Almost Greek

My culinary career might have started in Paris where I discovered that eating is not only filling your stomach, but also a social event. Not that I really learned to cook in those years. The worst dinner I ever served to friends was in Paris, when I decided to treat my friends to a real traditional Dutch green pea soup. I had no idea how to make the soup; so I emptied some tins of green peas into a pan, mixed them with some meat and I might even have added some celery and voilá, the soup was ready. In those times I had no idea that it should have been made with dried peas and when I tasted the soup with its sweet flavour of tinned peas, I decided to say nothing and presented the soup to my friends as a traditional Dutch dish. They all ate in silence, not daring to insult me and I have wondered ever since how they managed to come back to my house for dinner, knowing that I was such a lousy cook. My dog, who normally ate everything including chilli peppers, refused to eat the huge amount of leftovers, even though there were sausages in it.

Returning to Amsterdam, I had a friend who taught me that cooking was relaxing and so I got a better feeling for cooking. It was at this time that I started afresh cooking for my friends and this time I was more successful than in Paris.

I felt like Alice in Wonderland upon coming to Lesvos and discovering the vegetables and fruit coming straight from the land into the kitchen. Fruit and vegetables were not only fresh, they also came in an abundance that I did not know. Those first years I really had to struggle with buckets of tomatoes and apricots that our neighbour gave us and as a real Dutch woman, no fruit or tomato was to be wasted. There is this Dutch advertisement where you see some women peeling endless heaps of shrimps. Then one of them looks out of the window, to the sea and she gets a scare: approaching from the horizon is a large fleet of fishing boats, bringing more and more shrimps. Well, asking a Greek in the summer for one pepper, may provoke the same scenario: Greeks are so generous in their giving that you never get one but end up with kilo’s of them.

The abundance and the freshness of most of the products here on the island, set me up to do more cooking and to be more creative with the Greek products. I quickly got bored of eating every day the same dish, so I had to try other ways to get an aubergine transformed in something different than a moussaka, or a courgette prepared other than as fried slices.

And then there were all those products with which I was not familiar. Take a fig, which in Holland costs a lot of money and here in Greece you just can collect them from the trees. Or the capers to be collected from near the beaches. Or the chorta and wild asparagus, or the lovely goat cheeses available all over the island.

Greece is a Land of Plenty. Its people and its nature are so generous that it is hard not to turn into a cook. My cooking for friends has resulted in this book with recipes I use to make for dinners and lunches.

I know that there are cookbooks full of splendid photographs, but they always look so serious and their recipes too beautiful to try. To compliment the spirit for cooking, which must be light, I invited my Dutch friend Sylvia Weve to make the illustrations. I am honoured she found the time to read my recipes and the stories around the products and became inspired to make the lovely and entertaining drawings for the book. Although I am very nervous to see my recipes printed in a book, with the memory of my worst dinner-ever in Paris still in mind; I am proud to present you a book that I hope will inspire you all to do more cooking with the ingredients Greece provides so abundantly.

You can order the book through internet: Website: www.smitaki.nl
In a week or so the books will arrive at Lesvos and will be for sale in different shops.

Title: Almost Greek
Subtitle: Cooking with Greek ingredients
Pages: 144
Publisher/Editor: Smitaki, Amsterdam (Netherlands) 2012
Translation: Julie Smit, Mary Staples, Jenifer Giannakou
ISBN/EAN: 978-90-816501-3-7

It is raining...

It's a pity for the tourists that arrive on the island, but it has now been raining for some 2 to 3 days. The first tourists are mainly birdwatchers. They will not get wet in their cars that most of them use to watch the birds, but the birds are hardly to be seen through the thick shower curtains of rain. One thing is funny: it is the birds that signal the end of a shower: as soon as the water stops falling from heaven, above the dripping sounds comes the carols of the birds.

Now the birdwatchers don't have to worry that their beloved marshlands are becoming dry, the places where most of the migrating birds are staying. So much water fell these last three days that the rivers are swollen and the marshlands are full.

Life on the island stopped for some days, because no Greek likes to go out during the rain. A perfect time to see how life is on other Greek islands. When you read for example 'Water in the Ouzo' by Cathy Lewin, or 'The Messenger of Athens' by Anne Zouroudi, you would say that life isn't so much different on the other islands.

'Water in the Ouzo' is set on the island of Kythera, which is south of the Peloponnese. The Dutch Cathy Lewin went there with her husband, a vet, to restore an old village house. The book is about all the problems that can befall you when you have a similar project in mind. The writer gives strong portraits of the workers and other people she encountered on the island. How to bribe in order to get your permissions, the strange working habits of some lazy Greek workers, nasty people who think they can fool you. It's all the same on Lesvos.

However life on a Greek island is best described by the Englishwoman Anne Zouroudi in 'The Messenger of Athens', a story that is set on the imaginary island of Thiminos. One day a fat man disembarks from the ferry and starts asking questions about the suicide of Irini, a woman living on Thiminos. It's not only the truth surrounding the death of Irini that is slowly revealed, but also how timid a small community can be. The writer herself lived on the Greek islands and she describes masterfully the gossiping, the power of the most important families in a small community and the habit of Greek men to have affairs.

Both women left the Greek islands, but certainly you can feel that both the ladies spent many years on the islands where they became vey well acquainted with village life. Cathy was already more distant from her Greek years. You can see that in the way she humours the colourful people she describes. Anne maybe had harder times. You feel a bitter sweetness beneath her words.

The German born Bertina Henrichs only knows the Greek islands from her holidays. But she wrote a book about a local chambermaid on the island of Naxos: 'The Chess-Player'. It is a beautiful crafted story about a local woman who risks her marriage because she develops a serious passion for playing chess.

And then for the people who don't have enough time for novels, there is also a volume of verses full of life from the Greek born Agni Fournaraki: 'Perceptions'. Like a modern Sappho she writes about life, love and nature in sweet, colourful, soft, thrilling, warming and quiet sentences. However, her poems are only in Greek and in Dutch. The volume is published with works of different artists and a CD where the poems can be listened to in Greek.

Looking at the water searching for a way on the road between the gardens, the drops drumming on the window-sill, it is a perfect moment to dwell on one of Agni Fournaraki’s poems:

"It is raining
a refreshing rain for my body,
thoughts, my spirit of love

It is raining
the drops slip and fall
above me
taking care of my worries

It is raining
a purifying rain,
a relief from being on the rack
alleviating"

From: Agni Fournaraki - Belevingen, Totemboek, (Holland).
Available at the Ianos bookstore in Athens and Thessaloniki: www.ianos.gr.

Cathy Lewin - Water bij de ouzo, Totemboek, (Holland)
Anne Zouroudi - The Messenger of Athens, Bloomsbury Publishing
Bertina Henrichs – The Chess Player, an article from Queen’s Quarterly

Copyright © Smitaki 2008