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…