Month: October 2015

Extra Virgin Green Olive Oil, cold pressed

Every autumn Popi recruits workers, volunteers  and semi-volunteers to harvest the olives. When it comes to olive oil she is a perfectionist. The green olives have to be combed down from the trees gently, inspected one-by-one and carried to the oil press within a strict schedule. Luckily for all in the last years she has settled for one of the presses half an hour drive away, a big improvement over the long drives of the past, when she had confronted and discarded every facility in the prefecture. This year someone suggested to use harvest machines for speed. When we arrived the device was flat on the ground, Popi looking down to it in disgust and explaining that is was a really bad idea, the way it hurt the fruit.  Popi goes around, inspecting how all are performing,  and explaining what great fun it is to gather the olives: ‘It is not at all tiring, only a great opportunity to exercise, and that only for the first day, then it is not even a challenge’. As sunset approaches she intensifies her rounds of disks full of meatballs and …

Aromatic Chicken Pie

Some time ago we decided to cook the traditional moroccan bastilla. We tried out several versions, and in a while  drifted away to our version of chicken pie. We cooked it with dates or sultanas, with chicken livers or not, with hard boiled eggs or scrambled in chicken stock, almonds or pine-nuts – depending on what we had in the fridge and pantry. We settled on the following recipe, for individual or bigger pies. It references to the original moroccan pie in the sense that we kept the sugar and cinnamon on top. This is a simple but time-consuming recipe and everybody loves it. Makes 6 individual pies 1 whole chicken, cut into 8 pieces 4 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil 1 kg onions, diced 2 Tbsp finely grated fresh ginger 1 tsp ground cinnamon, plus 1/2 tsp extra for dusting 1/2 tsp ground nutmeg 1/2 tsp ground turmeric 1/2 tsp ground mace a pinch of saffron threads 400 ml warm chicken stock or water 10 dates, pitted and finely chopped 80g pine nuts, toasted 20g  fresh coriander, …