Tsigariasto with chili

My husband's line of work in the taxi business usually involves mundane rides from A to B. During the summer, foreign clients make the rides more interesting. Yesterday, he came home late, after spending 7 hours with an Indian couple holidaying in Hania. Sometimes, such exotic customers give away a lot about their culture. Yesterdy was no exception.

"The man and woman had been standing by the sign listing the indicative prices for rides at Square 1866 in Hania. I couldn't see what ride they were looking at. At one point, the man walked confidently straight up to my cab [E-class 2011 model Mercedes] and asked me outright: 'Can you take us to Elafonisi?'

"I explained that the ride was an expensive one. 'I don't care', he said. I feel obliged to explain this to foreign customers because sometimes they come here thinking that everythig in Greece is cheap, and they are shocked to hear the prices of some services. I even had someone remark 'that's London prices' and walk off in a huff. So I gathered that these people were wealthy. They looked like Indians to me. We usually think of India as a country with a lot of poor people, so this ostentatious show of wealth felt shocking to me. The taxi has been part of my family for over 50 years, but when I travel, I would never spend this kind of money on a taxi, not even with my whole family in the car. Idon't feel that rich.

"On the way to Elafonisi, I asked them where they were from (Mumbai), and why they chose Hania for a holiday (a friend of theirs had come here and given them a good review of the place). I explained a few things to them about the sites they were passing by. It's an expensive ride, and they may as well get their money's worth. They took a lot of photos, and they seemed genuinely interested in the scenery.

"On arriving to Elafonisi, I was really quite amazed to see so many people at the beach. It's mid-October, and the place looked like it hadn't calmed down since the beginning of summer. I let the passengers off and asked them what their plans were after Elafonisi. They told me they just wanted to to enhjoy the beach and they wanted me to take them back to Hania after a couple of hours. Obviously it was my lucky day today.

"The car parks in the area were full and there was no shade. Driving is the easy part of a taxi driver's journey: what tires you out is keeping the customer entertained at the same time. The weather in the northern part of Crete does not compare to the southern part. We've been feeling autumn setting in in the north, while the south still feels like high summer. While I waited for them, I could feel the car heating up. It had also become a dust bomb. Elafonisi is very dry.

"Two hours later, my customers stroll back to the cab at the designated meeting place. The man was limping a little. I asked him if he was OK. 'It's nothing,' he insisted. 'We walked the Samaria Gorge yesterday'. That made my day. they had ventured out of their comfort zone.

"'Where do you recommend we go for lunch?' the man asked. I was thinking the same thing, meaning I wanted to get back home and enjoy my own lunch. I suggested that they might like to pick a restaurant while we were driving back. The man looked around, and spotted the restaurant located on a small rise , just beyond the sandy area where the tarmac road starts. He could tell that it would have a good view of the sea. 'We'll go here!' He was always very confident about his choices.

"The waiter bought us the menu cards. I told him I was surprised to see so many people here at this time of year. 'So many?' he exclaimed. 'This is nothing! You should have seen what was happening here in the last week of September!' We've all had a good run this year in terms of tourism.

"My customers asked me to join them for lunch, whcih I think was very generous of them. This doesn't happen often. Naturally they wanted a bit of help with the menu. The restaurant served very traditional Cretan food with a few tourist dishes for those who didn't want to be too adventurous. I told them about tsigariasto - 'I don't think I want to eat goat' - pork roast - 'I don't eat pork' - braised chicken - 'Hm, chicken is common'. The woman ordered a pizza. 'What are you going to have?' the man asked me. I chose the tsigariasto. 'OK, I'll have that too,' he said. I really hoped it was going to be good.

"The meals came and we began eating. The tsigariasto was much as I expected it - slightly oily, well-cooked tender meat, falling off the bone, with a wine flavour to the sauce (no tomato). 'Does the restuarant have any hot sauces?' the man asked me. Hot food is being served more often in Cfrete these days... but this restaurant, it's location, the menu - hot food was clearly off limits. I asked the waiter, and he bought some commercial spicy tomato sauce to the table. 'Got any ketchup?' the man asked. The waiter bought some ketchup too. The man must have used up a quarter of each bottle, splurging it all over the tsigariasto. He reminded me of when my children were young and we were in London at a Pakistani restaurant. Except that they wanted to eat everything without the heat. Now they're used to other people's food, and they eat it as they find it.

"On the way back to Hania, the man asked me about other places to visit. I suggested Knossos in Iraklio. 'I mean another part of Greece'. Crete is a very big island, I explained. But they clearly wanted to go island hopping. So I mentioned the classics: Santorini, Mykonos. This is the most common route that first-time tourists take when comeing to Hania: after spending three days here, they go to Iraklio, then take the ferry from there to Santorini, with Mykonos on the itinerary too.

'You have a lot of mini markets here, don't you?' I asked him why he was asking this question. We had been driving mainly on country roads until then with hardly any shops. 'What are those people selling on the road?' he asked. What he was seeing was the local producers of natural products selling their wares along the road, and there were many of them. My customers were interested in the natural products, so he asked me to stop at the next seller. They bought wine, raki, rakomelo, thyme, oregano, marjoram, sea salt and honey, one of each item that the producer was selling on his stall. As we were leaving, the man asked me to stop again. 'Can we go back to the stall?' he asked. They decided to buy some presents too. And as we all got back into the cab again, the stall owner called me back. 'Come and take a present for yourself,' he said. I waited for him to give me the present. 'You choose,' he said. So I took a bottle of rakomelo. It was clearly his lucky day too.

We drove back to Hania with the cab smelling like a Cretan hillside from all the herbs tmy customers had bought. As I dropped my customers off at their hotel, I asked them if they enjoyed the trip. "Wonderful, wonderful! We will tell our friends to come too!' I suppose I coudn't ask for more than that."

*** *** ***

More and more people are coming to Greece for a holiday. 2017 was an interesting year for us in Hania. We've never seen so many Asian tourists coming here before. Tourism depends on stable politics in the general area which is generally an unknown quantity in our world these days. No one knows where the next attack will take place, ruining a country's reputation  for safety.

The tourism season in Hania ends on 29  October 2017 and starts again on 24 March 2018. We have suffered a little from over-tourism in Crete this year. But as a Cretan I can tell you that the winter is also a wonderful time to be here too. You have the island to yourself. The weather isn't always guaranteed, but you will still be blown away by Greece's beauty, history and archaeological sites are not season-dependent, and the food is still fantastic (perhaps even better). The sea is perhaps a little over-rated anyway.

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A year of the Greek left (Ένας χρόνος αριστερά)

A year ago to this day, SYRIZA was voted in as the government of Greece. Before Syriza, Greek politics was like a see-saw ride: green-blue, then green, and then blue again, and so on. Suddenly, Greece was flooded with the SYRIZA rainbow, whose 12-month 2-term office can be likened to a ride on a roller coaster. For most Greeks, 2015 will be remembered as a year of living a fairy tale in reverse: from happily ever after, Syriza now finds itself in the clutches of a wicked stepmother, unable to find any escape route.

SYRIZA's original campaign was based on Η ελπίδα έρχεται (Hope is coming), which gave it its first win in January 2015. During their first five months in power, SYRIZA failed in every respect to change the direction of politics in the country, breaking every single promise made during its election campaign. In trying and failing to negotiate a non-austerity deal for the Greek economy, SYRIZA led the nation to vote on an incomprehensible referendum question, where a NO (OXI) outcome won, but which was later reinterpreted by SYRIZA as a YES (to keep loans coming in). Despite the obvious incompetence of the government, it was voted in for a second term in a second general election in the same year. Global interest in Greek politics then waned, but the refugee crisis still keeps Greece in the front pages of the global press. 

Alexis Tsipras' initial impact on Greek society led it to believe that things can change, and they can change easily. Very little did in fact change, and change continues to come with difficulty, much greater than before. The two-party system that SYRIZA supossedly broke down didn't actually die; the former party of promises (PASOK(, was simply replaced by its newer version (SYRIZA), while the popularity of the main conservative party (ND) diminished in the face of the challenges. The unchanged status quo of Greek politics hasn't gone by unnoticed by the EU: the Greek newspaper ToVima recently published an uncomfortably long list of family-related appointments made during Syriza's time to various state bodies. The EU says this has to stop, which the present Minister of Finance (Euclid Tsakalotos) agrees with - all the while that his Scottish wife has been an adviser to the Bank of Greece since 2011, in other words since SYRIZA's rise. 

The left means many different things, depending on how we choose to interpret it. For me, the Greek left has always been defined by the people who shout the loudest and stomp their feet the hardest, always in support of negating any proposal made by the governing side. They haven't changed their tune while in power either - they still shout and stomp louder than their opponents, to negate what the so-called left government is 'proposing': in essence, the present left government is simply obeying to the demands made by Greece's creditors. Not that former right-wing governments were really any better: their campaigns were also based on making promises that could not be fulfilled, but they were more willing to compromise. Greek society has learnt the hard way now: no money, no honey. Which direction you lean to makes no difference to that particular rule.

The Greek left had never governed in a legal sense (ie by being chosen democratically) before 2015, so the left's first year in power was experimental. The experiment was not a success story, but it wasn't a failure either. Everything that was supposed to go wrong with a left government didn't actually go wrong in Greece: Greece wasn't thrown out of the eurozone or the European Union and I personally highly doubt Greece would ever have been thrown out of either, no matter how close 'expert' analysts insist it was to this point. Very few analysts looked behind the numbers: the mentality of Greek people would never push them to leave by themselves, while the creditors silently admit to themselves that their European project will also explode if they do the throwing out. What happened instead was that the Greek left veered off course: it went 'right' in a feeble attempt to get to the centre. Tsipras attended the 2016 Davos leaders' meeting where he wsa "brushing shoulders with bankers and billionaires", a far cry from his leftist origins.

Greece is still very much a divided society. Exacerbated by the European mess as things currently stand, Greece is still battling between her two extremes, neither of which presents a feasible solution to any of the country's economic problems. But I still believe that having Tsipras/Syriza in power was a good thing for Greece. Just like the EU insisting that there is no other way to save Greece but by a Memorandum, all Greeks have to admit that the former political facade in Greece had to drop, and it was Syriza that helped to do this. That doesn't make Alexis Tsipras the best politician - as far as negotiation tactics are concerned, he tops the list for having the worst negotiation skills according to an article from Harvard Law School. When he eventually goes (like all politicians do), he will have left behind some kind of legacy, however superficial it may be. Syriza/Tsipras' reign hasn't been characterised by total failure. Without it/him, the same-sex cohabitation law, supported by the present leader of the opposition party, would never have passed into Greek law, which helped to bring Greece one step closer to what is considered equality in the Western world. It should also not be forgotten that Syriza's handling of the undocumented migrants and refugee crisis was more humane than the previous Greek governments, and perhaps any other Western nation in the world. A million or so people have crossed from Turkey to Greece in 2015, and it should not be forgotten that since September, every single day, more than one child, as well as one adult, on average, has been drowning in the Mediterranean sea, and no one is doing anything to stop this.

Dawn rises above the hills - Γλυκοχαράζει στα βουνά
the jasmine smells beautiful - μοσχοβολούν τα γιασεμιά
the air is filled with birdsong - ραγούδι αρχίζουν τα πουλιά
as the sea smiles widely - γελά η θάλασσα πλατιά
while we dream of owning property and tv sets - κι εμείς οικόπεδα και Ι.Χ
fridges, furnishings and automobiles - ψυγεία έπιπλα TV
and as we pay for our sot weed - κουτόχορτο με πληρωμή
right next door to us, life departs - και δίπλα φεύγει η ζωή
Ξυπνήστε! - Wake up! by Panos Tzavellas, 1975

We constantly look to Western standards for justice and equality because we know deep down inside of us that our own Greek standards of justice and equality are deficient. So even though our feelings for Western style democracy are often ambivalent - at the same time that Western standards often present a sense of justice, fairness and good manners, they also contain elements of forced colonialism, and the superiority complex inherent in imperialism - we still feel the need to adopt the good sides of any foreign culture we come across. Unfortunately, Western culture has also been equated with consumerism, which leads to greed, an element of all societies, regardless of how fair or just they seem on the surface. Greed is partly to blame when we hear people (of any culture) lamenting the changes in society. They recall the 'better' times when there was more money in people's pockets, without remembering that there was less money in the treasury. Greed is to blame for the predicament that Greeks find themselves in. No matter which colour is governing, the result would have been the same. Syriza's naive politics are not to blame for the state of the Greek economy - I am certain that Greece would be in a similar situation now if the conservative coalition was governing, and social unrest would be much much worse than it already is.

I blame it mainly on the weather. I've said before on my blog that winter brings out the greatest pessimism among Greeks. But as soon as the weather brightens up, everything looks more manageable. In summer, we are either too busy or too hot to worry about the government's plans for the country. strike. In the dearth of the present winter, Greek farmers are protesting with their tractors on the streets, threatening to cut Greece into four pieces by road blockages. Come summer, they'll be planting cotton and tobacco, selling it and making good money in one season. Scientists, doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, engineers and notaries also went on strike recently, a novelty for Greece since it's rare to see white collar workers demonstrating. But the higher taxes and lower pensions that they are striking about are the same kinds of reforms that a conservative government would have had to commit to. They are all complaining about the inevitable.

A selection of headlines from Greek websites today on the anniversary of a year of a leftist government in power (all sites are centre-right, except for 'avgi' which is left):

- The grapes of wrath (tovima)

- SYRIZA's celebrations a far cry from last year's grandiose election win (tovima)

- Tsipras: «We are proud of the struggles we have fought, we will continue» (tovima)

- Tsipras against ties, farmers and Kiriakos [the first name of the leader of the opposition] (iefimerida)

- Figaro on Tsipras: A year later, Greece is still out of order (iefimerida)
- Liberation: The candle for a year of Syriza looks more like dynamite (iefimerida)

- Everything is on the table: Political crash, elections and cabinet reshuffle (thetoc)

- Two worlds: The government is partying, while the streets are raging (thetoc)

- "The Syriza that changed (not)" (protagon)

- A year of Syriza: Could it have been different? (protagon)

- Al. Tsipras: "We will not become the hostages of blackmailers or vested interests" (avgi)

and one from the UK:

One year on, Syriza has sold its soul for power - Alexis Tsipras has embraced wholesale the austerity he once decried (TheGuardian)

Few people keep in mind that we have to constantly reevaluate our present predicament to see a better future ahead. No matter how much Greece changes, as it is sure to do over the coming years, the changes need to bring about more confidence among the Greek people in terms of understanding the state of their country: they need to be more aware of the fact that the salvation of their country is in their hands alone. Only then can they convince others that they are worth investing in.

We aren't really on the way to reaching this point. The traditional Western view to reaching it would be something like 'a lot of hard work is required'. Not quite the case in Greece: How you turn round a country like Greece has to do with the mindset. You need to get rid of the middle-aged generation (40s-50s age group): they are the ones that now run the show, and try to ensure the rules don't change (no matter what political party is in charge), just so they can carry on as usual. Of course, we can get rid of them easily by promising them early retirement, but the real rulers of this country's economy have ruled that out. So we are stuck with them for the time being. Education might help: we could try teaching children how to think for themselves for a start. But we need new teachers to do that; they won't be retiring too soon, though. So we are well and truly stuck for the time being.

Greeks may sound like loud rabble-rousers, but Greece is a peace-loving country. Greeks do not desire to go to war. They rarely take part in other people's wars. We may have problems in Greece, but we don't meddle with others' problems, so we are well liked in that respect, which has led to Greece being regarded as a safe holiday destination. I've often heard it said that tourism won't save us - such naive words, in my humble opinion. That will keep the economy going just long enough to give people some respite from the misery of a depressing local economic climate, which is highly linked to the even more depressing global economic climate - Greece isn't alone: it's bad all over Europe, and beyond. Unless of course you're rich, and in this world, the rich can still hide behind their money, as I've often seen rich Greeks do.

So what is left of the Greek left? The political left is quite a different concept in Greece compared to the Western concept of what constitutes left. We are now seeing leftist movements rising in the UK and US. But they haven't been tried: the West was never communist. Nor was Greece. Perhaps this is why we are now reconsidering what constitutes fairness and justice in the world. And all this is happening while former European communist nations are leaning gung-ho to the extreme right. The world is in a mess, not just Greece.

An American friend emailed me just yesterday to ask me if there was any coverage of Bernie Sanders in Greece. "Can it possibly be that we, the duped American people, are finally going to stand up and make a real change?" she writes. "It seems a dream. I have asked myself why has Bernie waited for 30 years to run for the nomination? I guess the answer is that finally the winds of change are strong enough and we are mad enough to try to throw out the 1 percent's power and let the middle class people speak."

No, I told my friend, there is no coverage of Bernie here. I've heard about Bernie from another American friend - had she not told me about him, I would have been asking 'who's he?'. Neither so we get any coverage of his UK counterpart Jeremy Corbyn. I only know about Jeremy because I read The Guardian. I think this is because the Greek left has failed abysmally. Its right-turn shenangians have made it look a complete failure. Apart from voting in same-sex civil unions and allowing undocumented people into the country without repercussions (which makes them stranded in a country that can't offer them any meaningful help), it has gone back on every promise it made in the election campaign that helped it to gain power exactly a year ago today. If the left had been successful in any way for the Greek economy, we would be hearing all about the struggles of the leftist parties in other countries of the modern world in our Greek news sites. But the Greek left has failed - abysmally, as I note above. It celebrates its first anniversary in power today by taxing the average Greek citizen very unfairly (for 'growth' purposes), supporting the European bourgeoisie (to keep getting loans), and placing family and friends connected to the coalition government in positions of state power (nepotism). One year on, the average Greek citizen now thinks that the left was a fraud. That's probably why we hear nothing about Bernie Sanders in Greek news. We have lost faith in the left. And because we don't trust the right, either, we have lost faith in all politicians, and we just trust ourselves.

I'm not at all pessimistic about the future of Greece. It's tied with the current global trends. If things are going badly in general, then it won't be easy to start up all over again anywhere. Utopia does not exist. Greece is challenging to live in, that's for sure. But the more I understand my people, the easier I find it to live among them, and just lately, the easier they find it to put up with me. "Will you ever get sick of us?" my family recently asked me. No, I assured them. No one gets sick of Greece. Even if I decide to leave Greece, I'll never be sick of Greece. I'll always be trying to find ways to get back. Greece is stuck with me for the time being.

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Greek cheesecake (Τζιζκέικ)

Cheesecake in the sense that it is understood in modern culinary terms - a crumbed base, topped by a cream-cheese filling and decorated with fruit or jam - is not very Greek, even though one of the first cheesecakes was probably the 'plakounta' (placenta) made by ancient Greeks. Something similar to the plakounta is the simple melopita (honey pie), made on the island of Sifnos, a self-crusting egg-and-fresh-cheese mixture sweetened with honey. Traditional Greek cooking also includes a lot of sweet cheese-based desserts: in Crete, we have mizithropita (also known as Sfakiani pita) and other similar filo-wrapped pies.

Modern New York style cheesecake is now widely available in Greek patisseries, and is quite popular, possibly due to the heavy advertising of Philadelphia cream cheese, with a whole TV cooking show dedicated to its use. It's not an ingredient I keep in the house because of our preference for locally produced fresh cheeses. I decided to make a cheesecake with my leftover Greek Christmas cookies, melomakarona, which we got a bit tired of eating. For the cream cake, an idea would be to use a recipe for melopita which uses fresh cheese (mizithra). But local mizithra varieties have a distinctly savoury taste, which is why it isn't the best cheese to use when making a no-cook cheesecake. For this reason, I decided to use Philadelphia cream cheese, which gives a smooth texture, mixed with some other Greek dairy products.



For the base:
Break some leftover melomakarona (including crushed walnuts - I think I used about 10 melomakarona) for your base and mix them with about 50g butter. Press this mixture into a baking tin (I don't have a springform tin).

For the cream filling:
Place a small pottle of cream cheese (200g) with equal amounts of thick Greek yoghurt (known in Greece as γιαούρτι στραγγιστό - 'milk cream') and cream (known in Greece as κρέμα γάλακτος - 'milk cream'), 50g runny honey and grated orange zest. Once the mixture thickens (but does not set), pour it over the biscuit base and allow to set in the fridge.

For the topping:
Any kind of jam would do here. I decided to cook up a fresh runny jam, by heating about 100g of frozen red berries with 50g sugar for 5 minutes on high heat. I poured this hot mixture over the cold cream to get a slightly marbled effect. (Alternatively, let the jam cool down for a firmer top layer.) 

Another Greek idea for topping would be to pour some honey over the cream, sprinkled with orange zest and ground cinnamon, something I decided against at the last minute, because I was fast running out of honey after all my Christmas baking. honey also has a very sharp taste, whereas sugar is more neutral (it sweetens something without adding flavour to it, like honey does).

It's now St John's feastday, and there are still some more melomakarona (as well as kourambiedes) left over. An idea for a trifle, perhaps?  

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A whiff of Paris (Άρωμα Παρισιού)

I'm a bit of a σπιτόγατος, so I appreciated the offer of a friend last night to meet up with her in town. It was a mild winter's evening, quite a change from the very cold temperatures that we experienced over the Christmas and New Year period. The town was not at all enticing on this night as it had just started drizzling, it was rather dark, and there were hardly any people walking with us. Quite surprisingly, many of the cafes and restaurants were closed in the area where we were walking, which seemed strange, as one would think that this is the time when people would be out making merry. But the New Year's holiday was pretty much over, and the next day was a normal working Monday. We walked along one lonely street after another, often in the company of more stray cats than human beings. At one point, we stopped to admire the display at a clothes store. "Very chic!" we both agreed.

We continued to walk towards our destination which was a cafe located on a side street close to the cathedral of Hania. As soon as we entered Eisodion St, the atmosphere changed. The street was lined with cafes and tables, which were all looking quite full, despite the rain. Awnings had been placed on both sides of the street above the businesses, which shielded the patrons of the half dozen businesses that were doing brisk trade in the area. There were no empty seats indoors, so we took an outdoor table at Sketi Glyka where we had a great vantage point with the whole street in view.

The cafe has been open for about three years in Hania, and it has a good following. It's very popular among young people, with a reputation based mainly on the high quality French-style pastries made on the premises, which make it original to Hania. It is also popular as a dessert restaurant, and serves nice warm drinks to go with its sweet offerings.

  

These days, novel businesses that rely on local rather than tourist custom pay great attention to details like decor, a far cry from the plastic-lined paper tablecloth of the traditional Greek summertime taverna. Businesses in Hania constantly have to juggle between different tastes on extreme ends, something which proves difficult when the two different kinds of clientele are cohabiting the same space. It's easier to do this in the winter when the tourist go, and the town is taken back by the locals.

Our tourists from abroad - both Greek and non-Greek alike - decry the modernism of new-style Greek businesses, slandering them as blasphemously non-traditional in a 'traditional' country like Greece. They forget that the average Greek citizen is just as modern as they are, and seeks the same globalised lifestyle that they themselves are enjoying in tier respective countries.

All the while that I was sipping my chili-mango flavoured tea, I couldn't help feeling a little smug about having found a bit of Paris in my own hometown, without the threat of terrorism. Every country has its own problems, but that particular problem is not at all particular to Greece. No one is immune to terrorism, but our own form of home-grown terrorism is quite different to that of France.

Bonus photo: Christmas lights in Hania - Christmas isn't over for us here until Epiphany, and the post-Christmas sales start in mid-January, not Boxing Day.

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Kiwi rack of lamb (Αρνάκι Νέα Ζηλανδίας)

A kiwi rack of lamb, bought on 50% discount at the Marinopoulos supermarket, originally priced at 22 euro. A long long time had passed since I had last bought a kiwi rack of lamb. At this price, it seemed the right time to do so now.



Cretan lamb is much much smaller, somewhat scrawnier than kiwi lamb. A Cretan lamb chop always feels like I'm eating a lollipop meatball. We don't often eat lamb because we prefer beef and pork. So when I saw it on special, I thought it would be a meal I would enjoy cooking and eating, to remember (much) older times.

I'm now very used to Cretan lamb, which is smaller than Greek lamb raised in the mainland. Although we also buy French and Dutch meat (where our main meat imports - beef, pork and chicken - come from), we buy only Greek lamb. So this kiwi meat smelt very different in my kitchen. I remembered the first time I smelt Greek lamb cooking in the oven of a small Greek home kitchen. At the time, for me, it stunk. Nowadays, it smells quite neutral to me. I am more likely to detect the scent of the wine it's soaked in, and the herbs and spices used to cook it, than the meat itself.

I tried to recall the smells in our NZ house when we cooked kiwi lamb, but I couldn't remember them. I couldn't even remember the smell of kiwi meat as my mother cooked it before we went to church, so that our Sunday roast could be ready when we returned home. I remembered nothing. Nothing! Like I had never even been there.

The smell of the rack of lamb in my kitchen smelt wrong. The smell was pretty strong. No doubt, someone would notice soon. So I soaked the lamb in wine, doused it in spices and cooked it for ages, hoping that the smell would somehow go away (or at least, stay hidden). But that smell didn't go away. Even though it was somehow veiled by the seasonings, it had now permeated the kitchen on this rather cold Saturday.

"What's that smell, Mum?" my son asked me, making me feel rather nervous.

"That looks so good!" my daughter said, comforting me somewhat as she saw me taking out the roast from the oven.

"Is it cooked through?" my husband asked, which is usually his main concern with meat. I could see it falling off the bone. My husband then noted that his father had once bought kiwi lamb when he was young and his mother cooked it, but the smell put them off, and it was left uneaten.

Oh, shit, I thought. But times have changed: "Whoever isn't hungry isn't obliged to eat," I reminded everyone. We all sat down for dinner.

The rack of lamb looked huge as it sat in the roasting pan. I'd had to cut it in half to make it fit. I wondered if we would get through it, especially if mutiny was declared (over the smell, which was faint, but still quite discernible). Things turned out well. The lamb was really quite OK. Some comments were made about the differences noted when compared to the lamb we usually cook at home. The smell was apparent to all (I knew it!), so I was ready with my wine-and-spices story. I remembered the price of that rack of lamb (information that I kept to myself), and I praised myself for landing such a bargain. Should I have bought two pieces at that price, I wondered. The supermarket freezer had quite a few of them in stock (all bearing the 50% discount sticker).

I took a bite, concealing my own hesitation. Any second thoughts I had about this rack of lamb had to remain in my head. Poor thing, I thought, it's like it had landed in a house full of loud opinionated (ie obnoxious) people, an invited guest who was regarded as a freak. Make yourself at home, they all said to it as they poked it prodded it, exposing its foreigness in all the ways possible. I felt embarrassed, almost ready to apologise to the visitor for any offence we may have caused.

Perhaps these awkward feelings might not have arisen, had the company been different. But it's much easier for me to change the meat than it is the company. Greek lamb or kiwi lamb, it will make little difference to me. The sooner I don't have to cook, the more quickly I will enjoy my food, Όπου γη και πατρίς - the origin of the lamb will make no difference.

(Note to myself: Next lamb dish - Greek-style fricassee, with lettuce from our garden. Do not use kiwi meat. Wrong smell.)

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Hoxha the Greek

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, communism declined all over Europe, and people from communist countries were able to move freely. At this point, many citizens of former communist countries entered Greece, whose borders never really needed controlling during the communist era: Greece was surrounded by the sea in the south which created a natural border that was difficult to navigate, with Turkey in the East and Italy in the West, countries whose politics never targeted Greece from the migration aspect, and finally the communist countries in the north, who guarded their own borders for their own purposes. But when communism began to lose favour and free movement was granted, Greece was an obvious choice for Eastern Europeans (as we often label the citizens of former communist countries), and since 1990, many Eastern Europeans, primarily Albanians, are a permanent fixture of Greek demographics. But a whole generation has passed since then, and immigrants' children have been born/raised in Greece: the Albanian in Greece is now a Greek Albanian.

I've written before about Albanian people in Crete. 25 years down the track, we are talking about a second generation of Albanians who have been born and/or educated here, and they are now creating the third generation of Greek Albanians. Despite being born in Greece though, their citizenship status still creates problems for them in terms of official documents, and they remain a kind of Hellenic alien. The previous government was set to recognise some rights of second generation immigrants, but this is now being vetoed by the present government's coalition partner (who says that it may show preference in recognising the third generation - and so the chase goes on).

The second and third immigrant generation has essentially grown up and been educated in Greece. They speak Greek perfectly, without an accent, and they do not stand out among the general population, given that Greeks come in similar shapes, colours and sizes as they do. Despite the subtle differences between Greeks and Albanians in terms of their appearance (they tend to be shorter, paler and slimmer than Greeks, and they sometimes dress differently), Greek Albanians are thoroughly assimilated, and can be found in all sectors of society, save one: the public service, which in Greece is still reserved for 'real' Greeks.

The way that Albanians have assimilated in Greek society reveals a lot about Greek society itself. I'll use a few examples of Albanian people I know and have contact with, who show 'typical' Greek societal traits. My Albanian contacts are simply copying society:

1. My daughter recently came home feeling rather grumpy, after we told her that she couldn't stay longer than 9pm at a Sunday night party at a friend's house. "But the party hasn't even started!" she complained. The next day was a school day and the start of a new working week. Didn't her Albanian friend's parents know this? I'm sure they did. But this is just how the average Greek in their neighbourhood holds parties.

2. An Albanian friend recently told me that he is no longer sure about his legal status in Greece. He had a resident's permit, but during one of the least stable political periods of Greece in 2012, he stopped paying his social welfare contributions - like many Greeks - given the lack of monitoring. But now that the system has caught up the non-payers, he owes a lot of money - like many Greeks - and if he doesn't pay it, he will be asked to leave the country - unlike his Greek counterparts, because they are living in their own country.

3. My husband recently picked up an Albanian from the police station, where he had spent two nights in a cell. His crime: driving without having a driver's licence. Driving without a licence was quite common in Greece, up until the law came down harder on unlicensed drivers, albeit relatively recently, and now the general rule is that people will not risk it. This man has been living in Crete for more than a decade, is married and has three children. He had no legal status in Greece. but this was not a problem when the law was lenient, and he was just doing what other Greek citizens were also doing. Now that it's harsher, he finds himself in great difficulty, much greater than the average Greek: legalising his status in this country will require a lot of money.




The crisis is said to have taken its toll on all residents of Greece, irrespective of their background, and many Greek Albanians have had to reassess their existence, in the same way as other Greeks, in their country of birth. For many Albanians born in Greece, Greece remains their homeland in most senses, even food-wise, as can be seen from the highly authentic looking Greek food, prepared, cooked and sold in North London, by Albanian-Greeks.

The arrangement of the food in this cosy-looking takeaway restaurant has little to differentiate it from the typical Greek mayirio found all over the country. In fact, it felt like I was looking at the dishes on display in the Agora of my own hometown. The reviews of the restaurant attest to its Greek authenticity - but the facebook site is quite telling of a different story. The names in the likes and comments are not at all Greek.


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Steak and kidney-less pie

One of our more memorable meals in London was taken on New Year's Eve at the Battersea Pie Station in Covent Garden. We had ended up there after attempting a walk along the Thames, starting from Cannon St. At Blackfriars, we were stopped by the crowd and safety control units who were policing the area and keeping people away from the riverside, due to the fireworks event that was schedule to take place later in the evening. Our detour away from the riverside took us through some very London sites of great historical interest. It almost felt Dickensian.

Poultry obviously takes its name from its former association with the chicken trade.

We were intrigued by what looked like a private function with a focus on seafood...

... and highly unamused by this vile-sounding Christmas food special! (It has been described as: "An overwhelmingly negative reaction, ranging from 'aggressively disgusting' to 'one of the worst things I’ve ever put in my mouth'. It gets points for effort, attempting to combine virtually every festive ingredient, but it tastes like someone has pushed their Christmas leftovers into a blender and served them with rice.")

New Year's Eve is a very quiet day for London business people, but even when London is supposedly sleeping...

... it keeps changing looks, as it prepares for various events, and this time, the portaloos made it look like it would be welcoming the New Year with a heavy bout of drinking.

We eventually needed to use a bathroom ourselves, so I popped into a Pret-a-Manger and bought some Christmas mince pies which I'd really wanted to try while in London.

When I asked for the bathroom facilities, believe it or not, this place did NOT have toilets! So we held off, in the hope that we would eventually find a place to take a leak legally.

At The Strand, the former Aldwych tube station, often used as a film location, looked ghostly silent. This street was cut off to strollers due to the fireworks event.

Somerset House was looking very festive with its ice rink (where we found some free bathroom facilities).

I had a quick browse through the ridiculously overpriced Fortnum and Masons shop (it was sponsoring the ice rink) - 50 pounds for a set of 6 Christmas crackers, did I read that right?!

A short stroll away, we found ourselves at Covent Garden. Cold weather makes you feel hungry all the time. I chose the Battersea Pie Station, in the hope that I would find some steak and kidney pie (and Cornish pasty - another of my favorite pies in New Zealand). We weren't disappointed. My family lets me do the ordering most places when in London, because they know I know the food well enough. My early life in colonial New Zealand stopped abruptly just when New Zealand's food tastes became more international, so I still have fond memories of New Zealand old-fashioned comfort food, which were invariably British-based.

Chicken and mushroom pie, steak and kidney pie, and Cornish pasty - ~20 pounds, with a bottle of beer and a cup of tea.

Back home, when I decided to make a steak kidney pie myself, I found it near impossible to find kidneys! In Greece, the sale of beef and chicken kidneys has been banned since the mad cow furore - which started in the UK; yet, they aren't banned there! Although lamb's kidneys are still available for purchase here, when I tried to track some down, I found that they are never severed from the actual animal, so you have to buy the part of the animal that they are connected to. This is done for transparency reasons: in this way, the butcher is showing you that the animal was healthy - if the kidney is missing, the buyer may wonder whether the animal was sick. 

I used this very easy-to-follow recipe as the basis of my beef stew and pastry. The beef stew was cooked last night, the pastry was made this morning, and we had the pie for lunch with some leek and potato soup. 

To replace the umami taste of the kidneys, I bought a packet containing two slices of kavurma, adding some mushrooms and soya sauce (I was out of Worcestershire sauce) to my beef stew. I think the taste was successful, and the whole family enjoyed the pie, which will be made again eventually, because I froze half the stew. Slow-cooked food takes a long time to cook, so why not make a double batch and save your time later?

Bonus photo: A chat with the butcher where I bought the beef also revealed another mysterious EU meat regulation, which forbids lamb's spleen from being sold - but cow's spleen is permissible!

At any rate, if you have close relations with someone who raises their own meat, you can procure everything. I had lamb's spleen in sheep's intestine last week at an inner-city cafe bar, where the landlord-owner-cook prepares everything freshly and to order.

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OECD well-being indicators

Where is the best place to live these days? According to the most recent OECD report on regional well being around the world, it is Canberra:

While the Sydney Morning Herald headline said "Canberra the best place to live, in the world's best country", the rival Herald Sun headline went "Is Canberra really the world's best city? More like capital punishment". http://www.bbc.com/news/business-29531850

The interactive website of the OECD clumps Crete with the remaining Aegean islands:

Given that Crete is the largest island in Greece (and the fifth largest of the Mediterranean), the scores are totally misleading. An island like Crete with a population of 500,000 and four major urban centres, one of which constitutes the fourth biggest city in the whole country, cannot possibly be compared to a small Aegean island like (for example) Limnos, which has a total population count of 16,000. The housing score surprised me most: there is no shortage of homes for Greek island citizens, and Greek island houses are generally quite sturdy, despite our numerous earthquakes. Crete in particular is in a much better position earthquake-wise than other Greek regions. 

Athens does not seem to fare much better than the 'Aegean Islands and Crete' in terms of jobs, environment and housing, while income levels appear to be higher in Athens: 

This does not seem to make any sense - the island environments cannot really be compared to the highly urbanised Athenian environment, while income levels, which are generally low all over the country, do not take into account the purchasing power of the average citizen in each region. 

Comparing the results for the place where I live now to the place where I was born, New Zealand has also been assigned a rather messy classification: I doubt the average New Zealander answers 'the North island' when answering the question 'Where do you live?'. This details is even more suspect, given that the 'best place' to live in the world is 'Canberra', which is a city, not a region (like 'North Island'). And a city can never be compared to a greater region. But Canberra and Wellington (for example) could be compared to each other. 

It's rather surprising to find environment given full marks for 'North Island', especially when compared to Greece's islands - I wonder what is missing from the Greek island environment, for them to get such a low score. More surprises: the 'North Island' and the 'Aegean Islands and Crete' have very similar income levels. 

A city I haven't lived in but have visited often enough to be able to compare with where I live is London: 

We understand from recent news reports that there isn't enough housing in London. Housing is also a very expensive commodity for all residents despite their income levels. From what I've seen of housing in London, I really don't think that housing there is three times better in 'Greater London' than it is in 'Aegean Islands and Crete'.

These figures really don't make much sense to my sensible mind. They appear to be completely generic, and totally unrepresentative of the true quality of life found in them. The OECD admits this to a certain extent:

How’s life?  The answer can depend on what region you live in.  Evidence shows that some factors that most influence peoples’ well-being are local issues. http://www.oecd.org/regional/how-is-life-in-your-region.htm 

It has done more specific case studies of various regions, but there are unfortunately very few of them. A comparable one for Crete may be of Sardinia. To get more information about Sardinia, you can go to this link and click on the bubble on the map.

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Plantain

It isn't just foodies who like to browse through food stalls when travelling in foreign lands, as we are all, to some extent, attracted to the unusual. When in London, I like to look at the fresh food stalls in Lewisham, which display quite a few imported species of fruit and vegetables that we do not see in Hania, and I wonder how they are prepared and what they taste like.

Apart from the tomatos, bell peppers and avocados, everything else looked quite foreign to me. Our supermarkets stock only one kind of mango (always imported), and one type of okra (only when it's in season). Taro (κολοκάσι) is now making an appearance, but potatos,onions and garlic continue to be the only root vegetables we see in our fresh markets. Ginger is now a staple in supermarkets, but it's still only imported.  

This year, I decided to buy some plantains to take back and cook at home. I bought them in a very unripe state - they were bright green, with no black markings. At first sight, of course they look like bananas, which often confuses the uninitiated. My family couldn't believe that they could be anything else.

I bought the plantains at the same time, but they all seemed to be at different ripening stages after nearly three weeks sitting on the kitchen work bench.  

Plantains don't really look any more exciting than bananas. Plantains are always cooked (the German word for plantain is Kochbanane - 'cooking banana', which expresses it succinctly), unlike bananas which are eaten raw, even in their unripe state. But even bananas were once an exotic species for Crete/Greece, and they haven't even been around for a century here:

In the early 20s, a monk from the area, returning from the Holy Land, brought with him a few banana plants and planted them in the Monastery of St. Antoniou of Arvi (in Iraklio, Crete). When the plants fruited, nobody tasted them despite their nice fragrance, since they knew nothing about them. But a few plants were planted in gardens and fields as ornamentals. A few years later a doctor who was in the area and knew the fruit, not only tried it before the astonished inhabitants, but bought a bunch of bananas. In the early 30s the first crops were a fact. Bananas, grown in sacks with straw or paper, were transported by animals to Viannos, and from there by truck to Iraklio and then by ferry to Athens. The Cretans were still not eating them. Ten years later the banana cultivation started in Malia, on the north coast of Crete. At that time the price was 25 drachmas per oka (old measuring system) in the winter which fell to 5 drachmas in the summer. At the same time the price of olive oil did not exceed 7 drachmas per oka. In the early 50s the Cretans 'discovered' banana as a fruit and began placing the product on the markets of the island. Demand is great, but is not covered by production. In the late 50s, banana imports began during the winter from African countries and South America. (For more information, click on this link.)

Bananas only became a common commodity in the Greek market after entry into the EU. Before that, they were considered exotic and expensive. When I was teaching in Athens in the early 1990s, a student recounted this story to me: her parents had been to London to visit friends, where they purchased a large bag full of bananas which they took on the plane back to Athens. At the airport, they took a taxi to take them home, where they unloaded their suitcases and bags - but the driver didn't see the bananas on the ground and he squashed them with the wheel by accident, much to the dismay of my friend's parents, who had transported them to Greece like precious cargo!

Post by Organically Cooked.

My plantain dishes, all cooked with our own olive oil.

After nearly 3 weeks of having the plantains sitting on my kitchen bench, I decided that the time had come to try cooking them. My recipes come straight from the internet, my first source for anything I don't know. Apparently, you can eat them both as a savoury and a sweet. The green ones are better as a savoury, while the riper ones are better as a sweet. I chose to use one less ripened plantain to make tostones which are very popular in the Americas, eaten with rice and beans, and a simple sweet plantain dish with the most ripened plantain, similar to the fried banana dessert in Asian restaurants.

My family's reaction to the plantain recipes was as could be expected of people eating unusual food for the first time. They said that it wasn't the most exciting thing that they had ever tasted. Perhaps it's true that plantains aren't the most exciting food species around. But they are forgetting something. I told them to imagine that this was a common meal in their home, like it is for many other people around the world, and also to imagine that the plantain is all they may have had to cook with. I know that they enjoyed the meal much more than they would have, had we not had this little talk.

The last plantain was eaten last night, and I can tell you that it brought back memories of our recent trip to London, knowing that there won't be any more plantains to eat for quite a while...

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Interlude

I've been away from blogging for a bit, due to our London holiday. We always prefer cooler weather for vacationing due to our own climate which is generally too hot. From our first day there, we felt very lucky with the weather, which was generally fine and sunny, not too hot, and no rain or even wind, perfect for enjoying the outdoor London life.

I'd like very much to blog about what I saw and what we ate, but we came back to our busy life, and have only just managed to catch up with our home life this weekend. So I'll leave my travel stories for later, when I have gathered and organised my thoughts a little. In the meantime, you can enjoy my photos here.

If I were to pick the one photo that summarised our trip for me, it would be this one. It may look very insignificant to most people, but put yourselves in my shoes (ie my red sandals): the last time I walked on grass and could feel it on my legs was when I was last in NZ (over a decade ago). All my subsequent visits to London have taken place in cold weather so my legs were always shoed-and-socked. This is the first time I have visited in September. The feeling of cool grass blades cooling my toes took me right back to my childhood. In Hania, you cannot find grass long or thick enough to do this. If you sit on it, you'll get a brown bum.

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The happy immigrants of London (Οι χαρούμενοι μετανάστες του Λονδίνου)

I just read a very interesting article written in Greek by Eirini Dermitzaki, a director and writer born in 1982, in Sitia, which is located in Eastern Crete. She studied Acting and Filmmaking. She currently lives in London. You can find out more about Eirini on her website. I thought it summarised the situation of London's immigrant workers very well. With Eirini's permission, I have translated it here.

 

"We are the happy immigrants. With tremendous joy, we wake up in the morning. We love the alarm clock that lets us wake up at six. We love the soiled carpet as we step on it to go to the bathroom. That carpet has been stepped on by other good immigrants like us from all over the world. Then we pour water on our face, one shot of ice, one shot of heat. It is said that English taps are deliberately constructed in this way. A different one for the cold water, a different one for the hot, so we can easily get used to the changes.

"We migrant workers are such worthy people, that we stack ourselves on the train every morning to get to work. There, we meet others like ourselves. It doesn’t matter if you wear a nurse’s uniform, overalls or a suit, because we are all the same and we are so much in love with each other that we don’t mind getting stuck all over each other, so if anyone ever fainted from fatigue or sleeplessness, we will catch him in time. To pass the time on the train we talk on our cell phones or play with our tablets. It is very significant to be engaged in this way because we don’t need to make the effort to think.

Eirini Dermitzaki exhibited her work last year at the Slate Gallery in London.

"We drink coffee before we get to work. A beautiful Fairtrade coffee from African plantations. We love coffee because it was created with loving care by the hands of other immigrants. All of us, of course, are dreaming of the day when we will all drink only tea.

"At work, time passes pleasantly whether our boss is British or an immigrant. Because both of them hide in us the hope that one day we too will become masters of immigrants, or better still, of the English. During the break we are pleased to be sitting side by side with immigrants. Our colleagues Ahmed, Pedro and Sonja smile cordially. We are all pleased that we are all immigrants with all our equal rights, and we feel like healthy members of society, and we are grateful that we are not like the others, unemployed migrants, or even worse, undocumented illegals.

Eirini concentrated on Schism in the Slate Gallery exhibition: "What you leave behind, what lies ahead. The problem of integration especially in a city like London whose residents are from every corner of the planet. And in the end, you may end up getting lost somewhere in between. You may belong to neither your country of origin, nor the one where you migrated." 

"Once our work is done for the day, we drink our beer in the neighbouring pub to celebrate that we worked today. We laugh and drink and shout out loud, so that we forget what we really wanted to talk about.

"We immigrants, before going home, stop at the supermarket. We no longer look for products from our country on the shelves, because packaged food in plastic wrap is very cheap and we eat it all. We do not care if the vegetables are tasteless and the meat smells like carrion, because we feel safe when we carry our full bags home. At the exit, we greet our friend, our immigrant neighbour, who is carrying his own shopping bags, and feels the same pride that we do, that he can feed himself and his family.

"Back home, we share the living room with other immigrants. The kitchen cabinets, the refrigerator shelves, and the toilet paper. To have a bath, or to do our laundry, we arrange shifts. And it's very important that everything is in order and organized. Our house is like a small state. With rules and boundaries. With limits. We immigrants like that kind of stuff. It fills us with feelings of security that people who speak other languages or believe in another God can observe the same laws.

"The days pass, and so do the months, we get paid, we take our leave, we pay the bills, the rent. Everything is expensive and many times we do not have many enough money but we do not worry. The bank takes care of us immigrants with a bunch of loans and credit cards. At night we lie in our beds and we do not feel our legs from fatigue. Others do not feel their back or their head. Others do not feel any emotions. No thoughts before we sleep, because we do not miss our country at all. We feel fortunate that we are immigrants and we know that those who stayed behind are jealous of us. But we do not think about them. Because that is how we immigrants are. Since we became immigrants, we have forgotten who we were before that. So we sleep soundly like birds, and this is very important. It’s beautiful to sleep so deeply. You don’t even remember what dreams you saw. Anyway, what can one do with one’s dreams? We immigrants have a tomorrow. A next day, the same as yesterday, awaits us."

Immigration is not all it's cracked up to be.

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