Lucky to be here book

I like to eat. In fact, you could say that I live to eat rather than eating to live.

Greece, like most northern Mediterranean countries, has a wonderful cuisine. It is also influenced by Middle East cuisine and has had the “benefit” of Turkish occupation for 400 odd years, which left a legacy of good Turkish cooking as well.
I could fill another couple of books with great recipes from Greek cooking, but many others have already done so. One of our favourite Greek cook books is, "The olive and the caper" - Adventures in Greek cooking, by Susanna Hoffman. It has excellent recipes from all over Greece, but garnished with wonderful stories from, and descriptions of, the women who taught her the recipes. It starts with, "You are invited to savour an array of dishes that have welcomed visitors for countless centuries". I wish I had written this book!
Greek cookery is mostly based on that nectar of the gods, olive oil. As I have mentioned elsewhere, the olive tree just keeps giving and giving, but the oil is the most beautiful of gifts. Tasting warm, fresh pressed olive oil, on a bit of charcoal toasted bread, has to be one of the most delicious sensations in the world. Of course, you have to have grown and be pressing your own olives to experience this, unless you have access to an olive oil press and some nice charcoal toasted bread! I use olive oil with all my food, and even though Lida is an amazing cook, I will sometimes add some fresh oil to my plate, just to enhance the taste. It is extremely healthy and is probably the main reason why the “Mediterranean diet” is considered the healthiest in Europe. I have seen tourists turn their noses up at dishes swimming in olive oil thinking that they are swimming in “grease”. “Grease” and animal fats will heighten your risk of heart problems, whereas olive oil will lower that risk! At the beginning of a session of drinking tsipouro and eating mezedes, we will pour some olive oil on to our plates, season it with salt and pepper, soak it up with bread and eat it. Delicious! And it helps line the stomach with a layer of oil so that the alcohol does not affect you so much.

I have spoken about our love of tsipouro and mezedes often in this book. It is a wonderful way to eat and drink, stretching a meal out over a few hours, giving us plenty of time to talk and laugh. This is, of course, the favourite way for Greeks to eat. For them, food without conversation, is not worth eating. Drink is nice too, but not as essential as good company and good conversation. Most mezes are traditionally sea food. The sea has provided food for thousands of years and the preparation of it has become an art. Everything from octopus to squid, shrimps to salads, are prepared in a hundred different ways, so that each small plate of food that comes with each small bottle of tsipouro is never the same twice in one session.

Tsipouro (“Raki” in Crete and Turkey), if distilled correctly, is a pure form of alcohol made mostly from grape juice, and as long as it is not adulterated with “other flavours”, has a lovely delicate aroma and taste, and will not give you a hangover. Many people drink it flavoured with aniseed, as that is reminiscent of ouzo, but I have learned to drink it as is, and sometimes see the “ouzo flavoured” drinkers with a hangover after the event. To avoid hangovers in general, you should always dink lots of water, and in Greece, water is always placed on the table as a matter of course. Tsipouro should be cut with water half and half and, particularly in the summer, one or two ice cubes should be added. This brings out any subtle flavours and also allows the palate to taste the food rather than be “burnt” by overly strong tsipouro. (Whisky drinkers are divided into 2 camps, one says you should add about 40% water, the other says no water at all! I lean towards the first, even a very good malt will benefit from a little added water.) I cannot begin to describe the various mezedes that are offered, all I can say is find a “Tsipourathiko” (a taverna specialising in tsipouro and mezes) and start ordering tsipouro. The food will come (and keep coming!).
When we first came to Greece, everyone drank ouzo and only in a few small workers cafes could you still get a small plate of food with the ouzo. Often just a few olives or a slice or two of tomato and cucumber. For the rest, if you were lucky, you got a small bowl of peanuts. Sometime about 30 years ago, in the town of Volos, on the mainland, someone started to sell original tsipouro with a nice seafood meze. Our favourite sailing captain, Theo, says that it was his grandfather, who had originally come to Greece from Asia Minor in the swap of Greeks and Turks in the early 1920’s, and brought with him the tradition of drinking a “Raki” with a plate of good seafood. (These refugee Greeks also bought “Rebetiko” music with them, which is a special form of “Greek blues”. Nothing to do with the blues that comes from USA but urban songs from the poorest Greek communities from the late 19th century onwards, which became popular and adapted in Greece until the early 1960’s. Often they were laments about what they had lost from their homes in Asia Minor. The themes were always, love, joy and sorrow. There has recently been a revival of interest in Rebetika songs.) The good food and convivial atmosphere of these Tsipourathika started to make them very popular, and Volos became (and still is) the center of this trend. Someone in Skiathos opened a small Tsipourathiko and that proved so popular with the local Greeks that Tsipourathika started to spring up everywhere. The competition keeps prices very reasonable (although still more expensive than on the mainland), and also meant that the food had to be good or the customers would go to the better ones. Businesses that act as restaurants for the tourists in the season, run as Tsipourathika in the off season, and the good ones are always packed.
I have now started to produce tsipouro from my own still, using our grape juice or wine from a previous year that we haven’t got around to drinking (or considered “not so good”). It is a fascinating process and takes quite some time, so patience (which is not my strong suit) is required. The first alcohol that boils off from the “brew” is lethal and needs to thrown away (or used for rubbing alcohol). Likewise, the “lower wines” (below 40% alcohol) should not be kept but can be used in the following distillation. In fact, I throw these away as well as I want my “hooch” to be the best it can be. I have also started to experiment with making whisky, but although it is eminently drinkable, whisky aficionados will probably turn their noses up at it. Ideally, it should cure for 3 years in an oak barrel and I have asked some Romanian friends to see if they can find a small one for me. Whether I can wait for 3 years is something we will find out!
At home, we eat an interesting combination of food of European, Greek (notice that I do differentiate between Europe and Greece), Indonesian, Dutch, and Lida’s fantasy. She never sticks to a recipe, just using whatever we have to hand and her experience of what works well with what, to produce meals that always delight me. I also cook but do not have Lida’s skills. My cooking is always in a cast iron skillet and I start with browning onions and garlic in olive oil while I am thinking about what else will go in. I often end up with nice, rich, saucy dishes that go well with pasta, rice or potatoes. Lida’s favourite pan is a cast iron wok in which she can stir fry, simmer, or steam a variety of foods. Her stir fried food is renowned by all that have tasted it and is never quite the same twice. We also love hot food and our home-grown chili peppers will often be added to a dish. We take a Surinam mango chutney from Holland whenever we visit, which has a very special taste and a fiery heat. Having fresh vegetables from our garden always helps to make the meals delicious. There is nothing like cutting a fresh lettuce and pulling a fat spring onion from the ground for a salad, or plucking a fresh tomato or courgette straight off the plant, and then eating them an hour later! All our produce from olive oil to oranges are grown organically, so we know that what we eat is the very best and tastiest that we can get. We make a lot of the wine that Lida (mostly) consumes. I prefer tsipouro in the winter and beer in the summer, although in the winter, a glass of good red wine also goes down very nicely. With our neighbours, we also smoke meats and cheeses, and the results of this are usually sliced and kept in vacuum packs, some frozen, some for (almost) immediate consumption. Smoking adds a lovely flavour to food and is well worth the time and effort. Our own olives are cured in various ways (pickled in brine or vinegar and olive oil) and there is almost always a bowl on the table from which we browse as we pass.

Once we had a good source of abundant water, we grew our own organic vegetables. For many years we did this commercially, but even when we stopped doing that, I always had a veggie garden every year. Everything we grew was pure; no pesticides, no herbicides, and no artificial fertilizer. Thus we knew that what we consumed was not going to be bad for us. We have always avoided "processed" food as we never knew what had been processed into that food. Also the packaging that came with supermarket processed food was always a problem to dispose of, and is now proving one of mankind's major challenges as we pollute the earth and oceans.

Every year we have added more compost, rotted manure, and worms to our vegetable garden areas, and the plants now grow to a really good size and give us far more than we can eat. It is our pleasure to give away excess produce to our friends and include them in earth's bounty.