Greek Food

Our clan spent most of our family holidays in a gorgeous coastal village in the Mani, in the southern mountainous part of the Greek mainland. The holidays mainly consisted of fitting in ruin-clambering and Harry Potter between opportunities to sit in the shade, eating, drinking and playing cards. We whiled away the days feasting on Greek salad, with tomatoes so ripe you could smell the dish approaching the table; proper chewy bread dipped into smoky aubergine salad; Kalamata olives; saganaki - fried cheese with lemon; crispy white bait; fried courgette slices with garlicky potato dip, and lamb roasted for hours on an outdoor wood fire, served with gooey, herby, lemony potatoes. Everything on the menus was dictated by the seasons, so we saw very similar dishes wherever we went, but rather than being boring - this rapidly made us discerning experts in what to choose where. One of our favourite tavernas was ‘Lela’s’ in Kardamili...

At one time, the eponymous Lela had been the housekeeper of the travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose Greek home overlooked a nearby bay. We only ever received nods from the lady herself, who was a tiny little nut-brown wisp of a person, swathed in black, nestled in under the veranda, but my sisters and I loved her half-British (very tall, tanned and blonde) nephews who worked as waiters there during the summer. But it was the food that won us over really. The above snap shows one of our typical Greek dinners. Lela’s had the best pastitsio (at the front of the photo), which is a kind of baked macaroni pie, which was long tubes of pasta in a bolognese-style sauce, although it was flavoured with lots of dried marjoram and (I think) cinnamon, then topped with a thick-set cheese sauce, laced with tangy feta-like cheese.

Appetite whetted yet!? As is pretty obvious, I love Greek food, and think that it’s unfairly underrepresented in amongst the multicultural smorgasbord of foods available in Britain.  A lot of people think of overly-greasy moussaka and dry lamb kebabs when they think of Greek cuisine, but the flavours and smells I remember are fresh pressed olive oil, dill, cinnamon, lemon, thyme honey, sweet coffee, incredibly creamy yoghurt (with a crust, like clotted cream) and masses of oregano.  

One of my mum’s favourites is papoutsakia - which was translated quite sweetly as ‘aubergine shoes’. In the picture below, I’ve used a marrow instead (a freebie from a friend’s blooming allotment) which makes a slightly lighter version - but the technique is the same.

Papoutsakia (for 2 generously, with potential for lunchtime leftovers if you’re not quite as greedy as us)

 
1 large aubergine or marrow
½-1 lb lamb mince
Beef works fine if you prefer it. Either way, I use ½ lb, and bunce it up with a couple of handfuls of green lentils because I’m a cheapskate - but just use more mince if you’re not as penny-pinching as me, or if lentils are just a touch too earth-motherish for your liking.
1 onion
1 carrot and/or 1 stick celery
½ tsp cinnamon
lots of dried oregano
½ tin tomatoes
squeeze of tomato puree
glass of white wine
25g butter
1 heaped tbsp flour
200ml(ish!) milk
feta cheese (about ½ pack)
nutmeg
cayenne pepper
lots of fresh dill

Finely chop the onion, carrot and celery and soften in a generous glug of olive oil. When they're starting to go golden, add a good tbsp of oregano, the cinnamon and some salt and pepper - turn up the heat, and brown the mince - breaking it up with the spoon so it gets coated in the flavour from the veg. Once browned, stir in a dollop of tomato puree, the tinned tomatoes, and a small glass of white wine. Turn the heat down again, and let it blip away for about an hour,  adding a little water if it looks like it’s drying out. If I’ve emptied the tin of tomatoes, I fill that up with water to get at all the dregs of the tomato juice and use that. When the sauce is nearly ready, roughly chop a big handful of the dill and stir it through.

 
Typically, the dish was made with a white sauce on top, but when I made it I was trying to make something a little lighter, so I just crumbled over some feta. If you want to go the whole hog - make a thick, cheesy béchamel sauce to go on the top. Melt the butter over a lowish heat and stir in the flour. Keeping stirring this mixture for a few minutes (if you rush this bit, the sauce will taste floury and be horribly grainy) until you have a pale gold paste. Pour in the milk bit by bit and keep whisking it in to make a smooth, thickened sauce. I seem to use a different amount of milk each time, so keep tasting it until it seems right and looks to be about the right amount - it should use around 200ml. Once it’s thickened, stir in a pinch of cayenne, a generous grinding of nutmeg, salt, pepper, and crumble in the feta.

Heat the oven to 180, and slice the aubergine in half long-ways, scooping out a little of the soft seedy centre so you can fill them with the sauce. Taste the meat for seasoning - it needs a fair bit of salt - and then dollop into the hollowed-out aubergines. Top with the cheese sauce and sprinkle over a little more fresh dill. Bake for 35-40 mins, until the aubergine is completely soft and the top blistering. We ate ours with a tomato and cucumber salad, dressed just with olive oil, plenty of flaky sea salt and more oregano.

I go through phases of obsessively cooking certain styles of food (usually led by a cookbook-buying spree), and am definitely having a Greek food moment since thinking about this blog. The power of nostalgia seems to be bringing the illusion of sunshine into my kitchen, in this determinedly rainy August - so do come back for aubergine salad, green bean stew with grilled cheese and the best baked vegetables in the world sometime soon. Meanwhile, I’ll be sat under a sun lamp with my eyes closed, pretending the flash flood waters are the Aegean lapping at the harbour wall…

Wife Soups

My husband (herein known as D because ‘husband’ makes me feel ancient) gave the first of these two soups this moniker because, I hope, it is comforting and reviving and tastes quite homely, rather than because it tastes like boiled lady. Although, to be fair, I haven’t checked.  

The original ‘wife soup’ is my panic-button dinner when I’ve had an overexcited spree at the veg market and everything is threatening to go off, or when I want something hot and wholesome, but not loaded with lard and subsequent guilt. It emerged from various recipes I’ve tried for the French soup au pistou and the Italian minestrone, but by renaming it ‘wife soup’ I can hopefully avoid ruffling the feathers of culinary pedants who wail the minute you serve bolognaise with the wrong shape of pasta, or put chickpeas in a cassoulet.

Although I am quite obsessive about cooking, I’m not too much of a nitpicker, and I tend to use recipes as a set of guidelines - unless I’m baking, which is more chemistry than cooking anyway - so these instructions might be a little vague. I’m definitely not one for weighing things, or being particularly exacting about timing, so if you’re a lover of Delia-level precision - please stop reading now, as we’re unlikely to be friends. My ideal ingredients come first, with suggestions for possible alternatives to follow, but disaster won’t befall you if you replace things, or don’t bother with stuff you don’t have or like. I use a whole bulb of fennel because I love it, but obviously use more/less of what you and those your feeding actually enjoy. And if your carrots are tiny - use three. I’m always surprised by how many people find cooking stressful, or are completely incredulous when I say I find it relaxing. It’s only dinner - if it’s a bit minging, you can still eat it and amend it next time. If it’s inedible, it’s not the end of the world. There are no prizes for making something for tea. Monica Galetti (the terrifying gatekeeper of Masterchef, who I love despite her being the scariest woman alive) isn’t going to lunge at you from behind the fridge and or loom over your shoulder dramatically wincing if your onion isn’t sliced perfectly evenly.

Wife Soup

For 2 - 4.

This depends a little on the size of the eater, and their respective greed. This quantity feeds two starving gluttonous people, with enough left over for lunch for one of us the next day.

1 leek, or 1 white onion

2-3 celery sticks
2-3 carrots
½-1 bulb fennel
sprinkling of chopped thyme or rosemary, and a bay leaf
Add ½ tsp of fennel seeds too if you don’t have fresh fennel (and you like it!)
stock or water
This is me at my most inexact I’m afraid. If you have nice, homemade chicken stock - fantabulous, use that - if not (and I usually don’t for this, chickens are such a luxury in this house that I tend to save the stock for something special) then water and a teaspoon of concentrated stock or bouillon powder will be more than fine.
1 tin butter beans
Use soaked/freshly cooked ones if you are terribly worthy. They do have a nicer texture, but as this tends to be a fall-back dinner, I rarely use them. Cannellini or haricot beans would obviously be fine too - I just find butter beans a bit more meaty and satisfying - but kidney beans don’t really work. They look a bit odd in the cream and green soup, and the colour leeches out so you end up with something that looks a little too much like gruel.
100g-ish small pasta
I have never weighed the pasta in my life, a couple of handfuls will do - I tend to save any scrappy bits from the bottom of a bag for this - and you can put more in if you’re feeding more people or if you’re wasting away. I do like to use macaroni or risoni or even smashed lasagne sheets which are a bugger to eat when they’re all slithery, but I have a bit of a penchant for weird textures, so I quite like that.
1 courgette
a big handful of greens
I have a strange addiction to greens, by which I mean the ‘spring/winter greens’ you find next to the broccoli and cabbages in the supermarket - the really irony dark ones, and I eat them with everything. I don’t think spinach has enough texture for this, so I don’t usually use it, but it does taste fine. Chard is good if you can get some, and kale works well too (particularly cavolo nero - the inky Tuscan stuff which is easy to grow thankfully, as it’s almost impossible to buy) it just needs a bit longer to cook.
1 clove of garlic
parmesan + a spare rind
This is a little kitchen secret which I think I originally stole from Nigel Slater, but which makes me feel very Good Life-esque. Keep the hard rind of any used-up parmesan for bunging in Mediterranean soups and stews (it works really well in bolognaise). It melts a bit and gives the base a bit of savoury depth, particularly if you’re using water or weak stock - just remember to fish it out before you serve. And if you are feeling a bit disgusting, you can nibble on any of the melted cheese still attached to the rind as a cook’s perk. Which is obviously a horrible habit, I would never do such a thing. Ever.

Heat a decent glug of olive oil in a large pan on a medium heat (ideally use a pan you can serve it in - saves on dishes, and keeps it hot). Roughly chop the onion, leek, celery, fennel, and any other veg you’re using which needs a longer cooking time, and add to the oil. Add a pinch of salt and a generous sprinkling of thyme and/or rosemary, the bay leaf, and the parmesan rind if using. Cook gently for about 10 mins, stirring occasionally, until they’re starting to catch and soften a little at the edges.

Drain the tin of beans and add them to the veg with enough of the stock to cover. I have absolutely no idea how much this would be, having never measured it, but they need to be able to jumble about in the liquid fairly freely. Turn the heat up a bit, bring it to the boil and cook for another 5-10 mins until the veg is squashable. If you have a stick blender, whiz the base just a little bit to thicken it - or alternatively put a ladle or two of the mixture into a blender, whiz that, and then put it back in. This isn’t entirely necessary - it just brings everything together.

Add around 500ml more boiling water (common sense will prevail here - just keep pouring until it looks rightish) and when the soup is boiling add the pasta, and another pinch of salt. Give it the odd stir - the pasta will try to stick - and cook for 10 mins. Meanwhile slice the courgettes into whatever shape you wish (half-moons is my personal preference as you ask), shred the greens and finely chop the garlic. Stir these in a minute or so before the pasta should be done, and half-cover with the pan lid so it doesn’t reduce too much. The garlic keeps its zinginess as it’s not cooked for long, but as such also stays quite pungent. I eat so much of the stuff, I’m convinced I can no longer smell it (ergo, I probably reek) but if you do have to be in close proximity with pernickety strangers anytime shortly after eating, add it at the beginning instead or just leave it out. 

When they’re cooked through, it shouldn’t take more than 3-5 mins, you should have a beany, veggie, pasta stew/soup that can almost hold a ladle upright. Take off the heat and, just before you serve, finish with a big handful of chopped fresh basil. Taste and add more salt if it needs it, and put the block of parmesan, black pepper and a bottle of olive oil on the table, so those doing the scoffing can season theirs as they wish (I like a good sprinkle, grind, and drizzle of all three). Lemon fetishists might want a squeeze of that too to liven it up. 

I’ve made it using chard stalks, a little butternut squash instead of carrots, halved cherry tomatoes, and a little cubed potato - roughly chopped and put in with the onions, etc. at the beginning, and finished it with broad beans, green string beans and spinach - all of which were delicious. It all depends on the season, and what is lying in the bottom of the fridge threatening to imminently mould.

Avgolemono

This is gorgeous stuff. It’s a Greek chicken and lemon soup, finished with lots of fresh herbs, which tastes incredibly good for you. I adapted this one from Sarah Raven’s version in Food for Friends and Family (worth buying for the focaccia alone, although it’s so good as to be too easy to eat whole by oneself) and the recipe in Vefa’s Kitchen, the beautiful Greek version of Phaidon’s The Silver Spoon. I love Greek food, having spent many family holidays in the Mani south of Kalamata, and think it’s a bit under-sung. I’ve certainly not come across many decent cookery books in English that stray beyond the usual souvlaki-moussaka-greek-salad staples. Vefa’s tome is great - as is Rosemary Barron’s Flavours of Greece, but that’s a blog topic for another day.

This soup is only for serious lemon fans. D often bemoans my overuse of lemon (I don’t seem to taste the puckering sourness in the way that he does, sensitive flower that he is) and this recipe’s lemoniness was at his limit (he claimed, after finishing two bowlfuls…). You do need a decent chicken stock for this, to counter the sweetness of the lemon. I won’t patronise you with how to do it, but it is worth the faff in this case. And if you have enough scraps of chicken left over from an original roast, you can skip the first part of the recipe and then it’s very nearly a free supper. Obviously you can use a stock cube - although I think the reduced liquid stuff in bottles is a better shortcut - but I can’t promise it will be as nice.

Feeds 2-3, or 2 with enough left for lunch.

It needs some bread and butter, so get some proper crusty bread, or some rye or sourdough, to have alongside. I either bake my own or, to stop your scoffing in its tracks, buy the Austrian rye stuff from Lidl. It’s cheap and delicious, and has a decent crust - an alien concept to most supermarket bread - so worth seizing on when it does materialise. White sliced is too bland and squidgy for this soup, save it for bacon sandwiches.

chicken breasts
1-2 depending on size, or leftover cooked chicken.
chicken stock
Approximately 1 litre. You may need to top it up with water, so make the stock a strong one.
100g rice
Any old rice is fine. I tend to use risotto rice if I have some, but even pudding rice will do (which also makes an ok risotto for half the price of Arborio - some studenty habits die hard). 
a handful of tarragon & parsley.
I love tarragon - and it’s absolutely gorgeous in this soup, it gives it a really healthy smell that feels like it’s cleansing you, but it is a bit aniseedy and has quite a distinct flavour, so if you’re dealing with fussy people, use chives, or just more parsley.
1 courgette
juice of 1½ lemons
It’s about 4 tbsp. As it’s such a central flavour of the soup, I’d use fresh lemons rather than the bottled stuff. Having said that, I haven’t tried it - so it may be worth an experiment.
2 egg yolks
a splash of cream (optional)
salt and pepper
It needs more salt than you think, just keep tasting it and season accordingly. Crumble in half a chicken stock cube instead if your stock isn’t very rich.

Chop the chicken into bitesize bits, and put them in a big soup pot. Pour in enough stock just to cover the chicken, and bring it up to a lively simmer for 5 mins. Add the rice and the rest of the stock, and simmer for another 15-20 mins (this depends on the type of rice, so keep an eye on it). Meanwhile, chop the courgette into thin, smallish slices, and beat together the egg yolks in the lemon juice. When the rice is cooked - add the courgettes to the soup. Add a small spoonful of the hot stock to the egg and lemon mixture to bring it to a similar temperature. Whisk the egg into the soup, and turn the heat down so it’s just simmering. It will need a few more minutes bubbling to thicken a little, so shred the herbs while the courgette is cooking. When the courgette is just cooked, take the soup off the heat and stir in the herbs, a swirl of cream and check the seasoning.

D, ever the photographer, has complained this week about the solid block of textual rambling. Unfortunately, the second soup was too good to leave waiting while I hunted the house for a camera, but next time I promise to include a little more colour. Meanwhile, I hope you like.  

Why Edible Ming?

It occurred to me not long after posting my opening gambit that the title of this blog really needs an early explanation, but it’s been hard to write my way around one of those squirmy “you had to be there” moments. It is a bit excruciating to have to explain what is essentially one of those rubbish private jokes which become so normalised inside the family unit that you no longer even laugh at it yourselves. It’s just a ritual which makes you feel loved and comfy, and leaves outsiders thinking you’re all thoroughly weird. So do bear with. Sick and tired of answering the wail of “what's for dinner?” every night when I was a kid, my ever-witty and sophisticated parents took to answering “ming”. This quip descended into the mature exchange of:

“What kind of ming?”

“Edible ming”. 

“What kind of edible ming?”

“Spinach.”

Hilarious, no? My dad’s alternative response was “pizza and beans” (a dinner which in his eyes was the lowest of the low, but which we secretly longed for) when in fact he was busy deep-frying courgette flowers and wondering why his teenage daughters’ eyes were permanently rolled heavenwards.

 
So basically - skipping to the end - ‘edible ming’ means tea, dinner, supper, scran, etc. (insert your colloquial phrase of choice), as well as being a reminder of how silly and lovely family life can be. And now it has a new incarnation as my attempt to write a diary of sort-of essays about food.  

If it is true that reading makes you a better writer then I should be snapping at Elizabeth David’s heels within the month, since my cookbook consumption is out of control. In the bookshop where I work, the cookery section is both my fiercely-defended and fussed-over domain, and a curse on my wallet. I regularly go into work to find cookbooks set aside for me that my dear colleagues can’t be faffed to shelve, knowing too well that I won’t be able to resist them for the length of a whole shift. I’ve snapped a chunk of my current collection, but this doesn’t cover the mountain of books of grub-based history, travel and politics currently warming the skirting boards in the living room. Titles like ‘The Rituals of Dinner’, ‘With Bold Knife and Fork’, ‘Hungry City’, ‘Salt’, ‘Spice Routes’ and ‘The Man Who Ate Everything’ seem to accrue around me like pondweed, and leave me at the receiving end of a lot of despairing looks. Not least from removal men, a few of whom I think I may have pushed into early retirement.  

I read cookbooks like normal people do the newspaper, while I’m eating breakfast, while I’m cooking dinner, when I should be studying. I particularly love the introductions, the histories of certain dishes, the little reveries and the barbed, jokey teases that Nigella, Nigel Slater and Simon Hopkinson write so brilliantly. Those bits are why my shelves are groaning with books, and what I’m trying in some small way to emulate here.

So there is, for want of a less obnoxiously twattish phrase, my ‘mission statement’. More food, less cook, to follow - I promise…

Dad's Legacy

Don't worry, this isn’t the start of an X Factor journey. I would rather take out my own eyes with a wooden spoon than earn a sympathetic look from the Geordie tear-dispenser, but as I only entered the kitchen with serious intent after my dad died when I was 20, it makes sense to start with him. 

My sisters and I spent a substantial proportion of our littleness eating, swapping stories and arguing around the dining table. We were, and remain, a greedy family, for which I blame my dad’s good cooking. We grew up in a River Cottage-esque idyll with a large vegetable garden, chickens, vicious hated geese, and a pervasive fear of the wrath conjured by Dad finding banana skins in the big bin (rather than the compost). We podded all the peas before they had the chance to make it from garden to kitchen, we looked forward to the first spaghetti squashes of the season, and were forbidden from considering Pot Noodles as a foodstuff. The only way Coco Pops were permitted in the house was at Easter to feed the chickens so they would “lay” chocolate eggs. (It was the foil that finally broke the magic - my poor otherwise-brilliantly-imaginative mother couldn’t come up with an explanation fast enough when challenged by three precocious and troublesome brats).

I do read the Guardian (I may as well have it tattooed across my forehead), but I am conscious of how hideously smug this all sounds. But it was lovely. Dad was a doctor, not a farmer, but he was an avowed food nut (or snob, depending on whether he was being a pain in the arse in the ready meal aisle of the supermarket). He made beef olives when we were boating on Scottish canals. He stuffed squid after work. He did buy crumble mix once - a slip which he has not lived down even in death - and once served us cold fillets of herring which were hairy. My sisters have never forgiven him for the "rustic peasant sausages" which he choked down stubbornly in the name of authenticity, while my mum ransacked the pantry for pasta and cheese for his retching family. He puffed up with delight when allowed to pronounce to others about our lack of a microwave. 

And thanks to twenty years of such conditioning and the inevitability of genetics - despite bemoaning his eccentricities in a stroppy teenage fashion - I am exactly the bloody same. When I left for a tiny kitchen of my own in London, we discussed dinner plans every night over the phone, always with the air of competition. I still have a picture he emailed of homemade Indian pickles, served in little tin dishes bought for that very purpose from the Kashmir supermarket in Middlesbrough. We discovered St. John’s Restaurant together and I ate brains for the first time with him in Knightsbridge. This is the first and last time I will be a bit melancholy in this blog, or over-share in any other slightly embarrassing way, but the reason I am writing it is that it does still make me sad that I don’t have anyone to ring to show off to when my sourdough works out. That is why I am writing this now, in a meekly showy-offy way, to tell the entire Internet instead. And my sister seems to think it would be a good idea, so we can blame her if it all goes horribly pear-shaped. 

There isn't a room in the grand total of five that make up my small semi-detached house that I love more than the kitchen. I would be happy living in it, with a hammock in the corner. I am a horrible cooking companion though, this I admit. I am borderline obsessive-compulsive, to the point of being a bully to those poor sods who try and ‘help’, and am an inconsistent perfectionist without the necessary talent to satisfy my own standards - but I’m working on it. My lasagne is (admitted in hushed whispers by my mum and sisters as if the big man's listening) better than Dad's, and it gives me enormous pleasure to imagine how competitively cross this would have made him. And my bread is better than his, although still not as good as my mum's. So I’ll be writing about my stove-side experiments, successes and failures, sharing useless but (I think!) interesting bits of food-related history and anthropology. My dissertations in both subjects were food-based (I am nothing if not one-track minded) - and it's about time they came to some use. I will try not to be gloaty, or samey, or dull. Here’s hoping that the scribblings in my recipe books are not to be the pinnacle of my food-writing achievements: “YUM. But needs more chilli” does not a budding Simon Hopkinson make…