Pork ribs (Χοιρινά παϊδάκια)

Today's Sunday lunch consisted of a novel meat cut that I;ve seen being sold in Greece for the first time in my years here: pork ribs. In Greece, pork ribs are always sold attached to the steak, so you can imagine my surprise last week when I saw a rack of pork ribs at the supermarket. The spare ribs were vacuum-packed, with a membrane stuck around them, and labelled χοιρινά παϊδάκια (pork chops) and sold for about €5.50/kg. 



Facebook friends tell me that this cut is also known as κορτεζίνα in Greece. But I bet most butchers would not even know it. Although it's a cheap cut, butchers would never sell pork like this: if you ask for it, they'll complain that they wouldn't be able to sell pork steaks if the ribs were missing. One way you can get access to them is if you ask the butcher to keep aside 'pork bone scraps'; but you have to tell him you're willing to pay for them, and that they are for your dog (and you will get them for less than what I paid for them).



The fact that this vacuum pack is being cut from Greek (and not imported) meat shows what people are looking for these days. Greeks still eat traditional Greek meals, but they also like novelty dishes like this, which they will have become accustomed to form travels and studies abroad. This kind of cuisine is essentially urban in nature; recipes for such 'novel' cuisine are also being passed around on Greek web sites and cooking magazines.

What could be difficult about cooking pork ribs? After looking it up on the internet, I found that this meat cut did prove to be a small challenge if you haven't cooked them before: dry-rub and glaze sauce are new concepts for me. Most recipes tell you to use your favorite dry-rub and your favorite BBQ sauce, both being things I am not familiar with, so I had to make them all myself. 

My version of a dry rub: mix together some salt, pepper, oregano, brown sugar, paprika.
My version of BBQ sauce: use a mixture of imported bottled sauces that I have in my fridge - hoisin sauce, mustard, worcestershire sauce, HP sauce.

I served the pork ribs with a garden-fresh coleslaw of red and white cabbage, finely chopped celery and carrots, made with mayonnaise and mustard. French fries were also on the cards for lunch, but I decided to serve the leftover pastitsio for carbs instead (waste not, want not). And that ginger beer we picked up from the supermarket the other day was perfect for a non-alcoholic substitute to our regular Sunday beer or wine. 

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Cheap 'n' Greek 'n' frugal: pork rolls (Μίνι ρολά)

Prices are in euro (valid in Hania). All ingredients are Greek or locally sourced; those marked with * are considered frugal here because they are cheap and/or people have their own supplies.  

While at the supermarket buying mince to make biftekia (meat patties which I freeze for later use in a quick meal), I noticed something that looked cheap and tasty and easy to prepare. On the fresh meat counter there was a packet of four mini pork-rolls wrapped in butcher's string. It was mid-week, I had a sick child at home, I'd just left work, we were expecting an electrician to finish off a wiring job that was still remaining from the time we installed the wood fired oven, and I needed to find a quick way to prepare the next day's lunch which would allow me to concentrate on other more urgent tasks.

Pork is often the cheapest meat on the Greek market (apart from frozen chicken), and is readily available in many different forms for quick cooking. Top-end supermarkets in Crete now also offer different vacuum-packed cuts of meat. Despite the crisis, the signs of the recession are not apparent in the food supply.

This meal was cooked in the wood-fired oven for energy efficiency. 

The meal I cooked with the pork rolls uses up a lot of preserved summer produce, believe it or not, which makes it quite a cheap meal. The onions I added to the roast were bought in July, last summer, from a grower-seller who travelled from one village to another, selling his wares. The dried mushrooms were a present from a friend, and were reconstituted with wine from our supplies. My home-made tomato sauce was used to baste the pork, as was our olive oil. This is a truly rich meal made from the various preserved staples found in many rural Greek homes at this time of year.

 When the meal was ready, I transferred everything to a more appealing serving dish which could be heated in the microwave the next day for the family to serve themselves.

You need:
4 mini pork-rolls (these came ready, in packs of 4, at the fresh meat counter of a supermarket: ~3.79)
10 small onions*
a packet of dried mushrooms (~2.50; this is quite expensive, but any mushrooms can be used)
1 glass of wine*
4 tablespoons of thick tomato sauce*
a few glugs of olive oil*
salt and pepper*

 This photo was taken on the balcony in natural light.

Reconstitute the mushrooms in the wine. When they are ready (about 15 minutes), drain them (do not keep the wine). Place all the other ingredients in a baking tin, adding a large glass of water. Cover with a piece of foil and place in a moderate oven. Allow to cook till the pork is tender (about an hour), until the sauce has reduced. Serve with a leafy green salad and some plain rice.

Total cost of meal: 7 euro (~1.80 per person).

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Pork steaks with onion (Μπριτζόλες με κρεμμύδια)

Peeling onions isn't everyone's favorite job, but I personally love it. it's relatively mindless and robotic, and although onion is considered a stinky vegetable that makes you cry, I personally find its aroma quite intoxicating. I find it difficult to cook without onion for this reason - every main meal I cook uses onion. Even though my kids complain about the strong smell when I'm peeling onions, they always ask me what delicious food I'm making once the onions start cooking. Onions are like salt - they add that special oomph to a meal.

A bit of trivia: new research using state-of-the-art laboratory techniques show that cheap onion waste (ie the bits that we throw away: the top, root and dry matter of the onion) has applications as a good source of cheap green synthetic anti-oxidant material (from a study conducted at MAICh.

The onion seller is a regular sight in Crete in mid-summer. We bought a couple of braids from this man in mid-July and hung them up under a balcony staircase. In a cool, airy spot, they won't sprout. These onion braids last us about 8 months.

Here's a simple no-fuss recipe for pork steaks in an onion sauce, which I made quite regularly throughout the winter. (I'd make it now too, because it's really simple, but it's nearing Easter, so we're clearing our freezer and not buying any new meat to make way for lamb.)

You need:
5-10 large onions (as many as you feel like peeling)
some olive oil to saute onions
4 large pork steaks
half a cup of olive oil
half a cup of wine
half a cup prepared mustard
salt, pepper and oregano



Peel onions and slice thickly. Saute in a pan till limp and transparent, but not for a long time. Transfer them to a baking tin (I use a round 30cm tapsi). Lay the cleaned pork steaks over them. In a bowl, mix together the remaining ingredients, and spoon over the pork steaks. Add half a cup of water. Place them baking tin in the oven and cook on moderate heat for 45-60 minutes. Then turn the steaks and let them cook for another 20 minutes or so. (That's it.)



The onion sauce makes the steaks quite heavy, so I don't usually serve carbohydrates with this dish, except bread, which we use to mop up the oily onion sauce. All it needs is a fresh leafy salad and some cold beer.

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Cabbage and loutza (Λάχανο με λούτζα)

Some of my best meals owe their existence to leftovers. That's how some of my most creative cuisine is made. They are often dishes I don't make very often, and if I did, they would taste different, according to the leftovers I have at home on that day.

I had a dirty looking cabbage lying in the fridge for what seemed like too long. The outer leaves had gone grey, but once cleaned, the inside leaves seemed clean. The problem with this cabbage was that it didn't taste good raw. A friend had given it to us from his garden, but it tasted terrible in the salad we made. The leaves were tough and chewy, nothing like the crispy cabbage we grow in our garden.

You can still see some of the grey bits on the cabbag. This cabbage was very dense, as if the leaves did not have enough room to breathe. The cabbage we grow in our winter garden comes out much more fragile - the leaves break off before I get a chance to slice them.

This is how the cabbage came to be forgotten in the fridge; I wouldn't dream of throwing it away, so I just left it in a plastic bag, pretending that the day will come when I would use it because there will be no other fresh produce available. That day never came. But I got tired of looking at that plastic bag in the vege box - it was taking up too much space in my fridge. I decided to do something about it. I took out the cabbage, cleaned it up (again), and chopped it finely. The crisp salad looked good to me - but I knew I could not present it in this way because it would not be appreciated. So I decided to cook it instead.

 

Whatever I cook in a saucepan, it is most likely to contain  - 99.9% of the time - some finely chopped onion and garlic, sauteed in olive oil. That's always a good start to a creative meal; onions cooking over a low heat give off an incredibly strong umami smell. Then I added the cabbage and wilted it a little. The onion aroma overpowered the farty cabbage smell that often accompanies brassicas. Now all the meal needed was a bit of substance. I chopped up some lountza (a kind of smoked pork made according to traditional recipes in the Cyclades and Cyprus), which I'd bought at the supermarket along with some sausages made according to a Metsovo recipe, and added it to the pot. 

Apart from some salt and pepper, the meal did not seem to need much more added to it. I served it with the meal we were having that day (spaghetti with mince sauce), but it turned out more popular than the main meal itself. 

Cabbage and cured meat seem to have some affinity. When I looked up 'cooked cabbage' on the internet a little while later, the first image to come up was one referring to a cabbage dish cooked with bacon. What could be simpler?

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Internet cuisine (Διαδικτυακή κουζίνα)

The world is full of badness and sadness right now, but we must all plod on, living life as well as we can, because who knows what might happen tomorrow?

"A colleague recently asked another food writer where a recipe she featured came from, and the reply was 'from the internet'." Claudia Roden, A Taste of Thyme, 2000.

When Saturday's weather took a turn for the worse last Sunday, I had to make new plans for the pork chops that I had defrosted. I couldn't barbecue them outdoors, as we had planned, so I decided to use the internet to give me some ideas about how to cook them. The rise in 'internet cuisine' is helping to teach people how to cook, as well as creating global food trends; cooking has never been so easy or as interesting as it is now. Using 'pork chops' as a search string, I was mesmerised by the number of images that came up showing well-cooked pork chops, sizzling brown on the outside, sitting on a range of dressings, their juices oozing out onto the plate. So much value for money from a simple broadband internet connection - I could not get this much value from a book. In an environmentally more conscious world, it's a luxury to hoard paper; apart from online sources, we can now use electronic readers. I don't want to believe that the age of the paper book is over, but it certainly looks to be going that way.

In Greece, pork is a very popular meat. It's the main one used to make the nationally popular street-food souvlaki, both in a pita bread and on a skewer. Grilled pork chops are a standard feature at tavernas, cooked over charcoal, and similarly for home barbecues. The Greek seasonings for pork chops usually consist of oregano, ground pepper and salt, with lemon juice sprinkled over them. Sometimes, pork chops are marinated in wine before grilling. That's the general Greek way of cooking pork steaks. In the winter when the weather makes it difficult to cook outdoors, they are usually placed under a grill in a conventional oven.

A little while ago, we managed to get hold of some locally reared pork. My husband was called up by a friend: "A pig will be slaughtered tomorrow," he informed him, "it's first in, first served." So he went out to the village of Nippos, where a farming family runs a dairy station, raising mainly sheep and goats, producing various milk products, curing olives and keeping a few pigs for the eventual sale of their meat. My husband bought back enough for 5 family-sized meals. We paid 5.50 euro per kilo, which is similar to the retail price of pork (it can go down to 3.50 euro per kilo when sold on special). When he bought it home, we left it in the fridge for three days to allow the remaining blood to drain away, then placed it in the freezer. This is the first time that we have bought pork with such transparency; we do this more often with sheep or goat meat. 

As I pondered about how I would cook our first meal using that meat, I decided to look up a few photos of pork chops on the internet. I showed them to my husband: he was mesmerised by the tempting food porn showing pork steaks in a range of poses, dressed in a variety of sauces and seasonings. He particularly liked the look of this set of photos, but was rather taken aback by the ingredients list: apple juice, brown sugar, soy sauce and mustard! I know what he was wondering: how can a dish containing such unusual ingredients (for Greek standards) look so good?

In A Taste of Thyme (2000), Sami Zubaida and Richard Tapper sum up the reasons why some people like some kinds of food and why others don't: "At the most obvious level, the wealthy and poor in a society, different ethnic groups, city and village dwellers, men and women, adults and children, eat differently... Commensality implies shared understandings and evaluations of what constitutes 'proper' food. But when we entertain guests from other traditions, we expect them - challenge them - to approve and applaud our food. Every culture and community is proud of its own food traditions and tends to be ambivalent or contemptuous about those of others... Stereotypes of other ethnic and religious groups frequently refer to food customs... Alternatively, a cosmopolitan orientation may be demonstrated by those who consume 'ethnic' foods, though dishes served in 'ethnic' restaurants are often adjusted radically to suit the perceived tastes of the local consumers, just as native cuisine may be almost unrecognizable when served to international tourists."

Although we may be veering towards a world that functions according to global trends, we're still a world full of different people, with our own culinary idiosyncratic preferences and dislikes. There is still a sense of national standards in the food people eat around the world. Greece is one of those countries where food is still perceived according to a set of national standards rather than global ones. Home-cooked family meals are still associated with known favorites. I often use the internet for cooking ideas, but I still need to make sure that the meal will suit the tastebuds of my eaters, as well as the availability of ingredients in my kitchen on a Sunday morning (apple juice is still considered to be quite definitely 'foreign' in Crete). What interested me more was the technique used in the original recipe to cook the meat, which was well illustrated and described by the author. My adapted recipe using common ingredients in a Cretan kitchen resulted in a very tasty and satisfying meal for all of us.

You need:
4 pork chops (don't trim the fat off)
5 large onions, thinly sliced
1 tablespoon of prepared mustard (mustard is just as common as mayonnaise all over Greece)
3 large tablespoons of home-made tomato sauce (a teaspoon of tomato paste diluted in a wineglass of water can replace this)
1/2 wine glass of Cretan home-brewed wine
a glass of water
3-4 drops of tabasco sauce (optional: for such a large meal, you'd expect more drops to experience heat; I am simply introducing it in small doses)
olive oil (it's difficult for a Cretan to quantify the amount of olive oil used in an individual recipe: my measurement is usually in 'glugs')
oregano, salt and pepper

Our Sunday meals are the ones that usually involve more thought than the meals I cook during the week - but they are also the ones that I would say are easier to prepare.

Set the oven to heat up at 180C. Heat some olive oil in a Dutch oven on the stovetop and sautee the onions till soft and translucent. While they are cooking, place the mustard, tomato sauce, water, wine and tabasco sauce in a bowl and blend the ingredients well. When the onions are ready, set them aside, and heat up some oil in another saucepan, enough to cover its surface like a thin film. The saucepan should be large enough to hold the pork chops. Place them on the pan, seasoning them with salt, pepper and oregano. Let them cook on high heat till they are brown on both sides (about 5 minutes), turning them once and seasoning them again. Then pour the liquids over the pork chops and let them cook in this sauce for about 5 minutes. Now lift the pork chops out of the pan and place them over the onions, then pour the sauce over them. Seal them with the lid of the Dutch oven and place them in the oven to cook till tender; this will take about 30 minutes.

Either I was too tired to remember to photograph the different stages of the meal, or it was too good to wait. What you see here is the remains of the meal, which were combined and re-heated the next day as leftovers.

To add some bulk to the meal, I cooked (separately) some lemon potatoes, which should be placed in the oven half an hour before the pork chops, so that everything will cook at the same time and can be served together. All you need is a salad and some good wine to complete the meal. 

©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.

Lettuce salad (Μαρουλοσαλάτα)

When I first landed a job in Athens nearly two decades ago, the first thing I realised I had to do was set myself up to live independently. Up until that moment, I had been living at home or with relatives. I had saved up my New Zealand earnings to take a European holiday, but after starting work, I had the instinct to know that I shouldn't be using my savings any more. Leaving some money aside to tide me through to my first salary payment, I put whatever I had left into a bank account and pretended that it didn't exist. I would now have to get used to spending only from my new salary; if I needed more money than what I was earning, I could then safely say that living and working in Greece wasn't going to work out for me, and I would return home to New Zealand (which we all know never happened).

My first job: proofreading English-language coursebooks during the day and teaching English in the evenings. The owner of this school also ran a successful publishing house. This is the time in my life that stays in my mind and helped shape my personality after I left New Zealand. (The photo was taken on a Sunday, the rubbish reflects the densely populated suburb, and the fact that rubbish collection is often inadequate in Athens.)

Although the average Greek starting salary at the time was 75,000 drachmas (approximately 220 euro), my own one was 180,000 drachmas (approximately 530 euro). Private teaching has always paid well, although in recent times, the private teachers' wages haven't quite caught up with public sector jobs, which progressed mainly on borrowed money (teachers' salaries have now been reduced, just like all state employees' salaries). Given my qualifications, I was always given the older/advanced students, which meant a higher hourly wage. I figured that if I was making so much more money than the average person, I should have enough to rent an apartment, pay for my everyday living expenses and put some money aside.

I didn't count on the cost of renting an apartment in Athens, which has never been cheap. In those days, a small apartment of the type called 'garsoniera' (one room plus bathroom and kitchen) would have cost me at least 40,000-50,000; at the time, my sister was renting a 'thiari' (two rooms plus bathroom and kitchen) which was costing her 75,000. These prices were only found in areas considered lower-class neighbourhoods; higher-class areas demanded much higher prices. When I phoned about an apartment in Ilissia, for example, I was quoted 75,000 for a garsoniera. To rent an apartment in Greece, you had (and still have) to fork out at least half a basic salary to pay for rent (utility bills not included), and then live off the remaining salary - there clearly is no room for putting much money aside. On top of that, apartments in Greece generally come with not a scrap of furniture, not even a curtain or a stove unit. This is why few people actually rented on their own in those days (and they still don't these days, either), preferring instead to stay on at home if this is possible, or find a flat-share situation if the situation allows. 

 

My first rented apartment: my landlord was a fanatic gardener. The green balcony deceives the viewer - the apartment was located in a large building, on a very central junction very close to the centre of Athens. All the buildings were so tall that you couldn't see any of the hills surrounding Athens, neither from the apartment nor from street level, unless you went to the top floor to hang out your washing. 

I finally found a fully-furnished shared flat with a monthly rental fee that I felt I could afford: for 35,000 drachmas per month (not including electricity charges), I would live in a furnished garsoniera (complete with TV!), but my duties included sole responsibility for cleaning the landlord's kitchen and balconies (she had knocked down the wall dividing her apartment from my one), and putting up with her miniature pincher doberman shitting in my room every now and then. I still think of it as a small sacrifice to make for cheap rent and a cozy apartment. 

Cos lettuce, straight from the garden, is not an appealing sight. You need to wash all the soil away, remove deocmposed leaves, and clean it really well. All your efforts will be rewarded with crips tasty salad. These days, a head of Cos lettuce is very cheap, at 39 euro-cents a piece. For a long time, this was the stardard lettuce available in Crete.

My uncles grew only Cos lettuce on their farm for many years, but now they are growing all sorts of leafy salads, like this curly red variety.

For work purposes, I also had to clear up my residence status in Greece. It was important that I did so very quickly, so that my Greek medical insurance (the infamous IKA) could kick in. I had come on a New Zealand passport and needed to either get a Greek passport, or a Greek identification card issued to me. To get a Greek passport, I needed an ID card, so I had to start off with the latter. This could only be issued in Hania, where my birth had been registered by my father. I needed to travel down to the island (these days, this kind of paperwork can be done at a distance with less hassle). During the coldest month in Greece (February), I travelled to Hania by ferry boat, sleeping in one of the third-class beds (which don't exist these days). If I didn't manage to snap one up, I'd have to sleep on the floor; my experienced ferry-travelling relatives told me to simply take a sheet to wrap myself up in, so as not to sleep on a dirty bed or soiled trodden floor, but I shouldn't worry about the cold, because the indoor areas of the ship were always air-conditioned.

All the expenses involved in my setting up an apartment and unscheduled travelling were adding up in my head. I had received an advance on my salary, but already, I was taking days off work, I had major  expenses, and I didn't have any idea how much I would have to set aside for the electricity bill. It suddenly became more important to me than eating. I started to plan for how I would economise: I would not eat out, I would not go out for entertainment, I would not take taxis; I would allow myself an English-language newspaper once a week, I would have a coffee with friends only once a week, I would call my parents only once a fortnight and write letters to them every week. 

While I was doing this, I was surrounded by people who did not choose to live so frugally. Eating out was de rigeur most nights among some of my colleagues (all Greek girls from abroad), which would often be preceded by a visit to a cafe and/or followed by a bar club. They were living life to the full; it was unthinkable for them to spend Friday and Saturday nights at home watching television. They had no idea when the buses ran, they only used taxis. They rented more expensive apartments than I did, but they never spent much time in them. As I watched them living life as if there were no tomorrow (which always came with hangovers, headaches, lie-ins, and late starts in the day for them), I often wondered how they could afford to live like this. I knew what they were making, as we were all on similar salaries. They often did a lot of private language lessons, and were well paid, but such overpriced work (which often commands unreasonably high hourly charge rates that are set randomly at the discretion of the teacher) is temporary and insecure. Students (or their parents) run out of money, cancelling lessons without notice, and the teacher is left without work all of a sudden; in essence, their expensive lifestyle was unsustainable and it had an unknown expiry date that often came when it was least expected.

 

Right around the world, chefs use lettuce as a background decoration on the plate. 

These plates have been photographed from my travels in Thessaloniki, Paris, London and Crete.

Even with their higher-than-average salaries, they still managed to run out of money every now and then, and they'd ask me to lend them some. My upfront refusals made them think of me as 'not a good sport', a 'stingy person', 'a tight-arse'. "If you needed any money, Maria," they said snivelling with a guilt-ridden complex, "you know I'd lend you some". Yes, they would, if they ever had any remaining on them. I don't know where these people are now, or what they are doing, as I have lost contact with my Athenian ex-colleagues, but I see similar examples of them in the more recent arrivals of younger women in Hania (always women - there is a special reason for that which I might go into in another post). Most of them find that, eventually, they can't keep up with their expenses and blame it all on the low Greek salaries and high living expenses. The present global (not just the Greek) economic crisis could easily have been predicted by watching the spending habits of my colleagues; they were all Greeks who had been born and educated abroad, all living on temporary financial sources like private lessons, all spending without saving, living with a false sense of security within the instabililty of their present situation.

You may be wondering what 'lettuce salad' has to do with this post. Well, it just so happens that, in those early days of my avid economising, when I went to Crete to apply for a Greek identity card, I stayed with my grandmother in the village. When I left to return to my new apartment, my new job and the concrete jungle, my relatives gave me some food to take back with me: a four-litre plastic tube of olive oil, some eggs, a few spring onions and two very large, very thick heads of Cos lettuce, still clinging onto the earth that they were rooted in, to keep them fresh. They would have also killed a chicken and given it to me, but I told them that I had nowhere to store it and was worried it would go off before I got it home (which is silly really, because I now know that nothing would have happened to it by the next day, especially in the middle of winter!).

Anne's salad: a friend taught me to mix vinegar and lemon juice together to make a very tangy salad dressing. Traditionally, Greek cooks use one or the other in their lettuce salads.

When I got back to the apartment in the early hours of the day, I put away my fresh produce and went to work that same morning. I knew that coffee would be served throughout the day at the office, so I never drank any coffee at home for the next few days until I received the remainder of my salary. I also knew that my extremely generous boss always bought everyone cheese pies and rolls for lunch, so there was no need to spend money on lunch, either (the office was located in an industrial area of Athens away from a central shopping district, on a kind of motorway). At the end of the day, I'd come home and cut some lettuce leaves off one of those thick heads I'd been given, and make myself an old-fashioned Greek lettuce salad, which I'd eat with a boiled egg and a slice of bread (I'd bought one loaf and made it last the whole week). At the weekend, I'd go and visit my sister (by bus, of course), and we'd pool our resources and cook up a cheap meal. On Sunday, I usually visited my very generous aunt, who was always happy to have her niece over for a meal with her family (my contribution to the meal was a bottle of drink). I did this for (as far as I remember) two weeks, until I received my first salary. If you ask me, only an Albanian would live like this in Greece in our days, because they've learnt to economise in similar ways. One day, when my children move away from home, I'd like to tell them this story, but I'll let them decide for themselves what they'll do when it's their first time living away from home.

Nowadays, green leafy salads are much more exciting than the early days on Cos-only lettuce in Crete. These leafy heads cost TWICE the price of a head of Cos lettuce. Some of them do not keep as well as Cos, so they need to be bought when you actually want to use them.

Maybe I was just born with the instinct to economise, but it had to start somewhere, which I think was from home, watching my parents working and saving. There was always good food on the table, and we never went without any of the basic necessities. We also had our luxuries: our parents gave us a handsome sum of money every Christmas and Easter to use as we wished, and we were taught to save our money through a bank account from when we were at high school. Most importantly, we were never in debt, we never took out bank loans, and we never asked others to lend us money. This is probably how I've managed to stay in Greece. Some people might like to remind me that I got a better start in life with the help I received from my parents to buy my own property, but that came many years after I had already been living in Greece. I'd already learnt how to work and live independently; parents often reward their children once they see them living within their means. 

*** *** ***

For many years, I've been making the same kind of lettuce salad as in my early days, adding some grated carrot and chopped dill to the lettuce and spring onion. These days Greek lettuce salads are nowhere near as simple as they once were, because of the greater variety of lettuce now available in Crete. Cos lettuce was once the staple lettuce, but these days, it's seen as very old fashioned, especially when there is a wide range of leafy salad greens to choose from at most supermarkets, and nearly all of them locally grown, for those of us who are environmentally conscious. Even the simple olive oil and wine vinegar (or lemon juice) dressing has changed: balsamic vinegar has stormed the market, and a local product called houmeli (derived from the honeycomb by boiling it after the pure honey has been extracted from it) is often added to salad dressings for a more sweet-and-sour taste. Only the olive oil has remained the same...

I first tried this salad at the Botanical Park restaurant in Hania, and have been making it ever since.

The following salads can be found these days in most good tavernas, although the old-fashioned one is what is commonly referred to as 'maroulosalata', while the more decadent one often goes under another name mentioning the meat/cheese added to it.

To make an old-fashioned taverna-style Greek lettuce salad, you need:
a head of Cos lettuce
some dill
2-3 spring onions, with their green tops
1 carrot, grated (optional)
wine vinegar or lemon juice (I've used both before, and made a very tangy salad with in this way)
olive oil
salt

Chop (not tear) the lettuce into chunky slivers, the dill finely and the spring onions into thin chunks. Add the carrot if using. I also add some pickled peppers into the mixture, which have been soaking in wine vinegar. Sprinkle some salt over the salad, pour over the oil and vinegar/lemon juice, and toss well.

To make the new style of lettuce salad that is all the rage in Greek eateries these days, you need:
some fancy lettuce (curly green, curly red, frisee endive, iceberg, etc)
some spinach leaves
some rocket (arugula)
honey or houmeli (a product made from boiling the honeycomb after the honey has been extracted)
balsamic vinegar
olive oil
pomegranate seeds
EITHER: the vegetarian version: salty piquant-tasting cheese (blue vein, graviera or feta cheese are used in Crete)
OR: the omnivore version: smoked pork strips (apaki or singlino is used in Crete; lardons would be a good substitute, as is boiled chicken)
OR: the vegan version: avocado chunks

 

My first French salads (above) - I've learnt to mimic their vivid colours by buying salads in a variety of colours and textures. I also like to add protein to them, to make them into more complete meals. 

Wash and tear (not chop) all the leafy greens into a large bowl. Pour over the honey (or houmeli), balsamic vinegar and olive oil onto the leaves and toss well to mix. The amounts you pour in depend on your preference, but they are usually used in drizzled, just to coat all the leaves. Add a handful of pomegranate seeds into the bowl. Now add some shavings of graviera or chunks of blue (or feta) cheese, or the heated pork strips, or the avocado chunks. Serve the salad like this.

Lettuce salad has come a long way in my house since my early days in Greece.

 

Lettuce salad is very much a seasonal product. I would never buy lettuce in the summer, as it doesn't really suit the seasonal garden to grow this kind of vegetable in a dry Cretan summer. Unlike the old-fashioned maroulosalata, the cheese/pork one makes a complete meal when a slice of really good sourdough bread and a glass of really good white wine is served with it.

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Cabbage (Λάχανο)

A brief break from my travel musings to concentrate on the food of the holy times ahead of us...

The cabbage is generally a misunderstood crop. We had a bumper crop of cabbage this year, but when we tried to give some away, people turned up their noses to it: "We don't eat fart grass," they said to us. Apart from making the usual salad out of it, I cooked it with pork chunks, added it to chili con carne to give the stew more bulk and it was a perfect addition to a stir-fry (cabbage is a good vegetable for sautees). When served with meat, cooked cabbage is a very comforting and hearty addition to a meal.

The combination of pork and cabbage is a popular and tasty one in most parts of Europe, but not well known in Crete. Pork is a mainstay on the Cretan barbecue menu, and most souvlaki is made from pork (the remainder being made with chicken). We roast and grill pork, we combine it with celery, it is a BBQ favorite; although cabbage is grown throughout the rainy months in Crete, it is never combined with pork. The odiferous lahanorizo has been banned from my kitchen (for reasons explained in the link); apart from its use in the surprisingly delightful lahanodolmades, cabbage is always served as a salad and rarely plays a greater role in the Cretan kitchen.

Wonderful ways with cabbage; if we grow it, we eat it.

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The cabbages were some of the hardiest plants of our winter garden, and they were waiting for us when we returned from our trip, giving me a chance to try Choucroute alsacienne, which I read on the menu card at the Chartier, but did not have the opportunity to try it. This dish seems to be one of the mainstays on their menu. If it is that popular, I felt I had to try it, and there is no better way to do so than with our healthy organic garden cabbage heads.

My first attempt at making choucroute; I added a finely cubed potato to the cabbage while it was cooking.

Choucroute is different from the German sauerkraut, although it is based on it. It involves cooking spiced up cabbage in a mixture of wine and vinegar. Cooking a la francais in Crete is an easy task: the raw ingredients are easy to find, but their combination is new to me. Choucroute does not require special ingredients, although juniper berries (which seem to be added quite often in the recipes that I searched out) are not available where I live, so I used pimento (allspice) instead. The basic recipe for choucroute can be adapted according to the kind of wine, vinegar and spices you prefer to use.

I used bay leaf, pimentos, black mustard seeds and black peppercorns for my first choucroute. Next time, I'll be adding a little mustard to the spices to give it more taste.

Many recipes for choucroute call for ready-made sauerkraut which is spiced up and added to pork cuts. This is not an option in Crete, unless we want to buy some from the German-based supermarket chain LIDL, which often sells pre-made cook-and-heat foreign cuisine, mainly geared for the tourists or foreign residents of the island.

My first choucroute did not use meat juices, since we had it with as a hot vegetable salad to accompany fried bakaliaros (salt cod) on Greek Independence Day.

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My favorite use of cabbage is as a saute. Here's the recipe I devised myself. Most of the fresh ingredients are locally grown or prepared, which is maybe why it tastes so good.

You need:
1 small head of cabbage (the scraggly cabbage heads that are in the garden now are large but need a lot of clearing of bad parts)
1 large carrot, peeled
1 large onion
2-3 cloves of garlic
2 tablespoons of capers (I pick and pickle these every year)
a few tablespoons of olive oil
a few tablespooons of soya sauce
salt and pepper
Slice the cabbage finely, grate the carrot, chop the onion finely and mince the garlic finely. (Too many finely's, but this bit can't be underestimated.) Heat up the oil in a wide shallow pot, and then add the onion and garlic; cook till they become translucent. Keeping the heat high, add the cabbage, carefully stirring the pot regularly, so that the cooked wilted cabbage comes up the top and let's the crunchy cabbage move down the pot. Do this until all the cabbage is added, then added add the carrot and capers, and mix well. Let the cabbage cook away for a few minutes, until it loses its crunchy appearance. Then add the soya sauce, turn down the heat, place a lid on the pot, and simmer for a few minutes, until the cabbage is done to your liking.

Sauteed cabbage is a nice alternative to salad, and it goes well as an accompaniment to most meat and fish dishes. We're having it for lent with boiled potatoes and lemon shrimps (pasta and soya mince are also pictured in the above photo).

©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.