All posts filed under: stories

The Lockdown GBTS Project

Published by

What can you do when in lockdown? Eat well. Ontop, as parents of a child in e-learning, we needed a decent amount of alcohol. I would say that the occupation around food and drink became something of a modest obsession..All that had consequences. When going back to a somewhat more normal routine you notice that clothes don’t quite fit ( I had the impression that my pants upper button would launch and hit somebody in the eye or knock a person dead).  When running the familiar route around the hill I began making concessions to the steep parts, accelerating only when another runner appeared.. So we had to face the simple fact: we gained weight!  For my part I even considered doing nothing about it, and spending the rest of my life with the extra kilos. Then again, perhaps not. I fantasized journeys that you travel easiest when lean and fitting in my wetsuit. Our problem is that we don’t like diets (who does..) . Our assumption is that even if we stuck  to a diet for a period, we would slip into the previous habits without thinking much. So we decided to come up with some simple rules, …

Quarantine Pathways

Published by

What we are realizing as we are slowly stepping out of the lockdown is that we followed rigid routines: reading, cooking, wandering in the city and in nature, watching the daily announcement of the civil protection and the chief epidemiologist.  In a sense we were walking on pathways that we deepened everyday. The first pathway was through nature, literary on the hill around the corner from where we live, or a little further away before and after the strict lockdown. We discovered new paths and took joy every time we saw wildlife (not the bears and wolves our son anticipated), but birds we had never seen before, swarms of butterflies and the usual turtles. We were walking mainly silently. The second pathway was through the city. We strolled past the Tsoladies (the ceremonial presidential guard), down to Zappeion. Our son had a precise map on his head with the optimal routes for his roller scooter, down to the level of pavement material variations. Of course the stroll was bizarre, passing through sites that were now …

Olive oil 2019

Published by

Another great year for Popi. She now has the confidence of a master producer, ready to show off her cool and tackle any small unexpected incident: A sack of olives forgotten in the far corner of the grove was picked up the next day. She could prove (contrary to everybody’s concerns ) that the olive press did not embezzle any of our precious juice to the advantage of the producer ahead of us! Olive groves produce a strong harvest every second year. 2019 was an abundant year and the hired workers plus friends and family worked for three days. The crew were Greeks, Albanians, German, French. The olives have to be shipped in the same day they are picked to the olive press, else the quality of the oil is degraded. A three day harvest implies three visits to the olive press, that stays open all through the night. There is interaction with producers that seem to be meticulous in their approach and there is always something to learn: this year Popi spotted a better …

happy easter

The bad conscience of a meat eater

Published by

Seht ihn! – Wie? – als wie ein Lamm. (Behold Him! – How? – As a Lamb.) -BWV 244 ,’Matthäus-Passion’ On Easter Sunday Greeks roast a lamb. That is, a whole lamb is skewered on a spit and roasted over charcoal. The spit usually pierces the scull of the animal or appears though the teeth, next to the prolonged tongue, in pure gore fashion.  Family and friends gather around the spectacle and celebrate Easter, preferably in gardens and yards in the countryside, among poppies, chamomile and daisies. Jesus is associated with the innocent lamb, scarified during Easter. What perverse association established the custom of lamb eating on that very day I do not know. Perhaps a suppressed kurgan inclination managed to resurface in the most sacred of celebrations to mock the orderly Christians, betting on the carnivore within. Or, even more bizarre, it has to do with something much more sinister and ancient: cannibalism. We have not completely lost the association to the living young lambs, sweet and innocent, recipients of our affection. Nevertheless we eat them, teaching …

Waiting for Santa

Published by

The Greek Santa visits on new years’ eve. He is Saint Basil, and comes from Anatolia. He was a major theologian of the eastern church, who excelled in the ‘nature of beings’, still ‘living among us, as he talks through the books’. He is very byzantine, and we have a description of his looks: “As of the character of his body he was long. Dry and lean, dark and yellow in colour of the face, long nose, cheeks and beard. His face was wrinkled and with some scars. He looked like someone who thinks”. He had an elder sister (one of the few early Christian women theologians – Basil recorded a discussion with her ‘on the nature of the soul’) and a theologian-philosopher younger brother. One of his fellow students during his years in Athens was Julian the Apostate, the last pagan roman emperor. I prefer this austere Santa to the chubby guy on the slate (Tim’s Burton version excluded). He doesn’t smile and was probably not very agreeable, but he is closer to our hearts …

olive harvest

Olive oil and the Salt of the Earth

Published by

A family member is an olive oil zealot. She keeps an olive grove and produces small quantities of olive oil to perfection. She has a mastery over the process from beginning to end and makes no consents to comfort. She spares no cost and redeems all favours during harvest in November. For these few days she turns from the easy-going and agreeable person she is to a warden of iron feast – and that we can attest. This year even our toddler picked his first olives, to his great delight and everybody else’s. But the result is proportional to the determination. After same day harvest and pressing the zealot turns modest, but with the content of the old master who knows that her work cannot be bettered. For those of you who (like me in the past) have not tasted fresh cold pressed olive oil of the best quality, let it be known that the distance from the stuff you get even in the good delis is similar to that of an ok wine to a French …

Ethics come at a price

Published by

This is a site based on ethics. After three attempts the Other Food Interpreter decided not to post the recipe for the honey-glazed lamb, because the cooking times were not quite right -according to her opinion, according to mine it was just right. I can testify that I cannot – will not eat any more lamb for the next month -ethics come at a price! Besides cooking lamb this weekend we visited the circus (it’s obvious why clowns feature in horror movies), had a very good grouper in a taverna by the sea and somehow prematurely considered water sports for our toddler. And read another chapter of Andrea Wulf’s great book about Alexander von Humboldt.       Mr Spock examines life forms

Stereotypes and tyrokafteri

Published by

What can I say.. there is truth in the stereotypes. Lunch in the countryside, with friends and children running around. We spent the weekend in a house with garden, and had visitors for lunch on Saturday. To be honest they brought most of the food. We just prepared the tyrokafteri (a spicy feta cheese spread) with feta from Stratoula, a local producer, originally from Epirus who ended up in Anavyssos (both very good credentials for a feta producer!), and small chillies from the garden. We had every good intention to prepare also a horiatiki salad with watermelon (the first of the season that we bought in the local open market), but we skipped it and had it the following day for dinner. (Stay tunned, the recipe will follow soon…) On Sunday we strolled in Lavrio, a small port with a very long mining history. We had ouzo and the typical mezes’ that go with it: octapus, marinated anchovies (gavros), fried red mullets (koutsomoures),grilled sardines and some delicious boiled greens (almyra). We gave the establishment an 8 out of …

Not all recipes are a success

Published by

Not all recipes we try for the blog succeed. Some might seem a good idea for a post, but after  repeated tries we might declare defeat, to much regret of the other food interpreter. The spectrum of abandoned recipes ranges from the disgusting  to the blunt. The disgusting are an obvious choice to drop- but the blunt? We always feel that we did something not  quite right – perhaps next time we will change the measures a little and it will succeed. Fact is, you know quite early if the recipe has a chance or not. Of course we end up eating the blunt; at least the ingredients are of a good quality, and we have a topic to discuss over dinner. And then there are the photos. We end up with a stock of photos we like for recipes we do not (the opposite is also often the case). Uploading the finished dish will not do – but why not the tomatoes, onions, eggs and peppers?