As a kid cauliflower was one of my least favorite winter vegetables. The stench, as it cooked in a large pot of water for considerable time—my father liked it well-cooked, almost mushy–lingered for hours, if not days in the kitchen of our Athens apartment. Of course my mother didn’t know that the longer you cook the cauliflower and its cousins– the cabbage, the Brussels spouts etc.–the worse they smell. My father, who knew nothing about cooking, insisted that she should add celery leaves in the water; but we often didn’t have any to add, or my mother knew that it wouldn’t eliminate the smell, so this became the cause for a shouting match. No wonder neither I nor my sister looked forward to cauliflower salad.

When I started to cook in my kitchen I tried to learn more about each of the vegetables, especially about the ones that I remember as challenging. There was no instant internet search then. I had to look up books and ask my scientist friends. I found that steaming the cauliflower florets—something not common in traditional Greek kitchens–was a big improvement; very little smell. But roasting it in the oven was a revelation! Practically no smell, especially if I added a few branches of thyme or oregano; and the roasted cauliflower was delicious, even without dressing! (more…)

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Croatian štrukli struck me, to put it simply. If ever there were a dish that connects the phyllo-wrapped pies of Eastern Europe and the Middle East with Italian stuffed pasta, štrukli is it. A recipe by Bozena, a Croatian from Melbourne started me on my štrukli adventure. I rolled a quite large sheet of phyllo, spread the cheese filling all over it, then carefully rolled it – more precisely I folded the sheet several times over the filling – to create a long log. Up to this point there was nothing unusual or new about this pie, as similar shaped pies are commonly formed in Turkey and the Balkans, then coiled and baked in a pan.

But for this Croatian pie the roll was then cut into pieces, which were boiled and finally browned in the oven. I was afraid that in cutting the pieces the filling would ooze out. It did not, however, as the soft, resilient, home-rolled phyllo successfully sealed the edges as I cut the pieces with the dough scraper. But I didn’t like the look of the pieces I carefully boiled in softly simmering water. Some of the filling dissolved into the water and my intention was not to create a tasty broth. (more…)

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White beans, similar to Italian cannellini – a New World legume – along with lentils and chickpeas were a staple of the impoverished Greek diet until the ’70s. In my first grade school book, published right after the Second World War, there was a description of fassolàda (bean soup), often referred to as ‘the Greek national dish,’ surprisingly without tomato. I was shocked, as fassolàda is always made with tomatoes, or ‘golden apples’ as they were initially called, from the Italian word pomodoro. Tomatoes became a common household ingredient all over the country at the beginning of the 20th century, but they were slow to penetratefassolàda, apparently. The fact that a tomato-less recipe for fassolàda endured for half a century after the introduction of tomatoes to the Greek kitchen shows the age and strong traditions behind the dish.

But times do change, and in this case for the better. Fassolàda means tomatoes, which ‘make everything taste better,’ as my grandmother used to say. My addition to the family recipe is the inclusion of turmeric, which deepens the flavor of all legumes. My mother added orange peel, when available, to most dishes with tomatoes, inspired by the days she had spent in Sparta in the southern Peloponnese, an area filled with orange and olive groves. She later started to add mustard to her fassolàda, claiming that it made the beans easier to digest. I have my doubts about the apothecary’s claim, but mustard certainly enhances the soup’s flavor. I sometimes add chopped preserved lemon instead of the orange, omitting of reducing the amount of salt. (more…)

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I know I probably repeat myself, but it is the time of year we feast on greens in our corner of the world. Together with the ones that grow wild in our garden, this year I add to the mix a few succulent grellos leaves (a kind of turnip greens) that I planted from seeds my friend Cali Doxiadis brought me from Spain. She said that unlike us, cooks in Spain don’t make horta salad, simply boiling the wild or cultivated greens and serve them drizzled with fruity olive oil and lemon; grellos are usually sautéed with pork or pork fat, she told me.

Here on Kea home cooks incorporate the winter greens into frugal main courses. They often flavor them withtsigagides or paspala—the local pork confit. Leftover small or larger pieces of the slaughtered pork are simmered with a little water, thyme or winter savory, and salt; when the water evaporates and they begin to sizzle, the scraps of pork are transferred to jars—clay pots in the old days—and preserved submerged in lard. (more…)

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I read that among all Europeans, Greeks and Albanians are the peoples less interested in wild mushrooms.  They are afraid that they will be poisoned and avoid them in general. This has changed in recent years, following French and Italian trends, and there are now organized mushroom foraging weekends in several parts of central and northern Greece. But I have yet to see individuals forage for mushrooms.  There are some exceptions, of course, like our friend Eva Green, a Greek-Australian painter who spends 5-6 months on Kea, and then goes back to Sydney, thus enjoying summer all year round. Eva has a passion for mushrooms and wanders around the mountainous central and eastern parts of the island, under the oak trees, where she once found some wonderful porcini. But, the other year she got some sort of mild –fortunately– mushroom poisoning, and she seems to have lost her enthusiasm…

Tourists visiting the islands in the summer probably think that mushrooms won’t grow in this rocky and arid landscape. But in the winter all over the Cyclades a wealth of wild mushrooms emerge among the wild greens. Even in our garden, under the olive trees, we get a few glystrites (Volvopluteus gloiocephalus) each winter; not a particularly delicious mushroom, but very common in the Cyclades. They are called lardites in Amorgos (lardi means ‘lard’) and islanders used to eat them in the old days dredged in flour and fried, like meatballs; they were often called ‘meat of the poor!’ (more…)

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