Gigandes (Γίγαντες - baked butter beans)

This post is mentioned in the Wikipedia entry for Gigandes. 

The main white beans used in Greek cooking are haricot beans (navy beans - for bean soup) and huge white beans that are often referred to as butter beans or lima beans (for baked beans). Butter beans are giant white beans, hence their name gigandes" (giants); the beans produced in Greece now have protected name status: they are called "Macedonian Elephants" (Ελέφαντες Μακεδονίας). They are not easy to work with: they require soaking overnight as well as copious amounts of cooking to become tender enough to eat - but the end result is really worth it. Gigandes are often served as an appetiser in Greek restaurants, and they render the British version of baked beans a cheap and nasty alternative. This dish freezes well, and if you aren't fasting, you can make a real feast of it by adding sausages. It is absolutely divine. It takes a long time to prepare and cook, so it's not one of our regular weekly bean meals. It's best eaten in the winter, like a hearty casserole hotpot - when you eat this meal, you'll need to have a little rest afterwards, as these beans sit rather heavily on your stomach! When thawing it from the deep-freeze, you may need to add some more liquid when heating it up.

Soak a 500g packet of butter beans overnight in a big pot of water. The next day, drain the water away and refill the pot with fresh water. Boil them for at least an hour in plain water. Don't add salt to the water - this will only serve to toughen them. Don't worry about the white froth that builds up on the surface of the water while the beans are cooking. You will be draining the water off, and nothing will remain. When the beans are done (and they will still be tough), turn on the oven to start warming up, drain off the water from the beans, and rinse them in fresh water. Pour them in an oven dish, and now start preparing the sauce (which you could have also prepared while the beans were being boiled). Don't put the beans into the oven just yet!











For the sauce, you need:
1 onion, minced finely
1 onion cut into thin slices
3-6 cloves garlic, minced
1 wineglass of olive oil
500g pulped tomatoes (or 1 can or pureed tomatos)
1 teaspoon of tomato paste
2 small carrots cut into thin rounds (if you prefer the vegan version - sometimes I add sausage, again cut into rounds)
a bunch of parsley, chopped small
salt, pepper and oregano
2-4 sausages of your choice (optional)


In a saucepan, pour in the oil, and add the onions and garlic. Let them stew a little over low heat till they become transparent, then add the tomatos. Mix them in well, then add the carrot and parsley. Let the sauce simmer for 5-10 minutes before pouring it over the beans. Add enough water to completely cover the beans in the oven dish. You will need to add more water during cooking time as the beans are baking in the oven. Finally (and here is the bit that you can omit if you are a cholesterol watcher, you're fasting, or you're a vegetarian) add the sausages, as they are or sliced in rounds, into the oven dish. Sprinkle the seasonings over the baking dish.

Now the dish is ready to be put into the oven; let it cook for at least three hours in a hot oven, always ensuring that there is enough liquid in the dish to stop it from burning. As the beans (and sausages) cook, turn them over with a ladle every half hour to ensure that they will all take on a crunchy, cooked look. The beans will be ready (ie soft but not mushy) when you see them popping out of their skin, and splitting into two. The oven will have been working for so long, that you will not need to turn on the heating for a while (a trick to save on energy fuel). Be prepared for the whole house to take on a saucy aroma - and defend yourself against gas production! To serve the beans, bring on the feta cheese and crusty bread, and don't forget the wine!

©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
Lentil stew
Bean soup
String bean stew
Split yellow peas
Black-eyed beans
Pulses

Yemista (Γεμιστά κι'αγέμιστα)

I thought I wasn't going to post today - I've already posted before about yemista. But today, when I informed my other half what was on the menu (I think I don't know anyone else who doesn't like yemista), and there were no leftovers from yesterday's lentils, he asked me (as if it was his one last wish) to cook the yemista in the pot instead of the oven. My yemista blog is for oven-cooked yemista. But there is another way to make them, which I do actually use when I'm running out of time, or I've just cleaned the oven (and can't be bothered getting it dirty again). This is perfect for the winter, when I use up frozen shelled vegetables from our deep-freeze to make yemista, or when I don't want to make too many - it seems a waste to heat the oven up for only four small servings of yemista; usually, an oven pan fits enough for 8 servings (ie 2 meals for a family of 4 members). And it was another simple meal; it took me an hour from start to finish.

I'm really against buying non-seasonal hothouse products when I know I can buy winter-season fresh produce grown in the field. But I still have some summer season harvests in my deep-freeze, so I was easily able to make this meal in winter. In fact, when hubby came home for lunch, he asked me where the aubergine and green peppers came form to make this meal. "Why, you planted them in the summer, don't you remember?" "Oh, is that why they taste so good?" The summer flavour was trapped in the frozen vegetables, as they had been picked and frozen on the same day. And the eggplant had retained its texture and colour.

I used a large pot to make sure that the vegetable shells (aubergine, green bell pepper and tomato) would all get a place on the bottom of the saucepan. I didn't want to stack them on top of one another, because of course, they won't cook so evenly, and I'd need to add a lot of liquid in the pot; the bottom layer will become soggy, while the upper layer will be too dry, or not as well oiled. I took the shells out of the freezer - they do NOT need defrosting - and placed them in the pot. If you defrost the shells, they go limp and become utterly unappealing. Once they are filled, they retain their shape when cooked.

After I had worked out how many shells were going to fit into the pot, I counted out the rice that I would need to fill them with. In this way, you can make sure not to waste any unwanted rice mixture. However, thanks to my friend Hrysa, whose mother made ayemista, I know what to do with any excess rice mixture. If any rice mixture is left over, you don't have to throw it away. You can cook it up as a rissotto with a little water in a pot: use 2 cups of water per 1 cup of leftover rice mixture. Remember that it will already contain tomato and oil, so it doesn't need the standard three cups of liquid per cup of rice to cook in. Yemista = stuffed, ayemista = unstuffed, hence the pun. Hrysa's mother made it up. Don't get it? Lost in translation... If you're feeling very energetic, you can boil up some whole cabbage leaves (to soften them), and roll up some rice mixture to make cabbage rolls.

Once you get the shells sorted out, make up the rice mixture. Whatever the amount of rice you use, you will still need the standard ingredients for yemista: a large onion chopped small, salt, pepper and oregano. Place that in a bowl, and add 1 tablespoon of rice for every vegetable shell you are using. I had 14 shells, so I needed 14 tablespoons of rice. Can't get it wrong this way. Add 1/2-1 cup of olive oil, 1 tablespoon of tomato paste and 1 cup of water to the rice, and mix everything well. We always use some fresh green herbs in yemista, so I went down to the garden and brought back a bunch of parsley which I chopped up into the bowl. The fresh mint that usually runs rampant in our garden has died out; I wouldn't even think of going to the supermarket just for that, so we did without.


I filled each shell with 2 tablsepoons of mixture. There was just enough mixture for all 14 (but I cheated a little by adding some plain rice to the last shell I filled, because I didn't have quite enough), so, no ayemista today. The pot was ready. You might wonder how the rice is going to stay in the shells once I pour water and oil over the yemista. Normally, we put the caps of the vegetables back on the shells to keep them closed, but since I didn't have them, I used another favorite vegetable for filling with rice: cabbage. Cabbage rolls (lahanodolmades) are made in the winter with the same rice mixture as for yemista, they are also cooked in a pot, and they are dressed in an egg-and-lemon sauce. Place a few large cabbage leaves on top of the stuffed vegetables. Then pour a cup of water and half a cup of olive oil over the cabbage leaves. To press all this down, place a large dinner plate (that will fit into the pot) over the cabbage leaves. The cabbage leaves and rice won't be going anywhere now. And do check out that plate: it's Crown Lynn, made in new Zealand!

Let the yemista cook for 40 minutes or so, on a low heat with the lid on the pot. After 30 minutes, check that there are enough liquids in the pot, as the yemista will stick to the bottom of the pan if there isn't enough liquid. To check this, tilt the pot to see how much liquid there is. Add some water little by little to ensure that you don't overdo it. Soggy rice is never desirable. When the yemista are done, remove the plate. Don't forget that it's now very hot! Have a pair of tongs and a kitchen glove to help you do this. Use a large spoon to ladle the yemista out of the pot. Place 1 eggplant, 1 tomato and 1 bell pepper on each plate. Don't the colours dazzle your socks off? Doesn't it look divine? We always have these with some Greek strained yoghurt (many people in the West use sour cream) and a salad. And I never throw away the cooked cabbage - when you taste it, you'll see why.

If you don't want to stuff vegetables, but prefer cabbage (or sorrel or silverbeet - Swiss chard - rolls instead), you can do this with the same mixture, but you won't call them yemista - you'll call them dolmades or dolmadakia, instead, depending on the size of the rolled up parcels.

©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 RICE RECIPES:
Simple pilafi rice for children
Spanakorizo
Yemista
Dolmadakia - dolmades

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