Zambolis apartments

Zambolis apartments
For your holidays in Chania

Saturday 12 October 2013

Crisis food

I got the supermarket early enough before the peak hour, which is how I managed to get hold of some πλατάρια - chickens' ribcages and necks.

In the pre-crisis days, when a butcher/supermarket boned various cuts of meat (which are usually sold in styrofoam trays and wrapped in plastic), this part of the animal was usually thrown away. When I bought meat, I would ask for 'some scraps' (this the kind of thing I used ot be given) so I could cook them up for my pets with some pasta or rice.

Since the crisis, these scraps are no longer thrown away - they are sold. They are popular (I can only find some when I am in the supermarket early enough). Not everyone uses them for their pets - they are seen in the same light as fresh food good enough to eat. They were selling at €1.57/kg - I bought 4, which works out to about 25 cents each.

When I bought them, the assistant asked me if I was going to turn them into soup. Greece is not really a soup culture (and it's 30 degrees Celsius today), but it is not unusual to find interesting vegetable-based soups which use meat stock on the menus of modern-style casual eateries these days, so I guess this will be a category which we could describe as 'watch this space'.

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3 comments:

  1. cooked chicken bones can splinter and if swallowed by a very hungry dog can travel into its intestines etc , so i would avoid wing , thigh, and drumstic bones , as for this particular cut of chicken here in Sydney it is not considered any worse then wings or drumstics and its priced very much the same,

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  2. yes, i'm very careful about that, thanks len
    chicken wings were going for more today!

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  3. Maria, our family lived for several years in a country of the Orient. Neighbors taught me how to "leach" calcium and such from the bones of fish and chicken. They soaked meat portions with bone in a vinegar/soy sauce (you choose your sauce..they called theirs an adobo sauce). Do not throw away the liquid but Incorporate that cooked sauce with other vegetables and serve over rice or however. Animal ribs cracked and the meat and bone portions soaking in a sauce also is a sauce source of added nutrition for the family. I checked this out with a nutritionist. You obtain the equivalent of a quart of milk's calcium for your children from such a method from one chicken.

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