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Crete part 2: Amari Valley; wild greens, pastry and sing for your supper


It may have felt on the wintry side at times, but we were in Crete at a perfect time to catch the full glory of wildflowers.

Our Thursday morning was spent gathering wild greens from the hillside, and preparing them for lunch. Kostas led us up the trail and he, Aris (a cave specialist and companion on many of our outings) and Lambros (owner of the taverna where we were based) showed us what treasures we were trampling and filled us in on some of the legends, food and folk medicine around the greens we were collecting and observing.


Giant fennel, not really fennel – in fact its poisonous cousin – but Ferula communis makes a dandy walking stick when it dries out, and it’s a handy torch as well. As Prometheus discovered, and used it to steal fire from Zeus to give to mortals.


Jutta, a visiting German botanist who happened to be there with her botanist husband, tells us about the curative powers of Sambucus nigra, Elderflower. She said the tree and its flowers were considered lucky, and the flowers used to be hung above a cradle to protect the child. When I told her I’d heard elderberry wine was a popular concoction, she said the berries are edible only after cooking -which I guess happens during winemaking – and are otherwise toxic.


Some frilly midget beans; so so tasty. Pan-fry them (in Cretan olive oil!) and then put them in your omelette.


Wild asparagus: very hard to spot by amateur foragers, but lovely to nibble on raw and a favourite for omelettes.


A shepherd we passed on the way up the slopes. I never saw the sheep, but then some people saw the sheep and not the shepherd. Anyway; nice view.


The greens basket, filling, filling. We harvest fava (broad) beans and artichokes on a nearby field.


Sorting the greens; the bowl on the left has asparagus fern fiddleheads; the one on the right has frilly beans.


A kind of summer kitchen outside the taverna had a handy oven like many we saw in Crete, ideal for roasting potatoes.



Women make food.


Men make fire.

Everybody eats omelettes; there’s also a sweet omelette (not in this picture) made with elderflower.

The finale: salad with raw artichoke, wild greens, borage flowers; boiled wild greens with fava beans and artichokes; potatoes roasted in goat fat; lentils; wild greens omelettes.

After lunch we departed for nearby Aghia Fotini, where we had a cooking demonstration, all about making stafidoto (filled cookies), baklava…

and these lovely Loukoumàdes (breakfast donuts), fried in olive oil and drenched in cinnamon syrup, Cretan honey and sesame seeds. At last, I thought, I have the secret to the Cretan diet: you start your day with donuts and raki and you will live forever.

Katarina the potter, who we were to visit later on, came to the town hall and presented us with a branch of rosemary from her garden which we were to wear behind one ear, as a kind of instant wreath. It showed our fellowship and was also intended to give us clear thinking in the meeting, which was much needed after all those donuts.

We had a presentation by Aris about caves, flora and fauna; there was a brief presentation by a local man who told us, among other things, about the tendency in this area to uproot old olive groves and replace the healthy, hardy local varieties of olives with dwarf varieties better suited to mechanical harvesting and producing olives with flavour more in keeping with contemporary tastes. Kostas told us a little more about MedASH, and its work to encourage hotels to compost their landscaping waste, to educate children in organic planting. His discussion of soil health included the memorable description of soil as the “stomach of the plant”; growing things are really all one organism, he said; roots tangle in the earth, and microorganisms connect them.

And after that… ack. More food?!? Supper that night in Gerakari village started with a quick demonstration of some of the things we’d be eating: fava bean puree, raw artichokes.

Wild onions and raw artichokes…

Boiled favas and artichokes…

A nice bit of lamb…

After the meal, singing and more singing. Everyone had to take a turn, by country. The Americans were a hit with “Comin’ Round the Mountain” to which they added a “yee-haw” chorus which so delighted our hosts they asked for an encore. Alas the three Canadians discovered we had only our national anthem in common, so that’s what we sang .

After the singing we were rewarded with ice cream with local cherries on top.

Crete part 1: snail tales from central Crete


We’ve just returned from a fantastic week on Crete, which I’ll attempt to document by day, with a very selective sampling from the 700+ photos I returned with; best I can do since I can’t share the feeling of being there.

We were hosted by the excellent and encyclopedic Kostas Bouyouris, agronomist and co-founder of the Mediterranean Association for Soil Health, who led us through Cretan food products in an enlightening and hands-on week of visits.

Our first stop was at the village of Kroussonas, where a group of women got together to start a baking cooperative; they now have a kitchen, shop and catering business. Seventeen of them get together to make traditional Cretan pastries and other baked goods, including one of our favourites: fried (in olive oil of course) pastries filled with wild greens.

Also beautiful, beautiful hand-decorated breads for weddings and other celebrations:

There was a pause when a pickup truck laden with vegetables pulled up, and we waited for some of the bakers to do their produce shopping, Cretan style. I thought this was so clever: have one guy in a truck come to the village, instead of everyone in the village driving to the shops.

We pressed on through staggering landscapes

to Gangales, in the south of Crete, to visit the Melko pasta factory where we were particularly interested to watch them make xinohondros, a traditional “pasta” made of cracked wheat, mixed with acidified fresh sheep and goat milk, cut by hand, shaped into portions and dried. It’s cooked with oil, tomato, potato, onion and celery and often with snails, and as it’s a kind of fortified pasta-cum-thickener, is one of the foods served during periods of religious fasting.

We had a tart and nourishing soup made from this pasta for supper, followed by many other traditional dishes including a platter of boiled goat.

Day two began as had day one, with luscious bowls of fresh yogurt, honey, bread, sesame halwa and strong coffee. We trooped upstairs to have a talk from another inspiring Cretan agronomist, Sotites Bampagiouris, who talked us through the enterprise known as Bio Forum, a ten-year-old economically viable organic farming enterprise.

A marvel of thrift and economy, Bio Forum creates composting heaps made of olive leaves (by-product of the olive harvest), and straw bales from mushroom cultivation, among other organic matter. They don’t use manure for these since the compost is used on vegetables and would therefore come into direct and possibly dangerous contact with food; manure can be used for composting fruit trees.

Seeds are nurtured in greenhouses and then transplanted when they are big enough to stand up against the weeds and insects.

Weeds are not automatically seen as enemies in this field: they act as wind screens, provide a refuge for insects that would otherwise head for more edible homes, help to create an anchor for topsoil through their root systems, and act as natural compost when the soil is turned after harvest. These greens were plump, spicy and delicious; members of the mustard family are particularly useful in areas where soil is compacted as their roots help to break it up, and provide salad greens while they’re at it.

After an organic fruit break at the farm, we zipped off to the Boutari winery, Fantaxometocho (“domain of the phantoms”), for a tour and lunch. The Cretan operation is only three years old, although the mainland company has been going since 1879. On Crete, the vinyards are totally organic, and, even more shocking to me, the vines are grown without irrigation. They say this makes for a lower yield, but a better wine since the plants produce healthier, sweeter grapes with more concentrated aromas; irrigation plumps the grapes up but also waters down the contents. Their late harvested grapes produce a delectable sweet wine which we were lucky enough to sample at lunch.

On the way to our new base in the Amari valley, we stopped for a retail moment in one of the Bio Forum outlets in Iraklion; Don samples a little cheese with basil.

Supper at Aravanes taverna where we began with a salad of lettuce and wild greens, fresh cheese, olives, bread… and went on to have tart rice, lentil stew and more boiled goat.

We finished with baklava we had brought from a pastry shop which we were to return to the next day for a cooking demo. More than ready for bed we crashed….

Arrivederci Apulia

Sea urchin (“UNI!!” shrieked the sushi-eaters), part of Friday’s lunch.

One of our speakers said he’d prefer to refer to the place we’ve been calling Puglia by its alternate and more ancient name, Apulia. We were rich in speakers this week.

Thursday we kicked off with a talk by eminent enologist Severino Garofano, about viticulture in the Mediterranean, as well as an overview of the Puglian grapes which we’d been encountering in liquid and nascent form all week. Negroamaro, primitivo, aleatico and susumaniello had all figured in our glasses, and we had a few more drops to sample the range of Garofano’s Azienda Monaci, over a lunch at our excellent hotel. It began with a clever little bundle of shellfish and ended with a triumph of torta: a warm, perfectly-sized almond souffle-ish marvel, melting with cream and a flourish of chocolate.

We took a chilly stroll through the vinyards of Tenute Rubino which are interlaced with fields of artichokes; a combination that works for me. The owners wanted us to get a sense of the land our evening wine would come from, and we certainly experienced the salt winds that flavour the grapes.


We travelled to Cisternino, a Slow City, where we enjoyed a meal of meat with our wine, in Rosticceria Antico Borgo Di Menga Piero, a fornello, a butcher shop where you can buy meat by day as in a regular butcher’s, but by night, when you approach the display cases as a steady stream of locals were doing, you choose your cut of meat much as North Americans might do with lobster. The offerings included involtini di trippa soffocati (tripe rolls), capretto (young goat), and costata di asino (donkey in a red sauce).

On Friday, there was another talk on fishing in the region which included discussion of garum, a Roman seasoning which lives on in the Vietnamese fish sauce nuoc mam, yet another food whose sustainability and provenance is under question (covered during the week in the (thanks Ruth) Christian Science Monitor).

We heard a lot about the different nets and traps used to catch seafood, including the technique of octopus-fishing requiring nothing more complicated than a chicken leg and a fishing line. Of course once you have your octopus you have to kill it, and then you have to beat it with a stick in order to tenderise it enough to eat.

We were given the opportunity to taste it raw, an opportunity that I do not think I will need to seek out again. It made me think how nice is octopus simmered in red wine. Or cooked in anything, really. Ditto the cuttlefish.

After lunch we headed out to see where the meal had come from, to the docks at Brindisi. We were on the brink of turning back, as it was windy and it seemed the fishermen may not have gone out, when a boat returned and its cargo was swiftly unloaded for a speedy fish auction.

One last supper – at the stylish Menhir – where we dined on fish of many faces including some local clams with broad beans and orecchiette.

We had some beautiful wines from Candido, including a mind-blowing Aleatico dessert wine. Then, clutching our tums and our lovely Maglio easter eggs, we stumbled off to bed to ready ourselves for the flight back to Milan early the next morning. Enough eight course suppers to fell an ox, more wines than we could count on two hands, and more enlightenment about the variety of local food products in this area than we would have believed possible. Next stop Vinitaly, in Verona this weekend, where we’ll certainly be seeing several of the wine-makers we’ve already encountered on our travels in Le Marche and Puglia.

Puglia Wednesday: wine and white cities

Wednesday’s schedule included a trip to la Riserva di Torre Guaceto where olive trees and other growing things are being protected. The olive trees we saw were at least 500 years old, and were part of a scheme to involve farmers in organic production methods by creating a co-op to produce and market organic extra-virgin olive oil.

There is also a marine park which includes the beach below, which we were told accommodates as many as 5000 visitors a day in the summer.

Although Italian marine parks like this one are off-limits to commercial fishermen, it seems that, through its conservation efforts, the reserve has enabled a 400% increase in fish stocks, and now a small local fishing enterprise is permitted, under strict scrutiny by the University of Lecce which monitors the size and type of fish that are caught.


We travelled next to a restored olive mill, Frantoio Locopagliaro, in the midst of a large olive grove. Underground mills were once the norm in this area, because they were practical to build – aboveground constructions required specialised labour – and their rock ceilings could withstand the pressure exerted by manual presses. The underground setting also maintained the oil and processing at optimal temperatures.

The press itself: after the olives and their stones were ground to a paste beneath horse-powered millstones, the paste was put in round woven baskets that were stacked and placed beneath the wooden screw which was turned by human effort. The oil was then separated from the rest of the liquid, and the paste was transferred for further pressing.

This olive crusher was used for the second crushing, to reduce the olive paste residue further for processing into lamp oil or other industrial use.

After a tasting of Puglian extra-virgin olive oils, we sat in intermittent sunshine to enjoy a terrific lunch which included such local novelties as chicory (a kind of spinach-like green) with pureed fava beans and roasted green peppers, a bit of burrata, some cacciocavallo, and a nice piece of capocollo tucked into an addictive little biscuit called taralli. And some lovely oily bread. And a glass of wine.

After this, we were whisked off to Ostuni – la Città Bianca – where we ascended to the summit for a quick look over the forests of olive trees below.


Then a speedy and very chilly visit to the vineyards, just starting to leaf, of Lomazzi & Sarli, who’d provided our previous night’s wines – including Dimastrodonato, a particularly good dessert wine made from a characteristic Pugliese grape (Aleatico) – and back we went to the hotel to rest up for supper.

Pausing in Puglia

Greetings from Puglia, where pigs fly.

Here in the heel of Italy, the weather has turned wet and cold and I have passed on a trip to Lecce to catch up with a few things. Naturally now that I have made that decision the rain has lifted and the sun has come out… Ah well.

We arrived in Brindisi yesterday at a desperately early hour and carried on to IAMB, the Bari centre of the Mediterranean Agronomic Institute: we will be visiting the institute’s Chania centre when we visit Crete next month.

Our Escher moment at IAMB.

They offer research training to agronomists from Mediterranean countries to study such issues as irrigation and water management, aspects of organic agronomy, and methods of managing endemic insects such as the olive fly.

Clever way to catch crawly insects on an olive tree: a collar of fiberglass.

We had an incredibly good lunch of local dishes, many of them seafood, and then paused for half an hour or so to view the characteristic conical houses, the Trulli, which are found in abundance in the area but particularly in a town called Alberobello.

On we sped to our appointment with butchers in Martina Franca where we watched the making of capocollo, another cured meat made of a whole cut of pork.

This one is trimmed to size, seasoned and dried for a few days, then marinated in boiled wine must and white wine, then wrapped in pork intestine, tied in a tea towel, dried a bit longer, unwrapped, hung to dry, then briefly smoked, and then hung again until start to finish it has gone through its paces for a total of about 120-150 days. By then it is a firm, sweet, slightly salty and lightly smoky treat, made in small quantities between October and Easter, when the climate is suitable for the cool dry winds it needs over part of the process.

After that we had a surprise gift of music and dance from a local folk troupe, then watched a bit of hand-crafting of orecchiette and maccheroni and sat down to another wonderful meal. We had a couple of soups – zuppa verde and zuppa di carciofi – and some pastas including the ones we had seen made. There was, for the strong, a further buffet featuring such specialties as Puglian salumi, raw artichoke and cheese salad, and a kind of risotto made with orzo (barley) and mushrooms. Some pastry and fruit followed, and a merciful sleep.

This morning we had a talk by Gino di Mitri, author of a book on Tarantism, the historic and region-specific ailment of Puglia, attributed to the bite of a spider, and which may have its pagan roots in Dionysian rituals, while its Christian expression took the form of prayers to St. Paul, saint of spiders. Affecting mainly, but not exclusively, women, tarantism was treated by music and a highly energetic dance, in which the sufferer used her body to describe the circumstances of the bite, and which ultimately evoked a trance that would allow the sufferer reconciliation with the spirit of the spider. The musicians – a tambourine player (almost exclusively female), accompanied by violin, guitar and accordion – would diagnose the colour of the spider, which corresponded to the nature of the ailment: for example, a blue spider would express melancholy and disharmony with the community. Homosexuality, we were told, was often entwined with the condition. Women who did not want to marry might claim to have been bitten, and the contaminating nature of the spider bite might in any case render them unmarriageable.

Last week is already a blur, but we had some wonderful people talking to us, including Stuart Franklin who walked us through a fraction of his formidable portfolio and spoke movingly about his latest project and forthcoming book on the changing landscapes of Europe, a depressing tale of overproduction, land-grabbing, overdevelopment and standardisation. We also enjoyed Richard Baudains who led us through some of the issues of wine reviewing: the extreme ends of its readership and the difficulties of communicating subjective analysis of an edible subject. We saw some wonderful films as well, from the Slow Food on Film curator, including a fantastic documentary called Life Running Out of Control which encapsulated the complex issues of genetic engineering, including the contamination of organic seed stocks by GM crops in North America, the risks to the farmers of India of the dubious economics of GM seed developers, and the moral and practical issues of experimental animal development. Shades of Oryx & Crake…

Le Marche – lotsa pasta, a bit more wine

So, this account is jumping around a bit, but then so did we.

Last Wednesday’s pasta tour of Spinosi was great fun. We found ourselves on another hilltop, in the village of Campofilone, in more glorious sunshine, where we donned our paper outfits and toured the small factory that distributes its dried pasta around the world, and its fresh products locally.

Afterwards, we had a lunch (Spinosini with lemon and prosciutto) prepared by our host Marco Spinosi himself and after that, we did our best to the shelves of the Spinosi shop, and all piled back on the bus to commence our previously reported afternoon of pork.

Some of Spinosi’s Spiritosini biscotti for afters; these ones were almond, very nice indeed.

On Thursday, we had another wine talk, from the excellent and extremely well-travelled Gianpiero Rotini, Export Director for Umani Ronchi. He showed us round their cellars, including the new one which is something of an architectural marvel, buried in the hillside, with state of the art brickwork and underground humidification controls.

He was hugely informative and interesting on the subject of wine marketing and shared a lot of great tidbits for our grateful cogitation. He cleared up one area of confusion for me as a wine consumer: the Montepulciano grape is native to Le Marche, but is often confused with a Tuscan Sangiovese product from the Tuscan village of Montepulciano.

He also told us that wine is subject to the most restrictive legislation after food, which always makes for interesting challenges when approaching new markets. He told us about the punitive taxation on alcohol that is hindering European exports to India; the difficulties in distributing to a diverse and segmented market in the US; and the inward regional focus of the Spanish market which make it a difficult one to penetrate.

Italy, he said, was the hardest country to sell wines in. A well-established culture of daily consumption is offset by difficulties in transport and distribution: there is not a good road transportation network (those mountains again!) which makes it hard both to work as a distributor and to ship your product around the country. And a lot of the consumption is local, largely by preference and tradition, so it can be hard for new wines to break in.

On the theme of profit-driven distribution, we heard that international marketing has been subject to the greed that the market economy invites: so the imported wines we often recognise as characteristic of Italy – Chianti, Lambrusco – had in the past swamped export markets simply because they are immensely profitable for export = cheap to buy and can be sold for huge mark-ups.


After tasting some wines (Verdicchio), and eating some lunch and tasting some more wines (Montepulciano), we had a whirlwind tour of the Moreno Cedroni factory, which was apparently in its afternoon clean-up mode, so we didn’t actually see anything being made. Probably most factories don’t need 24 shutter-happy foodies sticking their noses in production, but it was a bit disappointing to be whirled round in 20 minutes flat. Pretty jars and interesting ingredients, though. Not everyone can spin a buck from a tin of stewed monkfish tripe, or sea-snail (raguse) with tomato, garlic and wild fennel. And the fig and tangerine marmalade sounded promising, though I couldn’t see any back at the shop at Umani Ronchi. So I satisfied myself with a bottle of top-flight dessert wine (Maximo) and another of Montepulciano (Cumaro, named for the small red berry that grows on Monte Conero).

Our day ended, more or less, with a fabulous shop-a-thon at Azzurra, a purveyor of all things Marchese (“vini e tipicità delle Marche“) in another seaside town, Numani. Upon first arrival we pressed our noses hopefully against the windows, which were ominously dark: oh no, said someone, it’s Thursday afternoon. Which of course is the giorno di chiusura we all know and love (not) in Parma, which makes those from twentyfourhoursevendayaweek retail cultures stomp their feet and wave their credit cards in rage. But of course this tale has a happy ending: somehow we managed to get in the door and buy, buy, buy. I’m still not sure if it was by special arrangement, but we think our saintly driver Franco might have had a hand in it…