ReallyGoodWriter | Food • Writing • Poetry Iambic Cafe

food & poetry, but mostly the poetry of food

Food • Writing • Poetry

One morning we ascended a steep, gravel road and shortly found ourselves a lot of the way up a mountain, at an open-air milking parlour.

The goats were corralled and driven at intervals by a pair of well trained dogs towards the shepherds who wrangled them into position, milked them and sent them off to spend the day on the mountainside.

Our host models the traditional shepherd’s bag – which used to include one essential you don’t see much nowadays: a mending kit to allow them to stitch up their boots and clothing to get through the weeks and months they might have had to spend in the mountains.

He produced platters of fresh cheese, home made biscuits, and a bottle of raki. We were told we had to eat all the cheese. So we ate cheese.

And we ate cheese.

And we ate a bit more cheese.

And then we were down to the last piece of cheese. And when that was gone, it was time to see how it was made, so we descended again and visited – what else? – a local cheesemaker.

The milk has been coagulated, the curds have been cut, and then put into baskets to drain and firm up into cheese.

Afterwards, we were offered a very tasty gruyere-style cheese, Graviera, served with rusks (paximathia) and raki. And then, full of cheese, were called away to lunch.

Talk about a village welcome!
Men make fire..



Popi, who organised the cooking, read us a poem of welcome. The four-line poem is a popular and traditional poetic form on Crete, and ideally sized for inscription on the blades of the knives that form part of the traditional costume for men.

We were walked around the room, meeting the people behind the dishes, admiring the dishes, and finally eating the dishes. As Kostas said, the beauty of the event was not just the generosity of the welcome or the extent of the food that had been prepared for us, but the fact that it had been made from what these men and women had grown, raised or foraged themselves.

We had a cooking demo – how to make wild greens pies (Kalitsoùnia).

Lots of wine to sample.

We tasted many new things, and some we’d already tried; snails finally broke free of the leaves and plants we’d been seeing them on, everywhere, and rolled right onto our dinner plates. So much food! So many impossible choices. This was one affair where we couldn’t try a little of everything, not even close.

Xerotigana

Afterwards, the men kicked up their heels.

We had a last drink, and wended our way towards a couple of hours’ relaxation before 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.

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….

A few more pictures from Bologna, where the walls have faces…

Bologna birthplace of murdered poet and film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini.

On Thursday I thought I should make a little extra effort to get to Mantova/Mantua, which I’d wanted to see for a while. I seem to have managed to time my visit with that of every school aged teen in Northern Italy; the place was thronged, mobbed and ringing with the particular, unrestrained, and unmissable presence of the massed Italian adolescent. A sound that is even more penetrating, I was to discover, when situated inside a palace or town square. Yeesh. Worst of all, whether or not it was down to their presence, I found that the Ducal Palace’s Camera degli Sposi was closed for the day, except to those with reserved tickets. Bummer and a half. I bought the postcard but somehow it was not the same.

I did wander around the pretty garden of the Palazzo d’Arco, and because you cannot go through the rooms alone I had an odd and silently escorted tour of my own. I liked the kitchen, whose walls were covered in pots and pudding molds, and was grateful not to have to think about polishing a collection of that size.

Pizza Primavera, in Mantova: rocket and tomatoes.

Mantova, lots of water.

The other day in Parma. A lot of horse meat on sale here.. what would Peter Pan say?

And what about these guys: before I found them, they went out of business. Parma not ready for Tex Mex pizza?

Well it’s nearly over, our two weeks of blissed out sunshiny whateveritwaswedid. Most of my classmates took off for foreign shores: Copenhagen, New York, Istanbul, Montreal, Seoul… I stayed in Parma, mostly, just to be different. And just to have a look round the galleries and museums and churches which I haven’t done, waiting as I’ve been for a visitor to do it with. And I finally had one and here are some of the things we did:

Visited Osteria del Gesso, one of the local thumbs-up dineries. I had a very good meal there, but an even better one a night or two later at Ristorante Mosaika, a little placed I’d walked by a few times and had been wanting to try. We both had selected menus (I had the meat, Meli had the fish) and they were, in our favourite word, celestiale. They started us off gently with some deliriously fresh and beautiful balsamico-drizzled buffalo mozzarella, and delicate rounds of crostini with fresh green pesto; moved us smoothly on into starters (a wonderful rabbit terrine, and a salt cod puree whose salad came with a stunning soy-wasabi dressing) and pasta (gorgeous gnocchi draped with lardo, and a delightful tagliatelle freckled with fresh green herbs and strewn with shellfish)

and mains (tender white sea bass with clams and olives, and for me, meltingly pink lamb);


polished us off with warm, soft chocolate cake…

and for me a nest of perfectly ripe strawberries tossed in citrus and served with gelato.

To work all that off, we went nutria-spotting, checked out some puppets, popped our heads into the Baptistry, the Duomo, and every other church we came upon, except the desanctified ones (which were several); had walks in the Parco Ducale and Parco della Cittadella, sampled gelato from Grom and K2, had a drink in Web ‘n Wine, saw the Aga Khan masterpieces exhibition and peeped round the corner into the Teatro Farnese.

Then a day in Bologna, where we saw the Museo Civico Medievale and the Museo Morandi, the Chiesa San Stefano, the Basilica di San Petronio, and still had time to stumble upon an excellent pizzeria and have a sampling of gelato (from Gelateria Gianni, branches which seemed to materialise at every turning). We expired on a sofa somewhere and had a drink and a few olives before returning to Parma. Where we planned our assault on Milan the following day.

Of course we visited first the Duomo, and then wandered about looking for lunch, which we found at Bellavista Cafe – the food was excellent – the seafood plate disappeared a little too quickly to capture;

the pizzas looked amazing as they went by; the apple cake was delightful.

We then ambled through the Castello Svorzesco for most of the afternoon and never really got to the end of it. Meli had an hour to sprint round the Pinacoteca di Brera while I rested my feet and sipped a spremuta d’arancia.

And then Meli took to the skies from our very own Aeroporto G. Verdi, where the approach roundabout must have the best topiary ever: