Apple orange pudding (Πουτίγκα με μήλο και πoρτοκάλι)

At the moment, eggs are plentiful becuase they are in season. Go on, laugh all you like - during winter, hens don't lay so many, but as soon as the weather warms up, they do, and when it gets too hot, they stop again till it cools down, and they stop in winter. Last year, in one of Crete's coldest winters, I didn't get given many eggs. This year, in one of Crete's shortest winters (that wood fire stopped working at the beginning of March), I am constantly given eggs by friends and relatives, which means more omelettes and more desserts.  When you know the taste of real free-range eggs, you won't be able to go back to store-bought eggs in an omelette.

Although oranges are a year-round commodity, we notice that the summer variety (Valencia) is starting to ripen a little too quickly, again due to the good weather. So that's another seasonal commodity that needs to be used up creatively. Apart from fresh orange juice, orange can also be used a flavouring agent in sweets and savouries. 

We also had a lot of apples at home, due to the chidlren being given boxes of fruit at school under the asupices of the EU. They each brought home a box of fruit containing oranges, pears and apples. Unfortunately, the apples and pears were not in the best condition; they were OK under their mottly skin, but kids only notice the mottley skin. They went uneaten all through the week. 

In keeping with my frugal regime of using fresh produce creatively to ensure the family doesn't get bored with eating the same thing, I used our seasonal and abundant fresh produce and gifts, together with our own olive oil, to make a delicious dessert, based on a traditional recipe for English apple pudding.  

I recreated it in my Cretan kitchen, replacing (like I usually do) ingredients which I don't normally use (eg butter) with local produce (eg olive oil) in the batter (although I kept the butter in the syrup to make sure it congealed). Instead of milk, I decided to use freshly squeezed orange juice in both the cake and the syrup. The result was a heavily scented orange pudding, reminscent of the Greek portokalopita, a refreshing pie made with oranges which uses torn up sheets of filo pastry.

The syrup was poured out spoon by spoon over the pudding. What strayed to the bottom of the baking pan was eventually soaked up by the next day. 

This pudding made a fantastic breakfast to go with my sugarless morning coffee. All in all, it cost me a mere €1 to make. In this modern world, where we want to have more than we can afford but don't know how to do it without begging, stealing or borrowing, my thriftiness makes me feel that I can conquer the difficult financial hurdles that have been imposed on us. Since Thatcher's death, we are constantly reminded that the economy of a country cannot be run like a household:

Despite my dislike of Thatcher's policies, I could not help but have a regard for her commonsense attitude to good housekeeping, her wartime spirit of keeping the larder full of baked beans and dried goods just in case. Many economists despised this spirit, and warned her you couldn't run the country as you ran a household budget... (Guardian, 13/4/2013)

but at least I'm not trying to make my household go down the drain together with the country. And the country can be assured that I won't become Prime Minister.

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Granola (Γρανόλα)

An Athenian friend of mine introduced me to granola and since then, my kids have been hooked on it. It's so easy to make at home that I couldn't understand the hype concerning boxed granola when I stayed with my London hosts. They introduced the sturdy box containing a sturdy plastic bag whose contents looked nothing more than cereal with mixed nuts. "It's Dorset", one of them said, a bit like a name-dropper wishing to impress. 12 glorious bowlfuls, the box proclaimed on the front. Seriously? I thought. That's 42g of granola a serving - it must be a tiny bowl. That box wouldn't last in my house for more than three days between my two kids.

My friend's granola mixture is home-made.

As they watched my kids devouring the decadently flavoured granola (chocolate), they exclaimed how expensive kids were to maintain. "Imagine needing 2 of these boxes a week just for their breakfast!" they said. I stared at my kids pouring out the contents of the pretty packaging and imagined how easily the recycling bin at my hosts' house would be filled if they ate Dorset chocolate granola every day for breakfast.

What is granola? Rolled oats, cornflakes, nuts and dried fruit, baked in some kind of oil and sweetener. It is so incredibly easy to make that I rarely think of it as a recipe. Recipes abound on the internet, the ingredients are easy to find and rarely need any processing before being turned into granola. Different varieties of store-bought granola basically contain some ingredient that has been added for a more exotic dimension, eg chocolate or dried cherries, both of which raise the prestige of the product (and of course the price).

Making granola does not need much more than a spoon to mix it with. 

Store-bought granola is expensive because of the way it is marketed - to make the buyer feel a certain degree of prestige: buying a certain brand will earn him/her a good reputation. Contentious ingredients in granola include chocolate: the labelling on the packet will tell you where it's sourced (or it will divert you to their website), which is especially important for people with a heightened awareness of what they owe the lesser world that has made their one more comfortable. If anything has been added to a product that may not sound like your average natural-and-sitting-in-your-pantry ingredient, it will be explained to sound natural, eg "antioxidant: natural tocopherol-rich soya extract" is explained as something that is natural and found in "planta" (as if "planta" is an everyday word), which is added in the quantity of a "smudge" (so tiny it wasn't really necessary?) to make sure that "everything stays lovely and fresh" (the expiry date is often a year after the product was packed). Claims that the granola is hand-made in a country kitchen add to the prestige of the product even though we all know that a machine would have made this product cheaper; it is simply another association to class - we may not live in a house with a country kitchen, but we want our food to come from one, for that extra added illusion of affluence. Some kind of certification gprocides added trust: eg UK Vegetarian Society approved. And if the granola company is involved in conscientious projects, eg supporting tree planting in forests, it makes the consumer feel more righteous, supporting environmentally-friendly socially responsible companies.

Crispy granola keeps easily in an air-tight container.

Making your own granola will not inflate your ego in the same way, although it may help to keep your pocket inflated. It will also reinforce the fact you really cannot afford to dispose of your money so easily, and it may make you think your children are less privileged because they do not have access to such prestige products, even if they were available where you live. Home-made granola also brings home to you the reality of your environment. In Crete, for example, people do not worry about whether chocolate is fairtrade or not. If this really did worry me, I wouldn't eat chocolate at all, and I'd be demanding higher prices for our orange production (rather than selling it at low prices, we simply give it away to friends). This could be my get-rich-quick moment, marketing granola in my area, among people who do not know it as a concept; it may be an untapped market here, but who needs granola in a place where other breakfasts are already in use? Selling granola is all about building an image of exclusivity - Greeks generally follow the fashion rather than create it. But even if granola did become a fashion, in a crisis, if people cotton on to what granola is actually made of and how easy it is to make it, they will immediately realise they are being overcharged for such a simple product. You pay for the marketing more than the product.

My granola is made with Cretan honey and Cretan olive oil, which is a natural anti-oxidant in itself. Nothing can be more natural than what you make yourself, especially if all the natural individual ingredients are available cheaply to you. I use a mixture of rolled oats and muesli (it's cheaper to buy a ready mix) and locally foraged walnuts. It's all browned in the oven and left to cool before being stored in a covered bowl that slowly empties out during the week. In today's granola-making session, I added goji berries, which are now being promoted as a superfood. We may not be able to afford the cereal box, but we can still have our cereal.

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Greece was bad, Cyprus is good

Whenever Greece or a Greek name catches my eye in the foreign press, I scrutinise it very carefully to see how Greeks/Greece are/is preceived by the foreign media. I never used to do this so thoroughly; it's only been since the crisis broke out, when I relaised that the foreign media was viewing Greece in an utterly despicable manner - not just a scapegoat but the foulest dirt on earth. The word 'junk' was often associated with Greece.

I've now added Cyprus (and related words) to the list, since its recent topple in the financial pyramid. Greece has had an extremely close relationship with Cyprus: they are the two only Greek-speaking countries in the world, . Cyprus is the third largest and third most populated island in the Mediterranean. (Bonus trivia: Crete is the fifth largest and fourth most-populated island in the Mediterraean - it is not an island state; it is part of the Hellenic Republic.) Cyprus gets very good press on the whole, possibly because the media begrudgingly has accepted that the Greek crisis was actually a global crisis, and it could be any other country next, in the same sudden way that Cyprus fell down, so to speak. 

This morning, a headline caught my eye from the fornt-page Guardian website: 

Exploring Cyprus: mountain biking around the Akamas peninsula The Akamas peninsula, on Cyprus's west coast, is the quieter side of the island, with breathtaking lagoons and secluded bays – perfect terrain for mountain biking

When the Greek crisis broke out, the foreign media was not promoting the country, so this is quite a turnaround in the way it is treating a country that has suffered a dramatic decline in reputation. This time last year, Greece received some of the most negative press coverage ever, with reports constantly warning people about how unsafe the country had become as a tourist destination and regtular cancellations by those who had planned their trip to Greece (remember the stories of the Brits asking advice about which currency to bring with them: "Should we bring pounds, euros or drachmas?"). I began reading the article (the highlights have been added by me):

Spring in Cyprus is usually a time for positivity: after a short, cool period the island's intense blue skies and warm temperatures return (it's 23C and sunny this weekend) and the tourist trade, which trickles along through the winter, steps up a gear. This year however, given the turmoil surrounding Cyprus's banking industry, this part of the Med may seem like an odd choice for a holiday. But by continuing to visit the island, British tourists will be doing many Cypriots a favour. What's more, some tour operators are reducing their prices in a bid to fill rooms.

Perhaps they have learnt their lesson, I thought. Maybe they now realise how immaturely they acted when they slandered Greece - it had no effect, in the sense that there was still contagion, the crisis affected everyone, and Greek tourism was not to blame. Most likely, Cyprus is getting better treatment because British money is tied up in the country/island, whereas this was not the case with Greece. Greece has never seen sympathy of this kind from the same newspaper in the four years that she has been in crisis, only condemnation.

I skimmed through the article and checked the comments. Here's the first one (in red - the first part of the comment is a word-for-word quote):

Commentator 1 - 12 April 2013 10:26pm: (QUOTE:) "We didn't see another soul and were soon surrounded by miles of thick, stunted maquis scrub and gnarled, twisted juniper trees that appeared to be tumbling into the sea. ANY OTHER CRISIS RELATED COMMENT MIGHT FIT IN HERE" - Erm, what's the agenda here please? 

And here's the second one, two minutes later:

Commentator 2 - 12 April 2013 10:28pm (QUOTE:) "We didn't see another soul and were soon surrounded by miles of thick, stunted maquis scrub and gnarled, twisted juniper trees that appeared to be tumbling into the sea. ANY OTHER CRISIS RELATED COMMENT MIGHT FIT IN HERE" -  Crisis? What "CRISIS RELATED COMMENT" can you possibly deem suitable to insert here in your pre-edited, hastily forwarded, otherwise informative leisure-related article?  Not feeding the financial-scaremongers are you?

 The typo blooper went undetected for two hours before the article was corrected:

Guardian editor - 13 April 2013 12:40am: Sorry about that - there's no agenda. That was a subbing note from an earlier draft that slipped through the net due to a technical issue. Thanks for pointing it out. We've now removed it.

One wonders what kind of CRISIS RELATED COMMENT could have been included here, that fit in with the description of  "We didn't see another soul and were soon surrounded by miles of thick, stunted maquis scrub and gnarled, twisted juniper trees that appeared to be tumbling into the sea." My guess is included in the list below:

- signs of neglect, due to lack of funds to maintain the area
- poverty-related foraging, leading to possible destruction to the environment
- undeveloped tracts of coastal land due to lack of financing
- residents of the area with glum faces showing signs of depression as they face the prospect of unemployment
- a general sense of decay, like that of a shattered mirror whose shards were never swept away...

... among others. It's easy to add to the list when you are Greek.

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Black and white (Ασπρόμαυρο)

Whenever we visit London, we always go to a 3D cinema to see a movie as a family. It's one of those memory-building events in a family's short history when its members are still bound closely to one another; each time, this event reminds me of how my kids are getting older and that soon we won't be doing this together. We went to the BFI IMAX close to Waterloo Station, an impressive-looking round building plonked in the middle of the very busy South Bank on its own little island. We got there a little early, which gave us a little time to relax in the lounge area and warm up from the freezing cold outdoors. 

The lounge was located just outside the entrance door to the cinema, near a kiosk selling over-priced state-approved ISO-certificated junk food like popcorn, crisps, candy bars and - to my ocular delight - an array of all the lollies (I think the Brits call them 'sweets' and the Americans 'candy') familiar to me from my NZ days, in the shape of milk and coke bottles, omelettes, teeth and gums jaws, blackberries and raspberries, babies' dummies, multi-coloured snakes, marshmallow bananas and strawberries, jellybeans that looked like pills and pink I-LOVE-YOU hearts, among others. We'd buy them loose in dairies (which means something like 'mini-market', or 'corner-shop', depending on which part of the world you live in). I can still conjure up the taste of these E-numbered sweets even though I haven't had them in years. I can't believe I used to eat this stuff. My kids don't show a preference for them - they are not commonly found in Hania, anyway, nor are sweets of this sort sold in loose in bulk. We bought the kids some popcorn and took a seat at one of the tables in the lounge.



Most of the other tables in the waiting area were taken up by a group of school children, a classic sight in London. Every single time I have been to London, every single day, throughout all the school hours, wherever we go, whatever site we visit, there is always at least one group of uniformed school children visiting the same site at the same time as us. You can't help feeling envious of the opportunities given to them to live so close to one of the world's most exciting cities, to have so many chances to experience so much global worldliness. At the same time, I often wonder how much time a London school child will actually spend in a classroom if they are being taken on school trips all the time; then again, that is why I come here too. Living in a country like Greece, and in the state that she is in at the moment, I know what it feels like to feel responsible for my children's education. 

The children were having their lunch at the time; they all had packed lunches, judging from the gladwrap (what we called 'saran wrap' in NZ), plastic bags and aluminium foil on their tables. A popular home-packed school lunch in London, judging from the kids at the cinema, must be something like sandwiches, a juice box, a packet of crisps and a banana. (Aside from the crisps which I class as junk food, I thought that looked quite healthy.) This may have something to do with school rules when kids in uniform are on the road during school hours (as opposed to when they sit in the bus on the way home after school - it's all hi-sugar hi-fat junk food then, while the wrappers pile up under their seats). This was a concerted effort to make everyone conform to the ideals of equality: just like their school uniform which makes them all look the same, the children were eating the same kind of food, a packed lunch consisting of standard items. In this way, discrimination is avoided, and the rich and the poor would not be differentiated.  

Their three teachers, who sat at a separate table, were also eating lunch. Their lunches were quite obviously bought - the sandwiches, for instance, were wrapped in triangular cardboard containers, like those sold in most British supermarkets (Marks & Spencer and Sainsburys comes to mind) and they were drinking coffee. Whenever one child looked as though it was about to step out of line (standing up for more than 10 seconds, talking too loudly, moving from one table to the other for no reason, not sitting down while eating, dropping litter on the floor), one of the teachers - all females - immediately sounded out a warning. They were multi-tasking: having lunch, chatting with their colleagues and doing their job all at the same time, something you rarely see among Greek teachers in similar situations. And of course, everyone was being treated equally. I pointed all this out to the family for its purely educational value; unfortunately, this kind of peaceful normality, where everyone does their job showing some degree of obedience is unusual in Hania; just take my word for it.

A sole white girl was sitting amongst the largest group of children. There were nine other black girls sitting together in a circle. 

"She has at least one black parent or grandparent," I said to my husband. He looked surprised. Then he started laughing at the implausibility of how this sounded. My kids were too engrossed in their popcorn (some of which, to my horror, I noticed had fallen under the table) to be listening to our discussion.

"She's white," he insisted. "That's not possible."

"Take a better look at her," I said. The girl had natural blonde shoulder-length afro-frizzy hair, shiny white skin and a snub nose with wide nostrils. It took him a while, but eventually he agreed that there was possibly something that made this girl look similar to the girls she was sitting with. I explained that he didn't notice this initially because he hasn't grown up in a multicultural environment. In his schooldays, everyone was Greek. 

Advertisement in a south-east London free magazine, March 2013

A wider look at the other groups of children - 12-13 year olds - revealed similar group tendencies. They had all broken up into little friend groups, as is natural for children of this age to do. Boys sat separately from girls, and each gender had broken up into smaller groups. Each friend group contained similar-looking faces: black children sat with other black children, South Asian children with other South Asian children. The only two girls wearing headscarves were siting together. Of the minority white (in NZ, what we called 'Pakeha') children in the group (something like a ratio of 1:3), one white child grouped with two or more non-white, possibly reflecting the general multicultural mix of the group, as well as -again possibly - the fact that when white-skinned people find themselves to be a minority, they are generally more mobile than non-whites. The standardised school uniform gave these children a homogeneous look; but their self-grouping pattern is evidence that they are not all the same.
 

The different shades of my schooldays are reflected in these photos of Clyde Quay School (left) and Wellington Girls' College (right), from the years I was attending these schools. Compare these photos to my husband's schooldays, when all the children, without exception, were of Greek heritage.  All were born in Crete, but about hlaf were the offspring of Asia Minor immigrants, after the the population exchange in 1922.  

Despite my multicultural primary school days - unlike my high school years: they were very white - this didn't make me grow up multi-culturally. I had a separate home side (I was a Greek) from my different public side (I was a Kiwi). Multiculturalism is a bit of a lie: we break up into groups that resemble our own micro-cosmos. We are not really multicultural people; places where a wide range of cultures congregate and live together seemingly side by side are simply multiracial. Coincidentally, I found it much more difficult to make friends at my very white all-girl high school. When you don't find a cultural group to attach yourself to, you have to find an interest group. At this school, these were manifested by previous primary school associations,  involvement in sport or some kind of Protestant church group. I belonged to none of these categories. I was one of a very few Greek girls, and to make matters worse, I had no social life after school because I worked with my parents in their shop every single night, including weekends. (Fish and chips - there I go, mentioning it again, as I have throughout this past week in my blog. It could easily form the title of a book.)

Even if you want to claim that your background includes a colourful cultural potpourri, say 1/8 Irish, 1/8 Scottish, 1/4 Maori, 1/4 Dutch and 1/4 Greek (a perfectly plausible Kiwi combo) jazz, the truth is that in the end, only one of those cultures will have a greater influence on you, and I doubt it will be your Irish or Scottish side - you will probably be a 'fair dinkum' Kiwi. 

Οι Αλβανοί της Ελλάδος μιλάνε όλοι ελληνικά 

"The Albanians of Greece all speak Greek"

(Source: http://www.lifo.gr/team/bitsandpieces/37383)

The differences between my upbringing and my family's are often heightened when we leave our country. They see the world through purely Greek eyes. My children's school has a small percentage of non-Greek children - but the different cultures are not really visually noticeable. Greeks, Albanians, Bulgarians and Russians do not make a highly colourful array of faces. We are generally all Caucasian - also termed 'Europoid' - which gives our main immigrant groups' children the opportunity to blend more easily into mainstream Greek culture, which helps in their eventual assimilation. That isn't really multicultural, because eventually, we all become mono-cultural in this way. But it might feel more comfortable than being multiracial where the cultural distinctions remain differences. 

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Poor country, rich people (Φτωχή χώρα, πλούσιοι άνθρωποι)

The problems of Greece's EU - known formerly as the EEC - membership were well known from the very beginning. Here's a snippet from a film that screened yesterday on Greek TV, a comedy made in 1980, the year Greece became a member of the EEC.

Translation corresponds to the segment beginning at 14:00

Interviewer: Mr President, after our entry to the EEC, many people are worried about the future of our country...

President: Oh, they shouldn't worry. Upon entry to the EEC, we will do very well in the outside world.

Interviewer: But how will we fare inside, Mr President?

President: Inside, we will tighten our belts a little. We have already initiated a campaign against being overweight. Too much fat harms the heart. That's why we will all go on a diet.

Interviewer: Ha ha ha, Mr President. But it is said that our standard of living is very low. And with our entry to the EEC, being the poor country that we are, we will end up being like poor relatives.

President: Wrong! We are not a poor country at all! Evidence of this lies in the fact that there are 700,000 bank accounts all containing deposits.

Opposition: But I don't have a bank deposit book, Mr President.

President: You're spending your money in such a way that you are trying to become President. That's why you haven't got any deposits.

Interviewer: Mr Vice-President, what do you think about our entry to the EEC?

Opposition: NO to the EEC! No to the monopolies that threaten our country!

(simultaneous turn-taking of the interviewees ensues)

And it seems that the problems concerning Greece's entry have not really changed. These same issues are now being discussed not just by Greeks but by those who put her into the EU/Eurozone.

Coincidentally, Kostas Voutsas, who had a starring role in this film (not seen in the snippet that I translated), is now starring in a comedy series screening these days on MEGA channel, about a pensioner who has been thrown out of his house and is forced to live in a campsite called "Mε τα παντελόνια κάτω" (= Caught with his pants down).

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Scary food

One of the most popular posts in my blog is all about natural colours and flavours for icing cakes. I don't ice cakes very often - it's just too much extra sugar and fat. The actual post was based on an experiment I did in my kitchen using olive oil and icing sugar.


Last weekend, during the very strong windstorm when outdoor jobs and activities were put on hold, my daughter wanted to do something creative in the kitchen, using ideas from the annuals I buy her at Christmas. Using artifically coloured icing packets given to us by a friend, she turned my chocolate zucchini muffins into animal cupcakes.



I wondered if the kids would eat actually eat these cupcakes. After decorating them and taking the photos, they asked me what they should do with the cupcakes. I told them they could eat them.

"With that stuff on the top?" they asked. "Never! It looks like a painting!" I couldn't blame them for reacting in this way. I wouldn't eat that stuff on the top either. I later saw them peeling off the icing and eating just the cake. It just looks so unnatural.

I don't think it has to do solely with the health aspect that made them think twice about eating the icing. They've never actually seen this kind of icing, as it's completely unknown here (you can't buy it in Cretan supermarkets). Call it a case of the fear of the unknown.

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Maggie's dead (or: How to explain a politician's death to your kids)

While driving my daughter to her basketball practice session this afternoon, we listened to the radio, as we always do in the car, the only place we listen to radio these days. A punk rock rhythm was beating out, interspersed with political statements voiced by what sounded like Arthur Scargill and Margaret Thatcher. The noise of the traffic was drowning the music, so I turned up the volume to hear it better.

"Wot iz thet, mom?" my daughter asked me in English, obviously influenced by the incongruity of hearing the English language being spoken loudly and clearly on a Greek radio station without any translation. It's very difficult to explain to a child what I wanted to hear. The death of a politician who had little bearing in Greek politics at the time is a difficult one to explain to a child.

"Oh," I started, "well... a former English prime minister died... and she was quite an important person... but not everyone liked her... and they made up songs about her." It's funny how Thatcher's death is being portrayed in a country like Greece. Global news of this magnitude takes up our news coverage, even though it should have little bearing in our every day life. What I would have liked to tell my daughter was that Thatcher's death is important even to Greece because Thatcher ruled Britain at a time when Britain was a bit like Greece, an awful place to live in due to high crime, unemployment, disillusioned youth and terrible politicans:

Shorn of its empire, Britain now cut a very miserable figure on the world stage. For at least two decades we had been falling behind our rivals, and now the contrast was painful to see. Britain's average inflation rate for the 1970s was 13%. West Germany's was just 5%. Our unemployment rate was 4%. Theirs was only 2%. Our major cities seemed shabby and seedy, our newspapers were full of strikes and walkouts, almost every week seemed to bring some new atrocity in Northern Ireland. Over the course of the 1970s, two Prime Ministers, Edward Heath and James Callaghan, had been broken by the trade unions, while a third, Harold Wilson, descended into paranoia. Foreign papers talked of Britain as the Sick Man of Europe. Callaghan himself told his Labour colleagues: "If I were a young man, I would emigrate." Dominc Sandbook, BBC 9 April, 2013

"With music like that?" she frowned. Punk rock can never really be appreciated in the way that it flowered in its prime in its origns. Punk has a bleak dark beat to it which does not associate well with a sunlit country like Greece. Most Greeks I know who appreciate this kind of music are night owls, not getting up until the middle of the afternoon. I personally like to listen to the Clash's London's Calling, but I must admit that I do this covertly, when I'm alone in the house. It does not bode well with the sights and sounds of my everyday life. I never listen to this kind of music around the kids. It's part of the secret world of their mother, in the same way that we all have secret worlds that become discovered at some point in the course of one's lifetime, by which time it may be too late to make amends to our attitude about the people that we have lived with all our life and thought we knew well.

"Yes, it's weird music, isn't it?" I said. "It shows that some people really didn't like this woman." Politically motivated music has a different beat in different cultures. Greek political music takes on a monotonous rhythm reminscent of the music popularised during the dictatorship period of the 60-70s.

"Why? Was she a bad person?" Anyone keeping up to date with current affairs today will understand how difficult it is to explain this one without taking sides on the issue. The woman never did me any harm. If my parents were immigrants in the UK instead of NZ at the time of her rule, I have a feeling that her policies would have actually been in their favour rather than to their detriment.

My parents would not have gone to the UK to work in the coal mines. It is doubtful that such work was open to them in the first place. I don't think the miners' unions of the time let immigrants into such well-paying jobs. Instead, they would have gone to work in some kind of factory, ie the manufacturing business, which Thatcher supposedly destroyed, along with the miners’ unions. So in effect, my parents would not have kept their manufacturing jobs. But this is exactly what happened to my parents in NZ, anyway, about the same time that Thatcher came into power. In 1979, my mother lost her job in a hosiery factory due to its closure. My father knew that his time was also running out in the factory where he worked producing nylon thread (which was used in producing hosiery and in other industrial uses). That is when they decided that they would buy and operate their own fish and chip shop business. I know what my Mum and Dad - my children's grandparents, one of whom they never met and the other they never knew because he died when they were very very young - would have done in the UK during Margaret Thatcher's years - they would have done exactly the same thing as they did during Robert Muldoon rule in NZ.

"Some people liked her and some people hated her," I answered to my daughter's question. "Because she was a very determined woman, some people say she had a very harsh personality, but she just wanted people to work very hard for the money they were earning." I decided not to tell my daughter whether I liked or disliked this woman. Margaret Thatcher meant nothing to me at the time of her rule. I only remember her caricature in The Young Ones, which I watched because I liked the punk rock it often played, much to my parents' confusion. Their peasant origins never really allowed them to understand their daughter's world. We never really got on either, even though we had a deep affection for each other which was mutually understood. They knew I would never forget them: I always wrote letters and called them while I was travelling. My mother, who worked so hard to make sure we didn't have to live a hard life, might be surprised that I ended up living in a village only a kilometre or two away from the one she left to go to the other side of the world for a better life.

"She sounds like you, Mum," my daughter said. In a sense, my daughter is right. Thatcher was the daughter of a grocer, and she is remembered sweeping outside her father's store, where she learnt what it meant to work hard. I worked in my parents' fish and chip shop for close to a decade. My parents never expected me to work in this way in my older years, like they did, or in a job like theirs. It was very smelly work, and I never enjoyed it.

It's funny how much I have written about fish and chips lately, isn't it? I have a feeling that even if I lived in London instead of Wellington during the 80s, and London was burning, my parents would have chosen to live close to the river Thames on the east side, which was one of the scummiest places to live in London at the time. A bit like Mt Victoria where we lived in Wellington. Both Mt Vic and the East End got their comeuppance by the early 90s, being transformed into inner-city havens for the rich, where the house prices doubled and trebled in value, just like ours did when my father sold it in 1994 after my mother's death. Even if they didn't live near the Thames, they would have made sure that their family could be saved in time if London was burning. You can't do away with fighters that easily.

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In limbo

One of my facebook fans wrote to me yesterday:

"I want some more photos and posts of Greek village food!"

Hmm, I thought, it's true, I haven't posted many photos lately of village food. But I still cook in the same way that I have always cooked, and we eat pretty much like we always have, from scratch with fresh ingredients, in true Greek village style. Checking through my photos, the last time I took photos of my own Greek village cooking was in... London, where I brought along the (dead) rabbit I had carried in my suitcase and cooked it for my hosts. So why are there so few photos coming onto my blog of my home cooking just lately?

Rabbit stifado and fasolada, cooked in London last month. A reader recently pointed out that while I was posting food photos from London, my photographs looked dull and dark due to the lack of natural sunlight. Now I understand why I never have problems taking food photos in my home kitchen without having to set up any special effects for lighting (that would be overkill).

One explanation for my lack of quintessentially Greek food photography is the time period. The trouble with springtime weather is that our garden is in limbo at the moment. The winter garden is pretty much finished; apart from a few herbs (mint and parsley), some spinach plants and the remains of the rather overgrown chard and celery, most of our food is prepared with what is in our freezer and our pantry staples. The summer garden won't bring forth any harvests until it actually starts growing. I rarely buy fresh produce when I know that I have fresh produce in the garden. Even though I don't have a great variety of fresh garden produce at the moment, I can still cook a wide variety of food, using a creative approach that turns the same ingredients into completely different meals.  

March was a very dry month in Crete, evidenced by the cracks in the winter garden. The Swiss chard and celery plants will soon be uprooted; only the herbs will remain, and even they will have a hard time surviving in the summer. The spinach is doing really well, so well that most of our daily meals now contain spinach: spanakopita, kalitsounia, spanakorizo and salad. The dirt on the leaves below is African dust, what we call the red rain phenomenon.

To do this, we bought some plantlets on Saturday morning: zucchini, courgette and peppers first, with a couple of exotic tomato species thrown in (the zebra tomato is red on the inside but stays green on the outside). We left the tomato plants to buy for later in the month, as they are more prone to variable springtime weather conditions. My husband started planting the garden on Saturday afternoon. After a very busy and productive day, we went to sleep...

Xeroyiannakis nursery, April 2013

... and woke up on Sunday morning to a scene of mass destruction. At about 4am, a very strong wind was blowing over the island, νοτιάς, blowing from the south, hot, strong and full of African dust. It uprooted trees and ripped off the branches of those that managed to survive. Some people lost their chimneys to it. Half the plants my husband had placed in the garden did not survive - their tender stems were broken by this weather phenomenon, a freak windstorm, which occurs once-twice a year but not necessarily as strong as this one was. (Apparently, the overnight ferry boat from Athens to Hania was three hours late in docking at the port - it needed to be brought in by tugs!) I cheered him up by reminding him that he would have felt much more demoralised if he had seen healthy strong-looking plants die in the space of two hours, like a number of our numbers who had planted their gardens two weeks before we started. And the only reason why we didn't plant our garden so much earlier is because we were on holiday in London. I keep thinking thank goodness, because you know how hard it is to try to avoid keeping up with the Joneses... 

Spanakorizo (above); spanakopita and kalitsounia (below), with a batch of cookies.

For reasons of frugality, I cook with whatever we have, and what we have right now, apart from spinach and celery in the garden, is (besides pantry staples like beans) a few remnants from last season's over-abundance: green beans, eggplant slices, prepared tins of boureki and moussaka, as well as some tomato and pepper shells (to be used for stuffed vegetables. I need to get through them all; that freezer needs to be emptied, cleaned and ready for the next season's produce!

One day's meal is another day's leftovers - for lunch we had the last of our frozen summer beans, tomorrow's lunch contains the last frozen summer peppers in the spaghetti mince (both of which contain home-made summer tomato sauce), and the last of our cabbages went into the evening meal's spring rolls. On the one hand, this looks like poor man's food - on the other, living off last season's harvests makes frugal, high quality and filling meals.

The weather has now returned back to normal - cold and wet one day, sunny and dry the next. This means that the outdoor dining area on our balcony cannot yet be prepared for use. Last weekend, I was planning to hose down the dust that had accumulated all over the table and chairs; I felt guilty as I watched my neighbour cleaning up her balcony (another "keeping up with the Joneses" act). I'm glad I didn't do this after all - the windstorm will have made me feel defeated, as it did to my husband's gardening efforts.

My mid-winter London breakfast;
everything's in season there
all year round!

For now, my food photos will remain indoors, while the meals will seem a little on 'cucina povera' side. Life is frugal in my neck of the woods because it has to be. But there is sun, there will be beach, and hopefully, there will be another bountiful harvest that will allow me to feed my family frugally for another year. Many people don't agree with me (according to my facebook discussions) when I say that food is the one most significant expenses in our daily life. At the same time, people are on the lookout for cheap food, which is often hard to find these days at a high quality. If you can sort out that dilemma, most of your daily problems will be solved; and if you can solve your heating problems too, like we did with our free firewood, then there's something left over for a little luxury, even if it means a Ryanair flight, roughing it in a sleeping bag or on the sofa of your friend's house in London and visiting free musuems. The frugal life may look poor on the surface, but it is rich in experience.

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Pangasius - Catfish (Πανγκάσιους)

The media are again telling us that we are not eating what we think. First it was beef, now it is fish. What's more, we're eating fish species that were never eaten in the past. What we are not told (or reminded) is that people in the past were the ones paving the way for us to eat much of the food we are now eating, testing it in a way for us; so if we are now eating more newer flora/fauna species, we are simply doing what our ancestors did - we are paving the way for more food sources for our future generations.

Fish and chips - and the ubiquitous salad

Pangasius fish, otherwise known as catfish, is one of the newer species of fish that perhaps our grandparents didn't eat. It is farmed mainly in Vietnam and shipped all over the world in frozen form. It is a meaty white fish that can be used for roasting, frying or poaching. Due to its versatility and low price, pangasius is the fish of choice used when my workplace names fish on the menu for its resident students and staff.  

I rememebered potato fritters from my time in New Zealand - if only I had some time to make some tartare sauce.

It is said that cod is often being substituted with cheaper fish like pollock and pangasius in traditional fish and chips in Britain. As I've mentioned before on the blog, when you are not doing the cooking, you can't really expect not to be fooled. If it cooks up and tastes almost the same, you can't really tell what you are eating. And if the price is cheap, you can be sure you are being fooled.  

Pangasius looks good and tastes good - as long as it's fried.

Pangasius does not have a very distinctive taste, nor does it seem to smell much of fish. I've used pangasius before in my cooking and I find that it tastes good only when it is fried. I cooked fish and chips for the family  using this fish species. The fried catfish came out moist and the batter and olive oil gave it a good flavour. Pangasius is cheaper than bakaliaro (salted cod) and much easier to work with. Neither are in essence sustainably farmed or caught - but if you want to eat a cheap fish and chips meal, you won't have much choice: either your conscience or your pocket will rule, and these days, it's usually your pocket. 

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Fish and chips

After a shopping trip at a cheap clothes stores in Picadilly Circus, we headed off in the bitter cold of March towards Greenwich where I promised the children a trip to London's Planetarium*. As we came out of the  Cutty Sark station, we caught sight of the splendid ship. I would have liked to get closer to it, but the weather was dismal: grey sky, with dense fog hindering visibility. It felt more appropriate to be indoors, preferably somewhere warm and cosy. The cold makes you feel hungry.

"Can we have fish and chips, Mum?" my daughter asked me. She had spotted the big sign hanging on what looked like a grand old pub across from the station. The family was finally going to be given a chance to try fish and chips, which they had heard a lot about, branded as the national dish of Britain. 

Secretly I was very pleased that my daughter had noticed the sign. I have always wanted to introduce my family to fish and chips, but Crete is not the right place for it. Such a meal is available in other parts of Greece that were subjected to British influence (eg Kerkira/Corfu, where ginger beer is produced and cricket is played), and some tourist areas frequented by the British. Even though Hania is a popular summer resort for cheap package tourists, it's only very recently that fish and chips has made an appearance in the area, although we haven't yet had the opportunity to try it. And since it's easy to cook it at home, we will probably stick to cooking it there.

I had grown up with fish and chips; throughout my teenage years and then a bit, I worked alongside my parents in their fish and chip shop in Wellington. My family knew that my parents - the children's grandparents - operated their own chippie, but they really have no idea what this means exactly, and in our times, they will not be able to find out. Things have changed over the years in this sector to the extent that you can't easily buy yourself a greasy old-fashioned fish and chip meal, mainly due to health and lifestyle changes. No one would dare use newspaper nowadays to wrap food in and the demand for greater transparency in the food chain has meant that most fish and chip shops now try to name the source of origin of their products. Back in my days, no one questioned such things. Fish and chips was a once-a-week ritual for most families in New Zealand, the standard fast food. It was never regarded as junk food in those days; I even remember regular orders of fish and chips being sent to my primary school at lunchtime.  

The weather was not really conducive to strolling along the streets before choosing where to have our fish and chips. I was happy to take the first place we came across. A menu was pasted on the window of the pub - the prices looked quite reasonable, the food sounded familiar, and the indoor atmosphere as viewed through the window looked quiet and quaint. The Spanish Galleon is housed in a beautiful old well-maintained building, giving it an inviting appeal, although there were the usual signs of modernisation: the bar, the furniture, the standardised menu all point to some kind of gourmet upgrade. It's really hard to find the old-fashioned pubs and chippies of the past, but the pub provided a good combination of the two. Maybe it wasn't quite the traditional pub meal that I was really looking for, the kind that we read about in stories, but that's probably because I was looking for the past in the present time. We are too well read and expect too much from modern life, more than it can give us.  

We chose a range of dishes on the menu: fish and chips, sausages, minced beef pie and 'doorstep cut' club sandwiches. Most of the meals came with a serving of mushy peas, whose comforting taste was an unknown quantity to all of us; I explained this delicacy as the British idea of a bean dish (I admit that my husband does have a point when he says that fasolada is superior). I cook battered white fish in our Cretan home, but only in olive oil and the fish is more often desalinated salted cod. British-style fish and chips is a completely different experience. This meal took me back to my New Zealand days, as I remembered my father filleting large white fish, removing the bones, then cutting up the fish into even-sized fillets, stirring up the batter, flouring and dipping each piece into it before dropping it into a boiling vat filled with beef dripping. We even sold tartare sauce in sachets. My son was surprised that the sausages were battered - I wasn't surprised at all, since that is how we often cooked them by request for our customers. He was also surprised that the sandwich contained bread slices cut from a loaf - that's the effect of the gastronomification of the food business all over the world (pre-sliced bread is inappropriate in the gourmet trade).

I still can't get used to room-temperature English beer; it may have been close to freezing outdoors, but the room was warm and the food was comforting, so the beer could have been colder!

This meal cost us a very reasonable 51 pounds, including fizzy drinks for the kids and beers on tap for the adults. As we were there at lunch time, we got to see the range of customers that the pub attracts: shoppers who wanted a warm bite, locals who were having their lunchtime tipple, working people conducting meetings over lunch, and a few tourists like ourselves. During the peak hour, the dining area filled to capacity; as soon as lunchtime was over, it slowly emptied out. That was almost like an attraction for the tourist - it's never just abut the food.

* Few people realise that the Planetarium in Baker St no longer exists and only the Greenwich Maritime Museum houses a Planetarium in London. 

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Bronze

I usually accompany my kids on their sports trips, but it is very tiring, and there comes a time when we have to leave them to do what they should do on their own. Today was one of those days for me. I decided not to go and watch my son competing in the Cretan regional fencing competition. Since our trip to London, I felt that I could not catch up with housework, homework or office work.

His dad was horrified. "But you are his coach!" he scolded me. "If you aren't there, he won't win!" How awful, I thought. I have tied my son to my apron strings (even though I don't ever wear aprons). So his dad went instead, much to my surprise, because he always complains of too much work to accompany kids on sports events.

Am I really my son's coach? I wondered. I never cheer him on, I never shout when he scores a hit, I never even clap when he wins. I just say: "Good game," even if he wins or not. He did manage a bronze in the regional games last year, and he did quite well in the Greek games in Athens, but I never put it down to my contribution.

So while my son was at his sports event, and my husband was accompanying him, and my daughter was chatting up the other competitors, I got a chance to give the house a good vacuum, prepare the mixture for some spinach pies, put out some more washing, and cook a celebratory pork roll roast for their return. It's all about the game and not the win.

When my son did finally come home with a medal (bronze), I congratulated him i my mediocre everyone's-a-winner fashion and asked him how he felt about hius win. Before he could tell me anything, his dad jumps in: "Forget the finals, it was the last semi-final play-off everyone was talking about!" Apparently, our son knocked out last year's gold winner in the semi-final.

The first person to hit their opponent 10 times (each match is played in pairs) wins in the semi-finals. My son won the match 10-9, which means that his opponent hit him 9 times, but my son won when he made the 10th hit against him. I felt very proud to hear that my son actually won him, because I know how hard the game must have been. I have seen this other kid playing ion previous competitions; he was playing as if he thought he was one of the three musketeers. We watched him drive away in a 7-seater BMW after the match.

His opponent always played a very rough game, as though he was in it purely for the win. My son has been mauled twice by this kid, and every time, my son lost. Fencing is a sport of manners and politeness counts, with a handshake at the end of every match. But this kid simply charged at him the moemnt each match started. Few true fencers play in this way - it shows that the person is not playing as a sportsman but rather more like a snatch-and-grabber. I am not very competitive myself, and find it difficult to teach anyone to play to kill. But I was rather dumbfounded when I watched our opponent's parents scolding him whenever he didn't win. I could never bring myself to do this if my son lost. It's just a game. Or is it?

Bronze

"You must have played really well to beat him," I said. "But I hope you didn't play as roughly as he does." My son didn't answer.

"If you didn't get angry," his father said, "you wouldn't have won."

"What do you mean?" I asked. "He doesn't have to get angry to win! He is playing a game of skill!"

"If I wasn't there shaking my fists at him," said my husband, "I bet that last point would have gone to his opponent!"

The semi-final match between my son and the previous gold winner was the star of the show. It was a very long match, and it was fought very hard. We may not have won the gold, but we definitely made our mark. I don't feel sorry for my son's opponent - he wasn't really a sportsman to begin with. I feel more sorry for his parents who will be wondering what made their son's opponent play less politely than they expected him to.

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Πολύτεκνος (The multi-childer)

The recent case in the UK of the Philpotts - state benefit recipients who ended up killing their children, after botching up a plot to start a fire in their house and put it out so that can be named media heroes - has raised issues of political correctness that Brits don't often voice. Generally speaking, if Greeks were pitted against Brits, we would be regarded as the most un-PC nation of Europe. Instead of listening to all that PC crap on the UK media about Mr Philpott being a good father and having well-cared for children, we would have been quick to slander his lifestyle, branding it as abnormal: he had 17 children with various women, his wife was 24 years younger than him, he even had his girlfriend living in the same house as his wife; don't tell me there is no such thing as abnormal - yes, there is.

Few Greeks would have stuck up for this despicable sample of human. And if we received benefits like those handed out in the UK just for copulating so often without taking any precautions, we'd be furious that we'd be working to support this scum's lifestyle. We wouldn't be saying 'It's not my business'; quite the opposite - we KNOW it's our business. In fact, it's one of the reasons why, for instance, my son won't be going to the local high school located 1km away from my house (unless we oil someone - I'm still looking for the person who will appreciate the dip). Even though we live so close to the school (and the next high school is 3-4km away), we are not top priority - this has gone to a woman with 9 children ("She drives them to school in a truck, madam!" we were told by the principal) who doesn't live in the area, but because she once did and her first child went to this high school, she insists on bringing the rest of her brood to the same high school - in a tax-free vehicle provided by the state, with petrol provided by her state benefit. I have to work to fill up the car with petrol, but I have lost out to her. Her family is known in Greece as πολύτεκνοι- they have more than 3 kids; in Greece we even have a SPECIAL NAME for this group of people.

To have more than 3 kids, you need to be able to afford it. In my young mother days, I always believed that I wanted and could afford three kids. When people heard me saying this, they'd always - without fail - reply: "But if you have 3 kids, then you should have 4 kids. Why miss out on the πολύτεκνο benefits?" Don't tell me people just roll out the kids because they love kids - in places like Greece and the UK where contraception is readily available, and people are educated well enough to make informed decisions about family planning, they KNOW about state benefits.

Dad and daughter in London: daughter is teaching her dad how to use her new gadgets

Nine kids is a bloody exception in this mad world that we live in. If you want to enjoy state benefits in Greece, it's far more 'normal' to have 'just' 4 kids (the national average is something like 1-point-something kids). If you have 4 kids, you can (or used to, before the crisis) get a πολύτεκνο benefit for life. If you are a public servant, you can take up to a year off to look after each child, ON FULL PAY for crying out loud, including another 6 or so months for (fake) bedrest if you need it (but even if you don't, you just pretend you needed it). And if you are a public servant with 4 kids (THEY were the ones mainly having πολύτεκνο families, and πολύτεκνοι would even be GIVEN JOBS in the public service because they were considered the 'weaker' members of society), and you didn't really feel like going back to work after taking 18 months off to have a baby (you would have planned your pregnancies to take place every two years, to receive the maximum time off), you could do a pseudo-Master's degree which allowed you to take up to two years off your job - and of course, you always did this AFTER you had the four kids which gave you the right to a state benefit for life. (As for the Master's degree, it often remained unfinished, or was a worthless piece of subsidised crap; I have a cousin my age who was away from her job - a four-hours-a-day teaching job as a kindergarten teacher - for close to 10 years because she was having babies: she is now hoping to get early retirement.)

Just a couple of years before the crisis, the state legalised similar benefits for having 3 kids. The 4-kids families put up a fight, saying that having 4 kids was MUCH MUCH harder work, and thereofre more benefit-worthy,  than having 3 kids. Seriously, you bludgers? Having just 1 kid is more than enough for many of us, but benefit scroungers are too blind to see this. They were looking at the issue purely from a monetary point of view.

The Association of Three-Children Families - they even set up a bloody union for it

Of course there are public servants who put a great amount of effort and take pride in their work, and of course, they do not all have four kids. Of course there are people who really want to have a large family and they would have done it even if they did not have state benefits. But if you really don't have much money, and you are both working parents, and you acknowledge that life is difficult economically, then you know that it is not a good idea to have a lot of kids, not just because they are difficult to maintain, but because it really isn't feasible these days, in a world with more than 7 billion people, many of whom are not in a good position to provide food and the basic necessities for their children. The problem isn't that there aren't enough people in the world to populate your country or make your house more merry - the problem is that you mustn't expect others to look after your kids just because you bloody well had them.

So I have to second George Osborne's claim that "It's right to ask questions as a government, a society and as taxpayers, why we are subsidising lifestyles like these. It does need to be handled."

As I said before, it's none of my bloody business how another country spends their taxpayers' money, but the crisis has made us wonder just where the hell our money is going. If we don't want the next generation to become state wards (in the way that benefit recipients in the UK and public servants in Greece are branded), we need to ask ourselves how this can be avoided.

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Sun

Even though I couldn't really see what I was photographing due to the very bright light,



the photo seemed to turn out quite well in the end.

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Bad hair day

Just a quickie before I start thinking about the horrible day I'm bound to have tomorrow, after the sultry weather, high southerly winds, air as thick as dust, car covered in red rain, sneezing my head off allergically, hair looking like Marie Osmond's (in the 80s), mid-20s temperatures (degrees Celsius) while the indoor temperature still feels like winter because the cement and brickwork haven't yet warmed up, feeling listless and bothered (though I don't know by whom), making the preparation of a meal out of the question, it doesn't help that I lost three hours of hard work this morning due to Linux-Windows incompatibility, and I know it's going to be a horrible day like yesterday because the day before was just as bad as yesterday, and I know I won't get the work done that I was supposed to have started on Monday and still haven't done anything about (it got screwed in cyberland, anyway), and this bad stuff is bound to come in threes, so I even bought a LIDL lasagne to 'cook' tomorrow (it said 'pork' on the packet - I thought lasagne was made with 'beef'), so wish me luck, because if you ask me if it could get worse, I'd say yes, because I haven't been fired yet, but at least I own hair tongs, so I won't have to go out looking like a shaggy dog that has just had its hair blow-dried after a shampoo and set.

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Nasturtium - Tropaeolum majus (Νεροκάρδαμο)

Two scents overpower you in the late afternoon in springtime Hania: orange blossom, and nasturtium.



Nasturtium plants run riot wherever they sprout, overtaking the ground instantly with their large leaves and crawling, climbing vines.

 

Despite its scruffy nature, a field full of nasturtium flowers is a very uplifting sight. Although they can be a nuisance in the garden, nastrutiums make a very beautiful addition when trimmed back and trained in order to prevent them from spreading too quickly. What's more, every part of the plant is edible. The flowers are used in salads and the seed pods make a substitute caper. Although not commonly used in Greek cuisine, the leaves can be used in the same way as mallow, stuffed with herbed rice, in the manner of Greek dolmadakia.

Nasturtium and mallow flowers, growing at the base of  the dry trunk of a palm tree which died after a weevil attack. 

I like them best in their wild form, especially when they blend in with their surroundings.



And if ever in doubt of nature's perfection, just take a look at the nasturtium's leaves. All the same, and not one alike.



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Nonegenarian

After spending her teens in WW2 with her village occupied by Nazis, yiayia is celebrating her birthday today, at the age of 89.

In colloquial language, Greeks measure age according to the next birthday you are going to celebrate. Hence, from today onwards, she counts as a nonegenarian.

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