Fennel (Μάραθο)

As you drive to and from the airport of Hania, you will come across an amazing sight - a tall graceful with bright yellow flowers, surrounded by bushy fronds.



It is Ferula communis, also known as the giant fennel. Even though it looks like fennel weed, which Cretans use a lot of, it isn't actually a proper fennel species. It doesn't smell of fennel at all; it is completely scentless, a little like the fronds of the fennel bulb.

The aromatic edible fennel is the one on the bottom right hand corner.  
The large fennel-like bush is the giant fennel which hasn't bloomed yet.

If you care to look around in the same area where the giant fennel is growing, you will come across the real fennel weed, which also grows wild and is used in many Cretan dishes, notably the marathopita (fennel pie).



Fennel grows in bushes, and only yields a flower when it is close to the end of its season. Fennel grows most of the year round, by roadsides and rivers.



These fennel pies were part of the offerings served to the first tourists to land by plane in Hania for this season.

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The creative character of Cretan cuisine (Ο δημιουργικός χαρακτήρας της κρητικής κουζίνας)

Here's how one lazy Greek passed her day recently.

It all started with the fish. It was Saturday, the best day for cooking fish in our house, as we are usually all at home without other obligations. I had wanted to cook some salmon with fennel flavoured with an ouzo sauce, a dish I had come across in my blog readings. The combinaton of fennel and salmon was a match made in heaven, one of my friends had told me recently. So off I went to the fish market in search of some salmon.
It was not the best day forbuying fish though. The weather was too rough for fishing, and very little fresh fish had been brought in to the markets. All the fish shops seemed to be selling yesterday's catches, judging from the amounts of each variety found in their display, and it was early morning. The salmon was priced at 14 euro a kilo, but the pieces were not cut evenly. Some slices were from the tail end - thick but small - while others were misshaped into squares; there was no way of knowing how many days they had been in the fridge.

My attention was caught by the skate wings. I had once seen a skate (σαλάχι) being caught at the beach. This was the most plentiful fish at the fishmonger's this morning: 10 euro a kilo. The pieces looked large and filling, with the added bonus of having no sharp bones, just some soft bone cartilage that can easily be removed and doesn't cause pain on biting.

I had plenty of fennel at home; the stalks with their willowing fronds are a common feature of the Cretan countryside. But the bulbs are not grown for retail selling in Greece. All the fennel bulbs I have ever used in my cooking (and always with seafood, especially cuttlefish) have been grown by relatives who have an interest in cultivating foreign vegetables, but only for their own consumption. I would have to buy imported fennel to try this dish, even though I knew that their seasonal quality would be compromised. Another nagging feeling in my mind was the fact that in the same week, I had already bought some celeriac (celery root) to make another foriegn-inspired dish, and I felt that it would weigh down unnecessarily to my carbon footprinting of the world. I decided to make do with what ingredients I had on hand and decide how I could best substitute the various items once I got back home.

Apart from the celeriac and some carrots, my fridge was holding a hoard of leafy herbs and greens, that I had forgotten to turn into marathopites (vegetarian fennel pies) during the week. I set aside the fish and made piles of all the greens on the kitchen work top.Then I went down to the herb garden my mother-in-law tends and picked some fresh fennel weed and mint, and chopped off some of the leafy green tops from the onions and garlic that she had also planted. The fish, I decided, needed less preparation time, so I set to work on the greens, cleaning them, drying them well (they shouldn't be too damp when adding to a pie), and chopping them into a bowl. It's hard to keep track of the quantities of each ingredient. Ultimately, it boils down to what you have on hand, and how much you have to use up; your pies will take on the flavour of the most powerful ingredient in the mixture.

I'm not a great fan of making pastry, but since it was Saturday and I didn't manage to buy any from my favorite pastry maker int he town, I had to roll my own. It's a messy job and your hands get very sore when using a rolling pin. It's not a job you can do on a regular basis if you are often away from home. The good thing about home-made pastry is that it keeps in the fridge for two days, and you can break off as much as you need to use on one day, and keep the rest refrigerated if you don't have time to roll and fill pastries on the same day (I find it very tiresome and repetitive work). With a weary heart, as I thought about the time racing away and Saturday's lunch meal that still had not been cooked, I got the pastry going.

You need:
a glass of water
a small wineglass of olive oil
a nip of tsikouthia (Cretan alcoholic drink - ouzo can be used instead)
a pinch of salt
a kilo of flour (I use organic flour, Limnos flour and/or a special blend made by Miloi Kritis for pie-making)

Place all the ingredients in a bowl and mix them lightly with a spoon. Then start adding the flour, by pouring three cups in the liquid all at once. Mix well, and keep adding flour, this time at the rate of  1/2 a cup, and mix it in until the mixture stops looking like a batter, and more like dough, which can be kneaded in the bowl without your hands getting bits of it stuck onto your hands. When the dough looks as though it has the right consistency, tip it onto a floured surface and knead it well so that it looks like an evenly shaped ball of dough.  You may not need to use all the flour. This dough will yield 25-30 small rounds of pastry.

At this stage, the dough can placed back in the bowl and covered with a towel until you are ready to use it. It will keep out of the fridge overnight in cool temperatures. At this stage, my dough becomes soft and easy to roll out. If I don't use it immediately, I place it in a plastic bag and put it in the fridge, along with the pie filling - and try to remember that I must use both of them up in the next two days...

*** *** ***

Once some space had been cleared, I looked at the original fish recipe again. It was a very uncomplicated recipe. The butter would have to be omitted, since we only use olive oil in our cooking. Butter gives a different texture to food, but I have long learned to go without it, since we have plentiful supplies of probably the best variety of extra virgin olive oil at our disposal all year round. I say this without any hint of superiority. You need to taste it to understand the difference.

Although I have a bottle of ouzo at home, no one drinks its. It is a remnant left in our drinks cabinet, and I haven't opened the bottle in a long time. Tsikoudia, the Cretan equivalent of fiery-tasting alcoholic clear-coloured spirit (it does not go cloudy when ice is added to it), has a different taste from ouzo, but it has essentially the same kinds of characteristics. Many Cretan housewives use it to flavour their dough when making pastries and pies. I decided to use this more familiar taste (to my family) than introduce too many new ideas in our midday meal.

Celeriac and fennel bulbs are two comepletely different things. They share one feature which is their subtle aromas. Again, they are different in that respect too, but I had now already devised my own recipe that I felt certain would work with the skate wings. Once I created the recipe - from the fresh ingredients I had available - I realised that I would have to divert from the original cooking style as stated in the recipe. As I was searing the fish fillets in the frying pan, I could tell by the texture of the finished seared fillets that the appearance of this half-cooked fish would not go down well with my family. Seared meat and fish is not common in Greek cooking, where everything must be, in general terms, well cooked. I decided to cook the fish in the oven, like a fish plaki dish.

Here is the dish that I created. It serves 5-6 people.

You need: 

600g filleted skate wings or other fleshy fish - salmon and galeos (shark) will also work
1 carrot, grated

1/4 of a large celeriac root, grated

1 onion, finely sliced
1 leek, finely chopped 
1-2 fat garlic cloves, finely minced
1 nip of tsikoudia
olive oil
freshly ground sea salt
freshly ground pepper

Heat some oil and sear the fish fillets on both sides (three minutes cooking time for each side) one-by-one. Place each seared fillet in a deep baking dish.

Heat some more oil and and saute the onion and garlic till translucent. Add the carrot, leek and celeriac, and cook on low heat till the vegetables have softened. Season well and add the tsikoudia. Let simmer for five minutes. Turn off the heat and top the pan over the fish fillets. Add half a small wineglass of water (to stop the fish from sticking to the cooking vessel. Place the baking dish in the oven and cook for twenty minutes or so, until the flavours have blended. This dish keeps well for a day and can be reheated.

Skate wings can also be fried, lightly floured on both sides. For a heartier meal, they could be dipped in batter and served like fish and chips.

*** *** ***

Moving on to the pies, I plucked up the courage (after lunch, after I had thrown all the fish-smelling dishes into the dishwasher) to continue with the marathopites. Remembering how ungratefully my previous efforts at making marathopites were received by the children (whose tastes change as they grow older - or is it just that they become fussier?) I decided to add some mizithra (Cretan cottage cheese) to the original greens mixture.

Then I began to roll out the pastry - with my hands. I snapped bits of dough off (the size of golf balls) and rolled them out in the plam of my hand. To enlarge them, I used a rolling pin and sprinkled a little flour over them as I pressed them. Making small rounds of dough is much less tiring than flouring the whole table and cutting rounds off, then reshaping the pastry off-cuts into another ball of dough which again needs to be rolled out.

I filled each pastry round with an amount of filling equal to that of the size of the ball of dough that I cut off and rolled out. They were placed on an oiled baking dish, brushed with beaten egg and sprinkled with sesame seed. At this size, I could fit 12 pastries on one baking sheet. They were cooked on the low shelf in a moderate oven.

I was now getting impatient. I had been in the kitchen for most of the working day, and I wanted to get out of there as soon as I could. There was enough dough and mixture for another tray of marathokalitsounia (as I had now christened them, since they were neither marathopites, nor kalitsounia). I began to work robotically, first breaking off the remaining dough into small balls, then shaping balls of filling in the same size and leaving them on a plate.Then I spread out the dough balls into little rounds and topped them with a ball of filling.

These I sealed like little pouches that had been punched down again, so that when I finished with them, they looked like seamless flat pies that had no opening: marathomizithropites, I named them, from the Cretan technique of making marathopites and mizithropites. These could be baked in the oven on an oiled baking tin, or individually fried in a pan on both sides. As the first lot of pastries were cooking in the oven, I cooked half the pies I made in the pan, each one separately, and placed the other half ready pies in the deep freeze, to use at a later date. 

This is the first time I had skate, and therefore, the first time I cooked it. Two different fish dishes, using whatever was on hand, to cater for the desires of all the family members, and two different kinds of pie, with the same dough and filling mixture, with enough remaining to be cooked for another (busy) days. Not a cookbook in sight with any recipes resembling the ones I made up in one morning, but first an idea (from the other blogger), and then a desire (to rid my fridge of excess produce), making instinctive and creative use of all the seasonal resources found in our surroundings.

This is in fact how many Cretan (and other Greek island) women used to cook in the past, and how some are (obviously) still cooking. Some food resources from the past are now not eaten, because of the changes in the Cretan society and the fast pace of the technological development that has taken the whole world by storm due to globalisation. A woman - she's only 66 years old - recently told me that when she left her village and moved to another due to marriage, she was cooking things like omathies (a kind of sausage made from the pork offal), something which very few people would now do, because they require special skills in making them, sausages are now more readily available everywhere, everyone has a refrigerator, and few people keep a pig on their land as a valuable food resource (more likely they keep a number for commercial purposes). That same woman also told me that she used to harvest fern fronds (also known as fiddleheads) when they had just appeared in spring, a most unlikely ingredient in Cretan cuisine, and a practice that has literally died out in modern times!

This is actually the origin of Cretan cuisine, making use of all edible resources without unnecessary wastage, watching and learning from the older generation, continuing traditions by adding new ideas and resources as they become available (eg refrigeration, imported products, ease of availability of fresh ingredients), using all the senses to create a memorable dining occassion, one that no tourist can find in a Cretan restaurant, because the daily cuisine of the home differs from the commercialised Cretan cuisine, in which tourists expect to see a standard product that has a known label attached to it.

If Cretan cuisine could not develop in this way (among other avenues that it has also taken), it would have become a dead cuisine, stalled in time, and brought alive every now and then by restaurants for the purposes of serving tourists and the younger generations who have no tangible link to their own past. It would resemble a quaint tradition, something that is paired with traditonal heel-slapping dancing and the grating rhythm of the Cretan rizitika music. But Cretan cooking has never been locked in the depths of the past (and neither has Cretan music - thank God that developed in the modern way it did!) and now with the emphasis on organic fresh local seasonal high quality produce, it is constantly evolving and becoming known as one of the healthiest and most varied cuisines in the modern world, with its foundations lying in simple cooking techniques and fresh primary produce.

And then they call the Greeks lazy and unproductive...

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Fennel fritters (Μαραθοκεφτέδες)

Imagine that, instead of 2009, it is 1949, and you were living in a village in Hania. Let's choose a low-lying village that's easy to get around in, like Fournes, rather than a village close to the Lefka Ori, high up in the mountains where my mother was born. Winter is about to depart and make way for the spring; the fields all around the few centrally located houses of the village are verdant with new life. It's time to think about what you're going to cook for lunch tomorrow.

It's a weekday afternoon (if it were a Saturday or a Sunday afternoon, work of any sort would be forbidden) and you've just woken up from your midday nap after the lunchtime meal. You know you've got to make a move on, because by the time you get to the place where you gather your food and get back home, it will be nightfall. Your main concern is to find enough food to feed your family of five children, and one or two aging parents, besides yourself and your spouse.

You leave the house and start walking to the fields, possibly wearing your apron with large in-built pockets, and carrying a woven bag. You won't need your milk pail and egg basket this afternoon; you milked the sheep and goats in the morning and collected all the eggs in the chicken coop just after lunch time when you fed them. In any case, the animals always live close to home, so that they can be protected against the elements. You can't use the eggs from the chickens, or the milk from the sheep, because it's Holy Week at the moment; it's still Lent and you're fasting, in which case you won't be eating any meat or dairy products until Easter Day. The eggs will be used for making koulourakia and tsourekia or saved for dyeing red on Holy Thursday, to be cracked as tradition dictates on Easter Sunday, while the milk will be made into malaka and mizithra, which will be used to fill your Easter kalitsounia and meat pie.

As you walk along by the side of the well-worn path next to the fields (you didn't use the donkey today, as it was already tired out from a journey your husband took over the last two days when he used it to go to the town), your eyes first catch sight of the plentiful mustard greens bordering the road. You keep on walking; mustard greens are everywhere, you have them as a salad for lunch every day. If you don't find any choicier pickings today, you can fill your apron pockets with these wild herbs on the way home.

You're not expecting to find anything new, just the same old stuff you find every day. But you have to come out and forage on most days because there are few ways to store your findings, even if you did manage to pick a lot and carry them on the donkey. Today, your finds will be as much as your hands and pockets can carry. They can carry a lot, but it's never enough: you're feeding at least eight people every time you prepare a meal.

I foraged the greens and the snails from the path leading to the river; this road faced fields of orange and olive trees on the opposite side. As you can see, my 'donkey' was my car.

I could have collected many snails on this trip, but we prefer to fatten them up at this time, rather than eat them freshly foraged (we start cooking them in mid-summer). They also taste different after they have been fed flour or macaroni. In the past, you made do with what was available; people probably ate a lot of freshly foraged snails than what we do in our time.

Your first stop is by the river. The fennel has just started to sprout tall. You start snipping off the baby stalks in the brightest green, carefully picking out all the dry bits. As you snip the fennel weed, you notice that the dry stalks of the previous year's fennel plant crop have become homes to the river snails, which have fattened up over the winter period, and are now large enough to eat. Their brown and white rounded shells are easy to spot among the green fennel stalks.

Your pockets slowly start to fill up with snails while your hands are filled with fennel whose aroma is fresh and invigorating, reminding you that very soon, all the snow will melt away from the mountains, and summer with its plentiful harvest is on its way. As you make your way back up the river and onto the main road, you notice your neighbour's orange grove teeming with sweet navel oranges. Your fields are about a half hour's walk, but you're getting tired, and you still haven't gathered any mustard greens, a staple of most of your meals these days. You 'borrow' a few oranges from your neighbour's field, hiding them in your blouse which is tied securely at your waist by the apron strings. (In any case, you know full well that he borrows Valencia oranges from your fields in the summer.) Then you pick a large amount of mustard greens to hide your pregnant-looking belly and make your way back home. There should be enough foraged material to make a decent meal for tomorrow's lunch, to be supplemented by the bread you baked last Monday, table olives, oil for dipping, and maybe a lentil stew.

Mustard greens; known as kapsanthous and vrouves

When you finally come home, you find the children in the midst of raiding the bread bin (most likely a shelf in the kitchen cupboard), so you throw everything you're carrying onto the floor and rush to pick up the 'xiliki' (the large thin rod used as a rolling pin for phyllo - filo - pastry) to shoo them away from the pantry; if they eat up all the bread, you'll have to start making and baking more all over again, and you don't want to start up the wood-fired oven too quickly, as there are other jobs to do.

"But we're hungry, Mama!" cries Number 3, the middle child from your five, perhaps the feistiest of the lot. You have to think quickly. Yesterday you made marathopites (fennel pies); you can't be bothered making those all over again. For tonight's evening meal, you'll try something slightly different (yet very similar) but much easier to prepare: marathokeftedes (fennel fritters).

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Fennel fritters are a delicacy passed onto Crete and the mainland from the Cyclades. They resemble the Greek bifteki (meat pattie) in appearance, but they contain no meat or eggs; hence they are often referred to as a kind of 'poor man's fritter', since they are composed mainly of flour and water. The basic recipe calls for fennel herb and onion added to a seasoned flour-and-water batter, but you can also add some other finely chopped herbs, spinach and/or spices, like cumin and garlic; without these little extra aromas, these fritters can taste very bland.

Fennel fritters are not the most exciting meal you will have. In fact, you might wonder how anyone could eat something so bland, unless they had very little to eat. This was probably the case during the last week of Great Lent before Easter, what is known as the Holy Week (the 'Big Week') in Greek: eggs, dairy, meat and fish were off the menu, while permissible seafood was only available to those who lived near the sea and had the money to buy shellfish. So it was indeed the case that there was little variety available at the time.

In Western Crete, the equivalent of marathokeftedes (fennel fritters) is marathopites (fennel pasties). All over Greece, every region - even the smaller islands, like Serifos, Mykonos and Tinos - has its own special 'poor man's' fritter and pasty recipe, which could be lenten (vegan) or dairy-based (vegetarian). The dairy-free version is perfect for the Holy Week when frugal meals are cooked using no meat, eggs or milk-based products. Fennel fritters are can also be made with the fennel root, as found in Trukish cuisine.

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Mizithropites - Sfakianes pites (Μυζηθρόπιτες - Σφακιανές Πίτες)

Making filo (phyllo) pastry has never been my forte. I don't really need to make it that often because I have my precious filo pastry maker working miracles for all my spanakopita, hortopita and kalitsounia needs:

But filo pastry doesn't work for marathopites, those sensually aromatic seamless fennel pies traditionally made in Hania with wild greens and a lot of fennel, my all-time favorite Greek pita. When I made some marathopites recently, I needed to make the pastry for them myself:

Put some olive oil (no more than 1/3 of a cup) in a bowl, sprinkle a little salt, pour in a shot of tsikoudia, add a cup of water, and slowly mix in a kilo of all-purpose (or strong) flour to get a smooth ball of dough. This pastry can be used for all kinds of pies and pasties: spanakopita, hortopita, kalitsounia, marathopita, mizithropita, among others.

Let your pastry ball rest for about half an hour (at room temperature) before using it.

Meanwhile, I prepared the wild greens mixture. I love this sight:

.

I made a few marathopites, which I piled one by one on top of each other, each layer separated by a cloth. I even managed to roll them out without their popping open and spilling out the filling:

I used white flour to make the dough and wholegrain to spread it for the marathopites. Wholegrain flour suits this kind of pie, which contains wild greens and pungent fennel. This savoury pita is made and cooked in exactly the same way as the mizithropita below.

The wild greens mixture ran out before the pastry. Not wanting to waste it, I decided to make some sweet cheese and honey pies, mizithropites as we call them here, otherwise known as Sfakianes pites (meaning "pies from Sfakia") because they have their origins in this part of Hania. These pites are famous all over the island. They are the best pies in the world. I know I also said that about marathopites; maybe I shoud clarify things a little: the best SAVOURY pies in the world are marathopites, while the best SWEET pies in the world are mizithropites.

The pastry method for making marathopites and mizithropites is exactly the same. Shape small balls of dough the size of a lemon. If you're making marathopites, you'll be using a ladle full of greens mixture; if you're making mizithropites, shape the mizithra (similar to ricotta cheese) into balls the same size as the pastry. The cheese must not be too damp or runny. Mix in some semolina or flour to make it firmer. Don't add any more salt than what it originally contains.

Roll out the dough into a small round. Place the filling (mizithra for sfakianes pites, greens for marathopites) into the centre of the pastry round, wrap it up pouch-like and punch the top of the 'pouch' down. You will end up with fat little rounds of dough that will now be spread out and turned into flat pies, filled with cheese or greens, with a seamless look to them. Everyone will be intrigued as to how the mixtures ended up in the pie, a bit like the ship in the bottle...

Start spreading out the filled pastry. Use flour to keep the pastry from sticking to your work surface and roll them out VERY LIGHTLY (I can't stress this) with a rolling pin or spread them with your hands. I prefer the rolling pin - can you see where my pastry burst open at the rim?

Now you know why I don't like making my own pastry - my whole kitchen ends up resembling Alaska. Try clearing up the flour with a cloth; whatever you touch with it will also get coated in flour if it wasn't in the first place. Maybe a damp cloth is better; that will end up looking like sludge. The vacuum cleaner is the most efficient tool here...

Marathopites and mizithropites can be frozen, one on top of each other, with plastic wrap (I use clean supermarket bags) between each layer. My marathopites went into the deep freeze, but we couldn't resist the mizithropites. They last up to a week in the fridge; you can have them for supper any night of the week. I made a batch of eight (before I ran out of mizithra). Heat up your largest frying pan or a skillet (they were originally cooked on something called a 'satsi' in Greece). Cook them on a hot LIGHTLY OILED pan (too much oil will fry rather than cook them) on both sides till done. When they're ready, pour a HUGE spoonful of honey over them, cut them into quarters and serve.

These pites are also made and cooked using the same technique in other parts of the southeast Mediterranean: have a look at Nihal's spinach borek and potato borek. Borek is a kind of Turkish pie. The word 'borek' is also used in Greece, but as Nihal notes for Turkish cuisine, Greek cuisine is not homogeneous: 'boureki' in Crete is quite different to 'boureki' in Northern Greece, although they both refer to some kind of 'pie'.

*** *** ***

I STILL have some dough left (and no mizithra or greens to fill them with). I must find a way to use it up; I'll just have to make some xerotigana...

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The 100-mile pie (Η πίτα των 100 μιλίων)

With the increasing interest in food sources, local diets, environmental awareness and the ever-increasing cost of living, more and more people are turning to local produce for their food needs. Val recently discussed the 100-mile diet which is based on eating food produced within a 100-mile (160km) radius of where you live. How local you can get even in a small town like Hania depends on how local you want to keep things.

In Crete, we can easily survive off our own produce. I need take only local products and reach out as far as Herakleion, about two hours away - 150 kilometres. The length of the island is twice this mileage, but I don't actually need to go out as far as Lasithi, the westernmost province of the island, to get my fresh produce. I can easily get a varied menu at this time of year (summer) for every day of the week, although I'd probably have to serve up the same ingredients cooked up in a different manner on a daily basis. Seasonal variations need to be taken into account if I were to try this at a different time in the year.

There is no doubt that there are some products which I use on a daily basis which are not local and never will be. I like my morning coffee, produced not just more than 150 kilometres away, but in another continent. And the milk I buy for my family, is unfortunately, not local, even though we have a booming dairy industry in Crete. Locally produced milk costs twice the price per litre of fresh carton milk produced in large industrialised outlets in other parts of Greece, collected at a centralised location, packaged, and sent off to other parts of the country. I used to buy NOUNOU CALCI (1.5L) fresh milk, which now costs over 3 euro a carton (while KRIARAS goat's milk costs 2 euro per litre). This is what made me switch to NOUNOU FAMILY (1.5L) fresh milk, costing me just over 2 euro a carton, produced by the same company. The television news keeps telling us on a daily basis that fresh milk in Greece is the most expensive in the whole of Europe, and it costs 20 cents more per litre than the next most expensive country, France.

Trading products started once people conquered the natural borders of a land when they learnt to sail. I wouldn't want this kind of trade to stop; even people who have been eating locally all their life out of necessity will succumb to the luxury of being allowed a bite of pineapple, even if it is from a can (and when they discover how sweet and juicy it is, they may even want to see a real one). If we really were keen on eating locally in a bid to save the environment, then we wouldn't travel for holidays, either. Can you imagine a Brit preferring to go to Brighton or Blackpool, instead of coming to a Greek island for his or her fortnight's worth of annual summer holidays? I hope the travel agent reminds them to pack a brolly in their suitcase just in case.

Congratulations should be in order for the Small family of Fife, Scotland, for creating the Fife diet, a meals plan using only locally produced food, even for their Christmas dinner. We should all try it, simply to see how difficult and rather boring it can be; no matter what way we try to apply it in our own lives, it will still make us all conscious of what we eat, and what it takes to produce it and get it onto our plates. Michael Pollan discusses this very issue in The Ominvore's Dilemma, where he discovers how difficult it is to "make" all one's dietary needs, despite the fact that it always turns out to be a tastier meal than fresh produce that has been shipped or trucked into his environs.

There are many times in my life when I have felt a psycho-somatic need to cook and eat in a manner based the old-fashioned peasant diet of the Mediterraneans, who lived on (at the time) isolated islands. Their food consisted of a high content of fat (there were no such things as "light" staka cream), while they themselves worked on average 8-10 hours a day on their own self-sufficient farms and walked at least 15 kilometers on a daily basis from home to farm and back home again, while today's average Cretan farmer does the same kilometers in the pick-up truck (I proofread a study containing this fact at MAICh), walking only an average of two kilometers nowadays. I wouldn't call any of my own jobs hard labour, not even the housework; how strenuous can pushing a button on a washing machine be?

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My son hates seeing green things in his food. If there's bell pepper in the spag bog, he will carefully remove it from his forkful before plunging it into his mouth. He asks me if I could one day make a boureki without courgettes. He eats zucchini chocolate cake as long as he can't see the zucchini. He ate the courgette patties because he thought it was a hamburger (I had hidden one in a hamburger bun with a slice of cheese on top and a slice of ham at the bottom). But he won't eat a salad, or horta, or anything that is clearly green - with one exception: spanakopita. This is why I make so many spinach pies, green pies, kalitsounia, and anything else that is stuffed with greens and encased in pastry. Right now, I am in the middle of a 'pie run': my hortopites are going to go into the deep freeze, ready to be cooked in September when school starts (and that's only three months away), and tucked away in lunchboxes.


Last year, we had a vlita and courgette boon in our garden. Of course he refused to eat boiled horta, and wouldn't even look at the zucchini that accompanied them. So I devised a recipe that got him eating summer greens in a pie without losing any of the vitamins usually lost when vegetables are boiled. The idea to stick courgettes in the same pie came from a family friend who made kalitsounia using zucchini, including the zucchini flowers. To make this pie according to the 100-mile rules, I would have had to omit certain ingredients, as well as make substitutions; this would have a disastrous effect on my family's routine, which is why I decided not to deviate for my original recipes for fear of forcing my family on a hunger strike.




My 100-mile hortopita and kalitsounia were made by using the following ingredients:
- amaranth leaves , grated zucchini and chopped zucchini blossoms, a mixture of herbs (green onion tops and onion, parsley, spearmint and fennel): all growing wild in our garden; the zucchini plantlets were bought from a small family-run garden centre, but I wonder where they procured their seeds from?
- mizithra cheese: produced locally, from locally-raised sheep and goats;
- salt and pepper: I have no idea where the pepper is grown, but salt can be (and is) procured from salt build-up in large rocks by the sea, which friends have often gifted to us in the past;
- an egg to brush the pastry: our neighbours and my uncles give me free-range eggs;
- semolina and white-flour pastry; this is my biggest dilemma: does Crete produce its own flour, or does it come from other sources? I am waiting for MYLOI KRHTHS to let me know where the procure their grain from. Flour was milled in Crete from ancient times, but in the industrialised world we live in, where food is collected at one point and re-distributed, I have my doubts about the where the grain in the silos at Souda Bay come from - is it a coincidence that the ferry boat is found a stone's throw away?
- sesame seed: ditto as for flour; the packager is located only 5 kilometers from where I live, but where did the sesame actually grow?

To make the world a better place does not necessarily mean that you have to eat locally, but you should be able to justify your choices in food, in the same way that you justify the choices you make for your children's schooling (I drive mine daily close to the village where the sesame seed is packed) and the kind of car you drive (a 9-year old Hyundai Accent, still going strong).

I'd like to thank Val for bestowing upon me the "Yummy" award, so I dedicate this post to her.

This is my entry for Weekend Herb Blogging, hosted by Paulchen.

©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.

CRETAN PRODUCE:
Soft mizithra cheese
Xinohondro (hondro)
Stamnagathi
Marathopites
Cretan boureki
Avronies (wild asparagus)
Wedding pilafi
Dakos rusk salad
Lagos stifado
Sorrel
Silverbeet
Black mustard greens
Kalitsounia in the oven
Kalitsounia fried
Malotira
Orange juice
Bougatsa Iordanis
Sfakianes pites
Olives tsakistes - pastes
Olive oil

See also:
A day in the field
The rape of the countryside
A summer garden
A winter garden
An autumn garden

Dolmadakia - stuffed leaves and flowers (Ντολμαδάκια με αμπελόφυλλα κι ανθούς)

I was talking to a friend of mine today (Abraham Lincoln), and he was wondering what "I feel good" meant. Today I feel quite good: my children and husband are well, we watched TV as a family last night and laughed a great deal, I had just enough money to pay for some petrol, I used my credit card prudently to buy some milk and (B grade) tomatoes, it's Friday so I don't have to prepare school lunches tomorrow, and I'm going to use the vine leaves I collected from my garden and frozen a little while back, along with the zucchini flowers I've been collecting over the past week to stuff them (along with the tomatoes) and make yemista with dolmadakia caps to feed my family with. Maybe I'm just too simple-minded, but I really don't mind being a first-class Master's graduate with a simple mind; that makes me feel good too. And if you read some more of Abraham's stories, you might start feeling good about simple things too.

My husband is a very proud gardener; he loves his blue garden, now that he's buffed all the leaves with a sulphur powder to scare away some nasty mites. This powder is not a pesticide - it's a deterrent, and is permissible in organic agriculture. Every morning, after I returned home from taking the children to school, I picked the zucchini flowers that had sprouted the previous day. They flower in the early hours of the evening, then stay open for a couple of hours before they close up, and cannot be prised open for stuffing even by delicate fingers. All in all, I picked 9 flowers this past week. They were growing on their own stem, not at the end of a courgette; once you chop off the flower from a zucchini, it stops growing. Even zucchini flowers still attached to the courgette can be stuffed: look at how Lucy did that - the effect is stunning. I also had about thirty vine leaves in a packet, blanched, dried and frozen by my very own self, and these will form the caps of my stuffed vegetables today.

The vine leaves were thawed in their storage bag, placed in a pot of hot water. The zucchini flowers are incredibly resilient: after being cleared of their yellow powdery interior centre, they were stored one inside the other, and did not break when I took them out of their storage bag (in the fridge; they can't be frozen), remaining unblemished, as if they had all been freshly picked on the same day.

Nine zucchini flower parcels won't go a long way in this house - there are six of us eating this meal today. That's why today's leaf and flower parcels are going into the oven - as caps for the stuffed tomatoes. The recipe is the same as for my classic yemista and dolmadakia recipes combined.

Another most impressive dolmadakia leaf is large flat-leaf basil, which Marianna illustrates.

©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.

This is my entry to this week's Weekend Herb Blogging, hosted by Laurie.

MORE DOLMADES:
Yemista
Ayemista
Sorrel parcels
Silverbeet parcels
Lettuce parcels