Single-serve chocolate galatopita (Γαλατοπιτούλες)

The photos seem to have gone astray: you can find them by clicking on this link. Use the previous/next buttons to see more photos.

My friend Hrisida has been at it again, giving me some more ideas for using home-made filo pastry, thereby improving my technique. She mentioned how much she liked galatopita, a sweet custard pie made in Northern Greece. Here in Hania (and probably throughout Crete), the word 'galatopita' is not even heard. I had tried galatopita in Karpenisi when I visited the area last summer; to me, it tasted simply like a 'dairy' pie (it was hard to work out if it was made with milk or cheese).

Galatopita is the first pita on the left (after that, it's spanakopita, tiropita and kolokithopita). The pie looks crusty all over - just like all the other pitas - but with less filo on the top than the other ones.

When googling a recipe, I always check the images. After picking the galatopita photos that I liked, I then opened the page of whichever one took my fancy. Here's what I found:
- some use no filo at all (they're baked like a custard)
- some use filo only on the bottom (they're baked like a pie)
- some use filo both on top and at the bottom (like the one I tried in Karpenisi)
- some pour syrup over the baked (filo or filo-less) pie (in other words, they turn out like a galaktoboureko).

There were also some interesting variations, eg nuts/dried fruit in the custard, flavoured custard (notably chocolate) and variations on the way the pita is presented (eg cigar-shaped roll-ups).

Of all the recipes, I have to say that I liked the chocolate galatopita most of all, with its airy-looking crust. The combination and contrast of the pale fyllo and dark custard made it look quite pretty, and very festive. It would make a spectacular Christmas dessert, made as individual servings. It's been a while since I used my ramekin set; now is the perfect time to take them out. The following recipe is based on Asproula's galatopita recipe (in Greek); she also makes her own filo pastry for all her pitas.

For 12 small ramekins (individual servings), you need: 

3 1/2 cups of milk

1/2 cup of fine semolina

1/3 cup of butter (I use olive oil)

3 tablespoons of cocoa powder

1/2 cup of sugar (you can add more sugar if you like your custard to taste very sweet)

2 eggs 

cinnamon

4-6 sheets of filo pastry (I make my own)

Warm the milk in a saucepan, then add the semolina, stirring continuously so that the mixture doesn't stick to the saucepan, and making sure that it doesn't go lumpy, until it thickens to a cream. Turn off the heat and allow the cream to cool slightly. Add the butter, sugar and sifted cocoa and mix well. Finally beat in the eggs and whisk them into the cream, blending everything well.

Grease your ramekins (I use olive oil: you can use butter) and line each one with a small piece of filo pastry, leaving a little (but not too much) pastry hanging over the edge of the ramekins. Grease the filo well and then lay another piece of pastry on top of it. Sprinkle each ramekin with a little sugar and cinnamon (which I forgot to do!), then fill each one carefully (so as not to stain the edges of the filo, like I did!) with the creamy mixture. Try to make the filo pastry stick decoratively over the edge of the ramekins (this will be easier with store-bought filo pastry); grease these pastry bits well. Place the ramekins in the oven on the lowest rack and bake in moderate heat (180C) for approximately 35-40 minutes, until the cream has set. Turn off the oven, let the galatopita ramekins sit for a few minutes to solidify, and then remove them.

  

My home-made filo pastry turned out quite thick, which I put to good use: it made the perfect crispy wafer to dip into the custard as we ate the pie. Because I didn't add much sugar to the dessert, I added some kind of sweetener (which is completely optional): chocolate snow, icing sugar, Greek home-made spoon sweets, honey and ground nuts all make a delicious topping to this festive dessert.  

 

Serve the galatopita cool - it tastes much better at room temperature. The galatopitoules come clean out of the ramekins, but they can also be served in them (recommended if you have baked them 'naked', ie without filo; otherwise, the filo pita needs to be cut). Galatopita can be eaten slightly warm or cold and can be reheated. It's sometimes sprinkled with sugar and/or cinnamon; I served them with some red berry fruit (mulberry spoon sweet from Northern Pilio) and nuts. Another nice idea would be to crumble some tahini-based Macedonian halva over them (if this is available where you are) for extra sweetness.

My preferred way of enjoying galatopita - the day after it's baked, for breakfast. I only had enough filo pastry for 6 ramekins, so I made the remaining 6 galatopites as 'naked' pies. The result: a velvety custard treat.

Another bi-coloured festive variation to this pie would be to make chocolate-flavoured filo pastry (add some cocoa powder to the flour) and omit the cocoa from the custard. It will also surprise your guests and they will think you are a celebrity chef.

Bonus holiday recipes, from my friends:

Kiki Vagianos from the The Greek Vegan - Melomacarona Cookies

Athena Pantazatou, Kicking Back the Pebbles – Grandma Chrysoula’s Kourabiethes

Mary Papoulias-Platis, California Greek Girl - Bittersweet Chocolate Date Nut Baklava

©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 way we were (Όπως ήμασταν παλιά)

I recently went to a Christmas bazaar, organised by the Cretan International Community (CIC), held every year in Hania to raise funds for charities. This bazaar is co-ordinated by non-Greek residents of Crete, so it's not surprising that many non-Greek activities take place. Here you will see a style of entertainment that is quite different to the well known Greek bouzouki, Cretan lyra, Greek dancing and Karagiozis puppet theatre for kids instead, you will see skiffle bands, trapeze artists and magic shows. There's also a great variety of items on sale that you wouldn't see in the average Cretan home. To begin with, let's take food: butterfly cakes, cupcakes with buttercream and sprinkles, chutney, chili sauce, kombuchi, fruit cake and roly-poly cake; handcrafts stalls selling hand-made cloth bags, caps, jewellery, candles, Christmas wreaths, greetings cards, and dolls' clothes; some bric-a-brac which includes antiques, old things people don't want anymore, and second-hand clothing. And lots of books, in English, German, French and Scandinavian languages.

In the past, other people's trash didn't often get transformed into other people's treasure. Before the crisis, the general thought was "Καινούργιο σπίτι, καινούργια έπιπλα." Now it's "Τα παλιά έπιπλα θέλουν επισκευή." At least, that's what I've been hearing among my circles - people are even ready to recommend me an upholsterer, in that usual Greek 'use-my-friend' way. Greeks now know about second-hand clothing and other people's bric-a-brac. But 'artisan' jewellery with 40 euro price tags during an economic crisis? Hand-made dolls' clothes - have you ever seen Barbie wearing a woolly rib-knit sweater? Greeks haven't gone the whole hog yet. It's still a little difficult to find a place to leave things you don't want so that they can be given away to charity, which is the reason why I recently saw this Asian design curtain dumped (together with the curtain rail) by the bin. Given the occasion, I remembered to take a bag of clothes and toys my children had outgrown to the bazaar, giving it to the organisers of the bric-a-brac sale. 

The kids had a great time watching the performer on the monkey bike walking a tightrope, blindfolding a member of the audience and juggling knives over his head. The last time they saw entertainment like this was at Covent Garden in London (although we often see Northern European jugglers at traffic lights these days, along with the one-armed man, the paper-towel seller, the car-window cleaner and the simple beggar). I also bought them some butterfly cupcakes to try (which they thought were OK - if you aren't used to eating canned whipped spray-on cream as part of your daily diet, you'd think they were just OK too). While they enjoyed the show, I was able to browse through the second-hand 1-euro-each reading material . Among the dusty shelves of the well-thumbed books, I found a couple of long-forgotten gems, each one able to give the reader some idea of what endeared foreigners to Greece back in the days when she had a good reputation.

Foreign Women in Greece was originally published in 1978, and came out in 1984 as a revised (third) edition. It was basically an analysis of 148 questionnaires handed out to non-Greek women living and working in Greece. The Adjustment chapter is quite revealing:

"Almost all of the women who responded were unanimous in the things that they found valuable in Greek society: good food (the first to be mentioned!), friendly people, a more relaxed way of life, the warm climate, less violence than in most Western European and American cities, a healthy attitude towards children, little danger of narcotics, etc. We would like to emphasize these very positive factors."

Whatever changes have taken place in Greek society, it's heartening to know that this is what people liked about us 30-odd years ago, just three years after we'd entered the EC, as the EU was known back then. The questionnaires were mainly answered by women living in Athens, but there is also a chapter in the book entitled Greece is not only Athens, quoting women's opinions about life in villages and smaller towns:

"I like the way my children are allowed to grow up more slowly. They are not so sophisticated as children in England. There are not the problems of drugs, glue sniffing, drinking and smoking... Fresh air, slower pace of life, and far more friendly non-aggressive people than I ever met in Athens... A neighbour is always near to warn - get out of the road, does your mother know where you're going?... Everybody knows everybody else, and if anyone tries to cheat it gets around fast... Because you're a foreigner, the locals expect you to be different and they excuse your foreign ways rather than criticise them."

Similar ideas were recently expressed in the ekathimerini's Letters, by a Norwegian living on the island of Paros, who stated that he loved Greek society for its people and atmosphere, admiring the strong family bonds that he believes do not exist in his country: "Greek men [are] proud, and this is something that Norwegian men may have lost in the last 30-40 years of the feminism fight, maybe they have given up the struggle, the women in Norway seem to cope very well without men (ha ha)." Of course, not all the women surveyed were satisfied with the (at the time) Greek woman's lot:

"All this visiting and sitting around in tavernas and coffee shops is stifling and repetitive... lack of education and cultivation of the people - my heart goes out to Greek village women. They haven't even begun to realise how exploited and degraded they are."

The book was published at a time when women's issues were often classified under the umbrella title of 'women's lib'. Some of the survey data still applies for foreign women living in Greece:

"... 67% of the women who had a partner came to Greece because of their partner. Most of these women mentioned additional reasons, eg a wish to live in the south (presumably Northern Europeans), 60% of the women with a partner stated that coming to Greece was a mutual decision, 19% said it was their own decision and 12% the partner's."

That's why there has never been any "Foreign Men in Greece"equivalent: it's usually a case of foreign woman falling in love with Greek man and ending up living in Greece, a common trait in many culturally mixed relationships (the man takes the woman to his homeland).

So that was all part of living in Greece in the good old days: a safe friendly environment, a good place to raise children, but maybe not such an exciting place...

My next little gem of a find was a book containing over 300 glossy photos of Greece, a yearbook edition by the Greek National Tourism Organisation (1978), in German, entitled simply Griechenland. It was aimed for German travel agencies, to entice tourists to Greece. I didn't expect to find this book still listed for sale, so it came as a surprise to find at least half a dozen of these books still floating around the web, selling at about 4 euro. I've also seen other issues from different years lying around in cafes.

This book, despite its purely commercial purposes, was never sold for profit. It was simply given away. But it's clearly the kind of book people with lots of disposable income buy to keep on the coffee table or as a present for a friend. I can imagine this kind of book gracing diaspora Greeks' offices. Greece could have been making 'easy' money out of this kind of marketing, not using it simply to entice tourists to visit Greece. The photos these yearbooks contain are classic images of Greece. For example, the GNTO's current downloadable gastronomy brochure contains an image (on page 8, loukoumi and mastiha) which was included in the 1992 yearbook - τα χάπια μου, παρακαλώ, τα χάπια μου, θα ξεράσω.
(I think I spoke too soon - look at the latest GNTO campaign: these pictures are going to be plastered all over 7 million US diners' cheeseburger placemats). 

But all is not lost. This book was aimed for the at-the-time growing German tourist market to Greece, making them now one of Greece's biggest tourist groups, surpassing the United Kingdom's previous first place. Despite Greece's miserable economic outlook, 2011 was actually a record year for Greek tourism - over 16 million arrivals - with more Germans than Brits coming to Greece. In such terms, this book succeeded in its aim. The 1978 edition contains photographs of familiar Greek tourist sites before they were desecrated by hyper-mass tourism: 200+ shots (taken in 1977 or earlier) of scenes from daily Greek life, and another 100 depicting plant and marine life. It should not surprise anyone that Europeans find the Greek biodiversity so alluring: despite Greece having one of the lowest environmental protection indices in the whole of Europe, she has one of the highest biodiversity indices (exactly the opposite case exists in Sweden). 

The photos, surprisingly, did not include taverna shots with wicker chairs and lazing tourists. But the dozen or so food-related photographs revealed just how little has changed since that time: 35 years later, it is reassuring to know that some things have remained stable. Greeks are still eating the same food, maybe because it's still really good. It's one aspect of Greece that tourists still come for, and would be saddened to see it change. No wonder Greek cookbooks are selling like hotcakes right at this moment in North America. That's something people like about us: our food.



The photographs from the book that I have included in this post are timeless shots which can still be taken today (only the people will be wearing more modern clothes). The roast lamb on the spit clearly marks the photo as a typical Easter Sunday shot, as does the lagana bread with the olives and pickled peppers (clearly taken on Clean Monday). Greek coffee is still popular despite the rise of frappe, but watermelon, figs, corn and grilled octopus are a relish of the late summer season. Koulouria (bagels) still look just like they did so many years ago and still constitute a very popular snack. The Cretan paximadi (rusks) doesn't seem to have changed much either. The simple Greek tomato salad, served with some feta cheese and wine in a copper-coloured metal carafe, can taste so unforgettably good on a hot summer's day, just after a cooling swim in the Mediterranean...

My bazaar (if somewhat bizarre) book finds tell us a little about what people once liked - and still like - about Greece. At the same time, we also gain an insight from those slice-of-life snapshots into the reasons why we have changed. In some cases, it was inevitable; in others, we had to.

UPDATE 15-11-2012: The CIC Christmas bazaar will not take place this year due to unavailibility of venue. It may take place as an Easter event instead.

©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.

Olive oil cookies (Λαδομπισκοτάκια)

Every weekend, I check which of my newly-acquired cookie jars is emptying the quickest, and by Sunday evening, it will be filled with something freshly baked. My home-made ladokouloura are much cheaper than any kind of good-for-dunking medium-quality semi-sweet store-bought biscuit (unless you buy the generic LIDL or EUROSHOPPER label, where you end up with lots of broken cookies as well as many crumbs - good for making a cheesecake base, if only cheesecake were part of the traditional Greek culinary repertoire).

I was looking for a new idea for a good biscuit with which to fill my newly-acquired cookie jars, when I chanced on this grandmother's blog. She put up a different cookie recipe for a whole year. In her first post, there was no photograph to accompany the first recipe, where she gives her version of Nestle's famous chocolate chip toll-house cookies:

"My next cookie memory would be the ever famous, possibly all-time favorite, the chocolate chip cookie. There is nothing better than to bite into a round circle of baked dough sprinkled with gooey melt-in-your-mouth chocolate. A chocolate chip cookie can dry tears, heal broken hearts, mend scraped knees and elbows and solve sibling arguments. Most of the problems in the world could likely be solved by a properly baked, right out of the oven, chocolate chip cookie. The power of a cookie is underestimated."

I feel the same way when I see my children dipping their hands into one of the cookie jars.

Toll house cookies are expensive to make in Hania, where neither high-quality butter or chocolate are cheap, so I've adapted the basic recipe by replacing the butter with our own supply of olive oil. It works very well. Chocolate chips are available in Hania only as cooking chocolate drops by Samouri and Jotis (except possibly in the wholesale trade to bakers, confectioners, etc); they didn't melt when cooked. I got get cheap, tasty, nice-looking cookies that everyone really liked.

Toll house cookies are a kind of 'drop' cookie - the soft batter falls off a teaspoon onto the cooking tray. From previous experience, I prefer to bake chocolate chip cookies so that they are firm all over. Greeks don't like chewy soft cookies (that's just part of their food identity), so I use more flour than the original cookie recipe. For me (and most Greeks, I'd say), a chocolate chip cookie needn't be eaten immediately, because Greeks don't eat hot biscuits (another food identity element). Greek cookies always need sitting time when they come out of the oven. At any rate, the batter can be prepared in different ways: as a cookie, slice or even from refrigerated dough. 

The best aspect of the original recipe is that it is very versatile. You can add nuts (whole, chopped or ground), dried fruit, grated coconut, dark or white chocolate, spices and cocoa to the basic recipe and get a whole host of cookie variations, not only in taste but also in appearance. That way, no one gets bored of eating your home-made cookies. It's amusing watching the kids rummaging through the cookie jar to reach their favorite one before anyone else gets it, especially if it's the last in the jar.

For the basic cookie recipe (yields 70-75 pieces), you need:
3-4 cups all-purpose flour (~ 70 cents; I used soft, ie low-gluten flour)
1 teaspoon of baking powder (minimal cost)
1 cup olive oil (our own supplies)
3/4 cup white sugar (~15 cents)
3/4 cup soft brown sugar (~20 cents)
(or just use 1.5 cups of soft brown sugar)
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract (~15 cents)
3 eggs (30 cents)
(The basic recipe also includes a teaspoon of salt - I don't use it)

Start off by combining all the ingredients EXCEPT the flour in a bowl and mix well. The oil needs to be beaten into the mixture till it emulsifies, as it often sits on the top because of its light weight. Then beat in the flour gradually, to get the right consistency for firm cookies. The amount depends on your location and the temperature, as the original recipe (see top photo, right) correctly notes. The mixture will look like a firm batter, or a loose dough. It's the effect of the olive oil. Don't let that put you off.

 

Classic dark chocolate chip cookies and snowdrop cookies (cocoa powder and white chocolate) 

Now comes the fun part: you can divide your batter/dough (depending on how much flour you added to the mixture) to make different cookie flavours. I usually divide it into two lots, to make two different cookie flavours. For a start, you can add 1 cup of ground walnuts, almonds or coconut for extra texture. Or, you could make any of the following combinations noted in the photograph caption below. I was able to make them with just half a batch of cookie dough, being extra careful to keep the cookies a regular shape and texture, in order to cook evenly. None stuck to the bottom of the baking tray (it was greased with olive oil).

If Bertie Bott (from Harry Potter fame) produced 'every flavour cookies', this is what an assortment pack might look like: choco-mint, quince spoon sweet, halva, choco-halva, coconut, chocolate chip, chocolate chocolate chip, orange, jaffa, walnut, coco-walnut, choco-nut, fig newton, ginger-walnut, and a couple more whose precise contents I don't remember.

Once you've made up your batter, drop your cookies with a teaspoon onto a baking tray. The dough can also be rolled in balls in your hand (as with my 'assorted flavours' cookies), which you can press down a little, to make the cookies spread out evenly. I can get about 20 cookies on one sheet, with enough space to spread. Bake the cookies in a moderate oven (about 180C) for 15 minutes for firm cookies, the way Greeks like them.

Happiness is... full cookie jars, and a weekly bundt cake for school lunches.

These cookies look almost festive for me, with their many colours, textures and flavours. The festive season is upon us and it came quite soon to Hania this year: winter set in early, following our early autumn's footsteps. By the middle of October, it was cold; by the beginning of November, we were using the heating system. Compare that to last year: in early December, we were thinking that we might be enjoying an outdoor barbecue on Christmas Day.

Cost per medium-sized cookie: about 5 euro-cents, if you have your own olive oil supplies.

©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.

Soap (Σαπούνι)

In order to succeed, you may have to be prepared to play dirty, even if your line of business is soap, as this story about the Omo, Surf and Tide soap giants tells us. They formed a cartel for detergent prices in eight European countries, including Greece, who too often and too easily falls victim to toys-for-profit schemes. If it weren't for the 'righteous' act of another soap giant (Persil spilled the beans to the EU Commission), Greece might still have been paying for this joke.

Maybe it's Greece's fault too: in the past, Greeks too easily fell prey to the 'stigma' of brand names. Greeks (like Americans) are generally fashion victims, preferring brands, not just in clothing and car models, but even when presented with a choice between a brand label and an own label at the supermarket, for mundane everyday items like pasta and soap. This is now definitely changing (spurred on by the economic crisis), but Greeks still haven't reached the lengths that Germany and Britain go, to economise on supermarket shopping: "The large numbers of Mercedes and BMWs parked in Aldi and Lidl [both are low-price discount supermarkets] parking lots reinforce the old adage that poor people need low prices, while rich people love low prices." (Private Label Strategy: How to Meet the Store Brand Challenge by Nirmalya Kumar and Jan-Benedict Steenkamp, 2007).

Artisinal soap from Marseilles - a present from a friend. The rough-looking brightly coloured soap was quite an eye-catcher: Yes, it was packaged seductively, yes, it looked and smelled beautiful - but it was not as mild or as pure as odorless uncorrupted olive oil soap (you could tell from the feel on your skin). 

Greece's soap woes have turned her modern history into a soap opera. How befitting for a country that was once a pioneer in natural soap production - and olive oil soap products continue to take pride of place in the natural soap market, despite the country's reputation.

The early days of soap making and olive oil production go hand in hand, together with the beginnings of Crete's trading industry. In the 1600s, Crete became cultivated intensively with olive fields - before that, mainly wheat was cultivated. In the 1700s, olive oil was exported from Crete for making soap, much more so than for eating! One kilo of olive oil yielded one-and-a-half kilos of soap, making it an extremely profitable business. The French were mainly interested in it, given their renowned soap making skills deriving in Marseilles. Soap was also very important in the textile industry - cotton, and wool had to be cleaned before being spun/used. Crete began to export this value-added (ie more processed) product to France, as it was considered easier to export in this form rather than as olive oil. (Left: Cretan supermarket shelf showing various olive oil packaging; Right: body soaps on a supermarket shelf in Crete - the olive oil soaps are at the very bottom, in cake form,)

Saponification involves the following steps: liquidising, washing, baking, moulding, stabilising, cutting and packaging. The soap-making skills of the Cretans weren't as high as the French: soap making requires the use of soda ash (carbon nitrate) which had to be of good quality. In the past, Cretans bought it from North Africa/Middle East while the French used Sicilan/Spanish soapstone. So the French would buy Cretan soap and melt it down again and rebake it. The French were in fact Crete's main clients in this sector (60%). Soap making was what controled the prices of olive oil in Crete: it acted as a kind of stock exchange. (Left: olive oil soap made in Greece, sold by Amazon.com; Right: OLIVA olive oil soap from ABEA, Hania - one of the most popular soaps selling on the web-based market).

Crete wasn't able to compete globally once the industrial revolution was well established in the late nineteenth century, because she was still under Ottoman rule, there was no carbon for fuel and the nature of the island was not business-minded. Cretan agriculture needed to be altered towards industrialisation. The marketable units in existence were just too small in scale: they consisted mainly of olive oil (and oil-derived products like soap), while wine making was also important. Electrification of the island took place in the 1930s. When Crete joined the Greek state in 1913, it was a positive step towards becoming more competitive - but it was still a little too late, considering the point that the West had already reached.

Quality soap production rested on the high knowledge of the skills of the soap-maker even as recently as 50 years ago. Up until the early twientieth century, the island of Lesvos (now known as Mitilini) was the most important soap making area of Greece, while Crete was the second most important. Constantinople was one of the biggest buyers of Cretan olive oil soap, which explains why Lesvos was a more important soap-producing area than Crete; Mitilini was closer to the buyer, so the island was converted into an area of olive monoculture. After the 1922 population exchange between Greece and Turkey, the port area of Pireas became the most important soap-producing area in the country.

Olive oil soap is the best soap to use for personal hygiene (especially women's hygiene); it's not the best for your scalp though, as it leaves residue that creates dandruff. It's also very good at removing olive oil stains from clothing; oil needs oil to get rid of it.

Hania's soap production began with the establishment of the soap-making factory ABEA, west of the town of Hania, in an area now known as Nea Hora (the "New Country" - it was the first suburb to be built outside the city boundaries) by a French scientist (Julius Deis) in 1889. It only came into Greek hands in 1916. In 1941, the Nazis destroyed the factory completely; it was eventually rebuilt in the same place. Olive oil soap until then consisted of not-very-appealing green or brown cakes of soap. It wasn't until 1960 that aromatic soap began to be produced. In 1971 detergent for clothes washing machines began to manufactured.

The ABEA soap-making factory in Nea Hora before it closed down. The school built on the former site of the factory has written a post about the former factory, containing not just interesting information, but also moving photographs like this one, of former times.

By the late 1990s, it was agreed that, due to the urban sprawl, the ABEA soap-making plant had to move out of the town. The smell, dust and smoke were creating havoc in  the lives of the people who lived in the area. It wasn't until 1992 that the factory moved out of the town; by 2004, all the plant's operations were moved outside the town to various locations, and in 2004, the original installations were deemed unsuitable for preservation. A school has now been built on the former site, where only the chimneys of the former factory remain.

All the information about Greek soap making and the ABEA factory comes form the book "The History of the ABEA Factory in Hania, Crete 1889-2009" (in Greek) by Vasiliki Vourdoumba, Yiannis Vourdoumbas and Andreas Georgousakis, Kasimatis 2011.

©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.

Pancakes (Κρέπες)

There are common themes recurrent in my teaching work, which also constantly get attention in the mass media, such as education, pollution, climate change and poverty to name a few. Most Greek children know about UNICEF, and will have taken part in some of their fundraising ventures. Before I became a mother, I was fascinated by UNICEF's range of educational toys and books, and often bought products they sold, even though I didn't have a family of my own, because I could turn them into interesting projects for discussion in an English class. These books ended up becoming a part of my children's book collections, books which I mainly bought at a time when I liked the idea of cooking for multitudes, but did not have any multitudes to feed.

It's a very satisfying feeling when children show an interest in what their parents are doing around the house. No doubt, many parents will agree with me that when children see their parents doing something constructive, creative and interesting, they will happily relinquish their toys, cartoons and games, and ask to join in the 'fun', using 'adult toys'. This is slightly perturbing when they want to hold or use dangerous objects, such as clippers in the garden or knives in the kitchen. They need to be watched the whole time, but it is worth the effort. A rainy Saturday morning is better spent making biscuit dough than watching cartoons the whole day.

I think the gloves attracted them more than the weeding...

Since my children discovered these UNICEF recipe books on the bookshelves, they often ask me to let them make something that they (think they will) like out of them.

My daughter likes to dress the part, but I notice she also has culinary flair.

The recipes are organised by country, with a diagrammatic account of the ingredients required, with pictures accompanying the instructions. Each recipe is given an origin. The recipes are simple, while most require minimal cooking. The children usually choose to make chocolate sweets, but there are many savoury recipes included too, using locally grown vegetables; I also encourage the children to help me make the Greek dishes, for obvious reasons. I've made a number of dishes from these books together with the children (the countries named below are given as the origin of the recipe included in the books). Sometimes it convinces them to try the finished meal (eg aubergine dip); other times, they simply enjoyed the process of making the finished product:

• guacomole (Mexico)
• aubergine dip (Iran)
• roast peppers (Greece)
• hamburger (Canada)
• brownies (USA)
• chocolate biscuit balls (UK)
• 'surprise' cake (Yugoslavia - some of these books are quite old!)
• pancake fritters (Holland)
• walnut crepes (Hungary)
• chocolate tart (Switzerland)
• hot chocolate (Holland)

By far, their favorite recipe ios the one given for walnut crepes from Hungary - but without the walnuts (since they're cooking, it's their choice)! The printed recipe contained a mistake, which I felt I had to explain to the children by reminding them that we live in the internet age, and can check any information for its validity. But the process of cooking is still fun, and the experience gained is worth the mistakes made along the way.

To make 10 large pancakes, you need:
225g flour
400 ml milk (the initial recipe said 40ml - clearly a typo!)
2 tablespoons water
3 eggs
100 grams sugar
butter/olive oil for greasing the frying pan

My daughter once again surprised me; after cooking all the pancakes herself, she presented me with the tolled up pancakes spread with chocolate and cut in bite-sized pieces.

Mix together the flour, milk, water, eggs, and sugar. Let the mixture rest for an hour. Make sure your mixture is runny. If it isn't, mix in some more milk to make a runny batter. Melt some butter (I use about a teaspoon of olive oil) in a frying pan, and pour two tablespoons of mixture into the pan. Let it spread all over the pan. Cook the pancakes, one by one, by melting a dab of butter in a small pan, and pouring two large tablespoons of the runny egg mixture into the pan. They need a high heat and constant watching over the element so as not to burn. Cook them on both sides (kids love flipping pancakes), take them out of the pan and lay them on a plate, one stacked on top of the other.

We like to serve them with chocolate spread, honey or jam. Pancakes are a simple fun way to get everyone involved in cooking. They are also a winning meal - no one says no to pancakes.

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Cheap and frugal (Φθηνό και οικονομικό)

The concept of frugal food recently gripped the food-related sections of the mass media. In the UK, scientists (not cooks or nutritionists!) recently resurrected the toast sandwich, which is supposedly a very cheap nutritious meal, providing you with enough calories to fortify yourself without it being too fattening (as long as you don't eat more than one of these), made with just three slices of bread - a slice of toasted bread, buttered and seasoned, tucked into two slices of untoasted bread. Apparently, it costs 7.5p and yields 300 calories - very cheap* and very filling - but wholly unappealing.

The whole concept has been borne out of the global economic climate. It's nothing new: bread (not necessarily with marg) is often what sustains the poor all over Europe, but should be viewed with caution, as George Orwell's experiences tell us, in Paris...:

You discover what it is like to be hungry. With bread and margarine in your belly, you go out and look into the shop windows. Everywhere there is food insulting you in huge, wasteful piles; whole dead pigs, baskets of hot loaves, great yellow blocks of butter, strings of sausages, mountains of potatoes, vast Gruyere cheeses like grindstones... You discover that a man who has gone even a week on bread and margarine is not a man any longer, only a belly with a few accessory organs... Have you noticed how bread tastes when you have been hungry for a long time? Cold, wet, doughy—like putty almost. (George Orwell, 1933, Down and Out in Paris and London)

The budget traveller's hotel breakfast doesn't change much from London to Paris - except in the freshness and shape of the bread served. No need to tell you which photograph represents which city.

... and London:

... men... slightly underfed, but kept going by the tea-and-two-slices which the Londoner swallows every two hours... his cheeks had lanked and had that greyish, dirty in the grain look that comes of a bread and margarine diet... two years of bread and margarine had lowered his standards hopelessly. He had lived on this filthy imitation of food till his own mind and body were compounded of inferior stuff. It was malnutrition and not any native vice that had destroyed his manhood... Food, to him, had come to mean simply bread and margarine—the eternal tea-and-two-slices, which will cheat hunger for an hour or two... a ration which is probably not even meant to be sufficient... The result is that nearly every tramp is rotted by malnutrition; for proof of which one need only look at the men lining up outside any casual ward. (George Orwell, 1933, Down and Out in Paris and London)

Freshly baked bread and olive oil make a hearty Greek snack any time of the day. My kids like this kind of snack in the evening. They toast thick country-style bread and pour olive oil over it, sprinkled with a little oregano and a little lemon juice. The bread is dense, crunchy on the outside, soft inside. This kind of bread meal probably won't be considered cheap in Northern European countries, where freshly baked bread is regarded as a 'gourmet', 'artisanal' product and olive oil is an expensive import. Pre-sliced bread is unsuitable for this kind of snack.

Bread and oil are considered staples in Greece, but not in the same form as presented in the bread-and-marg meal: in Greece, spongey square mass-produced slices of bread are only considered edible in the form of a toasted sandwich filled with ham and cheese (at the very least). If this were ever to be presented to someone in Greece with the ham and cheese replaced by bread (and I wouldn't want to be the one to do it), the recipient would probably (and rightly) think of their host as completely lacking in social graces. Even the poorest Greeks right at this moment would laugh at the thought of such food being dubbed a meal. Moreover, Greeks do not resort to other commonly regarded cheap meals in the UK, such as tinned baked beans (~12p per 200g serving) or Chinese bowl noodles (~11p per packet). Again, these cost (much) more to buy in Greece, because, like the sliced-bread lunch, such convenience food has never been regarded as a real meal. (I bet many/most Greeks wouldn't know what to do with the tin/packet int he first place.) In the Greek price comparison sites, they aren't even listed, which shows that they aren't considered a common shopping item in Greece.

 

Above: Frugal meals in our house are very common because they make use of whatever is growing in the garden, which is what a lot of our meals are based on, supplemented by cheap store-bought carbohydrates like pasta and rice. Rice parcels can be made throughout the year with different seasonal leaves and herbs. Right: summer - zucchini flowers, vine leaves and tomatoes. Left: winter - squash flowers, wild-growing sorrel and chinese leaves from our garden (the seeds were a present from a friend). Nothing is truly 'free', but it can be considered as very economical.
Below: Lemon-cured olives collected from local trees, garden-fresh radishes and roasted peppers in olive oil, slow-roasted pork (the cheapest meat on the Greek market - Greeks generally eat less meat now) with freshly harvested potatoes from a friend's garden - a typical Sunday meat meal in our house. It is both frugal and sumptuous.

Frugal food means different things to different people, according to where they live and what their situation is. Urban dwellers' meal choices could theoretically be the ones containing the most variety because of the choices made available to the masses, but to have such variety on their table, they need to pay for it: they are in that difficult position of, generally speaking, needing to buy all their food needs, so their idea of frugal food is no doubt ruled by the contents of their wallets. Discount supermarkets are preferred to the corner store, with people using the street market (in Greece this is known as 'laiki' - λαϊκή) more often. In rural areas, frugal meal choices often combine great variety with high quality, depending on what's growing in the garden, the trees and the fields. There is an element of truth when they say "Το φαγητό είναι το λιγότερo"** in conjunction with the crisis. Their only restriction is that they must produce it themselves - for rural people, this comes naturally.

Despite Asian fare being considered the cheapest kind of restaurant meal in other European countries, in Greece, this kind of meal costs much more than a cheap taverna meal. But with the abundance of fresh ingredients available to the rural Cretan, even international cuisine can become standard fare at a miminum cost. Left: onion bhaji, garden-fresh sauteed chinese leaves (the seeds were a treasured present from a friend) with Greek cured meat (lountza - a kind of Greek bacon: a little goes a long way), and eggplant fried rice. Right: boiled rice, stir-fry chicken with black beans, and sauteed chinese leaves. Frugal daily meals consist of some kind of bean dish twice a week - but it's only cooked once: the second time we eat it, it will be a leftover from the same cooking session. Frugal meals mean being economical from many aspects: money, energy and time all count. 

Greeks now earn less money and are required to pay more special taxes, often with little warning given, under the threat of having the power disconnected if they don't cough up. What we often took for granted has now come under heavy scrutiny. In the past, fruit fell off the trees and onto the ground - this rarely happens now (it's harvested before it falls). The four most oft-discussed topics we hear being talked about concern what heating fuel we use (this one tops the list), which system heats our water supply (ie do we have solar panels, and is our water heater connected to the central heating system), what's growing in our garden these days and whether the latest tax bill has come yet. 

 Heating fuel has now become very expensive, so most people in Hania are now investing in fireplaces or indoor wood-burning ovens/heaters. This is our pile of firewood - the heater will be purchased soon.

We also hear stories about food insecurity, as they apply to other people: Άλλοι πεινάνε - καλά είμαστε εδώ***. This pretty much sums up city life for me: it was never really sustainable. Frugality is nothing new to most rural dwellers. They've been living in crisis mode most of their lives, well before the global economic crisis even hit the news. They've never thought of any part of their income as 'disposable' - to them, that part was always called 'savings'.

A meal out is definitely out for now (pun not intended) - when we eat 'out', it's usually a cheap and tasty souvlaki every now and then: YA! near the Hania town hall sells them at 2 euro per pork gyro and 2.20 euro for chicken, beef or kebab.

Πενία τέχνας κατεργάζεται: "the need for survival (ie hunger) creates ways of survival", the Greek form of the proverb 'make, do and mend'.

*The same meal in Hania costs about 18 euro-cents (twice the price of its British variant): LIDL sliced bread costs E1.19/20 slices and E1.59/28 slices (the same bread could possibly be bought more cheaply from another supermarket).
**"Food is the least of our worries." 
***"Others are hungry - we're fine here." 

*** *** *** 

Stale bread is never thrown out in our house (and probably not in other Greeks' houses now, either). Apart from warming it up (it softens this way) and spreading it with oil or butter, it is used in the mixture for biftekia (meat patties) and skordalia, a garlicky dip. The crusts are removed from stale slices of traditional bakery bread (it can be made with stale mass-produced bread too), which are soaked just a little so as to soften them and make them easy to blend with garlic, salt, vinegar and oil. I used a mixed-grain bread to make mine (pictured, above right), and left the crusts for dipping. This cheap and frugal bread dish is simple to make, and forms a staple part of a lenten meal, especially on Palm Sunday. The dip can also be made with boiled potato (pictured, above left) when there's no stale bread at hand. 

It may sound like the Greeks are eating bread with bread in this way - but again, skorthalia is never served on its own: in fact, it's traditionally accompanied by boiled beetroot and fried fish. It's all a matter of identity, not just a case of a more refined cuisine: you eat what you are.

©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.