Tinned tomatoes

I've been following the populist 'no more tinned tomatoes' debate that broke out just over a week ago in the New Zealand media, when a women's refuge worker demanded (not just requested) that food donations to the charity should not include tinned tomatoes. The 'Treatise on Tinned Tomatoes and Why They Are Like Books' did not get as much airtime as did the readers' vicious comments about the connection between 'poor people' and tinned tomatoes, which sounded like it was coming from non-Maori/Pasifika (read: white) higher-end middle class New Zealand society. The post (I found a cached version) did not actually villify tinned tomatoes. All the reasons that the writer gave for banning tinned tomatoes were based on solid facts and sound logic. Given that we are just days away before Christmas, it shouldn't be too difficult for most people to see why words like 'tinned' and 'staple foods' don't collocate well with 'Christmas'.

The women's refuge worker claimed that refuges (like food banks) often have many tinned tomatoes in their pantries, often past their due date. Women who use refuges generally don't use tinned tomatoes, nor did the people who raised them, and some of the women who use refuges don't even (know how to) cook. So if you gave those women a choice, they would never even ask for tinned tomatoes. In other words: if a woman cooks with tinned tomatoes, its a cultural thing. Pasifika/Maori women - the main users of women's refuges in NZ - are unlikely to have a cultural background of cooking with tinned tomatoes. Middle class NZ society might be very surprised to discover this: some people just don't use this quintessential global pantry stocker. By judging these women on foreign (to them) cultural terms, ie as good and knowledgeable budgeters ("tinned tomatoes are cheap!", "tinned tomatoes are versatile!"), the 'tinned tomato brigade' can't actually see what these women are feeling when they enter a refuge, ie sadness, depression, shellshock, running away from violence. Coupled with a lack of life skills and literacy skills, being cash strapped, in debt and looking after children, they wouldn't even feel like cooking, let alone cook from scratch: tinned tomatoes usually imply cooking from scratch.

Women who turn to a refuge for help have no family support - if they did, they would not be asking a refuge to help them. The writer made a point of how important it was to help such women get what they wanted, rather than what other people feel they need. In such moments, they want simple comforts: "spaghetti on toast or really simple things, stuff [that can be eaten] straight from a can if needs be".  Donors donate what they think poor people (which does not always mean the same thing as 'women in a refuge') need rather than want: "That’s you putting your values, and your mores, and your cultural prejudices on other people." Offering to teach women how to cook, how to use tinned tomatoes, and any other life skills they may be lacking is all very well, but there's a time and place for everything; when they arrive at a refuge, they need to settle into a new kind of life. Eventually, they may start preparing meals like they used to for themselves and their children; but some of these women may never want to cook, let alone from scratch. So tinned tomatoes are probably never going to be useful for them.

My old no longer wanted books started this foreign language library at CIHEAM.MAI Chania. Many students use it in their free time, and students also add to the collection.

The writer made the analogy that "tinned tomatoes are a bit like books": just like we don't all cook, we don't all read. While cooking and reading may sound like very basic activities to some people, to others they are not. For some people, cooking and reading are very difficult activities. Giving things to people who need things is not the same as giving people presents: the things you give to people who need things have to be useful things. Giving tinned tomatoes - a very cheap common product - to someone who has never used them is like giving away your old books which you no longer wish to read to people who never read novels. The better off harbour comfortable perceptions about what others should be doing all the time to become better off.

The treastise against tinned tomatoes aroused a storm of comments from both sides of the argument. A (Maori) woman working for another women's refuge added canned chickpeas and canned lentils to the forbidden list of items that refuges didn't want:

"We ask for fresh meat and vegetables and we get beans and lentils. What are our people going to do with chickpeas? Are they going to be making hummus in the safe house? Like tinned tomatoes, chickpeas and lentils have to be cooked and accompanied with other ingredients, using knowledge and supplies that many families [don't] have."

A (white) woman working for a Salvation Army food bank said she was shocked to hear that other charities were turning away tinned tomatoes:

"...the refuges are being a bit fussy... We are very short on things like [tinned] tomatoes... chickpeas and lentils are staples in Salvation Army food parcels given to families at this time of year... The staples are never going to go out of fashion. And hungry families will usually eat anything."

Anything? I doubt it. (And she also put her cultural prejudices into the picture by calling women in refuges hungry.)  Food is incredibly personal and highly cultural. Clearly the Salvation Army is catering for different kinds of people from those entering a women's refuge. People on a low income may also lead a more stable kind of life, not the nomadic existence of a woman fleeing from violence. Processed food is not necessarily the greatest miracle in the food world to make women's lives easier; having someone doing all the bloody cooking for you is even better than buying, carrying, storing, preparing and cooking food yourself. We don't all have that luxury of a private home cook; this usually happens when you are very wealthy or if you live in a cultural setting where one of the household's women (eg the grandmother) will prepare meals for all the family members, who may be working out of the home, or have been assigned other tasks. As mentioned above, if a woman has this kind of family support, she would not be asking a refuge to help keep her safe in the first place.


Snails and xinohondro - highly acquired Cretan tastes!

As I was following the discussion in the media, what really struck me was how unlikely it is among these refuges that someone will be cooking something for someone else, so that those people who need a decent meal (especially children) would find something that wasn't full of sugar/fat/salt (read: snack-type ready-to-eat highly-processed, eat-from-the-packet kind of food). It is already obvious that a lot of the people using these services don't have many life skills needed in order to maintain a healthy standard. So why not have someone cooking something on a regular basis, which can be served up to everyone and is also healthy and comforting? Some of the commentators mentioned that they would like to do such a thing as a cook-up, where some of the meals produced can be frozen for emergency moments. I think that the answer to this question will bring to the fore a host of other social issues that will be difficult to resolve.

It seems to have escaped people's notice that a lot of people in highly advanced countries like New Zealand are too busy to cook these days. This doesn't apply just to people in difficult situations. Most people in advanced countries spend their time in many creative ways, which often include doing things away from the home. And when they do have free time, they spend it more leisurely. Cooking is not a leisure activity when you are thinking about how to feed a family. It's a chore.

Lentil (φακές - left) and bean (φασολάδα - right) stew/soup - it depends on how much water you add.

Cooking for others, cooking with tomatoes and cooking with beans are therefore all very culturally based. In truth, I cook tomato-based bean dishes not because they are the yummiest thing imaginable, but because I have to feed a family, and beans are a pretty good quick cheap choice of food which can be prepared the night before, by the working woman in the household. (I am doing this right now as I write: a pot of lentil stew is boiling away on the stove. It should be ready before midnight. No, I don't use a pressure cooker.) This is not to say that a woman living in New Zealand from the Maori/Pasifika cultures cannot do the same thing for her family as a Greek or Indian woman (two cultures which use beans a lot in their daily diet); she doesn't do this simply because it's not part of her culture. She could be taught to do something like this - but if it was never part of your culture to prepare food in this way, learning to do this kind of chore is very difficult in modern times, when people are generally being 'taught' to treat food as a commodity: you buy/eat food when it's time to eat, or when you're hungry, or maybe to comfort you - and it's all ready prepared by someone else, and - generally speaking - you will generally cook when you feel like it. What may have been part of the food culture of a Maori/Pasifika woman fifty years ago has now changed, due to her translocation - due both to internal and external migration - into a highly advanced society headed and directed by non-Maori/Pasifika leaders. No matter how settled a woman in New Zealand who has turned to a refuge becomes, she is unlikely to revert to a less processed-food daily diet.

*** *** *** 

The 'tinned toms' discussion that ensued tells us much more about comfort food, processed food, and the act of cooking, than it does about how to use tinned tomatoes. The following can be implied:
- Comfort food is ready-to-eat food
- Cooking is for people who lead stable lives
- Canned chickpeas and lentils are the kinds of food that connoisseurs, health-freaks, vegetarians, vegans (and generally other 'smart-farts') know about (and eat)
- Certain cultural groups eat a lot of chickpeas and lentils, so they will know what to do with them
- Certain classes of people - especially those whose lives are less complicated - have the chance to be more adventurous in their food experiences
- Canned food (eg chickpeas and lentils) is for poor people
- Canned tomatoes are useful in a home where the act (which is now often considered an art) of cooking can actually take place (read: you have a kitchen, a stove/oven, AND you can afford to pay the electricity/gas bills)
... inter alia.

Canned tomatoes - and muuuuuuuuch more recently canned beans, but never ever canned lentils, except at LIDL when it's having a 'Spanish week' - are highly popular among Greek food banks and especially in soup kitchens. They are cheap and easy to work with. They make quick filling meals. A heated tin of tomatoes could quite possibly be poured over some boiled pasta. BUT: If this was never part of your culinary repertoire, then you will not eat it, let alone know how to make it. Culinary knowledge in western countries has passed into the realms of mystery, while things like chickpeas and lentils are considered food for the poor - or food for cultured. Even Greeks will acknowledge that beans are cheap and that's why the eat them.  Most Greek women with a family (including me) will cook up a bean dish once a week on a week-day, de rigeur.

I can't actually imagine any working Greek woman with a family here in Crete not cooking up a bean dish at least 2-3 times a month, but this is based on cultural norms. Greeks may have become impoverished - but still, there is much truth in saying that theirs is a dignified kind of poverty. We can have our cake and eat it, because we know how to make the cake. Greek identity these days often implies food knowledge. Recent Greek emigrants due to the economic crisis often end up working in their own food-based business. Their family background is not necessarily middle class. They rarely realise the superiority of their culinary skills because until they leave Greece, they do not realise that there are people out there who lack such knowledge. They are also astounded to learn that most people in highly advanced societies watch cooking shows and buy cookery books - but they rarely cook meals: most of their food will have been prepared by someone else, for them to heat and eat.

It's still not very common to see soaked ready-to-use chickpeas (let alone lentils) in Greek supermarkets; on the other hand, there is a plethora of dried beans on the shelves. If such canned products were presented to a Greek woman, and she was asked to produce something on the spot with them, I don't think she'd have much trouble producing a hot comforting meal in little time. All you need to make classic Greek φακές (lentil stew) and ρεβιθάδα (chickpea stew) are tomatoes, beans and water; if you add some minced onion and garlic, salt and pepper, your soup/stew - depending on the amount of water you add - will taste nicer. A hot bean soup made with canned tomatoes makes great comfort food - and it tastes better the next day.

Puttanesca is one of the quickest things I can cook from scratch 

Tinned tomatoes are often hailed as a food processing miracle by media cooks:

"The larder is worryingly bare when you've run out of tinned tomatoes. They are the cook's comfort blanket, the progenitor of any number of soups, sauces, stews and braises... Tomatoes are the best source of the carotenoid pigment lycopene. Some studies suggest it can help prevent prostate, lung, and stomach cancers. Tomatoes are an interesting exception to the rule that cooking food reduces or destroys valuable micronutrients: lycopene is better absorbed when it has been heated, either during processing or cooking, as the heat turns the molecule into more useful isomers. Tomatoes provide significant amounts of bone-strengthening vitamin K, and some research suggests that lycopene also supports bone health. Many studies link tomatoes with heart benefits, and although the mechanisms aren't yet clear, the antioxidant vitamins C and E in them, along with lycopene, seem to slow down the processes that would eventually cause heart disease."

An old photo of my pantry - these days I prefer to freeze our bumper summer tomato harvest.

In short, a pantry full of tinned tomatoes and chickpeas and lentils symbolises domestic wisdom, happiness and prosperity. But this is something that is not within the sight of a woman fleeing to a refuge with just her kids and the clothes they're all wearing. They'd rather be having some tea and toast, and maybe something sweet, like chocolate biscuits, to bump up their spirits. In other words, they want the same things you want. I highly doubt that the average citizen of a highly advanced society is eating tinned chickpeas or lentils cooked in tinned tomatoes on a daily, let alone weekly basis. We all want variety.

When buying "food for the poor", we really need to think about what we ourselves like to eat rather than what we think poor people 'should' be eating. Better still, charities can tell you what they need because they know who they're supplying. It's even better to give them money (they are likely to make better deals with suppliers), so they can do the appropriate shopping for that tiny segment of society that is rarely visible to the majority. Especially now before Christmas, to make it a merry one, skip that bloody canned food. As the Greek saying goes:

Φάτε τώρα που το βρήκατε, γιατί αύριο έρχεται η φακή.

(Eat now that you have good food, because the lentils are coming tomorrow.)

More articles on Greek food banks and soup kitchens:
http://www.organicallycooked.com/2013/03/soup-kitchen.html
http://www.organicallycooked.com/2013/10/food-bank-community-grocery.html
http://www.organicallycooked.com/2016/04/the-social-kitchen-of-hania.html

All quotes come from the following links:
https://thespinoff.co.nz/parenting/11-12-2017/please-no-more-bloody-tinned-tomatoes/
https://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/afternoons/audio/2018625266/jackie-clarke-no-more-tinned-tomatoes
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/99767397/
https://thespinoff.co.nz/parenting/13-12-2017/no-charities-dont-want-your-inedible-food-items/
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11958543
http://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2017/12/charities-ask-kiwis-to-donate-more-than-second-hand-goods-or-tinned-vegetables.html
https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/new-zealand/hamiltons-salvation-army-shocked-auckland-charity-turning-away-tinned-tomatoes
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/99813458/we-want-tinned-tomatoes-hamiltons-salvation-army-says

https://www.stuff.co.nz/manawatu-standard/news/99843749/comments-rejecting-tinned-tomatoes-illjudged
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/99909805/get-off-your-tinned-tomato-high-horse
https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/opinion-analysis/99946985/hype-about-tinned-tomatoes-has-raised-the-debate-on-giving
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/oct/05/tinned-tomatoes-health-benefits-anti-cancer-strong-bones

©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.

Food for thought (Με το νου μας στο φαγητό)

The global trend towards a westernised lifestyle has spoilt us all for choice when it comes to buying and storing the ingredients we use to prepare our meals with. Despite the widespread availability of easy food choices, that still doesn't solve the question of what you're going to do with the food you buy once it comes into the house. The second millenium has spoilt everyone for choice. In my own home, the question of what to cook and how to cook it consumes our time and mind to a great extent. And it's not only our household that suffers from this fate: ask any home cooks in Hania, in Crete, in Greece and probably most places in the world how they choose what to cook on a daily basis to nourish and sustain their family, and I'm sure they'll tell you how difficult it is to please everyone with one meal. How, then, does the main cook decide on what to buy from the food stores she visits (it's usually the woman who does this in most families) and what to prepare for the main meal on a daily basis?

These days, my cookbooks usually sit unused on the bookshelf; I now keep them mainly for sentimental reasons (except for the orange one). The 'TSELEMENTES' cookbook was sent to my mother by her mother, a few years after she got married, but she never used it; the recipes had few associations with the food my mother wanted to cook for her family.

WEEKLY FOOD PLAN: I've always followed some kind of weekly schedule to plan ahead our daily meals; this helps me to be prepared and also to provide enough variety throughout the week. I also use this plan to make sure I don't cook too much fried food or meat. Without a plan, I'd be heating up frozen meals from the supermarket. The next day's meal often has to be cooked the night before due to work commitments, since there are some days when there literally isn't enough time to cook a quick or decent healthy meal. If there is no main meal for lunch due to other commitments, then we prepare a simple dakos and a salad, with a boiled egg or potato which don't take long to cook.

We try our hardest to convince the children that they have to eat like this, but they still need some persuasion; this poster has been stuck on the radiator for a few years now.

But that doesn't mean food thoughts are over for the day, once we've settled lunch. There's the planning for the next day. As soon as we've had our main meal (in Hania, the norm is to eat the main meal any time, according to the work commitments of the family members, after 1pm and before 5pm), I always announce or ask for suggestions about the next day's main meal. It seems that a lot of our waking hours are consumed with thoughts concerning food, preparing it and eating. In order for a family to eat healthy food, this has to be the case, because there are so many considerations to take into account.

Out of curiosity, I decided to keep a record of all the main meals I cooked or ate with my family starting from the beginning of the year (until pneumonia got the better of me). January is a good food month in winter, as there are holiday periods (like Christmas, which is a good time to go out for a meal), and the family spends more time together, so it's easier to plan meals. Lunch (the main meal) and the evening meal (always smaller and less formal than lunch) are separated by a colon. Leftovers are what remained from a previous meal up to three-four days.

1. New Year's lunch: pork and celery, pork steaks, cabbage salad, pizza, kalitsounia, Vasilopita
2. Lentils; leftover pork turned into souvlaki
3. Cauliflower and xinohondro; corn fritters and toasted sandwiches
4. Botanical Park Restaurant
5. Fasolada; dinner at a friend's place
6. Lunch at a friend's place
7. Broccoli pasta bake
8. Fasolada; kalitsounia
9. French fries; bread and oil for supper
10. Biftekia and potatoes in oven with maroule; lihnarakia
11. Pork and celery
12. Lentils; kalitsounia
13. Leftovers; dakos
14. Calamari and wild greens with rice
15. Oven-baked pasta with ratatouille sauce
16. French fries and leftovers
17. Makaronada, leek potage; marathopites; dinner at a friend's place
18. Pad Thai singlina; Sfakianes pites
19. Lentils; leftovers
20. Leftovers
21. Moussaka; kalitsounia
22. Yemista
23. Leftovers
24. French fries, Pad Thai singlina; The Botanical Park Restaurant
25. Leftovers; oven-baked pasta with ratatouille sauce; biscotti
26. Fava, biftekia and sausages
27. Green beans in red sauce
28. Leftovers; Chinese noodles
29. Pilafi; corn fritters; maroule
30. Chicken livers with okra and ravioli pesto; spanakopita and banana cake
31. Fried eggs and maroule; leftovers
    

How much meat, fried food, beans and greens did we eat in a month?

• 14/31 - vegetables and greens (including horta)
• 13/31 (days) - meat (including mince); it must be remembered that this month was a busy one socially with parties, meals out and festivals that usually involve cooking meat (otherwise, the total number would have been 10/31)
• 9/31 - beans and legumes (the total would have been higher if the month wasn't festive)
• 9/31 - fried food

How good to know we didn't stray too far off our target! Coincidentally, rice, pasta and bread, in combination with cheese products, featured almost daily.

TIME LIMITATIONS: Time constraints add a heavy burden to the schedule of even he best cooks. Let's take an example of a simple salad. Have you ever considered how long it takes to wash leafy greens, and let them dry enough so that the salad doesn't taste too gritty or too watery, especially when using your own salad greens from the garden? They are often covered in dust (or muddy) soil. Then there's the chopping and tearing, adding the necessary bits and pieces and the dressing, before that salad gets to the table. If you haven't prepared your greens from the day before, then forget it - you won't be having salad after work, in between picking up kids from school, setting the table to have the meal you prepared (apart from the salad), and knowing that you have to be out the door a certain time for afternoon activities.

I haven't got the patience to face this when I come home from work in the afternoon.
If I haven't prepared a salad from the evening before, we don't get to eat one...

Having a garden is all very well, but you have to devote a lot of time to it, as Rachel Laudan points out. Nothing grows on its own (it may sprout without any help annually, but it still needs your TLC.

STORAGE SPACES: It's all very well to have a food plan, but you also need the appropriate storage spaces if you want to have good healthy food always on hand. For example, if you intend to grow your own vegetables, there won't be much point in growing large quantities unless you are intent on storing them for later use (by freezing or canning). Have you ever considered what your most indispensable ingredients are? What do you always keep well-stocked? How much storage space do you devote to food, whether in the fridge or the pantry? What fresh herbs can you not do without? Do you ever count the cost of carbon footprints when storing food? How far are you prepared to go to reduce them for the sake of storing food items for your convenience?

If I lived in an apartment, I wouldn't have a garden, my balcony would be used for storing a small supply of onions and potatoes, and I wouldn't be able to store more than a crate of oranges from our fields. The kitchen would be too small to handle the preparation required to preserve food, and fitting the deep freeze into the house might be a frightening experience.

My mise-en-place, storage areas, pantry and fridge; the basement also contains a deep freeze for seasonal produce, some crates of citrus and our olive oil supplies for the year.

Just think back to the times when people had limited space in their house and no refrigeration, and compare that to the 'easy food' that we now have available to us. That's more than enough to make you realise how easy it is to eat all the rubbish you want as fast as it takes to say 'I'm hungry'. If you think you don't have enough cupboards in your kitchen to store things the way you want, take a look through these photos, and see what kind of food people around the world need to keep their families going for a week. And don't forget that all storage spaces need spring cleaning, which is why I wish Paula were around to help me sort out mine.

©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.

Tomato sauce for the winter (Ντοματάδα για τον χειμώνα)

My parents bought our first (and only) family home in Wellington when I was seven, where we lived altogether for nearly twenty years. It was full of different rooms for different purposes: a spacious living room (crammed with settees, glass cabinets and a stereo with a record player), a dining room (with a heavy unmoveable table), a TV room (the biggest PYE screen we could find, with ornate cabinet doors to protect the screenn against dust), a separate kitchen, a separate bathroom, a separate toilet, a separate laundry room, a small lawn with flower beds, a huge rambling garden, a basement and even a three-bedroom flat to rent out, all located within easy walking distance of the CBD (central business district), rendering even public transport unnecessary. The view from our house in Mt Victoria reached right out to Victoria University in Kelburn; I knew when the library was open for longer hours than usual just by looking from the kitchen window at the end of a 25-metre hallway. The quarter-acre bungalow dwelling was the NZ norm in the late 20th century, and when you have never lived differently, you think everyone lives like this, or at least strives towards this lifestyle.

When I came to Greece, I was mortified to discover that this was clearly not the case, especially if your home is in the middle of an urban sprawl like Athens. If you're lucky enough to afford a two-bedroom apartment with even a small lounge and a functional kitchen and bathroom, you will consider yourself very lucky, especially if you live and work in the same area. A house with its own four walls and a patch of garden is clearly a luxury.

I'll never forget my first rented flat in a central Athenian suburb, even smaller than what was described above. It was very cheap, which is why I lived there: 30,000 drachmas a month (less than 100 euro, utilities included) for a large bedroom, small windowless hallway which acted as a living room, a tiny but fully functional kitchen, and a bathroom, the only room which I had to share with a tenant who boarded with the landlady, an eccentric, microscopic woman in her mid-40s, who smoked a pipe and liked to walk in and out of my apartment naked, which was easy to do because she had made a small aperture in the dividing wall separating the two apartments. Her dog always seemed to make a point of shitting in my part of the property; she was more than happy to come and clean it up (after she put on some clothes). As you can see from the photo, I was making apple cake even then...



The other tenant shared her own kitchen, where she prepared miso soup and seaweed pasta, regularly inviting me to partake of such meals, accompanied by tea made from strained horta water. She clearly hated cleaning up; all her crockery was stained - nothing was ever scrubbed. She claimed to be a nature lover. She had what looked like a million pot plants strewn all over the adjoining balconies, located on the second floor of a corner apartment block, all set up with an automatic irrigation system. She never spilled a drop of water on the balcony tiles, not even to clean them.

The only good thing about the apartment was its location. The view from my two-by-five metre balcony was still more apartment balconies, but much further away from mine, due to a supermarket building across the road from the block. It had been purposely built and was only two stories high, which meant that I didn't have to stare into another person's home, or watch someone walking around naked. Summer evenings were stiflingly hot; if you opened the windows for air, the noise from the traffic - the apartment block was on a main road - was deafening. The only reassuring noise was the sound of a trolley bus passing by at regular intervals; you could rest assured the means of transport weren't on strike. It made me realise how miserably people force themselves to live, all for the sake of a 'good' job (you work long hours in a big city), going to shows like concerts, theater and film premieres (when you've been working all day, it's an effort to go) or maybe just to feel more refined (hence the rise of urban peasants who buy their apples from a supermarket, yet have never seen an apple tree).

I came to detest boxes for houses, but found that it was the only solution I could afford for a long time. I also realised I didn't want to live in the big smoke. I had no idea what the landscape of the area looked like, having gotten used to the view of one apartment block after another for miles around. One time, I went up to the top floor and was amazed to see that I lived near mountains! I had never put it in my head that I would ever live in (let alone own) a detached house whose walls I didn't have to share with anyone, but I still bought house and garden magazines and home improvement books: Terence Conran's House Book, Laura Ashley's Decorating with Fabric, The Complete Book of Country Living. I was living in the hope that one day I might make my dream come true. And for the most part, the dream of living in a large airy house away from the buzz of city traffic did come true: the four walls of our house are ours and ours alone; I just have to share the floor (it becomes someone else's ceiling after a certain point).



I still have those books I bought many moons ago when I was still dreaming of the life I'm living now, and one of them (The Complete Book of Country Living) contains a recipe I've been using for over a decade to use up a midsummer tomato glut and turn it into tomato sauce for winter use when only tasteless hothouse tomatos are available at the fresh produce section. I use it as a pasta sauce, a soup base for all types of beans, and a spread for pizza bases. (Another way I preserve fresh tomato is to puree it and place in plastic bags, or even stick whole tomatos in the freezer as is, but tomatos preserved in jars don't take up freezer space (there's no more room at the inn). You just have to be sure about the bottling process you use to guard against contamination.

The recipe I use to make 'fancy tomato ketchup' (as it's labelled in the book) has been copied directly from the book (Mallard Press, 1992) with my variations in italics. I've also used it for many other recipes to preserve various fruits and vegetables, but this is the recipe that beats them all.



You need:
25-30 medium sized fresh soft tomatos, without being squidgy
4 apples (I use only 3 of the large red starkin variety)
1 large onion (I use at least 2)
1 cup cider vinegar (red wine village vinegar, of course!)
3 tablespoons of brown sugar
1 teaspoon of oregano
1/2 teaspoon of chili pepper (I use a tablespoon of strong black freshly ground pepper)
3 whole bay leaves (or half a dozen, if you have them growing fresh in the village)
Peel (not necessarily!) and core the tomatoes. Puree in a processor and pour into a stainless steel saucepan. Peel and core the apples. Put them in a pan with a cup of water, cover, cook till soft and puree them (or just puree them raw, like I do) and add them to the tomatos. Add all the other ingreidents and cook on low heat, stirring often, for at least two hours, or until all the liquid has evaporated and you are left with just tomato (it will start sticking to the pan at this point, which is how you can recognise that all the water has gone); it will have drastically reduced in bulk. The tomato sauce is cooked in an uncovered saucepan; the kitchen will be smelling heavenly at this point.



Ladle the hot ketchup into hot sterilised jars (all mine are recycled from honey, coffee and other comestibles). Clean the rims of the jars (the capacity of mine never exceeds 750g, as this is the amount of fresh tomato I would use for the average meal) and seal them (I let the sauce cool down only slightly and seal them with a piece of saran wrap, before fixing on the lid).



The last part of the process involves placing them in a water bath canner for 45 minutes for 1/2-pint or pint jars, something which I never do. From my reading, I worked out a substitute method to get the same effect as the water bath canner (unfortunately, I can't remember my sources now. My tomato sauce keeps without going bad for just over eight months. When I open the jar, I hear that popping sound that a seal makes when it has been done properly; if it doesn't make that sound, then I worry. I make at least two lots of this sauce per season (I know I'm just showing off...)



The tomato season is only just starting. Up until the end of June, garden tomatos were few and far between. Even at the supermarket, the tomatos being sold were still hothouse tomatos. Apart form beef tomatos, we also produce vine tomatos which have a slight pear shape, rather than the regular round variety. When there's a zucchini glut in America, I've been told that you have to lock up even your letterbox because you never know who's going to deposit their excess crop in there. But don't expect to find any tomatos hiding in amongst the zucchini in your letterbox because there can never be a tomato glut, ever; you can never ever have enough tomato. It is always the most important crop we grow; it ripens later than any of the other summer garden vegetables, but what can you do with most Greek-style vegetable dishes if you don't have tomatos? Tomato is also the most sensitive crop we grow; it is more vulnerable than other garden veges to rot, disease and calcium deficiency.

This is my entry for Weekend Herb Blogging hosted by Archana from Archana's Kitchen.

©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.

Chili con carne (Κιμά με τσίλι και κόκκινα φασόλια)

I recently held a small party to celebrate our son's birthday. We invited only one other family who also have children our son's age, and I cooked only the bare minimum needed for a dinner party: chicken roast, lemon potatoes, pilafi rice, hare stew (the specialty of the evening), lettuce salad, cabbage salad and a saucy chocolate cake for Aristotle to blow out the candles. The party went well, although I must admit not all the menu did. Here are my salad blunders, in order of magnitude:

Lettuce salad: I decided to prepare all the salads on the night before the party, so that I could have the next morning to myself: the children would need to be dropped off and picked up at their Saturday morning activities, and I could do a little vacuuming before the guests came. In Greece, we never shred lettuce, we cut it with a knife. BIG mistake. The next evening, the lettuce had clearly oxidised after being cut with a steel knife, so it was tinged with a slightly red rusty look on the white stalky parts; it looked unappetising, even though its taste was not altered. That was one salad no one really wanted to try, and I can’t blame them.

Cabbage salad: My absolute favourite autumn salad is this one. I like to add grated carrot and slivered red pepper, which is still in season in autumn. Given that I am a fanatic of eating food in season, what on earth was I thinking of when I bought some red peppers in the winter? BIG mistake. The salad looked luscious, the red and orange of the pepper and carrot mixing in with the greenish-tinged cabbage. On tasting it, I realised that the (enormous) pepper had a chemical taste, which clearly points to where it was raised, and what nutrition it had received (greenhouse, chemical fertilisation, of course). It tasted awful; anyway, what did I expect of out-of-season food?

What to say? We all learn from our mistakes. Now I have to find a way to use up (or throw out) the red peppers I bought. Eating them raw is out of the question; they need to be cooked in a casserole.

It’s been raining on and off today, with some hail in between. Our hills are covered in patches of snow, while the White Mountains in Hania have been covered in it for a couple of months now. That makes me feel great – all this talk of climate change, the destructive forest fires of the past summer, and how we’ll never have a winter in the Mediterranean worried me slightly, but to tell you the truth, we’ve had a cold winter this year, and we’ve even had to dig out our heavy coats to brace ourselves for the bad weather. Hania has seen snow before - just four years ago, the south of Greece, including all the islands were covered in snow. From the aeroplane I was travelling in, on Febraury 15, 2004, all the islands looked like a icebergs. Our house was covered in snow which had melted just before we arrived back home.

When the alarm clock rang this morning, I decided not to wake the children up to take them to school. Why travel in this weather when Greek roads (and the Greek mentality) are not made for these kinds of conditions? I cancelled my bank appointment and stayed indoors. Does that make me a bad mother? Not when I would have returned to the comfort of my heated home while they would’ve been cooped up in freezing classrooms. And if it had snowed after all, I might not have been able to take them back home, so that would have been another disaster. My colleagues spent the night at the school on the day that snow covered the whole of Hania, and didn't get back to their homes until the next morning. I took the place of their teacher, while they continued on to the next lesson from their set coursebooks. Then they had the day free, and no one (except poor Dad) had to brave the weather.

Today’s weather is a perfect excuse to cook something hot and spicy, but we can only use what we’ve got in the house, no shopping expeditions allowed. I’ve found a way to get rid of those peppers: chilli con carne, a truly international dish, that has its origins, not in the country that it is associated with, but in the Western New World, in the same way that chow mein was invented in the USA, and not China. There's even a spare tin of red beans in the larder, which we use only to make this dish. It's now or never. Here’s a recipe from the BBC Good Food site that uses red peppers (although I suppose you could use green or yellow peppers equally successfully), and if I make it not too hot, then three out of four of us will eat (Christine’s tastes are more mature than Aristotle’s); and that’s just what we did, with a cabbage salad (no red pepper this time) and plain boiled rice – divine. I suppose you think I’m not a good mother again, because I didn’t make anything for Aristotle. But I did in actual fact. He loves plain rice served with Greek strained yoghurt. And there was leftover chicken from a previous meal, which he also ate. So there, we were all happy!

For the sake of convenience, the recipe is reprinted here (with my alterations in italics). The instructions are so detailed that I didn’t make many changes to them, either. There are also six good shots of this dish which closely resemble the meal I cooked, so my photos are more a guide as to what my version looked like.

You need:
1 tbsp oil (if you’re Greek, use half a cup of olive oil)
1 large onion minced
1 red pepper chopped into matchstick slivers
2 garlic cloves , peeled and minced
1 heaped tsp hot chilli powder (I used less)
1 tsp paprika
1 tsp ground cumin
500g lean minced beef
1 beef stock cube (I used a glass of red wine instead)
400g can chopped tomatoes
½ tsp dried marjoram (I didn’t have any)
1 tsp sugar (a tip in the recipe says to use a small piece of dark chocolate instead, which I did, but I didn’t bother to tell my husband)
2 tbsp tomato purée
410g can red kidney beans
salt and freshly ground pepper

Over medium heat, add the oil to the pan and leave it for 1-2 minutes until hot. Add the onions and garlic, stirring frequently, until the onions become translucent. Tip in the red pepper, chilli, paprika and cumin. Leave it to cook for another 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Turn the heat up a bit, add the meat to the pan and brown it. Keep stirring until all the mince is in uniform-sized lumps and there are no more pink bits. Make sure you keep the heat hot enough for the meat to fry and become brown, rather than just stew.

Add the wine into the mixture, then add the tomatos and chocolate. Season with salt and pepper, and stir the sauce well. Bring the whole thing to the boil, give it a good stir and put a lid on the pan. Turn down the heat until it is gently bubbling and leave it for 30 minutes. You should check on the pan occasionally to stir it and make sure the sauce doesn't catch on the bottom of the pan or isn't drying out. If it is, add a couple of tablespoons of water and make sure that the heat is very low. After simmering gently, the saucy mince mixture should look thick, moist and juicy.

Drain and rinse the beans in a sieve and stir them into the chilli pot. Bring to the boil again, and gently bubble without the lid for another 10 minutes, adding a little more water if it looks too dry. Taste a bit of the chilli and season. It will probably take a lot more seasoning than you think. Now replace the lid, turn off the heat and leave your chilli to stand for 10 minutes before serving; this is really important as it allows the flavours to mingle with the meat. Serve on a bed of rice with Greek strained yoghurt or grated cheese as a topping. And if there's any left over, you can freeze it in single servings to be enjoyed during another cold blustery hailstorm.

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

MORE MINCE RECIPES:
Biftekia
Dolmades
Makaronada
Moussaka
Cottage pie
Papoutsakia
Pastitsio
Soutzoukakia

MORE SALADS:
Summer horta
Winter horta
Cabbage salad
Lettuce salad
Greek village salad
Cretan salad
Beetroot salad

Spaghetti puttanesca (Μακαρονάδα πουτανέσκα)

Often when we go away on holiday, we come back wanting to eat something we really enjoyed while we were away. Here's a dish we ate every night in the same pizzeria during our mini-break in Paleohora during the summer. I used the one at mediterrasian, (minus the anchovies). All genuine puttanesca recipes are a variation of this one. I've been making spaghetti puttanesca so often since September that I've developed my own recipe now, and have established it in our weekly pasta slot so that it is now a firm favorite on a Saturday morning. My children even coined a new word for this pasta; they found it easier (and possibly closer to the Greek language) to say 'poutanezika' (rhymes with 'kinezika' = chinese) than 'puttanesca', much to our delight; their version sounds more like something meaning 'like a prostitute'. We cracked up no end. Unfortunately, it has lost its vegetarian aspect, partly due to my carnivorous husband; I really do put my foot down about his red meat intake. But I give up when I'm too tired, and this is the kind of meal you cook on a day when you really are too tired to cook. I have tried freezing this sauce, but it's not worth the effort; tomato based sauce thaws out more like a soup than a sauce. The texture doesn't seem to keep so well. I recommend doing this for the bachelor type. In any case, it is that simple to make, and as it doens't involve meat (unless you optionally add sausage or bacon bits), it cooks very quickly, unlike spag bog, known as makaronada in Greece; I always let teh mince cook for at least an hour on slow heat for the flavours to blend.

You need:
3 tablespoons of olive oil
1 large onion, minced
3-4 cloves of garlic, minced
1 large green pepper, finely chopped
1 spicy sausage, finely sliced OR 1 small packet of bacon, finely chopped (optional)
2 tablespoons of pickled capers
15 black pitted Kalamata olives, roughly chopped
250g fresh tomato, pulped
salt, pepper and oregano to taste
Pour the oil into a saucepan, and saute the onion, pepper (we love this in any red sauce) and garlic in it till soft. Add the chopped bacon and/or sausage (unless you want to keep it lenten, and omit both) into the pot, and cook it till the meat has lost its raw red look. Now add the capers and olives, oregano, salt and pepper. Stir this altogether until all the ingredients are well-oiled. Now add the pureed tomatoes to make a thick sauce. Sometimes tomatos tend to be too firm (and too expensive in winter) to be used as a soup or sauce base; if this is the case, I add some tomato paste liquidised in water to thicken the sauce, and you can also use tinned tomato if you don't have access to ripe red tomatos in the supermarket. Let the sauce simmer away for about 20-30 minutes, and there you are: a lovely red vegetarian (or not) sauce for some plain boiled spaghetti. I didn't add chili pepper as the original recipe stated - definitely not a child-friendly ingredient; I have also used chopped up roasted red bell pepper instead of green pepper in the past. Sprinkle some grated cheese over each serving for extra protein, and don't forget the white wine. A quick and easy lazy Saturday lunch. Puttanesca is one of the few dishes which call for cooked olives.

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

MORE PASTA RECIPES:
Bologanise
Stir-fry noodles
Stir-fry beef
Blue dragon
Octopus stew
Tuna pasta
Pastitsio
Pizza carbonara
Mussels sauce