Lazy Food

Dakos

I have, against all expectation, become an olive oil snob and realised that the bottle of not-completely-extra-virgin stuff I mistakenly bought was in fact completely undrinkable, fit only for polishing my wooden table. Asking Eleftheria for advice on what to buy, I learned that those in the know buy 'fresh'. So these days we take a water bottle to the village Supermarket and fill it up from a large urn with thick golden-green olive oil (6 euros for 1.5 litres, which lasts us a week). 

On my trip to Rhodes on Friday, I brought back some tasty tomatoes from Crete, and a Cretan hard white cheese called anthotyro made from sheep's and goat's milk. Dakos is originally from Crete, and for me it's a perfect (lazy) food. Not for Stelios, who doesn't eat cheese unless it's melted. So I made a bowl for one.



First line your bowl with some of the hard, dried rye rusks called paximadia, which I keep in the cupboards for when we run out of bread or for taking on a walk as a snack. You soften them up with a sprinkling of water. Add a layer of chopped tomatoes and a layer of white cheese, and plenty of olive oil. A few roughly torn basil leaves go very nicely indeed on top, or you can use rigani (oregano). If the tomatoes are nice and ripe, the juice should gradually soak into the rusks along with the olive oil.

Lettuce is just coming into season here in November - it's a winter thing in the south Aegean - and another salad that worked out nicely this week thanks to ingredients I'd picked up in Rhodes was red lettuce, slices of raw fennel and fennel leaves or anitho. What gave it a special Tilos taste was the handful of small black olives from Hippocrates.

Bread and Butter Pudding, Greek Island Style

My excuse for adding this to the blog is that they do make a variation on bread and butter pudding here. I had lots of white bread left over from a dinner party so I looked up the BBC recipe and adapted it to what ingredients I had in.

I oiled the tin with olive oil, then layered buttered bread with cinnamon and fresh-ground nutmeg, sultanas - and, since I had them in the cupboard and thought they might go nicely, dried cranberries and broken walnuts.

For the custard, I warmed up a few cups of full-fat milk and instead of using cream I added a few spoonfuls of thick Greek yoghurt. Meanwhile I beat together two eggs with a heaped tablespoon of sugar, then added the milky mix when scalding hot, and poured the whole mix over the bread. While it was all soaking in, I added a few blobs of Tilos honey on top. Into the oven at 180 degrees for half an hour. Scrummy.

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Two good dishes for Lent, which was in April this year.

Beware of reading this if you're a really lazy cook. I used to love tinned gigantes, or butter beans in tomato sauce. Now, having tasted the real thing, I have to make my own. The good news is, it's easy. But I admit it's something I wouldn't get around to doing if I didn't work at home.

Gigantes, or baked butter beans

First, soak a half-kilo packet of butter beans overnight. Next day, boil them for an hour or so until al dente; scoop off the froth with a spoon but don't drain off all the water.

Next, you can either add the following directly, or fry them up first: a large chopped onion and a few cloves of garlic, a few chopped carrots, a good glug or three of olive oil, a couple of chopped tomatoes and some tomato puree. Cook them all together for ten minutes to start the flavours infusing. Stir in some fresh chopped parsley and/or selino (wild celery/celeriac leaf), and salt and pepper. Tip into an oven dish and add water if needed to make sure there's juice covering most of the beans.

Then you bake them in a medium to hot oven, mixing with a spoon every half hour, for about an hour and a half until they're soft and getting crispy bits at the edges... Absolutely delicious hot, or cold next day.

OK, the next one's really lazy, but you can only make it in or around Tilos, I'm afraid. 

Garidakia, or Tilos Shrimp



These are the tiny shrimp caught around Tilos. We're lucky to get them fresh, but freezing does them no harm and they're so tiny you can even fry them straight from the freezer. You eat them shell-on. We decided, on Nikos the fisherman's advice, to fry them up with fresh onions and garlic this time. In local olive oil, of course. Fantastic. 

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I am perhaps the world's laziest cook. If there's an easy way and a complicated way to prepare something, I will always opt for easy. I live on a Greek island where there is loads of wonderful fresh produce, after all. We could probably live on fresh eggs and salad.

But the Greeks will often opt for complicated. This is the nation that invented moussaka. So sometimes I try out the dreaded: recipes. And sometimes I have to admit, it's satisfying. 

Is Stelios's mum trying to tell me something? Yesterday she lent me a cookery book - really interesting as it's local dishes of the Aegean. Luckily the recipe for Tilos, while not something that I've ever actually seen in Tilos, appealed to me a lot in its simplicity...

Tomato Soup with Bulgur Wheat (Pligouri in Greek)

This dish would be much, much better in summer when the local tomatoes are in season and juicy and ripe. It would also be better if I'd used what we call 'dry' onions, i.e. not fresh (spring) onions, as it would be sweeter and tastier. You chop a couple of onions and heat them in half a cup or so of olive oil, then add a few cups of tomatoes which should really be grated, not roughly chopped as the lazy cook here did it.

When they've simmered for five minutes, add the bulgur wheat - the recipe called for 500g, but I think it might have been better with less - and about eight cups of water. Then (oh, I love recipes like this) you just leave the whole thing simmering for about an hour until it's soft and the flavours have blended.

Add salt and pepper to taste, a little chopped mint and a sprinkle of feta. I also think it could be nice to add a little garlic at the outset - though not too much.