Economic crisis? (Οικονομική κρίση;)

Today is the day the powers that be have designated as World Poverty Day. The images usually associated with poverty are hungry black children living in slums. With the recent economic crisis, poverty might take on a new meaning. Poverty in developing countries does not compare to poverty in developed countries. Let's not forget that poverty in developed countries partly has to do with how much debt an individual has accrued on a credit card (needs are satisfied without being paid for), while in developing countries, poverty has to do with not being able to acquire basic needs in the first place.

In developed countries, people don't have to spend a lot of money on food. They can fill their stomachs with hi-fat, hi-carb, low-nutrient-value food at a fraction of the cost people in developing countries pay for their food. Those same poor people are also the fattest people in the country. In terms of food shopping, poor people will buy cheap food. It is a sorry state of affairs that the cheapest food is also the least nutritious, and this trend is unlikely to cease. What do people do food-wise to economise? Eat cheap takeaways, for one, and buy ready food from discount supermarkets. I'm not an economist, so please forgive me if I get my facts wrong in this, but I don't think I'm deluded when I say that I believe the average Cretan family won't be doing this. Somewhere, some place, something is growing freely, cultivated by someone who is harvesting in excess, and giving it away to somebody who will somehow prepare it into a tasty edible that will be shared out among family members who may not have the time to cook. Of course, takeaways are also available, but if you have a plate of nutritious food placed before you, you won't even think about fast food.

The summer garden is now in recession, so there's a lull period in our harvest. If we were subsistence farmers (without a salaried or freelance career), we'd be having trouble finding food now. So many food bloggers have praised the merits of nettles: apparently, they reduce allergies, cleanse your blood, relieve pain, stop hair loss and bleeding, lower your blood pressure, aid in digestion and kill germs; it's about time I tried them myself. The nettles in our garden are prospering in the autumn climate, so they'll be making their way into my greens pies from now on until the spinach starts to grow.

Poverty levels in Greece are said to be the highest (along with Portugal) in the EU-15. This also correlates with low average salaries in these countries. These statements must be viewed in context: Greece always had a lower average salary than for other European countries, and this became more prevalent once the euro was introduced. The meaning of poverty may be a universal one, but it does not ring the same tone when it is used in different countries. Greeks don't live in mud-huts, for instance, no matter how poor they are. And the economy of Greece has never operated in the same way as the economy of the more developed countries of Europe.

For a start, Greek banks never lend money cheaply. If you borrow money in Greece, be prepared to pay it back with a huge interest rate. Cheap housing loans are very carefully monitored by the state; there are a number of pre-conditions that must be met before a cheap loan will be meted out to anyone, and it involves a huge amount of paperwork. People often take out loans to buy their first home, which usually means an apartment, or to build their first home, usually on land that their family already had in their possession, or at least owned freehold. This effectively means that a family who builds a new house will expect to be living in that house for a long time.

The second point is related to this last fact: in Greece, you do not buy (or build) a property with a short-term view to owning it. You do not play the buy-and-sell game with ancestral land. You just keep it, until a good opportunity arises to use it. If you do end up selling it, you were either in desperate need of cash, or the property did not get used in the way it was intended (eg to be lived in by a descendant), and maintaining it was more costly than getting rid of it.

Take a friend of mine, whose husband inherited a piece of land from his parents in an inner-city neighbourhood. The area is considered working class, but the value of the land as real estate is quite high, given its proximity to the main town. It is not a visually appealing neighbourhood, but this has nothing whatsoever to do with the value of the property. They took out a loan seven years ago and built a house. Then they took out a second loan and built another house on top of that house, "for the kids," a common practice in Greece, saving land and property for your offspring. They've been living there for the last seven years and their children are in their late teens: how likely is it that they are thinking of selling this house? Extremely unlikely, I think. This story is typical of many of my friends, colleagues and acquaintances. We belong to the same category, regardless of the area where we live, the money we earn, the cars we drive. Some of us simply have more money at our disposal, according to the work we are involved in. But land and housing remain a stable part of a person's life: you buy land to keep it or build on it, and once you own a house, you live in it for a long time.

Property loans seemed to cause the greatest damage in the recent US crisis, which had a domino effect on all the other countries affected. As for the sharemarket, this isn't what the average Cretan does with his/her money. If there's a lot of extra cash in someone's possession, they'll be using it to buy more land, or build more properties that they'll rent out until the family needs them for accommodation. The properties won't be sold off; they will be built to be kept in the family. The only exception is 'rural land', which is sold at 'ballooned' prices to foreign property investors - I think they'll be in trouble now (after the Greeks got their money).

What if they don't want to build or buy land? Then the money stays in the bank. The bank has loads of cash available for loans, so the bank doesn't have a cash flow problem. There's loads of money in Greek banks. Who are the greatest savers, by the way? The Albanians, according to a recent news report. They make and save money in exactly the same way that Greek migrants did when they were leaving Greece and going to places like Australia, New Zealand and Canada, which is why most of them ended up with their own properties in those countries too (Albanians are also property owners in Greece). The government only last week raised the guaranteed pay-out sum of a bank account, should a bank go bust, from 20,000 to 100,000 euro. Surely the government isn't kidding when they say that the Greek banking system is stable.

A lot of less knowledgeable Greeks doubted the validity of the government's promises, thanks to the dependence of Greek TV news (both state and private channels) on reporting the economic crisis in the rest of the world. The best place to keep your money is under your mattress, said one English economist. Your house will lose its value, said another. This kind of reporting caused many people to panic without reason. Greece just doesn't follow the rest of the world; they're always doing their own thing. You don't come to Greece to earn money or gain work experience, do you? You come to Greece to see the islands, get a good tan, and indulge yourself in high-quality nightlife. If Greece suffers, it's going to be next summer when the package tourists can't come because they can't afford it because their country is in recession after the recent economic crisis. If anything, this is going to give Greece a chance to catch up to the rest of the world (or that the rest of the world will lower their standards and come back to our earthly levels), but I doubt that this will mean that Greeks will start thinking the same way money-wise as the rest of the world. We're still going to keep our land and houses.

We relied heavily on our summer garden these past few months, something the average lawn-mowing, flower-growing Westerner doesn't (or, weather-wise, can't) do, another reason to need to buy cheap food, since they can't grow it themselves. Now that autumn has set in and the sun isn't always shining every day, there is a lull period in our harvest, a good thing, because I can now see the back of the fridge, I have to supplement our vegetable needs with bought produce. The economic crisis didn't stop me from spending 17 euro just last Monday to buy all these delicious vegetables: locally grown (not necessarily organic) okra and stamnagathi (no more vlita - amaranth - greens in the garden; they've all gone to seed in preparation for next summer), apples from the mainland, the last of the summer sweetcorn harvest, kiwifruit from New Zealand and some very sweet baby Cretan bananas grown in Iraklio (150km away). We may not earn much (my present employment situation could constitute a whole blog's worth of posts), but our food is still nutritious.

And where did I find all these goodies? There are two greengrocers in the vicinity of my children's after-school activity groups. One sells mainly local produce, some of which is organic by default (eg wild greens picked from uncultivated hillside fields), while the other sells high quality fruit and vegetables imported from around the country. There is also an organic supplies shop (named after the goddess of the Earth, Gaia) located in between these two stores, and everything is within walking distance. If my children weren't involved in club activities, I wouldn't have bothered to shop from these stores, mainly because they are a little too far away from my house. I probably would have bought my extra needs from the local supermarket. Instead, I am now supporting small shops; my guess is most Greeks living in main centres still do this anyway.

(west: the tennis and chess clubs; east: another local produce shop; north: the local produce shop; south: the town centre, starting with our own form of Big Ben in the municipal gardens)

But it's still easy to fall prey to those TV people, who've been forecasting doom and gloom for the past two weeks. On Saturday night, I asked my husband what he would like to have for lunch the next day.

"Let's go out," he suggested.

"Let's save our money," I replied; I had been sucked into the panic created by the media. I took out some goat meat from the deep freeze to make a tsigariasto meat stew and sliced some aubergines in preparation for eggplant pizza. It would have been so wasteful not to have used the garden produce after all, in these hard times.

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Zucchini flower spaghetti (Μακαρόνια με κολοκυθοανθούς)

I know what my son will be cooking when he is tall enough to stir a pot and use the gas cooker: plain boiled pasta. Most children love this meal in its plainest form. Pasta, at least in my 'fat' way of thinking, is an alternative to bread, which is why I never bring out bread on the table when we're eating pasta. Plain boiled pasta is one of the most uninviting dishes that I can think of. Spaghetti from a packet, tossed into a pot of boiling water, then drained onto a plate, resembling creamy white worms. My son's quite happy to eat pasta like that, without even a sprinkling of cheese on the dish. No oil, no sauce, no flavour (unless you can call plain boiled pasta a kind of flavour). I can't stand watching my children eat such an unappetising plate.

Before the children came home from school, I jazzed up the 'plain pasta' a little. I know my son's going to ask me "What are those orange things stuck on the spaghetti?" He'll probably have something to say about the bright green bits too, and the tiny white cubes. Eventually, he'll start poking his fork into it. He might pick off the coloured bits. I'll have to make an effort not to look at him while he's doing this. But I think he'll eat it in the end. The only thing I won't be telling him is that I added some flowers to his 'plain' pasta.

The seasonal nature of our cooking means that we often use the same ingredients in our daily meals until their growing season is over. This doesn't mean that we have to eat the same meal every day. We simply use the same substance over and over again, cooked in a different way. The pumpkin flower excess in my neighbour's garden is still g(r)owing strong. I pick nearly 20 flowers a day from the vine. This has led me to find ways of using those beauties more creatively. The recipes I have discovered could easily form another '101 ways to use..." book. So far, I've done the following with zucchini flowers:

• fried them as a fritter
  
• stuffed them Greek style, cooked in the oven
• stuffed them again Greek style, cooked in the pot
  
• stuffed them Italian style, and
  
• added them to pie fillings

My recipe sources are often from the internet these days. This is not necessarily the best or only source of information, but I would like to sing its praises; the internet has helped me to broaden my horizons, while living in a small non-English speaking island community. What would my English-language alternative media choices be in this small town if I didn't have the internet? I'd have to buy magazines and newspapers (from a limited range that offers well-known 'groan' titles like Women's Weekly and The Times), go to the second-hand bookshops in the town (we're lucky to have a couple run by English ladies), or order more books from Amazon (no try-before-you-buy browsing there). We do not have English language lending libraries; the best library in town is the children's library, which of course contains a specific range of books given its target audience. So here's to the internet, which came up with the following novel suggestions for different ways to use zucchini flowers:

• zucchini flower soup
• zucchini flower omelette
• zuchcini flower risotto
• zucchini flower 'lollipops' (this one looks sumptuously glamorous)
  
• zucchini flower pancakes, and
  
• zucchini flower pasta

which I've cooked today, a simple oil-and-garlic sauce with julienned zucca (pumpkin) flowers and a dash of red pepper. The aroma of the sauce cooking away is enough to intoxicate your senses. I've seen the same sauce served up with very thinly sliced green bell pepper instead of the zucca flowers, in case you can't find them, and it really is a very simple sauce to whip up quickly.

You need:
half a wine glass of olive oil
1 large onion, finely chopped
3-5 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
12 large (or 18 small) zucchini flowers - if you can't get these, use very thinly sliced bell pepper slivers as an alternative
red pepper flakes (or ground red pepper)
1 courgette, grated (optional)
salt
250g fine spaghetti, boiled al dente

Heat the oil in a saucepan, and add the onion and garlic. Cook till translucent. Add the zucca flowers, and stir them in till just cooked. If you're using the zucchini as well, add this in at this point too. Season the sauce (I used ground red pepper to avoid 'picky eater syndrome'), and add the drained spaghetti into the saucepan, stirring around till the pasta is well oiled. Serve immediately; this dish can't wait!

This is my entry to Kalyn's Weekend Herb Blogging, hosted this week by Amy and Jonny from We Are Never Full.

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Other people's food: Sicilian cauliflower pasta (Σικελιανή μακαρονάδα με κουνουπίδι)

We were recently treated to a meal so extravagantly different to the kind of food we usually cook. My neighbourhood does not seem very multicultural at first sight, but one of our neighbours is not actually Greek; she settled here with her Greek spouse, after leaving her native Italy. Eventually, her parents moved out here too, after leaving their native Sicily, although they moved to Rome at a young age. Susanna enjoys looking at our thriving garden while she herself is pottering about in her own. She reminds me of my own gardening interests before I moved out of my bachelor pad (some would say it was an old maid's house); she's into flower gardening, while we are pretty much vegetable gardeners. We often give her aubergines which she uses to make pasta alla Norma, her favorite summer pasta dish, and no wonder, given its Sicilian origins.

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Sicilian food and culture is incredibly similar to Cretan food and culture. The Mediterranean diet, well known all over the world, was based on the diets of both these islands. Read what Diana Serbe has to say about Sicilian food and culture, and simply replace the words 'Sicily' and 'Italy' with Crete' and 'Greece': the statements will have exactly the same ring of truth about them:
"To have seen Italy without having seen Sicily, is not to have seen Italy at all" (Goethe). They came, they saw, they conquered: the Greeks, Romans, Arabs...When the Greeks saw the island of Sicily, they fell in love, sent their fleets, and set up colonies. The Romans saw what the Greeks had, fought them for it, and became the new conquerors. The Arabs saw what the Romans had, fought them for it, and put the island under their dominion...
Who would not fall in love with a country where even at night vegetables are "gleaming forth on the dark air, under the lamps." (D. H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia)? But what effect did such varied conquest have on Sicilian cooking? On the habits of the people? On the language?
Sicily is a large island of varied climate. There are subtropical areas growing prickly pears in abundance; every form of citrus is grown in Sicily - lemons, oranges, blood oranges... The quality of the vegetables gives a clue to the dishes of Sicily. Since their vegetables are of superior taste and quality, no Sicilian would defile them by creating complex dishes that mask the fresh flavor of their ingredients. Simplicity allows the pure taste of the vegetables to emerge. This is a key attitude to cooking, prevalent all over Sicily."
When we see each other from our own side of the fence, Susanna and I often talk about the food we cook with the garden produce. She recently asked us what all the new green plantlets are: broccoli, spinach, cabbage and cauliflower. Cauliflower, she tells me, is the main ingredient in her favorite winter pasta dish. She made some the other day and offered us a plate. The range of ingredients used in this pasta is really quite incredible. I would never have thought to combine these ingredients in one meal, and I would never have put it in my mind that such a dish could exist.

I googled the ingredients she told us she used to make this pasta sauce, and sure enough, a number of Italian recipes came up using exactly the same ingredients that she herself used to make this exotic-looking dish: cauliflower, anchovies, saffron, pine nuts and raisins. And of course, like all good Italian cooks, she made the pasta herself.

©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.

Little Crete (Μικρή Κρήτη)

The image of Athens that springs to mind in most people's heads is that of a tightly packed sprawling treeless city full of apartment blocks that bear a resemblance to the notion of inhabitable accommodation, with the pride and centrepiece being the Acropolis. The image is generally correct, but this did not resemble my first introduction to the city that the Scottish like to think compares to their very own Edinburgh (and why a sun-starved city like Edinburgh should, only the Scots can tell us - it's all Greek to me). As a Greek born abroad, I had very little idea what there was in Athens beyond the Parthenon. The leafy northern suburbs (like Kifissia) and the southern coastal suburbs (like Palio Faliro) were and still are unknown to me, despite having lived in Athens for nearly four years. I went to the wild west, into an area that remains relatively unknown to most of the tourists and locals alike; you don't go west of Athens unless you need to.

When I first arrived in Greece, my very first introduction to Athens was spent in an area that was very far removed from the images of the Athens that I thought I was coming to, a mental image acquired from the tourist brochures at the travel agencies, the travel books in the Wellington public library, and the postcards we were occasionally sent from our relatives. Everyone there lived in single story dwellings, there were quite a few parks and many open spaces surrounding the houses, and the Acropolis was regarded as one of the most useless rocky hills on a prime spot of land in central Athens. The area was close to the sea, hence the name given to the region: Παραλία Ασπροπύργου (Paralia Aspropirgou: the Aspropirgos coast).

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Aspropirgos is located 17 kilometres west of the centre of Athens. Many members of my mother's family moved to this area from the village of Κάμποι (Kambi) in the 1960s, in search of work and better opportunities; generally speaking, they were aiming for a chance to improve their lives. In the poverty of the post-war era, with the demise of village and rural life, everyone was leaving the agricultural regions and moving into the urban environment. But in Paralia Aspropirgou, urbanisation never seemed to catch on at the rate that it had in the centre of Athens. The area only recently acquired footpaths and tarmac on the road, while the main form of grocery shopping is still the neighbourhood παντοπολείο (pantopolio). Everyone knows each other; they are often related to one another in some form, be it as a sibling, best man, godparent or the same village origins. Many people from Crete settled in this area, creating enclaves of Cretan communities, in the same way that immigrants to the New World did in America and Australasia.

My aunt was one of those 'migrants' who settled in Aspropirgos with her young family after her husband was 'excused' from his duties as a policeman (due to the curse of the bottle). There were many job opportunities available in the area, all within walking distance of the first dwellings in the area: makeshift roughshod container style houses, onto which rooms were added one by one, until they were big enough top house all the occupants. They usually contain two bedrooms, and resemble brick and mortar shacks. The area was classified as residential only recently; since then, pavements and tarmac were laid on the roads, which were also given street names. Eventually, Thia bought her own home, very similar to the one she rented when she first came out to the area. It still remains a simple house, although it has been modernised to the point where she has air conditioning in the summer and radiators in the winter. Her tiny garden contains an olive, a lemon and a walnut tree, all of which she planted herself.

(the footpath, tarmac and street names are relatively recent additions to Paralia Aspropirgou)

"When we moved up with Leonidas-God-rest-his-soul, I realised that we would never move back down to Crete. Because of the jobs. Because we had no work there. It was very tiring travelling to Crete and back during the olive season, so I sold the olive grove I had been given as part of my dowry. What use was it to us? We had jobs here, and our lives were based here. I bought my own home with the money from the sale, and helped my daughters into theirs."

So what kind of jobs did everyone do around here? Factories. Hundreds of factories. Light industry, heavy industry, shipbuilding yards, gas works, electricity plants, metal works, oil refineries, cement works. The different suburbs of Paralia Aspropirgou weren't named after a church, in the classical Greek manner; they were all named after the works close to it.

Ask a cabbie to go west of Athens beyond Egaleo and watch the reaction on his face.
"Where ya goin' to, kiria mou?" asked the taxi driver.
"Paralia Aspropirgou," I replied. His face scrunched up; Paralia Aspropirgou isn't the most popular destination for cab drivers - there's no guarantee of a return fare. It's like World's End, the point of no return.
"Know ya way round there?" he looked at me suspiciously.
"Sort of, you can drop me off at Halips."

(Halips factory, as seen from the entrance to the suburb of Paralia Aspropirgou)

Halips (ΧΑΛΥΨ) is the now defunct cement works across the road from what looks like a narrow insignificant side street on one of the filthiest motorways in Europe, the very road that one must take to go from central Athens to Corinth. Looking at it from the motorway, it is difficult to imagine that there is sense of home and hearth behind the putrid dust storms that Halips left behind well after it closed down. Not a single house can be seen from the main road, only industrial plants. It looks like Hell, a wasteland of metal, concrete and glass, right next to the coast, a site probably chosen for the ease with which waste could be dumped without anyone needing to find out (toxicity tests started being conducted well after the environmental damage had turned the area into Athens' biggest sewer). Nothing shines here on the main road. If you saw the metal works in the Lord of the Rings films, you can conjure up the right picture in your mind. The windows are permanently covered with a thick film of dust, which doesn't get thicker because it is so dry, nothing can stick onto it any longer. It blows around continuously, entering the houses, settling on the ground, piling up in corners.

(when you don't have a choice, you may indeed decide to go for a dip here; don't worry about the mass of ships ramming into you - this is a ship cemetery, they're not going anywhere)

On my first night there, I woke up in the middle of the night feeling somewhat disoriented, as is common when you stay in an unfamiliar place for the first time. From the window of the kitchen-cum-dining room where I slept, I saw a fire that seemed to be burning on the top of a chimney. I startled my aunt.

"Thia, wake up! Something's burning!" I pointed to the window. She turned to look at me, with a surprised look on her face, then looked back out the window without saying anything.

"What's that fire there?" I realised that she had seen this flame before.

(look closely; you'll see the Olympic flame, too)

"Oh, that's the Olympic flame," she replied, and returned to her bed. "Διυλιστήρια (thilistiria - oil refineries)," she added. "Nothing to worry about." I think it should have been called δηλητήρια - dilitiria; poison.

I received a few more shocks over the next few days of living in Paralia Aspropirgou. One of the most shocking for me was that nobody could direct me as to how to get to Athens. No one knew how to go to the Acropolis. I finally found out from someone who had been living in Paralia Aspropirgou for a long time, and worked in Athens.

(the original Halips bus stop was at the point where the iconostasis is now; don't kid yourself about why the bus stop was moved a few metres away just below the recently built overpass )

"Cross the road and stand outside Halips. All the blue and white buses that pass this road terminate in central Athens (except one which clearly says PIREAS on its ticker tape). Buy your ticket at a kiosk before you board the bus and validate it once you get on. On a Sunday, getting into Athens takes a quarter of an hour from here, since there's less traffic."

It sounded surprisingly easy. "Why couldn't anyone else have given me this information?" I asked her.

"Oh, don't ask anyone anything here. They don't know, really they don't know anything. In any case, they do their shopping in Elefsina, which is only a few kilometres from Aspropirgos. It's much more convenient than entering central Athens. They'll just get lost, believe me, they'll never be able to return home if you let them loose there."

(various views of Iera Odos; heading westwards, once you pass the signpost for the old monastery, the road loses its tree-lined scenery and takes on a deserted ghostly appearance)

Elefsina, 5 kilometres westwards of Aspropirgos, is where the site of the ancient sacred mysteries perfomed in the goddess Demeter's honour are located. The site was highly significant in the ancient world, with members of her sect being sworn to secrecy about the ceremonies held there. The road from Eleusis (as it was then called) to Athens was known as Ιερά Οδός (Iera Odos), the Holy Road. It is still bears that name - Iera Odos offers some of the most pleasurable shopping opportunities in Western Athens - one big long stretch of road with few turns and bends, leading straight to the Parthenon, although this will not be so obvious any longer, what with the reshaping of the city of Athens once the urban sprawl began to spread out of control. There was a time when the Acropolis could be seen right along Iera Odos, although this has changed too, since the construction of tall buildings, obscuring the view of the hill where the Parthenon stands. My father remembers seeing it as he walked to work at the Pitsos appliance factory in Egaleo. It is more visible once you pass the site of the Agricultural University of Athens, which coincidentally is located in the most polluted area of the city, the western suburbs.

*** *** ***

So what did Little Crete have to offer in terms of edibles? I recently overnighted at my aunt's house, before meeting up with a friend who I had never met before in my life.

(typical views in the area of Paralia Aspropirgou)

"So what brings you to Athens, dear?" asked my aunt.
"I'm going to meet up with a friend who I've never met before," I answered.
"Oh.. well.. you know what you're doing, you always did." We left it at that.
"Are you hungry?" she asked me. I had left my own home in Hania at 7pm, and it was now half an hour before midnight.
"No, not really, Thia."
"I've got some leftover rabbit from today's lunch," she tempted me, an offer I couldn't really refuse. "I've cooked it with pasta, and there's just one more serving of it."

Thia comes once or twice a year to Hania and stays with her brothers. When she returns to Athens, she takes whatever she can in terms of fresh produce back with her. Cretan products are not always difficult to source in Elefsina - her main shopping area - but they are not always available when she does her weekly shop. Her brothers give her freshly slaughtered rabbits and chickens, farm fresh eggs, potatoes and whatever is in the garden at the time of her visit. There are also some Cretan supplies stores in Elefsina. A very small laiki street market runs weekly in the area, mainly used by old people and those that do not own a car. Most people drive to the large well-stocked supermarkets in Elefsina to do their shopping.

"I almost forgot, Thia, I bought you some aubergines and peppers." She was most thankful; we discussed different recipes I cook to use up the eggplant surplus in our garden.

It was time to go to bed. Thia doesn't usually stay up so late. She did it for me. As it was a warm night, we left the window open in the bedroom. It was eerily quiet in the neighbourhood, save for a humming sound. This sound did not stop, in the same way that the Olympic flame never blows out in the Aspropirgos refineries. It was the sound of the humming machinery that was working 24/7 in the surrounding area, a slow buzz that did not so much interrupt the silence, as much as pervade the air. Every other sound was like an over-write on the silent humming, like the lyrics to the refrain of muzak playing in a supermarket, an artifical world where nothing seems to change. Paralia Aspropirgos had not changed much at all, despite my first visit to the area being seventeen years ago.

In the morning, Thia insisted that I have breakfast with her. She brought out some φρυγανιές (friganies - dry toast squares), feta cheese made in Hania by a local cheesemaker ("ask your uncles where they buy it from," she informed me), and a bowl of cured olives from the olive tree on her property, served with a cup of hot τούρκικο (tourkiko - Greek coffee, named after its origins).

"Do you like it here, Thia?" What a question; she's been living here over thirty years.

"Of course, I do, dear, it's much better to be living in a little shabby house that I can call my own, rather than the best apartment in central Athens. If I didn't live here, I'd have gone back to Crete. I could never live in a box. And it really isn't that bad here; I know everybody and we all look out for each other. At night, all the lights from the factories sparkle like a Christmas tree. It's really quite beautiful."

If you could just keep your eyes away from the main road, Paralia Aspropirgos doesn't seem such a bad solution to the Greek housing and employment problem.

©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.

Poor man's fruit (Το φρούτο του φτωχού)

Bread and water - basic food: "Plain fare gives as much pleasure as a costly diet, while bread and water confer the highest possible pleasure when they are brought to hungry lips." Epicurus (341?-270 BC). Thankfully, in Crete, by the early 19th century, most people could add something more substantial to this simple fare: olive oil.

In the good old days when all Cretans ate a Mediterranean diet based on seasonal availability, and poverty reigned, meaning that everyone had to at least source their food in some way to keep themselves fed in order to survive (as well as doing a heap of other chores), when someone did not want to eat the main meal that a Cretan mama had cooked for her (usually much larger than the current average of less than 1.5 children per) family, they ate psomi me ladi, bread dipped in oil, the meal of choice for the poorest farming communities - and only if there was enough bread in the house. My husband's grandmother had told him of times when her children (including his father) 'stole' a slice of the bread she had cooked for that day, and she would chase after them to get it back if she could, so that she could offer it to accompany lunch or dinner. (The children would clamber up trees to escape their mother's wrath.)

Despite its humble looks and origins, psomi me ladi sustained the Greek people for many years. The famine that killed thousands in Athens during WWII did not affect the Cretans in the same way. In the capital city of Athens, people had no access to bread and oil. They had money, but could not buy anything with it because there was no food available during the Nazi occupation. This was not exactly the case in Crete. I remember my father saying that bread and oil were always available in his village, since most people produced their own oil and as long as the Germans weren't taking their livestock, they could trade some chickens and eggs for flour. If they got hungry, it's because there wasn't enough food to go round because the families were large. In his case, his father had been killed on the first day of the Battle of Crete, and his mother had a hard time scraping up enough food for her five children.

My late father-in-law came from a family of ten children. If he were alive today, here's what he would probably be telling his grandchildren about dinner time in his home in Fournes:

"I was brought up in a family with ten children. At that dining-table at home one lax moment and half my dinner could be gone to my neighbour. I learned to eat quickly while defending my plate with a protective arm." (Small Island by Andrea Levy)

But even Gilbert becomes a fussy eater when he is confronted with tasteless food:
"But with this English food I sat back, chewed slowly and will ed my compatriots to thieve. I had not yet seen a war zone but if the enemy had been frying up some fish and dumpling, who knows which way I would point my gun?" (Small Island by Andrea Levy)

They may not always have had shoes to wear, they may not have had pencils and paper to go to school with (my mother had a piece of broken slate and chalk), but they always had something to eat that would give them energy. If they had psomi me ladi, they had the energy needed to work in the fields, under the hot sun, dig up the soil, plant trees, and gather crops. Fruit and vegetables were always available according to the season, but that's not what kept people active:

"No one carried a pound of superfluous flesh, in spite of the vast quantities of starchy food. They expended every ounce they ate in work... Vegetables and fruit were eaten because they were good for you, but it was the bread, potatoes, meat and floury puddings which staved off exhaustion." (The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough)

My mother's village, located at the foothills of the high peaks of Lefka Ori, could only grow crops that didn't require irrigation. Tomatoes were grown without ever being watered, save one single time when they were planted. These tomatoes grew right throughout the summer. At the end of their growing period, they were cut in bunches and hung onto the rafters of the roof in the stone cottages. These tomatoes just as they were, slightly shriveling but not drying completely, right throughout the winter. The villagers were never without tomatoes all year round, despite not having refrigerators. They had one more ingredient to add to their basic bread and oil.

My green-finger uncles insist that this method of preserving tomatoes has ceased to exist; times have changed, there is more pollution in the soil, air and water, and plants are not grown in the way they traditionally were grown, using only natural fertilisation and no chemical additives. Not only do tomatos not keep well using this system; in Crete, they no longer grow without irrigation.

I still tell my fussy eaters that they can have some bread and oil if they don't want to eat what I've cooked. For example, today, we're having fish soup, not a popular choice with everyone. If they want something else, they'll have to learn to cook it themselves, which the children still can't do because they are too short to reach the cooker. Although their father is taller than me, which means he can reach the cooker easily, when it's his turn to cook, this is in fact what he makes for the children: a slab of slightly toasted sourdough bread, coated in oil and freshly grated tomato. (I know what my son will be cooking when he is tall enough to stir a pot and use the gas cooker: plain boiled pasta. )

(late September harvest)

Psomi me ladi can be dressed up with that most humble-looking red fruit, a basic food item for many Cretans: freshly grated tomato. Here's a slightly sharp-tasting sauce that combines tomato and olive oil with some herbs and spices, to make a great dip for thickly sliced sourdough bread.

1 large tomato, grated
1-2 cloves of garlic, according to taste
olive oil
salt
oregano seasoning
Drain the grated tomato of its excess liquids. Add the salt to the grated tomato, and let stand in a fine sieve until more liquids drain away. Chop the garlic finely and add this with the oregano to the strained tomato in a small wide bowl. Drizzle some olive oil over the tomato. Use this dip with slices of fresh sourdough bread (optionally toasted), as a snack or a light meal, accompanied by some cheese. Heaven...

This is my entry for Kalyn's Weekend Herb Blogging, hosted this week by Susan from The Well Seasoned Cook.

©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.

Pitahaya (Πιταχάγια)

Amongst the kinky imported fresh produce that makes it to the supermarkets in Crete, I spotted something that I'd never seen or heard of before. I have seen papaya, tamarillo, passionfruit, pineapple, lime, starfruit, and all sorts of other weird and wonderful crops, all carefully packed in boxes, specially made for the kind of fruit packed in them, with hollowed pockets to fit each one individually, all beautifully presented in uniform size. But I'd never before seen a bright pink fruit with tinges of neon green thorn-like protusions. It was Monday morning, the start of a new week; I decided to give it a try.

"What's this?" I asked the assistant at the fresh produce counter.

"Ahhh...," she started, looking closely at the label, "pi-ta-HA-ya."

"And what is it?" I asked, in full knowledge that it was a pointless question.

"I don't know," laughed the shop assistant.

"I'll let you know," I laughed back.

One euro and ninety-seven cents later, I took my pitahaya home. I wanted to find out what was inside this fluorescent creation of nature. But what do you do with a pitahaya? Do you cut it lengthways or widthways, do you peel it, what do you do with it? Before mutilating it, I decided to look it up on the internet)which I knew would spoil the surprise for me, as it would have photos of its interior).



Sure enough, it told me what to expect of a pitahaya and how to deal with it. As soon as I sliced it open lengthways - the outer inedible layer was as soft as a banana peel - the fruit seemed to peel away on its own. I smelt it - nothing. Maybe they have a special aroma when they are eaten fresh in the country they are grown... maybe.

It looked like an albino kiwifruit. It tasted rather bland. I stuck it in the fridge, thinking that maybe it will take on a different taste (like cactus figs) once they have been refrigerated. An hour later, I starting scooping it out with a spoon. Still no taste though; a little like low-quality vanilla ice-cream.

Oh well, I had my fun.

©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.

Eggplant pizza (Μελιτζανόπιτσα)

Not all the family liked eggplant. Some of us like it in traditional Greek dishes like papoutsakia or moussaka, others like it with stuffed rice in yemista, while some don't like it at all. I love roasted eggplant. We recently barbecued aubergine slices at a beach party, and I've been hooked on grilled oiled aubergine ever since.

Although the summer garden is not as proliferate as it was a month ago, eggplant and pepper bushes seem to be the most tolerant to cooler weather, and they are still doing very well at this time of year, even though we were recently drenched in sunless rainy weather.

(Swallows making their way in the rain to warmer climates)

We've pickled the excess banana peppers in vinegar (with a topping of salt before the jar is sealed), but the aubergines are causing me strife. Last night, when I realised I could fit nothing else in the fridge, I cut the big round variety into thick slices, laid them in a baking tin, drizzled olive oil all over them, and threw them into the oven, in the hope that, when they came out of the oven, I will have decided on how to cook them. The result was aubergine pizza.

You need:
4 large round eggplants
2 large tomatoes
2 large onions
2 large green bell peppers
salt and pepper to taste
olive oil for drizzling
grated cheese (optional)

Slice the aubergine thickly, lay out on a baking tin (it doesn't matter if one slice is partly covering another one), drizzle olive oil all over them and place them in a moderate oven until they have taken on a golden cooked colour. Turn them over carefully so that they don't break up and do the same for the other side. They will need more olive oil, as aubergine soaks it up quickly (the same thing happens when they are fried).

Once they are cooked on both sides, layer them in such a way that they cover the whole tin, placing some on top of each other to plug gaps. The base of the tin will now be covered in the same way that a piece of pizza dough covers the base of a tin. Chop the onions into thin slices and spread them all over the aubergines. Do the same with the peppers. Season everything with salt and pepper. Now grate the tomatoes all over the vegetables. Sprinkle the grated cheese all over the tin. (I didn't add the grated cheese until the end of the cooking time for the 'pizza'; for a vegan/lenten option, this can be omitted entirely). Cook in a moderate oven until all the vegetables are cooked (no more than half an hour).



This is a fantastic way to serve aubergine, especially when accompanied by roast meat, which we usually cook on for the Sunday lunch.

And if you want to make this in the winter, the aubergine slices can be frozen individually when cool, and then packed in a plastic bag to maintain storage space in the freezer.

This is my entry for Kalyn's Weekend Herb Blogging hosted this week by Valentina from Trembom.

©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.

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.

©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.

Our kitchen (Η κουζίνα μας)

A lot of people showed great interest in my response to the NY Times article on the Mediterranean diet. Thanks for the positive feedback. Here's my kitchen (on a good day):



And here's what we keep posted on our kitchen wall:


(a map of Europe dated 1897; a map of modern Europe; the school calendar; the many wonders of the world - not just the ancient seven; the food pyramid)

I'm sure this is just a normal way to educate children in the Western world. In Greece, you will often be asked if the paint comes off the walls when you take the posters down, and how easy it is to wipe away the sellotape or gum tack marks.

"How should I know?" I reply. "I've never taken them down!"

We welcome all donations of educational posters...

A Diet Succumbs (Η Μεσογειακή διατροφή υποκύπτει)

Here's an article two friends passed onto me just today, from the New York Times (reprinted here for convenience; do take a look at the original article here and here to see the photos). The bold paragraphs are my responses to the article.

Fast Food Hits Mediterranean; a Diet Succumbs By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL September 24, 2008
KASTELI, Hania, Crete, Greece — Dr. Michalis Stagourakis has seen a transformation of his pediatric practice here over the past three years. The usual sniffles and stomachaches of childhood are now interspersed with far more serious conditions: diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol. A changing diet, he says, has produced an epidemic of obesity and related maladies.

Greek people have a tendency to be fat, but obesity is a clinical term. It is easy to call someone fat, but it is also subjective. Saying that, I also feel myself that there is a preponderance of fat-looking children and adults in the town, as this photo indicates. We probably also suffer from illnesses that were not so common in the past, but this is probably not only due only to diet.

Small towns like this one in western Crete, considered the birthplace of the famously healthful Mediterranean diet — emphasizing olive oil, fresh produce and fish — are now overflowing with chocolate shops, pizza places, ice cream parlors, soda machines and fast-food joints.

They certainly are. Even without tourism, the globalised nature of these kinds of leisure stores means that they would have eventually become a part of the landscape. It doesn't necessarily mean that you have to eat there on a regular basis, however...

The fact is that the Mediterranean diet, which has been associated with longer life spans and lower rates of heart disease an cancer, is in retreat in its home region. Today it is more likely to be found in the upscale restaurants of London and New York than among the young generation in places like Greece, where two-thirds of children are now overweight and the health effects are mounting, health officials say.

Again, 'overweight' is a clinical term, while appearance is a subjective factor. In my opinion, the primary school my children attend has children who look 'slim', 'healthy', 'slender', 'thin', 'active'; there are only a few children of the 120 who look 'fat', 'chubby', or 'obese'.

“This is a place where you’d see people who lived to 100, where people were all fit and trim,” Dr. Stagourakis said. “Now you see kids whose longevity is less than their parents’. That’s really scaring people.” (So it should!) That concern has been echoed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, which said in a report this summer that the region’s diet had “decayed into a moribund state.” “It is almost a perfect diet, but when we looked at what people were eating we noticed that much of the highly praised diet didn’t exist any more,” said the report’s author, Josef Schmidhuber, a senior economist at the food organization. “It has become just a notion.” Greece, Italy, Spain and Morocco have even asked Unesco to designate the diet as an “intangible piece of cultural heritage,” a testament to its essential value as well as its potential extinction.

An intangible piece of cultural heritage is going a bit far, as Crete is not the only island to claim the Mediterranean diet as part of their culture; Sicilians and Tunisians were also considered to follow the same kind of diet patterns. Longevity can still be reached in Crete, but the Japanese live far longer than anyone in the world, and their diet is completely different to the traditional Cretan one. Again, it is not just diet that accounts for longevity; medical care (relatively inadequate in Greece, extremely high in Japan) also plays a role.

The most serious effects of its steady disappearance are on people’s health and waistlines. Alarmed by the trends, the Greek government has been swooping into schools in villages like Kasteli annually for the past few years to weigh children and lecture them on nutrition. The lessons include a food pyramid focused on the Mediterranean diet. It is an uphill battle, though. This spring, a majority of children who were tested at the elementary school of this sleepy port town of 3,000, also known as Kissamos, were found to have high cholesterol. “It was the talk of the school,” said Stella Kazazakou, 44. “Instead of grades, the moms were comparing cholesterol levels.”

It's not that people haven't noticed what children are eating at school. It's worse seeing what they're not eating: when both parents are working, some children do not even bring lunch to school. This embarrassing fact was revealed at a parent-teacher meeting held recently at my children's primary school, when some parents discussed the problem of a communal dining area, as the school does not have a separate dining room, so that the children are eating off the desks that they end up doing their school work on. The headmaster also gave a stern warning to parents, boldly telling them that a chocolate-filled puff pastry for morning break followed by another chocolate-filled puff pastry for lunch would only lead their children to an early death. Sadly, not everyone heeds his words. Thankfully, there is no school canteen at this school, so parents have the responsibility to prepare their children's school meals.

In Greece, three-quarters of the adult population is overweight or obese, the worst rate in Europe “by far,” according to the United Nations. The rates of overweight 12-year-old boys rose more than 200 percent from 1982 to 2002 and have been rising even faster since. Italy and Spain are not far behind, with more than 50 percent of adults overweight. That compares with about 45 percent in France and the Netherlands. In the United States, 66 percent of adults older than 20 were overweight in 2004, and 31.9 percent of children 2 through 19 were overweight in 2006, although childhood statistics are compiled somewhat differently in different countries.

In my reading, I have often come across this statement (that Greeks are the fattest Europeans), but I have also read that Great Britain has the fattest Europeans. In Crete, people do have a tendency to look fat, as stated above, but it's difficult to compare levels of obesity if different methods of measuring it are used in each country. But I've also read that Greeks (with a record rate of smokers) are also some of the Europeans with the longest lifespan. Obesity clearly isn't the only factor involved in longevity, and neither should food and diet be the main factor involved in rising obesity. A typical Greek child spends about five-six hours a day at school, most of the time sitting at a desk. (Take my children as an example: they have two 40-minute Phys.Ed. classes a week on their schedule; what are they doing in all the other classes?) After school, there is homework to be written, English classes to go to, as well as (in the case of most children) other school-related lessons at private institutes. There is a general lack of physical activity, in some cases coupled with bad diet (aside from sedentary hobbies imported from the globalised universe, such as television, DVD and computer usage).

In Greece, the increase in the number of fat children has been particularly striking, parents and doctors say. “Their diet is totally different than ours was,” said Soula Sfakianakis, 40, recalling breakfasts of goat milk, bread and honey. Her son, Vassilis, a husky 9-year-old who had a chocolate mustache from a recently conquered ice cream cone, said he preferred cornflakes in the morning and steak or macaroni and cheese for dinner.

OK, Vassilis, are you allowed to eat what you like whenever you like, or do your parents also prefer steak and cheesy macaroni on a daily basis? It all depends on who cooks, what cooking habits they follow, and whether there is a conscious effort made on the part of the main food provider in a household as to what a child will eat on a daily basis.

Dr. Antonia Trichopoulou, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Athens Medical School, said the problem had grown acute with the spread of supermarkets and, especially, convenience foods. “In the last five years it’s become really bad,” she said. “The children are all quite heavy. The market is pushing a lot, and parents and schools seem unable to resist.” Advertising geared toward children has invaded Greece full force, stretching into the countryside. On television there are commercials for chips; at supermarkets there are stands of candy. Last year, Coca-Cola sponsored a play about healthful eating. But facing both aggressive convenience food marketing and obesity for the first time, many rural residents here have little resistance to or knowledge of the dangers.

Fast food has invaded all parts of the world, but Cretan rural residents have plenty of knowledge on what is good or not good to eat. People make food choices that they talk about in public; you often hear parents claiming that they don't keep soft drinks or crisps in the house, for instance. But it is also true that cheap mass-produced hi-fat hi-carb snacks have invaded the supermarkets, and they are an easy long-life shelf-storable solution for convenience food. Some people could do with a few lessons in food and time management. A little more organisation and more conscious food-buying decisions are probably all it takes to make a significant change in the way one copes with feeding their family.

Dr. Trichopoulou said that some older people might have been tolerant of childhood chubbiness because Greece had for so long been a poor nation where hunger was a recurrent problem. Outside one of Kasteli’s several ice cream parlors, Argyro Koromylla said, “You don’t want your child complaining or feeling left out, so you give him what he wants.” Her son Manolis, 12, was finishing a cone, a large T-shirt draped over his stocky frame.

Hunger was not exactly a problem in the sense that people sourced their own food in more natural ways. It was simply harder to store it for long periods of time, and it was necessary to continually source food in order to have it. The more members in a family (as in the past), the less food that was available to share out, not because it wasn't available, but because it wasn't easy to harvest as much as was needed. The bounty of nature was always used as the primary source of food in Crete, which is not necessarily the case anymore since the invention and widespread use of refrigerators and supermarkets, but a lot of good-quality Cretan food still comes from nature itself. It's just that it is easier to get access to it, hence less physical activity is needed to source food, hence people are fatter.

Dimitris Loukakis, 44, said he was so concerned about changing eating habits that he had bought a farm to grow traditional crops himself.

There's no doubt about the health benefits of maintaining a garden and growing your own produce. Most people where I live do in fact grow their own everything and are very proud of it. But you can't grow your own ice-cream and puff pastry, so it's just a case of being food-wise and health-conscious if you want your children to be healthy.

Sitting at an outdoor cafe by the beach, he and his wife drank iced coffee while their chunky 9-year-old daughter, Maria, nibbled on spinach pie and glumly drank water. “I’m on a diet; I have to eat less,” Maria piped up, noting that the local school had recently started to teach students about nutrition.

Should we be feeling sorry for Maria nibbling on spinach pie and glumly drinking water? Some children gulp both down ravenously: we continually tell ours how good these are for them, and they now believe us, even catching on to news items that contain food words we have discussed round the kitchen table. They know the food pyramid off by heart - I've had it stuck on the kitchen wall for over a year...

“Some diet,” interjected her father. “We’re trying to keep her off sugar now. If we continue like this, we’re going to become like Americans, and no one wants that.

This is what we hear on the news all the time, that Americans are fat and eat junk food all the time. We should look at ourselves before we make such claims. But if we 'know' what makes us fat ('junk food', 'American food'), why do we still eat it? Greeks are very image-conscious: it's important to be seen in the right places, doing the right things, wearing the right clothes, sporting the right accessories, eating the right food. We eat badly as part of the show to impress, to show off, to support local businesses, to be 'in', to feel good - and junk food has a tendency to make us feel really really good in many ways...

The traditional diet, low in saturated fats and high in nutrients like flavonoids, was based on vegetables, fruit, unrefined grains, olive oil for cooking and for flavoring, and a bit of wine — all consumed on a daily basis.

And it still can be if you want it to be. It isn't hard to be seasonally inclined in one's food habits in Crete.

Fish, nuts, poultry, eggs, cheese and sweets were weekly additions. Red meat, refined sugar or flour, butter and other oils or fats were consumed rarely, if at all. Research on the diet took off in the 1990s, as scientists noted that people in Mediterranean countries lived longer and had low rates of serious disease despite a penchant for patently unhealthy habits like smoking and drinking. But that protection is now seen as rapidly eroding.

Nothing lasts forever, but we can make changes to our diet and physical activity patterns; it's in our own interest.

A generation ago, the typical diet in all Mediterranean countries complied with nutritional recommendations by the WHO that less than 10 percent of calories come from saturated fats and that less than 300 milligrams of cholesterol be consumed per day. Today, the typical diet in all of the countries exceeds those limits significantly, Dr. Schmidhuber said. In Greece, average daily cholesterol consumption has risen to 400 milligrams from 190 in 1963. Germany’s is similar. In Portugal, consumption went to 460 milligrams from 155. In 2002, a British study found that 31 percent to 34 percent of 12-year-olds in Greece were overweight — a 212 percent increase since 1982 — and “it has gotten worse, much worse, since then,” Dr. Stagourakis said. One-quarter of all children on Crete have cholesterol problems, he said, and seeing children with diabetes and high blood pressure is no longer uncommon. Unlike in the United States, where obesity is more pronounced in adults than in children, in the Mediterranean region the rise in weight problems has been more common among the young. Parents’ taste buds still tend to hew to a more traditional diet.

So it's clearly up to the parents to make conscious food choices in the household, which was stated above.

A survey by the World Health Organization last year of statistics from various countries found that among children in the first half of primary school, 35.2 percent in Spain were overweight — the worst rate — and 31.5 percent in Portugal. The lowest rates were in Slovakia (15.2 percent), France (18.1 percent) and Switzerland (18.3 percent). Greece was not included. Being overweight, particularly being obese, is associated with a wide variety of medical problems, like diabetes and liver disease. While heavy children may not suffer immediate health effects, they are statistically far more likely to grow into obese adults than their trimmer classmates. And in adulthood the conditions can be lethal.

I've also noticed another trend, based on my contact with children and young people in private language schools. Children tend to look fit and healthy, especially when parents make conscious food decisions. Young people tend to look slim, but they have developed a podgy stomach, evident from the way they sit at a desk. These children are clearly not getting enuch exercise, and are probably spending too much time sitting on a chair behind a desk, doing something else Greek parents just love seeing their kids do: studying for school. It's no wonder that the young will have a problem as they get older.

On traditional Crete, there was no need for calorie counting or food pyramids. People were poorer then, so their food was mostly homegrown, and producing it required more physical activity. “We ate what we grew and what we could make from it,” said Eleni Klouvidaki, 46, who lives in Kalidonia, a mountain village outside Kasteli, and describes her preferred diet as “whatever’s green.” On a recent day she prepared a meal of her staple mix of zucchini, tomatoes and other vegetables, and tossed it all in homemade olive oil. Now and again, she augments this dish with beans, or meat from her chickens or rabbits.

Believe it or not, a lot of people still eat like this, but they may still be overweight. The typical image of the 1960s Greek grandmother was a matronly figure dressed in black. She was probably standing by the stove, constantly wearing an apron. That was considered a normal image. Why are the rounded curvy bodies now looked down on? Probably something to do with fashion desingers and thier models. It isn't just the food that is changing people's health for the worse; physical activity, stress levels, the growing demands of modern society, pollution, occupational changes, they all have a part to play.

But she said that as more women worked and shops had moved in, the food culture had changed. “We’ve entered an era of convenience,” she said. “Even in this rural village, the diet is very different than it used to be.” She, too, occasionally grabs dinner in town, and four nights a week her son, who works in a car repair shop, drives to a fast-food restaurant. “They don’t deliver here yet,” she explained.

I know why her son can't limit his fast-food intake: in Crete, the going-out culture all has to do with eating out at the local grillhouse (taverna). Back in the good old days, people were unlikely to own a car; now, most households have at least two parked in their driveways. In time, that young man will realise that he shouldn't be eating so much junk; most young people do eventually learn not to eat so much junk food - it's never too late.

©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.

Fried zucchini flowers (Κολοκυθοανθούς α λα ιταλικά)

The weather has cooled down in Hania so much that I find I have more energy to get things done around the house and garden. It is now not so much of a chore to work with the brown soil under my feet, even if it is a little muddy.

(a very confused sky)

We planted a new group of zucchini plants about a month ago. They have been producing on a regular basis, but I now nip them in the bud rather than letting them become giant marrows. At the same time, I'm collecting more and more zucchini flowers on the stem (not the ones attached to the zucchini themselves), the so-called male flowers, probably because I'm in the garden so frequently and I can see them.



I've also seen these flowers growing over-profusely elsewhere too, in my neighbour's garden, but not on zucchini plants; he grows pumpkin, a not so popular vegetable for human consumption in Greece, but it does apparently make good animal feed, as well as the vine providing shade for other summer garden produce which is growing in an overexposed location.

The variety of squash that my neighbour's planted grows in the same way as do courgette plants, except that pumpkins are always vines, whereas our zucchini plants are more like lateral bushes, much shorter than a vine-growing plant. The flowers they produce are more plentiful, but smaller than those of courgette plants. They look exactly the same as zucchini flowers, and they can be cooked in the same way. It is difficult to tell them apart once they've been cut away from the plants.


(I picked some flowers from this pumpkin vine today and left a few on it to pick later - alas, by the time I returned, the flowers had all closed up again, as they do when the sun stops shining, or it is late in the morning; believe it or not, I had picked all the blossoms the day before! In any case, they'll open up tomorrow...)

The flowers look fragile, but they are actually very resilient. Pick them from the stalk, cut away the (usually five) spiky bits at the base of the flower, and remove the dusty yellow pistil. Wash them well (well-camouflaged insects are probably hiding inside them). Once they are dry, they can be stored for up to a fortnight, one flower inside the other, in a plastic bag or air-tight container (take care not to squash them), or used in a meal.

The Italians use zucchini flowers in a variety of ways. In Crete, they are mainly turned into dolmadakia rice parcels, but as I have a lot of these flowers at my disposal at the moment, I've decided to use them Italian-style, as a simple fritter.



For the batter, you need:
1 egg
3-4 tablespoons of flour
1/2 cup water
salt and pepper to season

Mix the batter ingredients until the mixture is smooth and runny. This mixture will be enough to fry about 15-18 flowers. Heat some (preferably) olive oil in a saucepan. Make sure it's really hot, then dip the flowers in the batter, one-by-one, drain off the excess batter, and toss them into the very hot oil. Cook them in two batches rather than one, because the temperature of the oil will decrease if you add them altogether, making them oil-soaked rather than dry and crispy. Turn them over once to brown on both sides, then use a slotted spoon to drain them out of the pan. Transfer them to a plate lined with a paper towel to soak up the excess oil. They are best served hot.



These flowers tasted very much like their parents: fried zucchini. They were accompanied by fried rabbit and an aromatic Greek salad to which I had added some rocket leaves; my summer purslane weed has now given way to autumn rocket in the cooler weather (though I did need to sow it, whereas purslane grows without any help at all).

For a more dramatic look, keep the stalks when frying them, as Laurie did, so that they can be picked up by the stem when eating them. I simply don't have enough room in my fridge to do this.

This post is dedicated to Priscilla, who still found the time to blog and update us on what happened to her home when Ike visited; spare a thought for others like her who have lost their kitchens from the havoc wreaked by nature itself.

This is my entry for Kalyn's Weekend Herb Blogging hosted this week by Haalo from Cook (almost) Anything At Least Once.

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