Category: Greece

September 8, 2010

Greece Food Photos #1: Setting the Scene

Now that it’s officially not summer anymore, and we’re all back to laboring after Labor Day, I finally uploaded my Greece photos. For the food-obsessed, here are the highlights, starting with Athens and getting settled on Mytilene.

In Athens, we ate lunch twice at a little taverna near our apartment. Everything was stupendously good.

But as usual, I wish I’d eaten more of the spaghetti. I just can’t quite make this magic happen at home, and it kills me.

We also had a great lunch at more of a modern hipster place, near Omonia. But no hipster nouveau-traditional restaurant I’ve ever been to has served shots of free hooch, unbidden, at the beginning of the meal. Raki all around, at 12.30 in the barely-afternoon, and then we had this. It looks like a mess but was actually a pretty presentation of a ndakos (Cretan rusk) salad. The juice from the tomatoes soaks the bread. On the right is our favorite brand of ouzo, Mini.

After Athens, we headed to Mytilene (aka Lesbos, and no, I will never stop leering). On the ferry, I received a wonderful invitation at the snack bar.

In Eressos, many friends and family joined us. That called for a certain festive atmosphere, provided handily by boxed wine. Ours had a socialist bent:

This led to lots of jokes about five-year plans, and then not doing anything at all.

We also invented a drink: watermelon juice and ouzo. Surprisingly delightful. We couldn’t decide what to name it: the Li’l Bastard and the Prince of Persia were top contenders.

By the way, there is some mild Mexican influence in Eressos, in the form of one Mexican co-owner of a cool bar. I think he might be singlehandedly responsible for introducing the idea of watermelon juice to our favorite beach cantina. As much as I resist homogenized beach culture, this was a great development.

And it’ll take a long while before this beach feels anything but Greek.

August 31, 2010

Greek Iced Coffee Culture

Americans, I hate to break it to you, but we’re getting screwed on the iced-coffee front. While you think we’ve got it made at Starbucks, Greece is totally lapping us.

Yes, Greece. You might think they’re a bunch of ouzo-drinking, tax-dodging yahoos, but da-yum, have they got the cold caffeine down. Check it:

First, we have the classic frappe, the signature drink of Greeks young and old. Whether you’re in a café in Athens or at a beachfront cantina, it should take you no less than four hours to drink a single one.

Frappes are so ubiquitous that every tiny grocery sells insta-frappe kits: a plastic cup with a lid, plus the frappe ingredients. We went on a walk out in the fields outside Eressos, and the roadside was littered with disposable frappe cups. Yup, even farmers drink frappe.

This is all dodging the issue of just what goes into a frappe. Well, I’ll tell you now: it’s Nescafe, plain and simple. Except it’s Nescafe made in Greece, so it tastes much better than what we get in the States. (Yes, I have done side-by-side tests.) You shake up Nescafe with cold water and sugar (if you like), and it turns crazy-foamy. Then you add ice and, if you like, milk. Then you sip for hours.

In our apartment at the beach, we found a handheld frappe whizzer, the same kind we have at home–but this one had a cord, a weirdly permanent detail on such a flimsy machine. (Ours is battery-powered–I guess so you can take it on picnics?)

Still don’t believe me? It’s all documented in Frappe Nation, a surprisingly gripping book by Daniel Young and Victoria Constantinopoulos. I even own a Frappe Nation tank top.

But Daniel better start taking notes for a sequel, because not only does Greece have the near-perfect frappe, but now it’s marching on to the ‘freddo espresso’ …

and, more beautifully, the ‘freddo cappuccino’–which is pronounced the Greek way, ‘fray-do cap-oo-tsi-no’. That one on the right is the newfangled thing, next to a dowdy old frappe:

I should’ve been a more diligent reporter, but I can’t tell you how they make these. They are not coming from an espresso machine. Just a different blend of instant coffee? Never mind–I just want to preserve the magic another year or two.

And I’m still not done. What’s even more staggering is the ridiculous proliferation of much goofier coffee drinks, like the Freddito:

Even weirder was this product, the Cafe Zero. We saw it practically first thing, in the metro stop at the airport. (Americans, Greece is also kicking our ass in the public-transport department–but who isn’t?) There they are, in an open fridge, just waiting for the busy jet-setter to whiz by and snap one up.

Jennifer popped it open on the train and took a cautious sip.

She was grossed out. But then she got used to it. But then, near the end, she said, “I’m getting kind of disgusted. This thing has stayed the exact same temperature and consistency the entire time, and it doesn’t have any condensation around the outside of the cup.” We felt, and sipped cautiously. She was right. It was creepy. Here’s what it looked like inside:

So, OK, Americans–maybe we don’t want to import this last miracle of coffee culture. But the others? Hell, yes. And fortunately, our trendy Greek neighbor has advised us that the ‘freddo cappuccino’ is available just down the street here in Astoria, Queens. In to-go cups. Athens, we’re gaining on you.

July 9, 2007

Summer Trip: The Food

About the time I was eating the most amazing mussels in the world, on the beach in Greece, I realized I should cut a teensy bit of slack to all those lazy food writers who overuse the phrase “a revelation” to describe whatever they’re eating. (I loathe this, for the record.)

I’m not saying the hand of God reached down and chucked me under the chin while I was eating, but I did have a moment of “a-ha” that was close to revelatory.

The next thought I had was: Maybe American food writers use “a revelation” so often because Americans have such awful food. In a cosmopolitan place like NYC, you can eat duck confit, medium-rare pork chops, assorted artisanal cheeses, and fresh veggies of all kinds, but very often you’re just eating a flawless simulacrum of the real thing…and probably paying a lot for it.

I use the prefix “art” to describe this, as in “an art pork chop.” Not at all to disparage the field of art or the process or art-making, but a food item that resembles food in every way but flavor may as well be an object placed on a plinth and lit with halogen bulbs. Then people can come peer at it and call it “cunning” in their critical reviews.

Because our food production system is so fucked up, and our palates so stunted by a relative lack of food tradition and our demand for cheap over tasty, we Americans eat art food all the time–and a lot of the time we don’t even know it.

It’s not till you eat a mussel that is briny and sexy like an oyster, but also sweet like a scallop, and sitting in a gorgeous translucent green shell that you realize exactly why people like mussels so much. It’s not till you eat a green fig off the tree that you realize what all the hype is about. And of course there’s always the “real tomato” issue.

So part of the problem I have with food writers having “revelations” all over the damn place is that they’re just showing exactly how little experience they have eating good food. If you’re having a revelation in print over some duck confit, it means you haven’t eaten good duck confit before. And shouldn’t that be just the barest qualification for getting paid to write about food?

Also, of course, food writers are always getting rapturous about their meals in France. Every food magazine every month has something about France–even Saveur, which is the most worldly of mags, and I admire them for it, still does the fallback “X region in France is amazing” story every couple of months.

I know France is great and all, but again, food writers are just revealing how un-stamped their passports are if all they’ve got to talk about is the charming village market and the authoritative French woman who prepares a revelatory lunch with her strong, assured hands.

Anyway, what I ate on my trip, which was soooo much more adventurous, and for which I was a million times better informed than even the most highly paid professionals:

1) Those motherf***ing mussels. We went back and had them a second time, and they weren’t as good–maybe they’d been overcooked, maybe they were not as fresh. It was good to know at least that Greeks in Eressos weren’t sitting around smugly eating mussels behind our backs every day.

2) Quick salt-cured sardines. Also in Greece, from a nice old lady in the village of Andissa. They were plump and succulent. A little obscene, like if you really did bite off your husband’s nice plump lip and ate it.

3) Pigeon in Cairo. I’ve already mentioned it, but that was truly, truly delectable. (And not a single bite of birdshot–there’s an urban legend in the city that all the pigeon comes from the shooting club, and friend-of-a-friend broke a tooth on birdshot once.) The pigeon gets stuffed with rice or freekeh (cracked green wheat), then it gets simmered for a while to cook the stuffing, and then it gets plopped down in a searing hot pan, to crisp up the skin. The broth from the simmering is served on the side in a mug, and it’s incredibly peppery and delicious. I would drink just the broth, but the resto has a policy that you also must order pigeon–but once you do, it’s all-you-can-drink broth.

4) Malta plums in Turkey. Not that these were the world’s most delicious fruit–just that I’d never had them before, and they were sweet and fascinating. They’re the color of apricots and have big, slippery seeds in the center, and they’re outrageously sticky. In the same day, I also got to sample some fresh chickpeas. Cool-looking, but enh.

5) Olive-oil-stewed sea beans, served cold, at Ciya in Istanbul. Every time, this restaurant has something delightful. They were still a little crispy-bouncy in texture, and the sort of salty you know comes from the inside rather than being added in the kitchen. (Incidentally, this is why Mediterranean fish are so delicious, claimed the fish grill man at our resto in Eressos.)

6) Ayran in Syria and Turkey. I’ve had it a lot before, but it’s always remarkable just how thirst-quenching salty, watered-down yogurt can be.

7) The world’s sweetest yogurt in Ayvalik, Turkey. We were eating a basic little lunch while waiting for the ferry, and I saw the guys at the next table had big plates of homemade yogurt. We got some for ourselves, and it was dairy-product heaven–light, not heavy like Greek strained stuff, and sweet-sour, and with a nice crusty layer of cream on top. Costa in Greece insisted it was because the Turks put sugar in everything–or at least used grape must to start the souring process. Which is interesting on its own. (On a separate dairy-product topic, I saw rennet for sale in a grocery store in Ayvalik–made by the major milk producer, and in a little bottle, right there next to the premade cheese. Great that there’s an assumption your average shopper would make cheese at home.)

8) Everything in Syria.

9) Apricots right off the tree in Greece, and even a few cherries. The local cherries (some we actually paid for, from the fruit stand) were exactly the sort of thing that make people say “a revelation.” They just kept tasting and tasting and tasting and tasting.

10) Best. Beans. Ever. in Istanbul. Fittingly, the name of the restaurant was ‘bean.’ At first, we ordered only one serving, and the waiter looked nervous. After I’d had a couple spoonfuls of Peter’s, and ordered my own, he looked relieved. Order and balance were restored. These beans were perfectly tender, just so they gave a bit when you bit into them, but held their shape. And they were swimming in this tomato-ish sauce that can only be described as pure umami. I have no idea what the magic ingredient was, but it did make me realize I hadn’t eaten pork in many, many weeks. Because that kind of tastiness I associate with pork bits, and here, they’d managed to get it by other means.

11) Assorted other things: kalkan (turbot) in Istanbul, baklava in Istanbul, borek in Istanbul, ice cream in Istanbul. Oh, and did I mention the man selling sardines, who had a beautiful silvery pile, but also a bucket of live ones, and periodically he’d grab a live one and throw it down on top of the silvery mound, where it would jump and thrash, as if to say, “These fish are soooo fresh…” Maybe a little sadistic, but a genius sales technique (right up there with the bra vendors I saw on the street in Cairo, tossing the biggest bras up in the air like pizza dough).

**For the record, Peter and I decided we’re against Turkey getting into the EU. Sure, some people might be a little less poor, or something. But it will inevitably make food worse, as produce-starved northerners demand Turkey’s farms yield bigger and more stuff. Currently, tomatoes are sweeter and cucumbers are crispier than anywhere but Syria, and I don’t want that to get fucked up by greenhouses. (Egypt, incidentally, has started using greenhouses–retarded, considering the one thing Egypt doesn’t lack is sun and dry weather. The tomatoes now suck.) Also, Turkey is already perfectly functional in other respects: you can drink the water, and you can even buy train tickets online. They don’t need the damn EU.

That is all. Must go eat breakfast/lunch. Probably no revelations to be had, alas.

August 26, 2006

Sea Urchins in Greece–finally

My days in Greece went something like this: wake up, put on bathing suit, make some random plan for going somewhere, walk down to the hotel lobby, and encounter someone else who will change my plans completely. Sometimes that was good, and sometimes it was very, very good.

The sea urchins were one of the latter cases. When I walked downstairs, I looked out on the veranda and saw Fani, my godmother, hard at work with a couple of her friends.

The funny thing was just how merry she looked about what seemed to be a really disgusting enterprise. They were cleaning a big tray of sea urchins. That involved, Fani explained, cutting out the soft “eye” on the bottom with scissors, then scraping all this brown jiggly goo out, while leaving the good part intact. All this while not stabbing yourself with the pointy bits.

They did look beautiful when they were done:

I’d never seen the inside of a sea urchin, and the only place I’d encountered the stuff before was as a big jiggly orange blob on a plate in Japanese restaurants, where it has come to be the ballsiest thing to order after chicken sashimi. I once read a (favorable) description of eating sea urchin as “like going down on a mermaid.” This whole sexier/cooler/bad-asser-than-thou posturing has no place in food, I think, and the one time I ate sea urchin, I was annoyed at the gung-ho attitude at the table. Maybe I was just being contrary when I said, “Enh.” Like a lot of Japanese food, it seemed to be a lot about the texture–or whether you can ignore the texture, which is silky and slithery and a lot like barely cooked brains.

But seeing these little sea urchins in their natural state, as sparkling orange stars laid out in black shells, I could see the appeal. They looked even more appealing when placed next to a bottle of ouzo:

The other accompaniment was fresh-baked bread, with which we were to scoop out the insides.

So, we dug in. The orange goo, smeared on the bread, was sweet and salty, delicate but also unmissable. It got a little more missable as I drank more ouzo, but before that, I was astounded by the tender, full flavor.

I was also touched at the extent to which humans will go to find something tasty. Around the table there was a glee that could not be credited completely to the ouzo. It was also sheer delight that we humans had once again succeeded in foraging. We had used our exceptional cunning to find, in the most unlikely of places, something not just edible but delicious. We’d won against these sea urchins, and that was cause for celebration.

Just a few weeks later, I got the same feeling at a crab feast in Baltimore, but that’s yet another story.

August 18, 2006

Summer pics

Still haven’t dealt with sea urchins, but in the meantime, Fotaq has our photos from Lyon and Mytilene.

The Lyon series unfortunately does not show the three-foot-tall gag pepper mill we endured for one dinner, nor the pounds and pounds of pain au chocolat consumed (nor, for that matter, Estela’s catchy song entitled “Pain au Chocolat”). Oh, and for the record, that’s not my kid.

The Mytilene series starts with photos from the cafeineon (coffe house) in Megalochori, a little mountain village with delicious spring water. We wouldn’t have really noticed the water, except that it was all the sisters who ran the cafeineon could talk about, in between slipping us plates of sausages, french fries, salad, and some very intense cheese. So afterward, we did walk over to the springs, and they were lovely and refreshing, and I wish I had some of that water right now.

As for the lunch, we were afraid to thoroughly clean our plates, lest they come dish us up more. See, we hadn’t ordered any of it, and we knew there’d be a struggle over the bill when we left–and not the way you think. Because of course they’d insist we shouldn’t pay them anything, and we’d say that’s ridiculous, and then Peter would buy the guys at the table some ouzo, and sneak in a few euros extra, and the ladies would say OK, fine, and we’d still go away with tears in our eyes that these total strangers were willing to spot us lunch.

So, there were a few snippets of cheese and ends of bread on one plate, and the one woman comes over to clean up, and she sees this. And she gets a napkin and ties all the cheese and bread bits up in a little bundle, and presses it into my hand. Aw. They even do takeout.

And I won’t link directly to this, but for the curious: photos of our wedding in Eressos, also on Fotaq. Nowhere near the hijinks of last year’s baptism, in part because the priest’s ne’er-do-well sons weren’t there, doing silly dances in their swimsuits. Word on the street was that they were grounded for setting their friend on fire. It’s hard to be the priest’s sons, I guess.

August 16, 2006

Some pics from Greece: overordering vs. portion panic

Still not the lovely sea urchin ones (have to get those off Peter’s computer), but over on Fotaq, there’s a little indication of what we did all day, every day. (And if you squint at the background, you can kind of get an idea of what a nice place it is.)

The back story to all these goofy pictures is this: Around Day 4 of our sojourn in Skala Eressou, Peter’s dad started getting a little concerned about how much we were eating, and, specifically, how much we were ordering at dinner every night. In the grand scheme of things, half a grilled fish going uneaten is no great crime, but I could certainly empathize with Charlie as Peter would flag down the waiter for the fourth time and say, “Aaaaand we’ll have a plate of the…” (but in Greek).

When there are 17 people around a big long table, and everyone’s saying, “How ’bout some lamb chops? Some macaronia? More tzatziki!” it can get out of hand pretty easily, and it did always fill me with an abstract anxiety. People, we need a PLAN, I felt like saying, but by then it was already too late, and the random ordering had begun. In truth, we rarely ended up with way too much food, but there was a certain haphazardness to the meals that maybe could’ve been averted.

Part of the problem is that you never realize, until you’re in the middle of it, the flaw of ordering a variety of dishes to match the number of people at the table. Because then the dishes come, and really, there’s never going to be enough taramosalata on that plate to feed 20 people, and you realize this just as the taramosalata has started around the table in precisely the opposite direction from you. So, you give it up for lost and keep your eye on the next thing the waiter’s setting down.

And just like that, your dinner is ruined, because you’re having to strategize at the dinner table like the last-born in a Mormon family. “Portion panic,” as I believe Jessika dubbed it, sets in, and before you know it you’re hoarding and reaching, and sneaking the last bites of things, and slipping french fries under your plate for later (actually, I just thought of that now, but it’s kind of a good idea) and so on.

So, anyway, Charlie I guess saw this happening–plus the occasional unfinished fish–and tried to do something about it. But of course that backfired, because if you lean over to Peter and say, “Hey, don’t overorder,” of course Peter’s just going to roll his eyes and keep doing what he’s doing. It’s too late.

The overordering thing reached fever pitch the day of our wedding. After our super-express 40-minute speed-read ceremony, we all traipsed down the hill to the little meze joint we’d talked into opening in the afternoon just to feed us a little snicky-snack and a little ouzo.

But you can’t very well tell a Greek restaurateur, “We’ll be coming from a wedding,” and expect him to undercater, or even sensibly cater. And he didn’t grossly over-cater, but there was an almost comically endless stream of little plates arriving at the table–to the point where Charlie started saying, “Stop! Phot, make him stop!” And he did, briefly, stop the flow of skordalia, beets, deep-fried meatballs, super-funky bastirma, sausage bits, cold white beans, succulent little zucchini wedges…but then we realized, WHY would you want to go and do an idiotic thing like that? (It helped that we’d been drinking the raki, briefly mistaken for water by my mother, for a little bit.)

Yes, there was some tragic food waste that afternoon. You can’t save the soul of every little meatball–you just have to focus on the ones you have been able to help.

So, then, after Charlie went home, Peter and Andrew briefly tried to heed his cautionary words. And that’s how we got these photos.

July 24, 2005

Living My Myth

The Greek Tourism Board’s new slogan is hopelessly cheesy: “Live Your Myth in Greece”. I’ve been thinking of other slogans, at least for Athens:

Athens: Like Cairo, but With Breathing Room.

Athens: Not so third-world anymore.

I don’t remember much from my trip here ten years ago–lots of to-and-fro on buses, and lots of sitting in a dim salon staring into space while my then-boyfriend shouted in Greek at his deaf grandmother. I do remember the meat sauce on her spaghetti, however, and the fact that I didn’t take seconds has haunted me ever since. And it was very cold, and Albania seemed like an exotic destination then (we never made it because there was a terrible snowstorm just around the time we got near the border, and we’d been warned about bandits armed with sharpened spoons. Honestly.)

This time around, Athens is sporting stylish new modes of transport (more subways, sexy trams taking dangerous curves on their way to the clubs at the beach) as well as stylish parts of town. I feel like I should be writing about it for some magazine, but it’s nice just to be on vacation.

I did meet a very sharp woman today who runs bike tours of Greece, which sound awesome. I’m mentioning it here in hopes that bike and travel freaks will be intrigued and pursue the matter, but that’s as far as working goes for today.

Soon Peter and I are off to Mytilini, where we may or may not be married officially in the Greek church. It first seemed that my heathen upbringing (i.e., no baptism) would be the impediment, but now it appears that Peter’s churchgoing cannot be properly documented either (i.e., the payoff to a priest in Albuquerque got a sealed letter, but the Denver diocese was quick to spot the fraud). So, while I was not too perturbed to interrupt my suntanning and ouzo-drinking schedule for an hour or so of bible-kissing and frankincense-smelling, it looks like I might not have to.

Don’t expect too much more posting for the next month…