"When I finally let myself go to become one with the Mediterranean..."

I remember many years ago when a food blogger friend of mine from the US told me that she was very careful about the statements she made in her blog because she didn't really want to get her name in the local paper for saying something that stood out too much. I wasn't sure what she meant: unlike her, I really wanted to get in the paper for saying something that stood out.

Today, I got that opportunity; in conjunction with my colleague Yiannis Katsikandarakis, and Nebraskan blogger Shannon Moncure, our article was turned into the main feature of today's issue of the local paper, Haniotika Nea. In Greek newspaper terminology, we made into the σαλόνι = 'salon'; apart from' living room', it also refers to the main feature page in a newspaper, usually found in the middle (the part that holds all the supplements - today, there was a brochure from ΔΙΑΦΑΝΟ).

From today's Haniotika Nea

The article was based on Shannon's account of her experiences while in Greece during a summer school term from the University of Nebraska. The title of the article is based on Shannon's writings: "When I finally let myself go to become one with the Mediterranean".

Here is a translation of all the bits of text that include my name:

1. Maria Verykaki (Ok, somebody got my name wrong, but I don't hold it against them -  in a small town, it's preferable to be able to keep a certain level of anonymity), responsible for the Department of Engllish Studies at MAICh,

2. Saturday 24-5-2014: "A visit to the local laiki (street market) with agricultural produce"
Crete is a highly agricultural island. To be exact, Maria, the English teacher at MAICh, who was our guide, explained to us that it is due to this fact that the island felt to a lesser extent the effects of the economic crisis which started in 2008. Small-scale cultivation is an integral part of the life of the inhabitants of the island, which allows the island to be self-sufficient to some extent in terms of food, providing for most of their basic needs.

3. One of the seminars that the Nebraskan students took part in at MAICh was conducted by Maria Verykaki (see above), responsible for the Department of Engllish Studies at MAICh,with the title: "The importance of environment in the sustainability of Cretan society".

Most of the time, we hear about the negative aspects of the crisis, and how people are unable to cope; publicly stating that a certain sector of society has been shielded from the crisis is a pretty bold statement - and it's got my name attached to it.

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Past experiences (Εμπειρίες από το παρελθόν)

In some people's minds, yesterday's post showed me up to be racist and prejudiced against Roma, which is, of course, not what I was trying to say in the first place, but that is what some may conclude after reading a one-A4-page summary of an episode in a stranger's life, which in actual fact lasted more than three years. The pictures of the girl were used to illustrate the post as a way to tie it in with international current affiars, as the Roma girl's plight has become a major European story at the moment. I would never have bothered to bring up the Roma episode in my own life through this blog had the girl's story not come up in the press in this way. But I'm glad it did, because these are the stories I want to make sure go down in my history. The stories I tell in this blog are not meant as sensational block-buster material for strangers' reading - they are real stories that my children may never learn about because when the time comes to learn about them, their parents might be dead, and they may never get the chance to hear these stories which will shed light on their own upbringing.

Through this blog, I have met a number of people who now regret that the only thing they knew about their ancestors was their name - and even that name had been changed when they migrated, so their offspring and grandchildren could not find any more information about them: all the information stopped at the Ellis Island records in New York, because it didn't match up with any records of the same people before they got to Ellis Island. We still see the same situation repeated by today's economic migrants, some of whom are dying in the earth's oceans, their undocumented status wiping out their traces. Even the magic tool of the millenium, the internet, still does not hold the stories that the moving people of the world grew up with, stories that may haunt or excite us, which would be interesting for later generations to know about if only they had the chance to discover them. 

I view this as especially important given that I live in a country where I was not born, and came at a late stage in my life, so that I do not have any connections with the local people (bar through blood ties, which is a different thing from friendships) through my young years, the time when people start forming freindships: primary school, high school, university. I did that elsewhere, and my connections with my previous homeland were severed after my mother's early death and my late father's departure from that country. Hence, my past is less tangible to my offspring than, say their father's past, which is all based in his present - and no doubt - future homeland.. 

Imagine moving around in an environment where no one knows you on the street: they can only judge you by what they see of you, not what they know about you, because few people actually know me in this town, and I like to keep things that way because it gives me the privilege to be able to hide away in my own little world and be a fly on the wall whenever I want. We learn so much more about ourselves from those flies on the wall, people who are not members of our own society and tell us things about ourselves that we never knew. We can choose to identify with what others say about us, or we can challenge their speculations. It is generally our choice what we do with this extra knowledge. But if we choose to take the easy option - to dismiss their descriptions of ourselves or our society - we will probably be missing out on a chance to understand ourselves better: 

"It is impossible to absorb a new or foreign reality unless you first comprehend well whatever is around you." (from an interview with the late Yannis Tsarouhis, whose life and works are being exhibited at the Benaki Museum in Athens)

The liberal world, as it has been shaped in modern times, has made us all feel aware of alternative lifestyles and opinions that we may not share. The ideal world is one where everyone is equal, but in the real world, this could never happen. There will always be rich and poor, educated and unedcated, black and white people. These divisions cause prejudices which the liberal world wants to try to wipe out - but they can never wipe out the divisions, which then raises the issue of being trapped in a vicious circle: on the one hand, everyone is equal, while at the same time equality doesn't exist. Rather than fight these forces, I prefer to live with the divisions. It's much easier for me to live with them, because I don't live in a country where people believe anyone can be Prime Minister (not in Greece at the moment, that's for sure).

 

But even though not everyone can be Prime Minister, I am pretty sure everyone can be who they want to be in this country, if only they knew who they want to be in the first place. We all tend to live with prejudices that we believe are formed by our experiences. I like to remind myself of this when I think of my cab driver husband. Not being a driver until my older age, I had been in a lot of cabs (but never his) before I met him. Most of my cab experiences were generally not good ones because I was always on my guard against being ripped off, as most people believe that Greek taxi drivers are rip-off artists. I also associated taxi drivers with smoking, because most cab drivers (used to) smoke in their car and do not ask the customer if this bothers them. And I rarely took a cab on my own at night, because my tidy dress style and accent always gave off an image to others that I was a well-to-do foreigner, which was bound to bring up a conversation about why I was in Greece, what I was doing here and if I am in a relationship. If a taxi driver is taking you home, that's the last thing you want to discuss, in case he decides to pass by your home regularly. 

Despite my prejudices against cabbies, I still married one, and am still happily married to one. My husband does not rip off customers, he does not smoke and he shares all his interesting daily stories in the cab with his whole family, be they stories of young girls who ask him if he has a condom to spare, priests who hold on to his knee for extra support, or stories that make him think about how he is raising his own family. 

Unfortunately though, we know plenty of cab drivers among us who rip customers off (our former co-driver was caught in the act, and received a hefty fine), do not take customers' preferences into account (while we travel abroad, the taxi reeks of smoke when we hire other drivers who do not take into account the fact that their filthy habits spoil it for many other people), and use the cab as a way to meet up with people they are having illicit affairs with, and I don't just mean romantic connections: we recently heard of a case where a cab driver - not a cab owner - was ferrying Pakistanis who were selling cigarettes ontained through illegal channels (the cab, which is now tied up at a police station, had been under surveillance for six months before the police pounced). 

"Egypt was charming... [Fielding] reembarked at Alexandria - bright blue sky, constant wind, clean low coastline, as against the intricacies of Bombay. Crete welcomed him next with the long snowy ridge of its mountains, and then came Venice... The buildings of Venice, like the mountains of Crete and the fileds of Egypt, stood in the right place... (A Passage to India, EM Forster, 1924)

I only very recently read A Passage to India, which describes the inherent racism of the English towards the Indians when they were governing them, how they swayed events to turn out the way they wanted without any justification, and how they ostracised their own kind when English people sided with Indians.  This story should remind us all that even though in theory we all want to be friends in our liberal world, we cannot always be, at least, not yet, to repeat the famous last lines of the book: 

'Why can't we be friends now?' said [Fielding, the Englishman]... 'It's what I want, it's what you want.' But the horses didn't want it - they swerved apart; the [Indian] earth didn't want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single-file; the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they issued from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn't want it, they said in their hundred voices, 'No, not yet,' and the sky said, 'No, not there'. A Passage to India, EM Forster, 1924. 

It takes us a long time to get over unexplained prejudices, but even when we think we have got over them, one tiny episode in a sea of incidents can easily break the balance that we strove for. For this reason, I never bother these days to make myself think that 'WE' are not all like 'THEM'. Instead, I tell myself that most people are not like me. I find that thought much easier to live with, as well as much easier to explain to my kids, who will eventually realise one day that they were not being raised in an average Greek household, in a similar way to Dr Aziz in A Passage to India, who did not view himself as an average Indian, but he eventually admitted to himself that he had to show some loyalty for his motherland.

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Roma (Ρομά)

Before the sensible polite hard-working very poor Albanian couple rented my home and made it theirs, I had a Roma family living in it. When they asked to rent the property, I decided to overlook their Roma background, and I signed a renatl agreement, in the full belief that they would be nice to me because I would be nice to them. That's what happens when you are raised in a liberal melting-pot background like I was in New Zealand. You never judge people by thier background, you never accuse them of being something just because of their background, and you always treat them fairly. (I believe this has changed somewhat in New Zealand since the influx of foreign migrants - covert racism exists everywhere at any rate).

Everyone around me told me that I was making a BIG mistake, but I didn't believe them. First and foremost, I had to be a nice person, and I believed - and still do - that you can lead by example. So I put Kosta and Venetia into my house, and their five children: Maria, Lemonia, Carolina, Georgia and Kostaki, the baby boy who was the last to be born, before Venetia had her uterus removed. "We needed a boy," she told me. "Only boys look after the parents in their old age. Girls are for other houses."

I gave Kosta a bank account number, and he said he would deposit the rent in it. The first month, no money went into the account. "What did you expect, Maria?" my husband said. "They are Roma. They never pay anyone." I called him up, and he wouldn't answer his telephone (which he did while he was trying to work out how to rent my house, and he had to chase me up because I reminded him that I couldn't sign a lease until I got the rent in advance - he was hoping he could pay in arrears).

So I trotted off to the house and found his mother and father there. I asekd when Kosta would be back, and she told me he was away on business in Italy. Then she asked me if I could install a phone in the house. Of course, I couldn't, and I didn't, but she kept asking me the same thing. I explained that she had to go to OTE and ask for a line, but she kept telling me that she couldn't read.

Eventually I caught up with Kosta, and he explained to me in that pseudo-polite way that Romas have when they want to pull a fat one over you that he lost his phone and he still hasn't got round to buying a new one. I gues he was paying off the plasma TV that was in the room where I talked to him. All around the house, there was chaos, but then it is none of my business to ask why they don't slpee on beds (they had no chair or beds or tables in the house). I picked up the rent and left.

Naturally, I had to return to the house every month to pick up the rent, because, as Kosta later told me, he couldn't read either, and nor could Venetia, and this depsite seeing the children's names scrawled on the outside walls of the house, spelt correctly in Greek letters. The chasing up of rent money went on for over two years. Sometimes when I visited, the house was full of strangers, sometimes it was full of children and no adutls, and some other times, it was empty. During the summer, they never lived in it. This made me think in the first summer that they had left and deicded not to tell me to abscond from paying the rent. This was the only time I entered the garden area of the house. It was filty, with human excrement lying under the two mandarin trees in the yard. Lice-filled combs were found in various corners; interestingly ,tehre was no actual damage to the house.

I decided to hire a lawyer that first summer to see what I can do about the situation, but just before I did, the miracle happened. The Roma returned. I was given the rent I was owed, at the same time as getting an earful from the neighbours who told me that I should never have allowed these pigs to rent my house, but I decided that it was none of their business anyway, and I did nothing else about it. If you are picking up the rent, you can't really do much about evicting them. You can only do that when yo do not pick up the rent.

After two years of being harassed in this way by these ungrateful Roma, I decided that I had had enough. This was exacerbated when the local council told me that I owed a lot of money on water usage. At the time, I could not change the name of the water user on the property, so it was still in my name. The Roma owed over 800 euro on water use, and I knew in my heart that no amount of niceness would help me get back my money. I decided to evict the Roma, so I hired a lawyer to take the case to court.

(Nor were they paying the electric bills, but the disconnection in such cases was swift, so they could never owe too much at one time; but cutting off water supply is seen as a holier need than electricity, which is why the council was a little lax about cutting it off, until I told them that if they didn't do it, then I would take THEM to court, too).

I finally decided to do what the law entitled me to do since I wasn't collecting any rent in that third summer of having to put up with their little games. While they were away, I never made any contact with them. I simply got the legal proceedings started as early as possible. For my good luck (as the lawyer said, not everyone is as lucky as I am), the court proceedings were not being delayed that year, the lawyers' union had not called so many strikes as they used to in the past, and the Roma did not even try to make contact with me, not once suspecting that I might have been up to something. How thick of them; how much they underestimated me; how dare them!

In three months after the proceedings started, the eviction was passed. The Roma never appeared in court, they never bothered to follow up the bailiff's orders, who would spy on them while they were completely unaware of what was going on, at the laiki (street market), and they never opened the mail that was addressed to them ("we are illiterate", they would lie to us). They were evicted due to their absence in court, not even sending someone to represent them. I was told that I could enter the house only after the eviction was passed and the eviction sign was posted for a certain period of time (I can't remember the details now).

The last day before they eviction could take place and I could enter the hosue, the Roma called up my husband on his phone. (Kosta had stopped calling me a long time before this, because, as he said, it was not in his culture to have business dealings with women. What a wanker.) I was with my husband on that day and I heard the dialogue: "How could you do this to me? What have I done to you? I always paid the rent! Come and take whatever I owe right now! You know I always paid my dues!"

"Maybe you recognise this child?"

Lies, lies, lies. In three days, they had removed eery single item they owned in the house. Unfortuinately, they house had suffered some minor damages - possibly due to the 20 or so people living in it at the same time at different periods - and the water and electric bills had not been paid. I ended up paying all the costs, including the lawyer and the bailiff. I have no regrets though: I gave them a chance to be nice, and they did not take it. I couldn't take any more more abuse, and I simply demanded my rights. The house was left uninhabited because I could not afford to repair it. The Albania couple who live there now begged me to let them repair it themselves. Seven years later, even when they cannot afford to pay me the rent, they always phone me first to let me know. And in the end, they never owe me anything because they have too much pride to sink so low.
Has this episode in my life changed the way I think about Roma? Not really. I always had the subconscious feeling that they were not above board, but I was simply in denial, because that's what a good New Zealander would be thinking like: innocent until proven guilty. And throughout this discussion, note how I avoided using the word 'gypsy'.

©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.

Soul (Ψυχή)

How do you view your soul?
Is it confined in a space?
Or is it a floating mass that you pull along wherever you move?

A Greek filmmaker, and animation and digital artist based in London, Katerina Athanasopoulou, has been awarded the Lumen Prize, for her film 'Apodemy':

Apodemy is an experimental piece on emigration created by Athanasopoulou for a 2012 group art project at the Akadimia Platonos park, the central Athens site whether the ancient philosopher Plato is believed to have taught... "I thought it fitting to work with Plato’s hypothesis of the human soul as a birdcage, where knowledge is birds flying. I was fascinated by the ornithological term ‘zugunruhe’ which is the turbulent behavior of birds about to migrate, whether free or caged." http://www.ekathimerini.com/4dcgi/_w_articles_wsite4_1_15/10/2013_523237

Katerina's describes the film as follows:

A flock of birds circles and moves a cage vehicle, seeking escape from a city half finished and abandoned, with roads interrupted by fragments of fallen statues. Those hands are simultaneously the pursuit of knowledge and also the heroes/leaders of the past that we have rejected but are still haunting us. In a time when Europe seems to be imploding, this is my portrait of Athens. http://www.kineticat.co.uk/Apodemy

We are shaped by our surroundings. Personally, I don't view my soul as caged. It's more like a dispersed cloud around me, that fills with the knowledge gained my surroundings: the trees, their habitat and the beings that make their home there. As I move around within my environment, I pull my soul along, leaving traces of my knowledge. It falls like the seeds of the sower in the parable:

... some fell by the way side, and the birds of the air came and devoured it up. And some fell on stony ground, where it had not much earth; and immediately it sprang up, because it had no depth of earth: But when the sun was up, it was scorched; and because it had no root, it withered away. And some fell among thorns, the thorns grew up, and choked it, and it yielded no fruit. And other fell on good ground, did yield fruit that sprang up and increased... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Sower

The lucky parts that fell on good ground are those that, rather than haunting me, give me hope:
- Know your past, 
to plan your future,
in the present. 

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New car

Goodbye Hyundai Snr...

 ... Hello Hyundai Jnr.

The old car lasted over 14 years, and it was still going quite strong albeit some old-age problems when we pounced on a good discount on the new car. If it lasts us as long as the previous car, I predict that I won't need to buy a new car until I'm 62. By that time, there won't be any kids at home, so husband and I (provided we have our health) can buy a little car to use for the supermarket, or the odd occassion when the completely online connected world demands our presence in the town which we already avoid if we can do so.

No kids at home and you're Greek? you may be wondering. Oh yes, Greece will be a completely different country by then. Watch this space.

©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

The good life (Η καλή ζωή)

The BBC4 Food Programme on Frugal Food is to be aired today (12.32 GMT, 14.32 Greek time), for which I was recently interviewed. I'm not quite sure how it will use the ideas that came up in the discussion, as I notice that the web page does not link to my blog, only to the other (UK) bloggers who were also interviewed for the same programme (see comment). We shall find out soon enough...

If I were to pick one photograph from my vast collection (due to my blogging) that summarises the economic crisis, in food terms and on a personal basis, it would be this one:

The wood-fired heater would never have come into our home if the Greek recession had not turned into an economic crisis. As soon as we installed it in December 2011, we stopped pushing a button to heat the house, and got used to hoarding wood and fire starter material, carrying logs up one floor, clearing the ashes from the previous evening, sweeping away the remains, building a pyramid out of branches, twigs and paper, and having everyone sitting in the same room to keep ourselves warm until it was bedtime. Eventually, as the main cook in the house, I got acquainted with the flames from the wood fire, and I knew when the embers had cooled down just enough so that I could cook a meal in the oven compartment of the heater, and I quickly learnt to synchronise my food preparation with that moment. We rarely use liquid heating fuel now, like 85% of the population in Crete (being one of the warmest regions in Greece) who have switched to another form of heating in the winter.

During the very heavy cold winter of 2011-2012, when the effects of the economic crisis and the consequences of the enforced higher taxation of Greek citizens drove families to an unprecedented form of deprivation ever seen in modern times due to a lack of cash-flow, I began a Cheap'n'Greek'n'Frugal  series of posts that featured every Friday on my blog, to highlight how I try to overcome the problem of keeping my family well fed on high quality food that costs as little as possible. 

Thoroughly sickened by the derisive treatment that Greece and the Greek people were being given by the mass media abroad, who understood very little of what was going in Greece at the time, despite Greece being in the news - and actually, the centre of it - on a daily basis, I began a 'beat the crisis' frugal food' album from June 2011 in my facebook page, featuring home-made meals that cost me very little to make, whose quality could not compare with the daily meals of people living in the so-called richer Northern European countries, as a way to remind myself that Greece was being purposely misrepresented on a global scale.

The series of Cheap'n'Greek'n'Frugal posts began in January 2012 and ended in June 2012. This should not be viewed as a complete coincidence - our summer garden then started to provide us with so much food after that, that my (still cheap 'n' Greek 'n' frugal) food lost its economical appearance. But that is the advantage of living in a rural environment. Frugal living does not mean you live in a hovel like a hermit - it means you search for ways to curb your costs, prioritise your needs, and stretch the resources available to you. Urban frugal living involves the same principles, but they come in a different form. The media is biased by selectively covering and emphasizing the negative welfare effects of high food prices on urban consumers, because their rural counterparts supposedly 'have' food:

"The groups who usually respond politically with strikes, protests or riots to the negative income effects of food price changes are urban consumers, not rural farmers; it is easier to mobilize the urban populations who are already concentrated in the cities." (Yuksel, H. Mass Media and Food Crisis, MAICh research currently being studied)

The photo was taken in a highly urban area of Hania in mid-March 2013. It shows what looks like a messy garden with a lemon tree in the middle. Look more closely: behind the garden is a chicken coop - the chickens are barely visible, but one is sitting on top of a rabbit pen. The area where the animals are kept will be covered by a shady leafy grapevine by the middls of summer (that's what the dry branches are: a vine about to start growing leaves). Next to the garden on the right are the remains of a wood-chopping session. The house looks unkempt and rather poorly; I believe economic migrants are living here, and not the Greek owner. But that makes no difference to what the photo depicts: it illustrates the frugal urban life in times of adversity.

But no one is self-sufficient in the world we live in. Rural consumers buy food too, while their income is generally lower than urban consumers. The media (which is generally biased to start with) prefer to cover more negative than positive news because the 'bad news hypothesis' is more catchy.

Vegan eggplant pie with home-made filo (approximate cost: 1.50 euro)

I can create virtually any meal I want at very low cost, using the resources around me.

Taiwanese dumplings with home-made filo (approximate cost: 1 euro for 12 pieces; recipe forthcoming)

It sounds really easy to be frugal, when you have your own garden, doesn't it? You grow this and that, so you cook and eat it. But few people realise how small the variety range is when you eat what you grow. In summer, for example, we grow tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, zucchini, corn, beans and vlita greens (which is English are called amaranth). So those are our vegetables throughout summer - we eat from that range for approximately a quarter of the year. Since I rarely buy vegetables from the stores, that means that I am prepareing meals from a very limited range of items. To make this diet palatable, that means that I must cleverly cook these vegetables in many different ways.

That's what being frugal is all about: using the resources around you as wisely as possible. For this reason, you rarely see recipes on my blog that involved expensive unusual fruit or vegetables - it's not really a frgual way to cook. But my recipes still bring out a wide variety of food types - I just invent different ways to use the same ingredients, so that the recipes rarely resemble each other, even though they are oftne made of the same things.

Ways with zucchini: you will find them in all the above dishes - with boiled greens, as the main ingreident in burger patties, as a dip and as cupcakes. Below is the king of Cretan zucchini dishes - boureki (with potato and cheese).

Below I list some of my articles about frugal food (and by extension, frugal living) that readers may find useful, to understand my own ideas about frugal food:

• Frugal living - take a peek inside my fridge to see what I stock
• Price comparisons of imported and local food in Hania
• Imam baldi - a dish I make in summer using 99% home-grown produce
• Tomato sauce - this is prepared to last me throughout the year until the next tomato season
• Yiros - the Greek version of a Happy Meal
• Lentil stew - a very Greek, very frugal and very much loved meal throughout Greece
• Some photos taken at a private subsistence farm whose owners spend little money on food, other than to buy fresh fish, bread, staples like beans, rice and pasta, sugar, salt and coffee

If I were to forecast the economic situation, I would say that for most Greeks, 2013 was not much different from 2012, and 2014 looks set to continue in the same way. I will still continue to act like an ant, hoarding for the winter. But I can still sing like a cicada, even if it means waiting to do this in the winter; at least I do not have to compete with them. Even if the situation suddenly changed and things began to look brighter, I don't think my own lifestyle will change: once you start being frugal, it's difficult to shake it off. 

©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.

Hot dates and hot chicks

A freind of mine recently told me that I should monetize my blog. In other words, I should make my blog make money, all the while that I am doing nothing more than I am doing now, uploading photos, sitting at my desk and writing. I'm not sure thought - I think I have too much integrity to do that.

I once read a book awritten by a bicultural author, which was based on some kind of bicultural charcater who had a mental breakdown. When I pick titles to read, I don't base my choices on the author's biography as it feels too subjective. But once I read the book (which wasn't very well written - it was just an OK story for me), I looked up her biography on the web and read to my astonishment that she liked tostay at home in her pyjamas all day and write stories. She was a little too smug for my liking. I despise the western culture that conjures up the mistaken belief that you can make money being a writer without leaving your house and just 'writing'. These days, anyone can write something and publish it, even if it is bad. It just gives you a bad name as a writer - and tehre may be a hint of truth that some people don't know how to pick a good writer.

I did use GoogleAds in the past, but I was bitterly disapoointed. It took me two years to collect something like 10 euros on my account, and Google wouldn't pay (in those days anyway) until you collected 70 euros! Worse still, the ads that kept coming up on my screen were to the likes of 'hot chicks' and 'hot dates' (have you seen many recipes on my blog with dates and chicken??!). I felt degraded - and I asked myself: what do my readers think about this?

I don't believe for a moment that people are seriously interested in clicking the ads on my blog. Most of my readers are regular readers, so they are here to 'see' me. So if I were to monetize the blog, it would have to have a completely different focus. For my blog to make money, I'd need to change it in a major way. It would need a huge makeover, something I can't do on my own. I'm a rather busy person; apart from the daily routine chores, I also have a paying day job, I cook something from scratch almost every day (good thing I remembered the fasolada at this moment!), I take my young kids to their activities, and at the weekends, if I don't join my husband in the garden, I am often working on work-related reading and writing, even after work hours. The last thing I want to do is write only 'nice' things to make people happy, which do not reveal my true feelings; people come here to hear the views of a Greek person, they like to see what a Greek person is cooking, they want to see Greek scenery as it is the moment I snapped the photo, without photoshopping it. That's what they come on for, so that's what I give them. They don't come for the ads.

I sometimes wish that I could make money from my blog, but more than that, I wish I could write the kind of things I want to write and make money by doing that. But I lead a privileged life already and I don't think I will get that lucky too soon. By privileged, I mean that I don't have debts, I have a healthy family, I don't have psychological problems, and I am happy living in the place where I am living. Maybe my life is not luxurious, I know that, but most people I know don't have all four of the above-mentioned.

You can't make money if you don't project a certain image, and the right person working behind your blog to maintain that image. And I don't want to tarnish my image by using ads that degrade me. GoogleAds did just that. Serisouly, do people really click on 'hot dates' ads??? And more importantly, how did hot dates become synonymous with my blog?!

Maybe Google has matured since those days. Maybe things have changed. But one thing hasn't and that is that huge businesses use insignificant blogs like my own to make money for other people. This is my silent protest against those monsters: to run a blog on my own lines, without succumbing to advertising pressures and disclaimers. If I decide to monetize my blog, then I will have to accept that I will lose a part of myself. I won't be free to write what I want and I will be under greater scrutiny.

It is pertinent to quote the famous Cretan writer, Nikos Kazantzakis, writer of Zorba the Greek:

Δεν ελπίζω τίποτα. Δε φοβούμαι τίποτα. Είμαι λεύτερος.

I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.

I am not as free as the quote suggests, as I have undertaken obligaitons and responsibilities, as a wife, mother and worker. But as I am now, I am my own person as much as I can be.

 ©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.

Busy

Normally on my birthday, I like to prepare a special post by writing a short story based on a fictionalised account of a moment in my past life. But it's been a while since I've written even just a short story. Spare time for the selfish art of creating just for the sake of creating seems to be severely lacking these days. In the times of the gloabl financial crisis, everything we do has to have a more functional purpose.  

In lieu of a short story, please accept some of my baking instead - chocolate muffins and cranberry and white chocolate cookies. They'll be at the office tomorrow, sitting pretty next to the coffee machine.

In the meantime, I think I'll take a blogging break and perhaps try and work on that short story...

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Seizing the day

I didn't feel well this morning: runny nose, sore throat, sore back, all signs of something like a cold starting. So I took the day off, and decided to get back into bed after I took the children to school. 

Winter in Crete: fine, sunny, no wind, and low temperatures (14C).

But the temptation to make something out of the day when everyone else's legs are away from the house is too great. 

Tidying the bookcase took me most of the morning.  Some things were thrown out (they became fire starter). My food/travel books surround my mum's Royal Albert and other heirlooms.

Today's lunch is always prepared yesterday (I cooked makaronada last night). But being alone on my own gave me the chance to cook the kind of meal that only I would eat: no matter how often I cook them, stir-fries are still not popular in my house.

Heat some olive oil, saute some minced garlic, sliced onion and grated ginger; add some garden greens (boiled broccoli florets and blanched pak choi leaves in my case). Flavour with soya sauce; cook by stirring over high heat till done to your liking. For protein, I added the leftovers of a chickpea stew.

I get a lot done when other people's legs are not in my way.

©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.

Interlude (Διάλειμμα)

This post has been written in response to a comment I received recently on another post.

As this is a personal blog which gives my own unguided point of view of things as they happen and as I experience them in a very modern and rapidly changing Greece, readers should bear in mind that I am simply stating my way of seeing things, even if it may sound quite misguided to others; in other words, I am trying to find some logic amidst the mess that Greeks find themselves in at the moment. I get my ideas about what to write from my daily life, the things I hear about, and any reading material that comes by my way.

It helps to remember that nearly all the people I am surrounded by (family, friends and colleagues) see Greece as the only place in the world that they will ever live in because they have known no other home and are not at a stage or a state in their life where migration is an option for them (most have never put it into their mind). We're in Greece for good, whether she's better or worse, richer or poorer, sick or healthy. I am not a political analyst, nor am I an economist; I'm a Greek blogger, which is kind of like coca-cola: it goes with everything these days.

Life in Greece at the moment is money-poor and resource-rich. I predict this will change in the near future: five years from now, Greece will not be so money-poor, and her resources will be quite different to the ones now relied on. (The vegetables were all picked on Saturday morning.)

I have never advertised my facebook page or my blog and I have never paid for 'likes'. I know that more people come into my facebook page than the number that have actually 'liked' it, and I physically know very few of my regular blog readers. I will not profer reasons for this, suffice it to say that these are public pages. If people are interested in what they read here, they will come back for more. If they find something they don't like and decide to fly off the handle about it, I will not be surprised: in fact I will expect it from my compatriots - as another (Greek) reader recently noted: "Greeks are notoriously passionate, and the majority of the public think with their hearts first, not their minds." I am very fortunate to live in a country where freedom of expression has not been censored: what happened to Shaheen Dhada and Renu Srinivasan will never happen to me because I live in Greece, an imperfect country which strives towards democracy.

Through blogging, I've made and physically met many good friends; I've also managed to see places in the world that I would not have been to (both in Greece and abroad) had I not been blogging. I like to share these experiences with others, that's all; I'm not here to sell anything, and I’m not asking anyone to agree with my opinions – I’m just posting mental notes to myself which may help my own children understand how their parents saw things ‘back then’ and why they were raised the way they were. Life isn’t that random, after all, and I urge all conscious parents to do this in some way.  

Regular blogging is scheduled to resume tomorrow.
PS: it's all organically cooked as long as we pick it from our own garden.

©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.

Neck pain (Αυχενικό)

I have a pain in the neck which causes me discomfort when I'm using a computer, knitting, sewing, ironing, peeling potatoes, preparing salads, and basically anything which requires the head to be lowered at a slight downward angle while concentrating on a task that usually requires you to sit/stand still and focus your eyes on one specific object.

This pain in the neck is referred to as αυχενικό (afheniko) in Greek, and cervicaglia in Italian. It's not referred to as anything in English, because supposedly it doesn't exist. The Italians will know what I am talking about, but sadly, the British will view it as an imaginary affliction, often seen as a way for a hypochondriac to escape from routine, which is why I don't talk much about it. But the truth is that I sufffer from this 'pain in the neck' for long periods every year. It eventually goes away a month after its onset, and there isn't really much you can do about it, except to get a whole lot of tests done to prove that you've got it, and once you're sure you've got it, you can start taking some pills on a regular basis that supposedly relieve your pain, but you need to take them for a long time, even when you don't feel the pain, to see any effect.

The pain usually starts with a weather anomaly, like high humidity, which Hania has been challenged with for the last month-and-a-half: temperatures in the mid-30s during the day, with misty mornings and cold nights. When I see this weather pattern setting in, I know I am going to suffer; it really is a psychosocial disorder, this pain in the neck of mine. 

I've tried the pills, and I know I really didn't feel any differently from when I wasn't taking them, so I've decided to let nature take its course instead, this time hoping that my pain in the neck will go away by the end of the month, and I truly believe it will, since I've been suffering from it since just after the birth of my first child (the things mothers go through), and I know it usually lasts up to a month (or so). But since my whole life revolves around all the above-mentioned activities, it's pretty hard to do much (writing in particular) these days.

 An amazing place I visited during the weekend, with friends and family: the ruins of the ancient walled town of Aptera.

The good thing about my pain in the neck is that walking, being out in the fresh air, lying down, and simply resting doesn't exacerbate the pain, so with all the good weather Crete's been having lately, it's given me the chance to be outdoors more, which means I feel the pain less, and I don't think about it so much. The truth is that the older we get, the more often we feel a pain here or there, and I've got friends my age who have similar annoying aches in other parts of their bodies (and they seem much worse than mine), so I guess my pain in the neck is just one of those things that comes with growing older. But if you have a young family, you mustn't let this part of your natural development hinder your daily dealings with them, so I always try to pretend that there is nothing really wrong with me, even though I do in fact feel a lot of pain.

The only thing I haven't done much of these days is any blog writing, but at least that's given me the chance to do more reading. Once I get over this thingamijig, I'll let you in on my good reads.

©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.

Desperately seeking Maria

Since 1983, women in Greece do not change their surname automatically when they get married, as they did in the past, unlike in most Western countries. This explains why you often find more than one name on a doorbell. It also helps you keep in touch with female friends in Greece who may have gotten married - their name is most likely to still be the same one they used at school.

Some friends of Maria's from her Kiwi days were visiting Crete recently and they wanted to surprise Maria by popping up on her doorstep without Maria knowing. Jo is the old-fashioned type who likes to send real letters in stamped envelopes. So every year, she would send Maria a Christmas card-letter with the same surname she knew Maria to have in New Zealand. Maria sometimes got the letters, but sometimes she didn't (although she did the last one). They were always sent to valid addresses but Maria had moved five times until today: her last known address was her own property which she had moved out of when she got married. It was being rented and the tenant knew their landlord well. So in theory, Maria was 'findable' and could be pounced on unawares.

As soon as Mike and Jo, originally from Wales, arrived in Hania, they went to a souvlaki shop in the Venetian harbour that they remember going to in 1977, when they had just fallen in love, where had holidayed together without Mums and Dads knowing that they were together at the time (Mike had to wait until his suntan faded before Jo invited him over to meet her parents). The souvlaki shop was still there, but it was trading under a different name: instead of Angelo's, it is now called Mike's. Mike himself thought this was a sign.

"Mike's bound to know how to find Maria's house," he said to Jo. So they gave him the paper where they had written the last address they posted Maria a letter, and sure enough, Mike said he knew where it was.

"Its not far from where we are now, you can walk there," he told them. Mike and Jo preferred to take a taxi because it was very hot. Indeed the house was very close to where they had taken the taxi from, but when they knocked on the door, no one was home. There was no answer except for the incessant yapping bark of a dog. They decided to leave on foot and come back later, where they found a woman sitting on the balcony.

With her long red hair flowing in the gusty wind that had cooled down the hot air, Jo asked the lady if she knew Maria. Dhanggit didn't speak English, and didn't really understand anything these strangers were saying. The intonation patterns of these people's language was completely unknown to her. But she liked their smiles and they seemed very friendly people, even though she had no idea about how to convey this to them. She couldn't understand what these people were doing here out of the blue: the only thought that came to her was that perhaps the owner of the house she was renting was putting it up for sale, and these tourists were interested buyers. Seeing their map in tatters, she patched it up for them with cellotape, offering them a glass of water to refresh themselves. They showed her Maria's name and address on the paper, but Dhanggit couldn't make any sense of it - she could read Albanian and a little bit of Greek, but anything written in curly lettering style in English spelling was beyond her (and this despite English and Albanian both being written with Latin letters).

Mike and Jo thanked the lady for her help, and returned to Mike's feeling a little despondent, where they told him of their experiences. They told Mike that they knew Maria's husband was a taxi driver. Mike thought that maybe Maria was now using her married name, but there may be someone at the taxi company who would know her with her maiden name as the wife of a taxi driver. So he phoned the company offices where he was told that there was indeed a taxi driver who went by the name of Verivaki. The secretary gave Mike the number of the taxi and told him that Mike and Jo should search for it in the taxi stands around the town.

After a relaxing evening at their hotel, off they went the next day in search of Verivaki's taxi. To their amazement, the first taxi they came across in the stand was the number they had been given. A tall dark handsome young chap was sitting in the driver's seat. They gave him the piece of paper with Maria's name and address and asked him if he knew this person. Verivaki's English was just as bad as Dhanggit's. As long as he could vaguely hear a local place name, he could work his way round the idiosyncrasies of various tourist speakers' elocutions, but being asked to discuss his own name in the English language was way beyond his capabilities.

He looked at the strangers and wondered how they knew about his family... He instantly decided that something was amiss here. After conferring with the other cabbies in the rank, they all decided that it was best not to deal with these people. Who knows what they wanted? The man looked especially shifty - he looked young with long white straggly hair; Verivaki assumed that it must be dyed. (Actually, Mike simply looked younger than his age - he was overly athletic for a 65-year-old and although he was now classified as a pensioner in New Zealand which means free public transport, children standing up for you in the bus, and a free weekly meal at a restaurant, he certainly didn't feel like an old fogey, and didn't really know how to act like one.)

"I don't know," Verivaki replied abruptly to Mike and Jo, who realised that they were now in a pickle about how to find Maria. Everyone who seemed to be able to help them was doing their best to hinder them. They went back to Mike's souvlaki, where he tried to cheer them up by telling them that there are millions of Maria's in the area, and her common name was probably what was thwarting their efforts.

Jo then decided to do what she least wanted to do: she logged into Facebook on a computer terminal and sent Maria a message. There would be no surprises after all. Maria responded immediately, telling her to meet up at a pre-defined spot in Hania. After a few hugs and kisses later, Mike and Jo narrated the events to Maria, who explained to them that the Albanian lady was her tenant and she didn't speak any English, which was probably where the misunderstanding occurred. Maria then invited them to her house for dinner; they were staying at a hotel close to Maria's house, so it would be easy to drop them off afterwards. So they got into Maria's car and drove out of the noisy town into the relative peace and quiet of rural Crete. Maria parked the car and they all got out.

"Honey!" Maria cried. "I'm home! We've got visitors!" At that moment her husband came out to greet them.

"Oh, hello!" he said, shaking Mike and Jo's hands. "I remember you! I take you to the house in Hania. You remember me?"

Mike and Jo were stunned to realise that before them stood the first taxi driver that had driven them from Hania to the house where the Albanian lady had patched up their map with sellotape.

"Why didn't you tell us that this was your wife's house when we were there?" Jo asked.

"Oh, I know it is my house wife," Maria's husband explained, "but you no say to me to take you to my wife. You say to take you to the house!"

*** *** ***

Greeks don't offer much personal information to everybody. They are (were?) generally very cagey about giving details of their personal affairs, even to people they know. But they love hearing about your own details and continue to ask foreigners lots of questions.

All's well that ends well. Thank you Jo and Mike (and Mike's souvlaki at the old harbour, which I will visit one day when I get the chance) for all the surprises you offered during your brief visit!

 ©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.

The little envelope (Το φακελάκι)

If you don't know where you came from, you won't know what heights you can reach.

 "Congratulations," said the smiling nurse to Manolis, as she came out of the operating theatre, although he didn't actually understand what she was saying. "It's a girl."

"Thangyu," he replied, smiling nervously on hearing his voice sound out the foreign words that he had rehearsed beforehand, in order to respond appropriately.

"Your wife will be returning to the ward soon," Ngaire continued, unaware that Manolis had no idea what she was saying. "You'll get to see your little girl as soon as she's weighed and measured." He nodded at Ngaire with the same nervous smile, while waiting for his koumbara to tell him what the next step in the process was. Ngaire then turned in a disciplined fashion and left them to attend to her next duty. She hoped that no other women would be giving birth in the next hour because she was nearing the end of her shift and would be delayed in leaving if another woman went into labour right after this birth.

"Congratulations, koumbaro!" Sofia was exuberant. "Everything went well! Now let's go to the ward and wait for Zambia." 

Manolis and Sofia went back to the ward where Zambia was wheeled in a few minutes later, looking rather tired, but with a glow on her face, as she had just become a mother for the first time. Sofia kissed and hugged her, displaying the camaraderie that women who had become mothers could share. Manolis, in the meantime, remained a bystander, as if waiting for his cue to take part in a performance, whose next act was just about to follow. He did not interrupt the two women's conversation to ask his wife how she felt: it was written quite obviously on her face.

Not long after that, the baby, bundled up in regulation sheets and blankets, was brought to them by the same nurse. "Isn't she gorgeous?" Ngaire cooed. "She has an expressive little face! I wonder what she's trying to tell us!" Ngaire laid the baby down onto her mother's breast. The baby wriggled her soft face towards the feel of her mother's skin, searching for anything it could clutch onto that would comfort it. "Oh look," the nurse continued in her foreign babble, "she's hungry!"

On seeing the baby in her mother's arms, Manolis was filled with feelings of love and tenderness, and an image of his own mother came to his mind. He wanted to tell the nurse about this, but he knew that this was not possible because he did not speak any English. So he just pointed to the baby and said "Thangyu," repeating what he had said to the nurse outside the surgery. He put his hands into the breast pocket of his blazer.

Ngaire looked at him sympathetically, feeling his emotion at this most significant moment in his life. She noticed he was having trouble retrieving something from the breast pocket of his blazer. He must be needing a handkerchief, she thought. In an act of efficiency, she left Zambia's side and came towards Manolis, who was standing next to the bedside cabinet. It was just at this moment that Ngaire noticed the crochet doily sitting below the regulation pile of paper towels that patients were customarily provided with, and wondered subconsciously how it got there. Her purposeful efficiency did not stop her from exectuing her duties: she picked up a paper towel and handed it to Manolis.

By this time, Manolis had retrieved what it was that he was searching for in his pocket: a little envelope, the size of a business card, which he handed to the nurse, slipping it just under the paper towel that she was holding, which he had carefully prised out of her hand so that the little envelope would look neither too conspicuous nor fall out of her hands, which would have caused her great embarrassment, if she had to pick it up off the floor. "Thangyu," he said once again.

"Oh, what's this?" Ngaire looked surprised to see the envelope. "A card! Who's it for?"

Zambia and Sofia had just noticed what was going on. Zambia smiled approvingly at her husband, but Sofia's cheerful outlook suddenly turned dour. It was too late. Manolis was pointing to the nurse, beckoning her to take the little envelope, which Ngaire had just opened to see what was inside. It contained a five-dollar note. What the Dickens? she shrugged dumbfounded, steering her gaze from the money to Manolis every half-second. 

"Manolis," Sofia hissed softly. "They don't do that here," It suddenly occurred to Sofia that this was Manolis' first visit to a New Zealand hospital, having had no need for one in the last twelve months, which was the total amount of time that he had been in the country. It was clearly a new experience for him.

The nurse pushed the envelope back into his hand, making Manolis jump a little. He did not expect his small gift to be returned to him so abruptly, which caused him to wonder: Did I not give her enough?

Having finished her rounds for the evening, Ngaire went to the staff room to rest a little and change out of her uniform before clocking out and going home. She found another three nurses there already, playing a quick round of Monopoly before their shift started. Petula Clark was playing on the radio and the latest episode of Coronation Street was just about to start on TV.

"What a night!" she sighed as she flopped onto an empty armchair. "I just got picked up by a man whose wife had just given birth!"

The other nurses looked up at her and giggled. "Was he good-looking, at least?" one jeered.

"Get this," Ngaire continued excitedly. "He tried to give me money!"

"Did you take it?"

"Don't be daft!" Ngaire replied. "What did he take me for, a prostitute?" That set off the laughter once again.

*** *** ***

It is doubtful that the nurses at Wellington Public Hospital were playing Monopoly before their shift; the only TV channel available in New Zealand at the time I was born stopped broadcasting well before a nurse started the late night shift (so did the radio strations), and Petula Clark's hit took a couple of months longer than in the US to make it to number 1 in New Zealand. To my knowledge, my father did pass a 5-dollar bill to the nurse that brought me to my mother's side, but I don't think he had put it in an envelope; apparently, she looked at him as he were from another planet.

©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.

Anglo-Saxon (Αγγλο-Σάξονας)

A tale of three cities - that's how I characterised Greece from the moment I understood the parallel infrastructures operating in tandem, serving the needs to three different classes of citizens. On the one hand, a group of privileged people; on the other, a group of abusers; and somewhere in between, the masses who had nobody/nothing/nowhere to turn to for support except themselves and their families. This seems set to continue, although each group's structure and members may change according to the new laws being implemented, which are still too fluid to be followed strictly to the letter - perhaps they never will be.

Greece was in a state of frenzy when I first came to Athens: cars clogged the too-narrow streets, people jammed over-priced stores, drachma bills spilled out of over-stuffed wallets, mouths gorged on too much food, cafe seats overflowed with customers, meals out were de rigeur and cigarettes were an indispensable accessory of the fingers. Everyone's dream: to get a job in the public service. Everyone's nightmare: to work in the private sector. Nobody's desire: to live in the countryside. The unsustainability of the system was considered a taboo subject, no matter how obvious it was. Who or what was to blame is still widely debated, "it's not my fault" being the recurrent theme dominating most discussions about the current state of things in Greece.



You have to have lived in Greece for a number of years, and to have needed to use certain services in order to understand this situation. It's not immediately obvious to the foreigner, especially people who do not have family based here. They live in their own ex-pat world, which provides them with a means of protection from the volatile relationships within each class. It's only when you get involved in the system out of necessity that your eyes are opened. The problem was not necessarily the actual system that was operating in pre-crisis Greece; despite its immoral and unethical nature, it worked well enough for everyone to be able to eke a life out for themselves in their own country. For me, it was the perceived notions of each group and the attitudes held among them that I found most difficult to grapple with. On their part, they couldn't understand my need to question the system's feasibility.

To most Greeks, my difficulty in coping with Greece's seeming immorality was translated by the locals as my inability to understand Greek society. Ideas like "you're a foreigner", "you think like an Anglo-Saxon" or "you think you're still living in New Zealand" were aimed at me. This was all undeniably true: I wasn't born here, I was educated through an Anglo-Saxon system and I had created a comfortable life for myself in Greece by living like a foreigner - on my own, making ends meet, and not overspending. I also broke some of the unwritten rules of traditional Greek identity. As an example, take my first Easter Sunday celebration in Greece: I was strictly vegetarian; when I went to cafes with friends, I would complain if there was no non-smoking area; when someone arranged a night out in the middle of the week, I would remind them that tomorrow was a working day. No one could see make any sense of my outlandishness. What a weirdo, they were probably thinking, she won't last long here. They still look at me at me with suspicion when I tell them I don't see any reason why I should want to leave: "Can't you see what's going on? they insist.

My Anglo-Saxon foreignness is probably what provided me with the strength, stability and durability I needed as a foreign-born Greek to stay in Greece permanently. An Anglo-Saxon education allows people to think more freely and yield more creative ideas. It teaches them to listen to others' opinions with a more open mind and fewer prejudices, without colouring their own judgment or beliefs. People with an Anglo-Saxon upbringing are more likely to oust people from their social groups if they feel that their own personality or integrity is undervalued or at risk (this includes family). Through this independent thinking, they are less likely to become attached to objects and places, and more likely to have a vision beyond that of what is immediately found in front of them. This spherical upbringing allows people with strong identity links to preserve their identity without the fear of losing it amidst an Anglo-Saxon world. Above all, it gives them the skills to be able to survive in the globalised world.

You don't have to be an Anglo-Saxon to be an Anglo-Saxon, but if you want to be a European these days, you have to think like an Anglo-Saxon.  


The tale of the three cities that used to make up Greece has not changed much with the latest developments. There still seems to be a class of privileged people who will always find a way to get away with paying their dues (they will argue that they don't actually owe anyone anything, not even society), there is still a group abusing the system (they are rich and rely on their stash of cash), and there is still that group of people who will never have much more than what they had in the first place, ie themselves. The main differences now are that the latter has grown in number, while the countryside is seen in a more positive light - at least you won't go hungry there.

Achieving sustainability is now a global goal: it remains to be seen if Greece, one of the first countries to be dealt the death blow, will also be one of the first to find the winning formula that is so desperately needed to avoid extinction. At least we have past experiences to remind us of how people coped - and they did survive.

©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.

Happy (belated) blogoversary: Seven (Χρόνια Πολλά με τα Επτά)

Magda, from My Little Expat Kitchen, has invited me to take part in a little game called Seven. Since I am not good at remembering my blog's (or anyone's) birthday, but I am good at connecting ideas, I can now take the time to congratulate myself on entering my fifth year of food blogging, and to thank you all for tuning in to read me.

Here's my list of 7:

1. My most beautiful post
Generally speaking, I have always combined food stories with photography from my town. The island of Crete is closely related to the island's food. For this reason, I have chosen Taste Crete as my most beautiful post, because I showcase the best in food that my region has to offer, and possibly some of my best food photography.

My food blog writing can be summarised in this photo: a view of Lefka Ori from the olive groves in the village.

2. My most popular post
I never expected to be a fasolada expert - admittedly, it's one of my husband's favorite dishes and I even manage to make it to number 1 from time to time in Google's page-1/top-10 search results. So I guess my fasolada must be pretty good...

And this happens to be one of the most popular photos of fasolada on Google - a certain little boy eating his mother's home-made fasolada.

3. My most controversial post

I'm generally regarded as a controversial Greek food blogger, not because of my recipes, but because of my ideas about the Greek food scene in general. I refuse to sacrifice my integrity for the sake of covering up fallacies about Greek food, both within Greece and abroad. Although the comments in my Greek food myths and legends post were very positive, the ideas I have expressed are like a slap in the face to other Greek food writers who do not take into account the modern changing times, are too regionally based in their generalisations, and/or are generally speaking in cliches.

Since writing my myths and legends post, the Wikipedia entry for gyros at the time has been greatly altered, but still manages to make mistakes: "In Greece, the meat is typically pork or lamb, but can occasionally be chicken or veal." WRONG! In Greece, the meat is typcially PORK or CHICKEN (never lamb), and occassionally BEEF."

4. My most helpful post
Another surprise for me: following closely after fasolada, my most popular post is all about how to freeze aubergine. We grow a lot of eggplant in our garden, which prompted me to find ways to freeze it. I was also prompted to write this post because I was constantly being told (by ignorant people) that aubergine can't be frozen (?%&*$!).

Don't discard them if they seem to shrivel - eggplants taste even better when their moisture diminishes.

5. The post whose success surprised me
My favorite chocolates are Roses made by the Cadbury company, which don't feature in my life these days at all (they aren't available in Hania, and if they were, they'd be super-expensive), but they were a very integral part of my youth in New Zealand. I wrote a story about Roses chocolates, and I believe that this post became very successful because Roses are a very special kind of chocolate, wrapped in a unique way, with different fillings and flavours replacing older ones over the years, which is the main reason why people google them. For similar reasons, my post on natural cake icings is becoming very popular, as people look for more natural alternatives to decorate their food.

Roses wrappers are not as charming as they once were, and they never carried warning signs like "Contains nuts or soya products" like they do now.

6. The post that didn't get the attention it deserved
I can't find just one post that didn't get the attention it deserved; there are quite a number of them. I believe that this happens because people come to my blog for different reasons, among which are for my stories about Greek/Cretan life, tourist information about Hania, and recipes associated with a Greek festival or a regional Cretan dish. This last reason is the one that brings most readers to my blog: in other words, they came here by accident (ie Google sent them, hence my popularity in making fasolada or freezing aubergine). To do my blog justice, one needs to read the stories associated with my food. The recipes are only a cover-up of something deeper.

Had these two children been born in Hania under similar circumstances 100 years ago, they would both most likely have been victims of infant mortality.

7. The post I am most proud of
Until I decided to write about koliva, a recipe that is very important in a Greek person's life cycle, I had never made it before. A Greek cook cannot call themselves accomplished (at least in my opinion) if they have never made koliva.

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A part of this game involves asking other bloggers to take part in the Seven game, presenting their own sevens list. My blog has taken me to places I never expected to go to, and I have met many good people through my writing. For this reason, I'd like to introduce you to some bloggers who, for various reasons, have shown interest in my work:

1. Heidi (she has visited Crete and she writes in Danish - use a translator tool!)

2. Carrie (she make beautifully decorated cakes)

3. Vicky (she writes in Greek - use a translator tool)

4. Mia Mara (she writes a bilingual blog with her friend)

5. Anna (she gives Greek food a new lease of life in the US)

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