieve this, and that's just not going to happen for at least 12% of the Greek population in the coming winter; Fraser and Rimas are probably correct to a certain extent when they advocate that we learn to store surplus food, live locally, farm organically and diversify our crops.

As a linguist, I'd argue that Rachel didn't really mean we should be eating modern fast food at all - just faster (and safer) food than what it was in the past.

*The inverted commas " have been used to denote quotes (in bold) from the article.
**Some Greek mothers never stop worrying about what their kids are eating when they are studying as far away as the UK. They will send them food parcels to their children, containing meals they cooked at home the previous day, froze solid, then sent to the UK by courier! (But that story is for another post.)

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