The open-air market (H λαική)

Everyone loves going to the street market in Greece. In most urban centres around the country (if not all), there is a laiki (say LA-EE-KEY) for every neighbourhood. In Hania, there are laiki stalls on every day of the week in different suburbs of the town. I live outside the centre, but I still like to go to the laiki, not necessarily for the fresh produce, but more for the atmosphere of the open-air market. The laiki is always held during the day, so it's also a meeting place for unemployed housewives and old-age pensioners. On a fine day (like most in Hania), going to the laiki is like going through a time-warp with its old-worldly look. Sellers are calling out "elate na parete!" (come and buy!) and "ola tzamba!" (everything for free!), women shoppers are seen picking their way through trestle tables full of stringy underwear (no doubt trying to find something in their size), and everyone's legs are getting tangled up in the wheeled trolleys that shoppers use to store their purchases. You feel like you are in an Arabian souk. It's a major hit with the tourists of our town. The new economic migrants have also added another dimension to it by selling cheap made-in-china electrical gear, while the gypsy community have been selling outrageous, out-of-season, cut-price fashion for quite some time at the laiki. If you're lucky to have a laiki scheduled in your neighbourhood on Saturday morning, it's a great place to stroll around, and this is just what I did last week when I left the children at their club activities.

Most of the stall sellers in the food section of the laiki are local growers of local fresh seasonal produce grown in fields they manage themselves. They come in their trucks, laden full of fruit and vegetables; they may be selling their products at the laiki for a better price than they would receive if they sold it to a wholesaler. Most of the products sold at the laiki look very fresh, and what's more, very local. Just think how little those farmers have had to travel to get their products sold: no more than 100 kilometres. The photographs show Cretan olives, preserved in the local fashion, along with locally produced mountain teas and herbs, citrus fruit (pergamon and oranges), various types of horta and bananas. The olives will have been collected from trees in the region; the teas and herbs are generally not cultivated, so they will have been hand-picked from mountainous hard-to-access regions; orange trees (as with olive trees) abound in the greater part of Hania; horta are both cultivated and grown in the wild; bananas have been grown locally for many years - they are shorter, sweeter and more yellow than their Ecuadorian imported counterparts.











But do beware of non-seasonal products. The peppers, courgettes and aubergines may look glossy and scrumptious, but they are all grown under greenhouse conditions (not everyone is willing to live without a year-round supply of tomatos); it's a known fact that non-seasonal products cannot be grown without the help of chemicals. If a tomato plant gets 14 hours of sunlight a day, for example, in summer, imagine how much it gets in winter, without even considering the fact that it is grown indoors. If I'm going to eat something out-of-season, I prefer to buy an imported product from the supermarket, or buy it from an organic produce shop. The cabbage, celery and radishes may not look so appetising, but they are all seasonal. Instead of courgettes and aubergines, try eating more cauliflower ratatouille; instead of making yemista with the classic stuffed vegetables, the rice mixture can be rolled up in cabbage leaves that have been boiled for a few minutes to make them more malleable.











On my last visit to Wellington, I heard that a farmer's market had started up in a disused site close to the city centre every Sunday morning. What a shame I didn't manage to visit it; I would have liked to compare the atmosphere with the Greek laiki. But I don't see how it can operate in a truly open-air manner; either the gale-force winds that Wellington is accustomed to will turn the stalls upside down, or the year-round wet weather will turn it all into a soggy mush...


I didn't really need anything from the laiki today, but I did manage to find some children's cotton pyjamas at E7, and some underwear for them at E1 apiece (of course, I'm going to wash it all before they wear it). I tried on some boots for E10, but they didn't fit me. Good thing; the temptation to buy something at the laiki is really just too great a bargain to miss.

©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.

See also:
GAIA (fresh organic produce)
To eat or not to eat?
Summer fruit
Taste sensationalism
Eating locally
A peek into someone's fridge

GAIA (Γαία)

It’s a fact that people with higher levels of income and education have more time and money to spend on improving themselves. Some people do this by reading books on subjects such as the existence of God; others do this by looking after their appearance; yet others expend great effort on ensuring that they are living a natural life in the unnatural world that they live in. I suppose I am in the last category. I wish I could grow all my own food requirements, but that would mean giving up work and tending the garden or grazing animals all day. I wish I could walk everywhere, but that would mean an hour’s commute to work every day, and another hour back home. Then, there are the children, whose school is situated 5 kilometres away, and the mere fact that we live on a hill, with no bus route or corner store from which to buy our milk and bread. We are not Quakers, therefore, we choose to live with all the modern comforts we can afford.

GAIA (say YE-AH), the organic producers' and consumers' association of Hania, is situated on a street parallel to a central road in the heart of Hania, on the ground floor of a small semi-detached double storey apartment block. It is surrounded by the local stadium, the central town park, a few inner-city schools, and many terraced houses, some of whose basements are now being rented out to the new economic migrants in our town. They share the remaining housing with civil servants who rent in the same area to be close to work. Other more settled residents of the town have obviously moved on from their humble beginnings and added artistic features to the exterior of their houses, such as abstract art and smart brass plaques advertising their professions. You could say that GAIA’s regular customers are people who live nearby (a large neighbourhood), civil servants who work close by (educated people), and people who are following the trend towards a more natural lifestyle (the socially bohemian elite). As more and more people are becoming convinced about the benefits of organic agriculture, the number of GAIA’s customers is growing, and so is the number of stores of this type in the town. To date, Crete supposedly has more organic food suppliers than any other part of Greece.

When I first came to Hania, there were no organic food suppliers. GAIA opened up a couple of years later. I discovered them two years after that, when I was pregnant. With the sudden interest in organic produce, and my fear of poisoning my children, I have become more actively interested in GAIA. The whole setup of the shop reminds me of the Organic Food Coop in Wellington. Although many more stores have opened up in Hania, all claiming to sell organic products, GAIA remains the only organic produce store that actually looks as natural as it claims its products are. For a start, the stark lack of colour hits you hard in the face as you enter the store, only to be pleasantly surprised by the range of colourful fruit and vegetables as you come to the fresh produce section, which by the way, all have a natural look to them: their size is small, their colour natural, and their shape normal. In the rest of the store, the colours that dominate are brown and beige: the shelves are made from unpainted wood, and the goods stored on them are found in hessian sacks. The fill-your-own bags for bulk buying are made of paper rather than the typical plastic carrier bags like those you get in the supermarket. The idea of natural food is promoted in the both the décor and packaging. It doesn’t have an website, but I think that’s more due to lack of time to invest in such a thing rather than a move away from globalisation.

GAIA admits that a certain amount of pesticides are used in the products stocked in the store, but only the permissible ones at the lowest level possible. Quality checks are conducted regularly on their fresh products. When something is deemed non-organic, it is clearly stated, with a note explaining what was found in the crop and what they are doing to remedy the situation. Their prices are not much different for fresh produce from what is sold at the open-air market or the supermarket.

GAIA is situated very close to where I drop off my children every Saturday at chess club and art class (more proof of the social elitism that surrounds the area), so it is a convenient way to do my weekly fresh produce shopping. But there are also some downsides to buying organic products. Not everything can be produced locally, so GAIA ends up selling many imported products like chocolate, rice biscuits, noodles, muesli bars and various other ‘luxury’ foodstuffs (just think of the carbon footprints involved in bringing them to a Mediterranean island), and usually at an extravagant price. I decided to buy some organic biscuits (E3 for a small packet) and some organic bread (E2.50 for a tiny loaf), both produced in the United Kingdom, apart from the strong flour (for bread) and soft flour (for cakes) – of German origin – that I bought at a similar price to that of the supermarket; however, I couldn't see any expiry date on the hessian sacks that the flour was stored in. The fresh produce looks and feels natural, but it also goes off very quickly, because organic produce doesn't have a long shelf-life.

I felt good about my purchases, especially now that I am about to try making bread for the family, but I still have my doubts about how organic an organic supplies store really is. My trust will remain in GAIA because they are a co-operative whose shop assistants always seem to dress in clothes that look as if they are made from recycled hessian sacks, instead of being a family-run business which relies on people getting confused over the meanings of the words ‘natural’ and ‘organic’. I’m thankful I can tell the difference.

©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.

See also:
To eat or not to eat?
Summer fruit
Taste sensationalism
Eating locally
A peek into someone's fridge
The street market

Gingernuts (Μπισκόττα Αγγλίας με τζίντζερ )

"...Griffins gingernuts are so spi-ceey,
made from - old English reci-pee,
with the good good taste of Griffins fame
- look for Griffins gingernuts by name!"

Some people will nostalgically remember this commercial jingle for gingernuts, until some others deemed it as blatantly racist, because it showed a man monkeying around tall trees reminiscent of the Carribean, while he was beating his hands on drums and singing that jingle in a clearly Jamaican accent, despite the fact that Jamaicans were not a well-known race amongst New Zealanders, except possibly to the post-war British immigrants. I clearly remember thinking "nuts" every time I saw it on TV. Possibly I remember it more than others because I can't walk into a supermarket and buy some gingernut biscuits, whether they are Griffins or any other brand. Gingernuts were my all-time favorite biscuit. Dark brown, hard, soft when dunked in tea, crispy when dry, and very spicy. I had seen them in the dairy (NZ English for neighbourhood grocery) where we bought milk, bread and anything else that we didn't buy from the Italian brothers in their store next door to the dairy. At manual training in primary school, next door to the old St Patrick's boys college near the former site of the Museum of Wellington, one of our cookery lessons involved learning to make gingernuts (among other New Zealand treats such as scones, rock cakes and ginger gems). That was when I realised that that was in fact what my friends' mothers were making in their kitchens - afghans and banana cakes, not kourambiedes and melomakarona. I was living a non-Kiwi life in a Kiwi world.

I have always had a healthy interest in other people's food. Growing up in Aotearoa (the Maori name for New Zealand - the land of the long white cloud), I always had a secret love of all things English, even though I knew I was a Greek girl. Here I am now, living in Greece; maybe I just got the mother countries mixed up. I never really started to watch cookery shows until I discovered Delia Smith, a chef so popular in the United Kingdom that people refer to her recipes as delias: "What are you cooking?" "I'm doing a delia". What I liked about her shows was that she always gave precise instructions for her recipes, and was full of caveats that always started with the word 'Don't", or contained the word "should". She made traditional English recipes which I had heard of, would eat at restaurants, but would never eat at home, because we ate only Greek food. Don't get me wrong, we always ate good home-made food; my mother was a very good traditional Cretan cook. I just wish she could have been a little more open-minded about the range of foods we were missing out on. However, I don't know if I would have been more accepted by my peers if I had had home-made gingernuts in my school lunch-box instead of koulourakia. After all, my children are quite partial to banana cake muffins and I put them in their lunchboxes.

I bought Delia's cookbook when I was a post-graduate univesity student. My favorite recipes from her book are the ones for orange marmalade, French onion soup and gingernut biscuits, and I've also used it to make chocolate eclairs, quiche and strawberry jam. I've used this book so many times over the past 20 years that it's been in my possession, but the page with the most oil stains, as you can imgaine, is the one with the recipe for gingernuts. To make gingernut biscuits, you need to have some golden syrup (otherwise know as treacle) handy, a honey-like substance. In Crete, we cannot buy such a thing. I'm lucky to have brought back a tin of the stuff from my last visit to New Zealand. I only use it to make gingernuts. Once it's finished, I don't know when I'm going to be able to procure a new tin.

With my adulation of Delia being such, I looked up her website, just to see that recipe for gingernuts recieving the modern glory it deserves - its own website. To my dismay, Delia only includes a recipe for chocolate gingernuts. I don't think I'm willing to give up my ways just yet for the newfangled version of a traditional favorite teatime treat.

You need:
110g self-raising flour
1 large teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon baking soda
40g light brown sugar (granulated sugar, not the soft dark-brown sticky sugar)
50g margarine
2 tablespoons golden syrup

Sift the dry ingredients into a bowl, mix in the sugar, then lightly rub in the margarine until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. Next, add the syrup and mix everything together to form a stiff paste (not a stiff dough). Roll small pieces of mixtrue into little balls. Place them well spread out on a greased baking tray. Flatten each ball with the back of a spoon and bake them in the centre of the oven for 10-15 minutes at 190C. When they are cooked, they will have left attractive cracks on the surface. Let them cool down for 10 minutes before removing them from the baking tin; they actually come out soft from the oven when they are done, and harden while they're cooling down.


What does the New Zealand domestic goddess say about this? The Edmonds cookbooks report the following ingredients. In 1914, the recipe states: "1lb flour, 1 tsp ginger, 1 tsp cinammon, 1 tsp spice, 1 egg, 2 tbsp sugar, 1 large tsp baking powder, 1/4lb butter and 1 teacup treacle", while in 1983, it states: "125g butter, 3tbsp golden syrup, 50g brown sugar, 250g flour, pinch of salt, 2 tsp ginger, and 1 tsp baking soda dissolved in 1 tbsp boiling water". I'm not quite sure what the egg was doing in the former, but it contains a lot of ingredients that keewee also uses in her gingernuts.

If you don't eat them all at once, store them in an airtight tin so that they don't go soft. Mine don't get eaten all at once, as my family aren't quite yet partial to spicy biscuits. Speculoos biscuits are probably the spiciest biscuit a Greek will have eaten. Ginger is not a Greek flavour; ginger ale is only made in Kerkyra (Corfu) which was a British outpost during WWII, while ginger root is now widely available in supermarkets, thanks to the new economic migrants. These hard biscuits go really well with a cup of strong coffee; and since we're talking about coffee, I've just tried out one of the new varieties of aromatic Greek coffee: ouzo, rose and mastiche. Very nice indeed!

©All Rights Reserved/Organically cooked. No part of this blog may be reproduced and/or copied by any means without prior consent from Maria Verivaki.


MORE BISCUITS:
Afghans
Brownies
Choclate balls
Koulourakia

Fakes (Φακές - lentil soup)

“The ancient Greeks told of a philosopher eating bread and lentils for dinner. He was approached by another man, who lived sumptuously by flattering the king. Said the flatterer, "If you would learn to be subservient to the king, you would not have to live on lentils." The philosopher replied, "If you would learn to live on lentils, you would not have to give up your independence in order to be docile and acquiescent to the king.” http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/622035-the-ancient-greeks-told-of-a-philosopher-eating-bread-and

Philosophers in Ancient Greece were known to eat frugally. Some people are put off by the thought of eating lentils. I don't know if it is their smell or appearance, or a certain adverse feeling towards them, generated by some characters from a British 1980s sitcom called The Young Ones. Maybe it's because they do not know how to cook them without turning them into tasteless mush. Greek lentil soup resembles Indian dhal, but it is more liquidy. It is eaten with the same kind of accompaniments as dhal - freshly cut crispy vegetables like cabbage, carrots and cucumber, boiled eggs and feta or gruyere cheese. It also goes well with roasted meat or fish. I like to make a huge pot of it (or any other soupy bean meal) on Friday night so that we can eat it on Saturday when I'm out and about in town with the children; whatever is left is eaten on Monday with the leftovers of the Sunday roast. It's part of our weekly food plan.

.






Admittedly, fakes isn't as appealing to the eye as fasolada - it seems almost colourless in comparison. But it more than makes up for its lack of appearance in its taste. It is my children's favorite bean dish.

You need:
500g lentils
1/2 cup olive oil
2 large onions, minced
5 cloves garlic, minced
400g fresh pureed tomato (or 1 tin of canned tomatoes)
1 teaspoon tomato paste
salt, pepper and oregano

Wash the lentils under cold running water in a colander. This is to remove the toxins (other beans need to be boiled for a few minutes before cooking, but lentils don't). Put the olive oil in a pot and brown the onion and garlic in it. Then add the washed lentils and the tomatos. I was lucky to have put away some freshly frozen pureed tomato picked in the summer from our garden. In the winter, if I haven't got any fresh tomato, I use the canned variety, with a little tomato paste. It works just as well. Add some salt, pepper and oregano; you can also add cumin or chili (if you prefer a more exotic taste- we just stick to the traditional Greek seasonings). Now add enough water to cover the lentils up to 4cm above the top. Cover the pot, and cook on a slow heat for two hours. Serve hot or warm, in a soup plate.

Admittedly, fakes are not used in many ways in Greece. They are used alone in bean soups, or as part of a medley of beans in a bean dish. You will rarely see a traditional Greek dish dressed up with lentils in the way a Westerner might throw a handful in a salad. One favorite variation of many cooks is to add a fistful of rice towards the end of the cooking time, in the same way as for black-eyed beans. This is called fakorizo. It gives the fakes a lighter, soupy taste. I used to do this for the children when they were young, but now we prefer them plain. If you do add the rice, bear in mind that rice tends to go mushy if kept in liquid, so if you serve it with rice, make sure you rinse off as much starch as possible form the rice by running cold water over the rice in a colander. This will help the rice to stabilise better once it is cooked, as well as it preserve it in better shape if you intend to serve it the day after cooking. When you are ready to serve the soup, squeeze some lemon juice (or vinegar - both are optional) over the soup once you have ladled it into individual soup plates. Serve hot with plenty of crisp vegetables, crusty bread and feta cheese (or fried fish, if you prefer a non-vegetarian version). We also eat it with guacomole. My daughter likes to break a piece of feta into small pieces straight into the soup. Yum, yum! Any leftovers? Freeze individual servings for some ready comfort food on difficult days.

©All Rights Reserved/Organically cooked. No part of this blog may be reproduced and/or copied by any means without prior consent from Maria Verivaki.MORE BEAN RECIPES:
Chili con carne
Bean soup
String bean stew
Split yellow peas
Black-eyed beans
Pulses
Giant butter beans

To eat or not to eat? (Τί τρώμε)

My bachelor uncles are the only people I know that eat only food that is in season - they grow it all themselves in their gardens, and if it doesn't grow in their fields, they simply do without. All they buy are the staples that they can't produce - some fish, rice, pasta, bread, coffee, sugar and occassionally meat (they rear chickens and rabbits). But I don't know many people who do this. I know I would like to do this, but the temptation to eat things we don't produce ourselves is just too great, especially when you are presented with so much at the supermarket (my downfall).

And now, we're down to the last of the summer wine, meaning the last of our home-grown garden tomatos. Alas, there is only one more tomato left in the fridge.Woe to us! Which of the two evils should we now prefer - to buy greenhouse tomatos or to use tinned tomatos with a bit of tomato paste thrown in? There is really not much esle you can do. Hothouse tomatos look as though they have been chemically grown (look at the size of them). Tomato paste claims to be 100% pure tomato without preservatives, and the same goes for the fresh tetrapak of pulped tomato puree. It doesn't seem, therefore logical to prefer the fresh tomato, unless it's organically grown; but even then it still contains chemicals, because tomatos simply do not grow in winter. A certified amount of permitted chemicals will be involved in its growth. The packaging states that the tomatos have been grown "with respect to the environment and the consumer" and "without toxic pesticides, genetically modified seeds, chemical fertilisers or hormones."

Greenhouses in Crete are located very close to the seashore, so any run-off goes straight into the place where you go swimming. Believe what you like. I don't believe the organic tomatos were grown completely naturally - they were completely tasteless. They cost approximately 65 euro-cents each, whereas the 500g-monster cost half that price. But doesn't that hothouse junkfood look delicious! Big, red, firm, unblemished - what more could you want from a tomato? Its purely organic counterpart (our last garden tomato) is a sorry sight, unable to compete against it, neither in terms of size or colour. As for taste, computers haven't yet been programmed to give off aromas. I shall leave that to my eaters.

©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.

See also:
GAIA (fresh organic produce)
Summer fruit
Taste sensationalism
Eating locally
A peek into someone's fridge
The street market

A day in the field (Ο ελαιώνας)

The olive trees are regenerating growth after the fire that razed our whole field (200 trees) a decade ago. We have cleared the land around 40 trees. The rest will have to wait. The fruit of the trees, the olive, does not ripen at the same time: some olives are black, while others are still green. But they are ready for picking for both table olives and olive oil.

The field was ploughed, and the earth was moved so that the olives now stand in step rows, rather than as one mass of trees like a forest. The ground is laid with black plastic nets, sewn together at their ends with wire, and pressed down with heavy stones. It may sound primitive, but this method has only been in use since the avialbalility of cheap nets, about 40 years ago. Before that, village women (my mother and her sisters) used to stand over the field with their back bent towards the ground, picking up every single olive from the earth. Back-breaking, poorly-paid work. No wonder my mother left Greece for New Zealand.

Unfortunately, the rain has damaged some of the paths leading to the trees, creating deep ravines along the tracks. In some countries, this is called "art". The floor of Tate Modern, an art gallery in London, was recently dug up for an exhibition. Apparently, the deep ravines on the floor represented the divisions of society for newly arrived immigrants to Britain. A lot of money was paid to "set up" the floor to resemble the ravines in our fields, whereas we are going to have to pay a lot of money to fill them up...

A lot of olive crop has also been lost due to lack of time and effort on our part. This makes us feel very sad, because we recelty bought 100 kilograms of olive oil to store in our house, for our daily cooking requirements; this oil could have come from our own trees. We also love to eat olives, and we could have put some more in lemon or salt if we had come to save the ones that were lost to the earth, but at least they will be providing good fertilisation for the filed, which is irrigated only by natural means, ie rain. We do not water the field at all.











The earth may look brown and dry, but the soil is still very fertile, and constantly producing nature'sl wonders. Stifno (deadly nightshade), radiki (dandelion) and tsohos (sowthistle) - all edible wild greens - are now flourishing on the paths. Our fields may be untended, but they will never be lost. And we aren't ready to sell them off to entrepreneurs who, in the most unlikely places of Western Crete, are building mansions with swimming pools for the rich retired northern Europeans. It is terribly tempting to dump this hard-to-work land and buy a luxury 4-wheel-drive SUV jeep, but if we hand no land to go to, then where would we drive with a fuel-consuming environmentally unfriendly monster?!











©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.

See also:
A summer garden
A winter garden
An autumn garden
The rape of the countryside
Table olives