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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Cheap 'n' Greek 'n' frugal: Lentil stew (Φακές)

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.

Lentil stew (or soup - it can be made into either, using the same ingredients) - commonly known as 'fa-KIES' in Greek, is eaten as frequently as fasolada, the Greek national bean dish. It's easier and quicker to make than fasolada, which is why I like making it. It's always the first meal I make when we return from a long trip away from home, because it's so easy to make - you can unpack your suitcases, put a load of washing on and get over jet lag or place/climate changes while it's cooking. All the ingredients needed to make it are pantry staples. As a stew, it simply gets better when left overnight. And it will be left overnight,because, just like fasolada, you never make enough for only one serving, so you'll have more time to rest after your holiday.

You need:
a few glugs of olive oil
400g-500g brown lentils (Greek-grown lentils cost about €2)
1 large onion*
2 cloves of garlic*
400g pureed tomato (I use my home-made tomato sauce)*
salt, pepper and oregano to taste*

Finely chop the onion and garlic. Wash the lentils and drain them. Heat the oil in a large pot, place all the ingredients in it, add plenty of water (twice the volume of the ingredients), and cover the pot. Cook on the lowest heat for two-three hours. I went to the supermarket to stock up on fresh food while my fakies were cooking.

My cutlery, crockery and clock are all family heirlooms from my NZ years.

We like our lentils like a stew. If you prefer them to be a soup, just add more water (to your plate or the pot) and mix till well blended. We had our lentil stew with classic Greek bakery bread, some slivers of Dutch herbed cheese which I'd bought at Zaanse Schans, and avocado dip sprinkled with smoked paprika powder (a present from a friend in Holland).

Total cost of the meal for four people (served twice): about €3, together with the cheese; about 40 cents per serving.

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Cheap 'n' Greek 'n' frugal: Yiouvetsi (Οικονομικό γιουβέτσι)

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. 

Remember that cheap 'n' Greek 'n' not-so-frugal beef stiado you made last week? It was quite filling, so there must have been a portion left over, right? Well, that's all you need to make this very filling pasta dish: just one regular portion of well-cooked beef (or rabbit) stifado.

Frugal yiouvetsi (serves 4)
leftover stifado (beef or rabbit stew) (you've already cooked and saved that from a previous meal)
400g elbow macaroni (0.50 cents)
some salt (optional)

If you're going to use leftover rabbit stifado, first take the bones out of the rabbit - it will be uncomfortable for your eaters otherwise, and shred the meat. Throw away only the bones - don't throw away the sauce that the meat was cooked in. If you use beef stifado, mash up the meat in the sauce. For each hungry eater, add one cup of water to the meat, and 75g-100 elbow macaroni. Boil the pasta till done. If the pasta needs more water to cook in, add only a small amount, so as not to make the stew too soupy.

You might need to add a bit of salt once the pasta is cooked. These leftovers also work well with orzo rice pasta, used in the traditional Greek youvetsi.

Total cost of meal: less than 1 euro per person - the meat was, in essence, included in the cost of a previous meal. 

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Chestnut stew (Κάστανα στιφάδο)

Upon hearing the word στιφάδο (stifado), Greek people generally conjure up an image in their mind of a rich red stew of hare or rabbit, chicken, beef or pork, cooked with a large quantity of onions. It constitutes staple winter fare in most parts of Greece, replacing the Sunday roast during the colder months of the year. But with the rising interest in healthy food and a move away from meat, many people nowadays crave a vegetarian version of the same kind of dish. The creative chef at MAICh, Yiani Apostolaki, has once again used his love and knowledge of Cretan cuisine to create a meatless stifado, which has many variations, and can only be termed a masterpiece. Yiani's chestnut stifado is often on the menu during the chestnut season at MAICh, where it is enjoyed by the resident students and staff of the institute.

Yiani's chestnut stifado

After having this for lunch at work one day, I decided that I had to make it at home as soon as I could for the whole family to enjoy. My own version of chestnut stifado reflects my family's preferences in spice tastes.

You need:
a few tablespoons of olive oil
1 large onion, chopped finely
2-3 cloves of garlic, chopped finely
500g chestnuts, shelled (to do this, follow the advice in this post; Cretan chestnuts peel easily - not so those from other regions, as I have discovered, when I wanted to buy some bigger and 'better-looking' chestnuts!)
500g whole small stewing onions (large ones don't cook evenly; make a small cross on top of the cleaned onions, as described in this post)
a can of pureed tinned tomatoes (I use my own home-made tomato sauce)
1 teaspoon of tomato paste (for a thicker sauce - this is optional)
1 small wineglass of wine
1 stick of cinammon
6-10 carnation cloves
2 bay leaves
freshly ground pepper
sea salt

In a wide pot, heat the oil and sautee the chopped onion and garlic till translucent. Add the whole onions and mix till they are coated in oil. Add the seasonings and wine, and leave the pot to simmer for a few minutes. Now add the pureed tomatos and tomato paste. If the mixture is too thick, you can add some water to the pot at this stage, but don't add too much: this will depend on the size of the onions. The topmost level of the liquids should be about 1cm below the topmost surface of the onions. Place a lid on the pot, and let the onions simmer at the lowest heat for 30 minutes. Now add the chestnuts, which will have been partly cooked when they were boiled (or roasted) to be cleaned,and cover the pot again. Allow the chestnuts enough time to soften. This depends on the desired texture; if you prefer the nuts to crunchy, then the stew doesn't need a lot of cooking time.

The meat version of this same stew (ie using meat chunks instead of chestnuts) will fill you up very quickly. But the vegetarian versions are so much lighter, that you will find yourself eating more than one serving, or a very large one at that, and you won't have that bloated stuffed feeling that eating such a rich meal usually gives!

Not only that, but the same technique, sauce and spices can also be used in vegetarian stifado using other ingredients; any firm vegetables will work, eg carrots, potatoes, eggplant, mushrooms and pumpkin (which Yiani also adds to his chestnut stifado), as long as they can retain their shape while cooking. Such vegetables have the same fullness as meat, while being exclusively vegetarian products. The tomato-based sauce hints at the taste of umami, a taste inherent in meat that people often crave, even when they are vegetarians, thus satisfying their tastebuds. Only the cooking times for each vegetable will change, according to the desired texture of the finished dish.

The traditional way to serve stifado in Greece is with fried potatoes or thick pasta, but any carbohydrate will do. I served mine with pilafi rice made with a very light chicken stock. Using aromatic basmati rice provides even more umami taste, if you want to keep the meal completely vegan. This dish also needs a very fresh green salad to accompany it, and very little else.

UPDATE 8-12-2011: Due to the recent popularity of this post, here are two variations of chestnut stew: one uses potatoes (served at a mountain village food festival) and the other with mushrooms (served in a popular restaurant in Hania). 



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Calamari with wild greens (Θράψαλα με άγρια χόρτα)

Today I am cooking with two ingredients that I use no more than twice a year - and always in combination. When I am given one, I buy the other, and cook this wonderful stew.

Fennel bulbs are hardly ever produced locally for commercial sale. I have never bought them myself, because I am very lucky that my uncles give me a few fennel bulbs every year from their garden - to date, they are the only people that I know in Crete who grow finnochio (as these are called in the trade). Finnochio is tender enough to be eaten raw, sliced into a salad, but I prefer its very subtle aroma and taste in a stew - and if you have never tried calamari and finnochio together, it's time you did.

I recently bought some calamari from the supermarket. What caught my eye was the label - it came from New Zealand. New Zealand food items make a surprising appearance in Cretan supermarkets: lamb, seafood and kiwifruit are all very common. The mileage they have covered - needing to cross at least three continents before they arrive in Crete - sounds highly polluting, but I comfort myself in the thought that to get to Crete, this calamari was probably part of a large shipment of produce, loaded onto a cargo ship which called in at many ports along the way, being unloaded here and there, while more products from elsewhere were loaded onto the same ship, thereby offsetting most of the carbon footprints it left behind as it was making its journey across the world.

Fried calamari is very popular at tavernas all over Greece. This is what my kids usually order when we go out, which is why I didn't want to fry this calamari at home. I think it is a terrible shame that many Greek people go out to eat food that they often cook at home, especially since Greeks are nowadays more open to foreign tastes and new meal ideas, judging by the abundance of imported food items readily available in the supermarkets on a daily basis.

Since I knew my calamari stew wouldn't be very popular with everyone in the house, I used only 2 of the 4 pieces that I bought (they were cellophaned-wrapped in two packets, each containing two calamari). Coincidentally, the whole dish consisted of leftover ingredients from other dishes, and it's probably the most complicated midday meal I've ever made, in terms of the number of ingredients it contains. I also cooked it the night before, so the flavours were enhanced by the next day when we ate it for the midday meal.

You need:
a few tablespoons of olive oil
an onion
1-2 cloves of garlic
2 medium-sized fresh (or defrosted) calamari, cut into large chunks (the calamari may be substituted with octopus or cuttlefish΄I used a kind of calamari known in Greece as 'thrapsala')
1 large finnochio (fennel bulb), chopped into thick slices (fennel is like an onion; they slices will disintegrate like pieces of onion)
1-2 cups of leftover spanakopita mixture (mine contained some finely chopped wild greens, spinach, fennel herb fronds, parsley, mint and cottage cheese)
a cup of shredded cabbage (this was actually leftover salad)
a glass of wine
a few tablespoons of tomato sauce (I used my own home-made bottled sauce)
a handful of small cured green olives (optional)
salt and pepper

Saute the chopped onion and garlic in the olive oil, then add the calamari and fennel pieces and let them take on a golden colour. Add the wine and let simmer for a few minutes, then add the tomato. When the liquids come to boiling point, turn down the heat and add the remaining ingredients. Cover the pot with a lid and simmer at the lowest heat point until the calamari is done to your likeness (and we like it pretty soft).

If your spanakopita greens mixture did not contain any cheeses, this meal becomes lenten, perfect for the pre-Easter period coming up. Braised calamari goes really well with another of those taverna favorites - fried potatoes. Make sure you have it with some white wine too.

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Chili con carne (Tσίλι με κρέας και κόκκινα φασόλια)

Whenever I can, I cook the midday meal (which could be eaten any time from 1pm to 4:30pm, depending on work and school committments) the evening before. I really hate my daylight hours stuck at home cooking a meal. It's not the preparation time, which, for Greek food, is usually a brief but busy period cleaning and chopping; it's the waiting time for the pot to boil, and the meal to cook through. You can't leave the house, and there is always work to be done. That's why I usually cook in the evenings. This kind of cooking routine is well suited to cooking on the stove top rather than the oven; some oven-baked meals may dry out, but this is not a problem with saucepan-based food - they just get better the next day. Pastitsio is an exception - that too just gets better as it ages.

I made this chili just recently on a Friday night, to have the first day of the weekend free to go shopping. Here's an easy chili recipe for a cold day's meal. When I served it up the next day, the flavours of the chili had blended well and it was an unforgettable meal.

You need:
a piece of beef about the size of a big palm, partially frozen
an onion
2-3 cloves of garlic
a few tablespoons of olive oil
1 small glass of wine
1 teaspoon of chili pepper (I only had the powdered form)
1 teaspoon of cayenne pepper (ditto as for chili pepper)
1 teaspoon of oregano
1 teaspoon of cumin
1-2 tomatoes, pureed (I used my home-made tomato sauce)
salt (and black pepper, if you wish)
2-3 cups of shredded cabbage
1 can of red kidney beans

When beef is partially frozen, it cuts more easily into thin slices or small cubes. I cubed the meat into dice-sized portions. Saute the chopped onion and garlic in the oil, then add the meat bits and let them brown well. When the meat is done, add the wine and mix well. Let the liquids come to boiling point, then add the tomatoes and spices, including the salt. Place a lid on the pot and let the meat simmer away at the lowest heat point until it is almost done - we like the meat to be very tender in this stew, which means I cook it for at least 80-90 minutes.

Check the pot occasionally to see if the liquid needs to be topped up until the meat is done to the preferred texture (I added up to a wineglass to get the right consistency). Just before the meat is cooked, add the cabbage and drained red beans. Let the stew cook till the meat is done, and the meal is ready.

I've made a similar chili meal using minced meat instead of meat cubes. Funnily enough, I made it at the same time as I am cooking it now - the seasons play a big role in our daily meals. Serve the hot chili served on top of a plate of plain rice, with chilled yoghurt or guacomole dip to cool things down. Make sure you have some cold beer available too!

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Choice cuts (Καλή μπουκιά)

The beef and pork stood out at the meat counter of the supermarket, which always looks splendidly full on a Saturday morning, and especially inviting on a cold winter's day, when most people are trying to decide what they'll be cooking at home during the weekend.

French beef is sold in large multinational supermarket chains (INKA, the locally owned supermarket, sells only Greek beef); I bought a kilo each of beef (left) and pork (right).

But take note: the beef displayed here is not local food; this beef is imported from France. We prefer French beef to the locally reared beef, mainly because the locally reared beef is very stringy and fibrous; it takes ages to cook, and never seems to have that melting quality about it that French beef has. France has a longer history in raising beef; Crete has a tradition in pork and lamb/goat, but not beef.

Whole onions, preferably small ones (scallions), are a traditional feature of Greek stifado.

For the beef, I decided on Souvlaki for the Soul's stifado, a stew cooked in the traditional Greek style, with dry spices and lots of onions. Stifado is often served with fried potatoes in Greece, but it also goes well served on a bed of rice or mashed potatoes. We had this with some green salad, sourdough bread to mop up the sauces, and some imported English ale, which is now becoming easier to buy - competitive supermarket price and product wars are all part and parcel of the more globalised place that Crete has now become.

This is what the pork dish looked like when it went into the oven - we forgot to photograph it once it was cooked!

For the pork, I sliced up a ton of onions, placed them in a baking tin and laid the pork in thick slices on top of the onions, filling in the gaps with quince slices, which gave the whole dish an enticing aroma. There was no real recipe to this; its simplicity won over in terms of taste. Quince cooked with pork is a popular combination in Greek cuisine.

This kind of cooking style is typical of my Sunday meat dishes. They are usually simple, but they are always cooked with olive oil, using high-quality fresh ingredients.

*** *** ***

When shopping, I usually go to a range of stores. It isn't uncommon for me to go to two different supermarkets on the same day if I'm searching for food items that I know are only available in the one or the other. For example, we like the bread found at the local supermarket, but prefer the beef at a branch of a multinationally-owned supermarket. Here's what the meat counters looked like at two different supermarkets on the day I bought these cuts of meat.

Above: the local super. Below: the multinational super.

Notice how animal's tail is still attached at the local store. That's how people buy their meat in such a store: this way, they know it's a goat and not a lamb. Likewise, they ask about which village or farm the animal was raised, what it was fed on, and if the animal was a male or female(!). This kind of information is clearly not available in the multinational store, where all meat is displayed in an almost packaged form. To be global, or not to be global, that is the question these days...

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Greek comfort food (Γεύμα παρηγoριάς)

Just look at our weather today:

There were signs warning of the ominous weather yesterday, despite the sunshine; that was just a ploy to keep the tourist activity alive. People were still walking around in their summer clothes, and we even managed to go to the beach. But the rain couldn't stay away for too long and by all means, it's more than welcome. We've had more than the average rainfall for this time of year.

Of course, I love it. It's cooling, refreshing, cleansing, invigorating, like a battery recharger, unlike the summer's stifling heat, which saps the energy out of you, leaving you with a feeling of suffocation, as if the heat is drowning you. It's still humid, but at least we've cooled down by a few degrees. And we don't need to water the garden any more; the rain does a great job. Maybe it slows down the growth rate, but the coffers are full anyway; there's little more room in the deep freeze. The perfect weather to stay at home. The best weather to cook a hearty meal and still have the stamina to eat it in the midday sun, which was well hidden today amongst the puffy rainclouds.



I found a rather large piece of beef at the butcher's the other day. If you like your meat, then you may have experienced this feeling some time in your own life: its colour (dark red) seemed to be screaming out to me: "I'm fresh, I'm tender, EAT ME!" There were very few marblings in this cut, which means very little fat; a very lean cut of beef, all meat. Greek beef tends to be rather tough to cook and eat, which is why we don't often buy or cook it in our own home (except for minced beef). It was my lucky day. This recipe - beef in tomato sauce with peas and carrots: μοσχάρι κοκκινιστό με αρακά και καρότα - is very popular right around the country, especially in this weather.

You need:
lean beef, approximately 800-1000g, cut in small chunks
1/2 cup oil
4 large onions, cut in medium slices
2 large cloves of garlic (optional), chopped finely
1/2 glass of red wine
4 large tomatoes, pureed (I used my own preserved summer tomato sauce)
1 teaspoon of tomato paste
salt and pepper
500g frozen peas (something we might try growing this winter)
2 large carrots, cut into chunks or sliced into rounds

Heat the oil in a large saucepan. Add the onions and garlic, and coat till they are well oiled. Cook for a few minutes (do not burn), then add the beef chunks. Let them cook till there is no red colour on the meat, turning them over to make sure all sides are coated and cooked in the oil, over a moderate heat. Add the wine, and let the meat cook for another five minutes to soak up the flavour. Then add the tomatoes and seasonings. Turn the heat to very low, place a lid on the pot, and don't open it for at least an hour; if this is Greek beef, it will need at least two hours to cook thoroughly (which is why we often buy French beef from the Carrefour supermarket, or locally raised beef from a nearby village; they are fed and slaughtered differently, creating tastier beef).

After the first hour has passed, take the lid of the pot (everything should be looking creamy and saucy), add the peas and carrots, place the lid on the pot and let the vegetables cook away, until the beef is also tender, according to your taste spectrum. I cooked this beef for two hours; we like it to fall away from the knife. This recipe is an adaptation of stifado; beef can also be cooked in that way, the main difference being the addition of spices and whole onions. Instead of the carrots and peas, a local alternative to vegetables is a handful of green olives, in which case, this red sauce is called kapama (καπαμά).

The traditional way to serve this meal is with fried potatoes and a green salad. A healthier alternative is to present it on a bed of plain steamed rice.

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Snails in a tomato stew (Χοχλιοί γιαχνί)

(This post was featured on the home page of BlogHer on 25th June, 2008)

Snails are an acquired taste. Not everyone would be happy about seeing them on their plate, except maybe at a restaurant where snails are treated like exotic decadence at a premium price. The origins of eating snails are far from luxurious. Peasants are the modern ancestors of the earliest foragers, and about the only thing that both societies had in common was that they needed to eat; snails could be sourced locally and were easy to find. Even my mother would forage for them in New Zealand, and they were quite large there, although not as large as the giant African snails that are used in the most elaborate recipe I have ever read about.

Once snails have gone dormant, they are at the eating stage, whether they have been reared in captivity or in their natural habitat. Snails are eaten as a main meal in Crete, so a normal serving size would include about 15-20 snails per person. There are many ways to serve snails in Crete, but in our house, we cook them in a stew. This stew always contains courgettes and potatoes - another way to use up our river of zucchini. It is a classic Cretan summer meal, and a special one for me: it is one of the most time-consuming, copiously prepared meals I make, apart from moussaka. Not everyone eats snails, but there is something for everyone to eat from the same pot that the snails are cooked in. And the most important thing to note about this meal is that all the ingredients (save the pepper) can (and were) sourced within 10 kilometers from my own home. It is most organic, and extremely local.

TO SEE IF THE SNAILS ARE ALIVE


An unbroken seal is usually a sign (99%) that the snails are alive. Put the snails in the sink and run cold water over them, filling and plugging the sink with about 2cm of water. The snails should eventually start showing signs of life at this stage. If they aren't moving or creeping out of their shells, they may still be alive. Don't forget that some of them move at snail's pace. I had just come home from the beach with the children when I started preparing this dish. I let them tell me when they saw moving snails. Admittedly, this process is time-consuming. We can't all hang around all day waiting to see if they're going to make a move. A quicker way to deal with this is to pull off the seal and prod their body. They will start to produce slime almost immediately. Don't throw them into boiling water before you can ascertain whether they are alive or dead. If you don't know what a dead snail looks like, believe me, they look pretty dead - think of a black corpse.

TO KILL THE SNAILS (censor's warning: PG)


You don't eat live sheep, pigs and cows, do you? So it is with snails; you have to kill them before you cook them. Michael Pollan discusses the pros and cons and the ethics involved in killing what he foraged in the Omnivore's Dilemma in order to cook and eat it; snails are not as unpleasant as large animals, but it's certainly an experience. When you do this yourself, you may feel like a cold-blooded killer. This is why a lot of animal-friendly people prefer to buy their meat prepackaged from supermarkets. The assistant at the meat counter in a supermarket, as described by Joanna Blythman in Shopped, "sells you a piece of meat as if it is a euphemism for a dead animal." Have a pot of boiling water ready and toss each snail into it. No blood, no mess, just loads of slime. Don't worry about the seal that is still stuck to the shell. This will clean far more easily once it has softened in hot water. At this point, if you raped the countryside to get the snails and find you can't eat all that you gathered, you can drain them, and freeze them to cook in a winter meal or during a fasting period, as snails are considered lenten fare.

TO CLEAN THE SNAILS:
The snails aren't exactly dirty; the last time they crapped was probably about 2-3 weeks before you honed in on them. Their seal is very strong and adheres to the shell as if it's been stuck with glue. For aesthetic reasons, it needs to be removed (unlike my koumbaro, you don't really want to be eating someone else's secretions). Once the snails have been dipped into hot water, the seal can be scraped away with a sharp knife. If you prefer, this can be done at the stage where you check if they're alive; the snails will realise that they are being tampered with, and will start to produce their slime, which may put you off cooking them, so that you take them back to where you found them...

The snails are now ready to be cooked in the meal of your choice. In our house, we have them stewed in a traditional Cretan recipe.

TO PREPARE THE SNAILS FOR COOKING:
You need:
about 80 snails at the cleaned stage, enough to give 4-5 servings


Boil the snails in salted for about 20 minutes, changing the water, changing the water once or twice (depending on how off-putting you find the residue) to get rid of the slime. I love the sound of snail shells rattling against the pot. They will now smell like an unusual species of shellfish. They will have lost their green slimy look, and you will now view them as edible. Strain the cooked snails of excess water, and place them in a bowl, covering them in wine. This is simply to make them smell nice; wine is often used in Greek cuisine to marinate meat, hence its use with snails. Let the snails marinate for a couple of hours (or overnight, as this meal CAN be cooked piecemeal - as mine was) before you add them to the main stew.


For the stew, you need:
1/4 cup olive oil (from the village)
1 large onion sliced thinly (from our garden)
2 cloves of garlic, minced (from our garden)
10 small zucchinis (from our garden - the less mature, the better - the ones I used today were just sweating in their own juice and cooked in very little time)
20 baby potatoes (given to us by my uncles), or 4 large potatoes, chopped into large chunks - I used far more potatoes than necessary to cater for snail non-eaters
4-5 tomatoes, grated (from the garden)
salt, pepper and oregano (I have no idea where they were procured)
finely chopped parsley (optional)


Heat the oil and add the garlic and onion. Saute till transparent. Add the potatoes and zucchinis - chop the courgettes if they are large, otherwise, leave them whole, as they tend to break up if overcooked. Coat them in oil and let them sizzle in the pot for about five minutes to let them acquire that fried rather than boiled taste. Pour in the tomato and season the food. Cover the pot, turn down the heat to the lowest point, and let the vegetables simmer till they are almost cooked (about 20-30 minutes). Don't stir the vegetables in the pot; shake the pot if you want to move anything in it. Potatoes go mushy and zucchinis break up. When you uncover the pot, your kitchen will take on the smell of French ratatouille. Add the marinated snails, cover the pot again, and let the food cook for another 15-20 minutes. Sprinkle the parsley on top (if using).

As I have 'fussy eaters' in the house, I sometimes remove the vegetables if I think they're done to perfection, so that they don't get mushy or break up. The snails are left in till they are tender and have taken in the sauce. The vegetables are placed back into the pot simply so that they don't dry out. This is a very oily dish - not for serving to the Queen of England, although the queen downstairs took a liking to it.

TO SERVE THE SNAILS:

For each serving, place a few potatoes and a couple of zucchinis with a good ladle full of sauce, and top with at least 15 snails per serving.

TO EXTRACT THE SNAIL FROM THE SHELL:

This is the fun part. We don't use special cutlery as the French do, and our hands play as important a role as our forks. For high society, have some warm water in a bowl in the middle of the table for people to dip their hands in to wash off the oily sauce. Don't forget the towels - paper napkins simply stick onto your fingers, cause a great mess, and you need practically one per shell, especially if you're inexperienced. I envy my husband on this point: as you can see, he is so experienced, that he never gets his hands messy and uses his towel once he's finished eating his plate.

Pick up a snail. Slurp the sauce in it - it's divine. Insert your fork into the shell and attach it to the meat. Twist the fork using a light movement, and the snail will come out in one piece, complete with a little black bit, its pancreas (which you can choose to eat voluntarily; some people swear it's the best bit, while others say it can be poisonous). If the snail did not emerge whole, there's still some more left inside; don't let it go to waste. It is inaccessible form the shell opening. You need to crack the shell. Slurp on it one more time. Hold it in one hand, and crack the centre top with the side of your fork. When you have cracked it - it should crack easily - stick a tine of the fork into it. Twist the fork around, and you should see the rest of the meat coming out of the shell's opening: kou-kou-tsa! This procedure takes as much practice as it does for a non-Asian to use chopsticks. Just watch my daughter:


You'll be surprised at how much you enjoyed your meal. The stewed courgettes and potatoes are a feast on their own. The sauce acquires a smoky cinnamon taste when the snails are added; bring on the sourdough bread. A piece of feta wouldn't go amiss, either. And if you did enjoy the meal, there are a number of other ways that snails are eaten in Crete: my Cretan cookbooks mention the following recipes (Psilakis alone mentions 37 recipes!), all using the same basic principles at the harvesting and cleaning stage as the recipe you have just savoured from your computer:

• snails pilafi: sauteed snails cooked in a tomato sauce with rice added
  
• snails with wheat or xinohondro: cooked in a similar way to pilafi snails
  
• fried snails: marinated snails dredged in oil and fried - a great accompaniment to this would be skordalia (the Greek version of aioli) or tzatziki
  
• snail moussaka: using the shelled meat of snails instead of mince
• snails with greens: fresh sweet leafy greens are simmered in a light sauce with the snails
• snail pie: a mixture of vegetables with snails cooked as a self-crusting pie
  

Let's give Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall a hand for creating a recipe using snails, called Gardener's Revenge, for the UK TV series River Cottage. He doesn't mention how to clean, deslime or shell the buggers (he uses them shelled) , and he cooks them for about two minutes (as the recipe states). Unless English snails differ enormously from Greek snails, he has a lot to learn, I think.

This is my entry for Weekend Herb Blogging, hosted by its creator, Kalyn'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.

Octopus stew with greens (Χταπόδι)

Octopus is considered a delicacy in Greek cuisine, despite its being eaten often nowadays, due to easy access to seafood and modern refrigeration methods. When grilled, it makes the standard appetiser (what the Greeks call 'meze' or 'mezedaki' to make a dish sound small enough to warrant ordering more food) to accompany ouzo; think of yourself sitting in a Greek seaside restaurant (taverna) , with fishermen picking octopus from their nets and hanging them up to dry. Tourists were mesmerised by images such as these in the mid 1960s. The octopus was hung to dry for a couple of days under the hot sun on something like a washing line on the caique it was fished in, or the taverna it was going to be cooked in; apparently this process tenderises the octopus and makes it easier to cook and eat. That's a great natural organic way to soften octopus meat, just as long as you have fresh octopus and plenty of sunshine at your disposal.

Some people have access to neither of these, but they still manage to find ways to eat tender octopus. This shows the power of the human mind to adapt, invent and create, when lacking even the most basic conditions required to perform an age-old task. Today there was no sun in Hania, just lots and lots of rain, thunderstorms and sudden temperature drops. We wish it would do this more often - Hania gets dry, dusty and dirty because it doesn't rain very often. So today's rain was a great way to get the car cleaned, as well as the balconies and outdoor staircases. I had to resort to a similar alternative to tenderise my octopussy.

Octopus makes for a tasty seafood dish. When I go to fish taverns, I love to eat it grilled, lightly dressed with vinegar and oil. The dressing makes a great dip for sourdough bread. It's a little difficult to have it like this at home, and even more difficult to satisfy everyone's taste buds with octopus. Christine saw the octopus on the kitchen benchtop: "Oooh, look at its head!" Aristotle was intrigued by the tentacles: "Don't touch those, they'll stick to your skin!" Grandmother waved her hand in the air: "Not for my stomach." Her live-in nurse was thrilled: "Mmm, no greens today." (Little did she know.)

The head of the house (the one who thinks he wears the trousers here) wanted to eat traditional Mediterranean style octopus in a red sauce with spaghetti (of all things): "That's the way everybody eats it, Maria;" he spoke affirmatively with a knowing look on his face. "Just make sure it's tender." I suggested something else: "Elbow macaroni seems more plausible, honey..." "Elbow what?" I meant ditallini pasta, something we call 'kofto' pasta here in Crete. "No, we always had it with spaghetti." Here he goes again. When he uses the phrase 'we had it', it always means at least ten years ago. The idea of spaghetti octopussy put me off the whole idea of having octopus - I hate spag bog, so I couldn't fathom slurping on spag oct either. I never include myself in meal planning. I'm always eating the bloody leftovers.

So you may wonder who I cooked the octopus for. Why did I bother? I often ask myself that question. In recent times, food has become more easily accessible and available. Food is no longer seasonal; you can eat anything you like whenever you like. Young people are more willing to try out new taste sensations: more junk food is eaten and children's tastes are accommodated more individually than in the past. There was a time when , if you didn't like what was on the table, you were told to eat bread dipped in oil, or were simply sent away from the table hungry. That's why people didn't get fat then. One meal was served; if you didn't like it, there was no other food to choose from. Children don't get a special meal in our house either; I have to be cruel to be kind. They too had leftovers.

As few people were going to dine on this dish, I decided to stew it in a light red sauce with some wild greens. "Wild greens again, Maria?" you ask me. "Isn't that what you had yesterday?" Yes, albeit in different forms. Maybe I overdo the greens bit. We have a lot growing all over the place in Hania, so I feel it's my duty to pick and eat them. I put them into food when my family least expect them, I serve them as a side dish, they go into snacks. In older times, the village dwelling Cretans ate beans and greens every day, very little meat and lots of bread if flour was available (otherwise, they ate hard brown rusks soaked in water). Research says that the Greeks are some of the fattest Europeans, and some of the heaviest smokers in the world - but they have the longest lifespan in all of Europe, while Cretans have low cases of heart disease. I don't know whether their traditional diet is to blame (in the positive sense) for this; I wonder if my horta-foraging mother would have still been alive had she not moved to New Zealand. She died of breast cancer, the only woman in her longevity-rich family to have suffered this fate.

So I cooked the octopus in a way I remember my mother cooking it in New Zealand. I can't remember how she tenderised it, but I have a feeling she let it stew for a long time. I don't remember her bashing octopus on rocks, hanging octopus to dry in the driving rain of windy Wellington or placing it with wine bottle corks in a covered pot. All I remember was that the octopus was always soft and easy to chew, and no one complained of it being inedible.

You need:
1 small octopus, slightly tenderised by placing the washed cleaned octopus in a lidded pot with no water, and simmering on the lowest possible heat for 15 minutes (using a wine bottle cork is completely optional - I didn't use it, and the octopus still came out super tender)
1/4 cup olive oil
1 large onion cut into thin slices
2 large tomatoes, grated
1 small glass of wine (I only had white wine available)
a small bunch of parsley, chopped finely
a small bunch of fennel, chopped finely
salt and pepper
(For a more substantial meal, add more greens, such as spinach, silverbeet and leeks - you won't regret it; I didn't have any left from my last pie-making round)
Tenderising the octopus helps in the sense that the octopus won't need to cook a long time in the sauce, and it will decrease the need for extra water in the sauce - stewing the octopus in the sauce may soften the meat, but it will make a stew too soupy. If you don't tenderise it beforehand, just let it cook longer with more water.

Saute the onion in the oil in a pot over low heat. Add the octopus chopped into smaller pieces and mix them about to cover them in oil. Then add the chopped greens and mix them in well. Add the wine and tomatoes, season with salt and pepper, and cover the pot with a lid. Let the octopus simmer on a low heat until it's cooked to your liking. There is no time limit on this: just jab it with a knife, press it between your fingers or, better still, taste it. If you do serve this with macaroni elbows (or ditallini), the best way to cook them is in the stew, by adding just enough water to cook the macaroni, so that the stew doesn't turn too watery (this is definitely what I'd do next time I cook this dish, and it will be soon).

When the time came to serve it, I boiled up some macaroni elbows for Margaret and took it down to her. She liked what she saw. "Your mother-in-law will eat this, it smells delicious." It looked good too; the small pasta shapes didn't detract too much attention from the squiggly bits of pinky red octopus meat. It made it stand out in the plate. I was in a dilemma: should I cook up the same macaroni for hubby, or go for spaghetti, the only pasta he ever eats, the reason why I hate eating pasta? I fried some potatoes instead - in fact, this is what I remember my mother serving up with this octopus stew, one of the few times she fried potatoes at home, since this was what she was doing all day long in the shop. That combination looked beautiful, too. And when I served it with a green salad and some feta cheese, I think I couldn't have done better. My husband also approved; chips go with everything. When he went downstairs, he also found out that his mother tried the macaroni in the octopus sauce, but found it too al dente for her liking. Didn't she say she didn't want any?

©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 SEAFOOD RECIPES:
Bakaliaros - bakaliaraki
Mussels sauce
Psarosoupa
Shrimp in lemon
Squid stew
Squid fried
Taramasalata

Goat and cooked lettuce in egg-and-lemon sauce (Κατσίκι φρικασέ - αυγολέμονο)

Spring is so much in the air these days in Hania. I just spent the whole morning in town and the whole afternoon in Platanias, a seaside village, at a hotel which was hosting the regional inter-school chess competition for Western Crete. A splendid time was had by all, despite the fact that the children and their parents spent five hours in an exposed section of a summer resort hotel, with long wait times in the strong cold wind that prevailed. These hotels abound in Hania, but remain closed during the off-season, when there are no European chartered flights available, and hence no tourism. Living in Hania, I don't get the chance to view these buildings from the inside; I only see their façade as I drive past. Therefore, it was a bit of an eye-opener entering this marvellous edifice which simply screamed summer everywhere you looked, with its bamboo deckchairs, mosaic-tile swimming pools (not in operation at this time of year) and umbrella light fixtures. The apartments looked like miniature villas with marble staircases and terracotta pottery gracing the gardens which were full of expensive greenery. The hotel must have been specially opened for the weekend's event, but all hotels will gradually start getting ready to greet this year's tourists when the season opens up at the end of the month. Seeing the hotel from up close, I felt very thankful to have a home in Hania close by to the places where people spend a few weeks of their annual pay to stay at for a couple of weeks a year.

The event was free, but not without its problems. It ran over the time expected, and no food or drinks were provided. 400 schoolchildren had registered for the event. I learnt my lesson: tomorrow morning (the second half of the event), I shall make sure to bring along some water and a few edibles, because I don't want to pay a euro per half litre of water and 2 euro per toasted ham and cheese sandwich; a right rip-off. There were also some pricey but filling brown bread rolls (the one I ate contained lettuce, feta cheese and olive paste), and the usual refreshments. But the rest of the food available was clearly junk - chips, chocolates and sweets.

There will be no time to cook tomorrow's Sunday lunch, the only time we eat meat in our house. Not that I don't like meat, but there's just so much healthier food available, so why overdose on cholesterol? We are getting ready to plough up the garden to make it ready for the coming spring months. Time to find a way to eat up the Cos lettuce my mother-in-law planted in winter. Cos lettuce is the main lettuce variety grown in Hania. It's something I couldn't get used to when I first came to Greece, as I could only dream of the curly iceberg lettuce we used to eat in New Zealand. But I slowly learnt to like coarser stiffer Cos (sometimes called Romaine) lettuce, and I have to laugh at the sign above the iceberg lettuce sold in the foreign produce section of the supermarket: it's often named 'salata'. Aren't all salads called 'salata'?

After arriving home at 8pm, we ate our evening meal as a family (spanakorizo) which I had managed to cook in between the trip to Hania and the chess competition (tired and hungry children will eat anything, even if it does look very green). When everyone had had their fill, they went off to doze in front of the television while I cleared away the kitchen table and started cooking tomorrow's Sunday lunch: φρικασέ (fricasse). This is not a difficult dish to cook, as long as you have prepared the meat and vegetables. Lettuce is an unusual ingredient in a stew; the lettuce is cooked with the meat. Other leafy greens can also be used in the same dish - spinach, stamnagathi (spiny chicory) and swiss chard, among others - with an alteration in the flavour. My mum used to cook this meal for the midnight feast after the first Easter Sunday service (ie the one that starts on Saturday night and finishes in the wee small hours of Sunday morning). She'd cook the meat with the vegetables, and when she came home from church, she'd make and add the egg-and-lemon sauce. In this way, I'll be able to enjoy another day at the posh hotel, and still get a decent meal on the table in a reasonable amount of time.

Fricasee in Greece basically means meat cooked in a white sauce, which isn't necessarily creamy. Egg-and-lemon sauce is the classic Greek white sauce, also used to make chicken soup. It is a perfect sauce for spring dishes; its creamy yellow colour goes well with green vegetables. Lamb or goat meat is the meat commonly used in fricasse dishes in Hania, and today I've preferred kid meat, because it is very tender and less fatty than spring lamb.


For the stew, you need:
1.5 kg of tender goat meat, preferably kid (or spring lamb), chopped into large chunks
a dozen spring onions, chopped small - I prefer a mixture of red onions, leeks and spring onions
2 large heads of Cos lettuce (but any lettuce will do, and many cooks in Hania use different kinds of horta, stamnagathi - spiny chicory - being the most popular), torn into large pieces
1 cup of olive oil
a few sprigs of dill, chopped finely
1/2 glass of wine
salt and pepper to taste



Prepare the meat by boiling it to skim off any impurities. If the animal was very young, you don't need to do this. Drain it well if you do. Heat the oil in a pot and brown the meat all over. When it is done, add the onions and let them wilt in the juices of the meat. Add the salt, pepper and wine. Cover the pot and let the stew simmer for half an hour. When you take off the lid, if you used a mixture of onions, your nose will be smitten with the most wonderful springtime aroma, reminiscent of green hills covered with wild flowers, with frolicking young animals (like the one you're cooking) gamboling over them.











Now add the dill and lettuce, and mix them in well. The stiff leaves of Cos lettuce need to wilt before they will fit snugly into the pot, so let the stew cook over a high heat and turn the ingredients over in the pot so that they will cook more quickly. Once the lettuce has reduced, reduce the heat to simmering point, cover the pot and cook for at least an hour, or longer, until the meat is practically falling off the bone, and the cooked lettuce melts in your mouth. There is no set time for this; it all depends on the meat. Now you can switch off the heat, and either continue on to making the egg-and-lemon sauce, or wait till you are ready to serve the dish and prepare the sauce later. And if you really like your food light, skip the sauce altogether, add some lemon juice, stir it around, and enjoy this meal as it is (my personal preference). If you do decide to postpone the addition of the sauce, you need to heat up the stew so that the liquid is warm enough to cook the egg-based sauce; adding cold stewing liquid to an egg sauce means that the egg won't cook.











For the egg and lemon sauce, you need:
2-3 eggs, separated
juice of 2-3 lemons
If you prefer a thicker sauce, add more eggs. I add more lemon than eggs, for a lighter, tangier taste. Whisk the egg whites until they are frothy (not stiff). Now add the yolks and lemon juice. Add large spoons of liquid (at least two soup ladles full) from the stew into the egg mixture, and stir vigorously to blend the liquids. This is not a tricky sauce to make if the liquid from the stew has cooled down, but it can be quite a challenge if the liquid has not cooled down enough. Raw egg will cook in hot liquid, so beware when mixing the raw egg sauce into the stew's hot liquid. The sauce should not have cooked egg bits in it!











Once the egg and stew liquids have been blended, slowly pour it into the pot, over all the meat. Stir it in very gently, shaking the pot form side to side to distribute it. Let it set a few minutes before serving. This dish does not need many accompaniments. It contains everything required for a balanced meal. A few fried potatoes go well with it. For the healthiest option, just have some village bread handy for mopping up the juices.

©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 LEMON(-AND-EGG) RECIPES:
Artichokes in a lemon sauce
Dolmades
Poached salt cod
Lemon cake
Potatoes lemonates
Shrimp cooked in lemon