Seafood and Sunshine

 Monday, start of Orthodox Lent, was a beautiful sunny day. We started off bundled up but by 3 o'clock the youngsters had stripped down to Tshirts and I took off my top layer too. 

The Octopus was hung out on my washing line to dry a little before it went on the bbq

Feasting took place at my daughter's house. Not ours this year

The tentacles were so big  our chief bbq-er skewered them and made them into octopus souvlaki

There was seafood and more seafood

Mussels in a mustard sauce, octopus, crabs, kalamari, spiky sea urchins (kina in Maori) and prawns  

And lagana, the special flat bread eaten today

Poppi filling up a wine bottle from our 20 litre wine boxes. There's white and rose

Friend Jan and K

And the family dogs

Molly the Old English sheep dog

Boem the cocker spaniel (also called Rusty when I can't remember his proper name)

Junior, an Asian breed, with a name like jujitsou (but it's not)

And me and my girls

Next weekend is another long weekend.

Monday is a National holiday

Wishing You a Good 40 Days

Clean Monday - March 2  2020

Kali Sarakosti is the greeting today. 
May you have a good Forty-Days of Lent.

We had a big family celebration

The situation on the Turkish greek border is very tense and the Turkish leader is bombarding his people with fake news saying the Greeks are shooting refugees and letting mothers and children die. Meanwhile he sends thousands more, where there is no hope, to the closed greek border and threatens us that Greeks too will end up like the Syrians and have to run like dogs.

The Corona virus is spreading very slowly. There are nine cases now. No one here is in a panic. There is worse to face.

Here is our celebration of the beginning of Lent, Clean Monday

The wood oven was fired up. We cooked flat bread, octopus and dried beans

The king in his castle, as my s-in-law says

Fish roe dip - taramasalata

Made from bread, salted fish eggs, lemon juice and lots of olive oil

Grilled octopus

Being cut up for a snack with ouzo

The youngest learns to knead bread

She did a magnificent job. It rose and rose and rose

Two laganas

Flat bread that we eat today

Sea eggs

Kina in NZ 

We scoop out the orange 'stuff' with the bread and lots of lemon juice

Can't stand them myself

A lot of them were empty. The moon is not in the right phase for sea urchins full of food

Argentinian shrimp

Grilled on the BBQ 

Peeled and eaten as-is

The highlight of the Lenten table, 'risotto' with mussels, shrimps and kalamari.

The 'rice' is that fat rice-like macaroni, called orzo I think. It is boiled in the water that the shrimps were steamed in. 

Simple and delicious.

We didn't eat too much. It's not that sort of meal. But as usual some drank too much ouzo. There was dancing and we had a fall but fortunately there were no broken bones, just broken glasses.

The men partied on as usual. 

Mothers  and children went up onto the road and flew a kite. That's another tradition on this day.  

Mothers, Nana and tall grandchild then had a friendly gossip on the front balcony. Time to relax, have a smoke, a beer and catch up on family life.

Younger grandchildren had a 'picnic' in the old water reservoir under the balcony. Dirty, smelly, probably full of spiders and apparently lots of fun. They then 'migrated' to the bedrooms, closed all the shutters, turned out the lights, hid in the dark under dusty beds and desks, flashing torches at each other. I imagine that's what they do anyway. 'Dark room' is a favourite game. 

As usual it all ended with women in the kitchen washing dishes, clearing tables, clearing balconies, re-arranging chairs  and tables and finally sweeping and mopping and removing many bags of rubbish.

A good time was had in parts by some.

Clean Monday ... a sort of Greek Ash Wednesday

A Lenten celebration.  

The first day of the 40 day fast (it is actually 49 days from Clean Monday to Easter Sunday) from meat, fish, eggs and dairy.

A public holiday.  Time to eat shellfish and octopus, kalamari, flatbread (lagana), taramasalata (fish roe salad), drink ouzo and finally fly kites.  Well, the kids fly the kites, the adults retrieve them from olive trees and gullies.  

The lagana, I read, is the name of the unleavened bread given by God to the Israelis to feed them while they crossed Egypt to their promised land.  It is two times the price of a normal loaf of bread on this day but I make my own.

When the lagana comes hot out of the oven you break great chunks off, cover them in home made taramasalata and by the time you sit down to eat the lenten meal your stomach is full.  Happens every year.  Our custom is to tear the lagana into pieces and not cut with a knife. 

Homemade lagana.  The ones on the left are made with sourdough and cooked in our woodfired 'pizza' oven

I am preparing dolmathakia yialantzi (without meat), from vine leaves I collected and preserved last spring, and a dried bean salad.  The beans are prepared with lots of fresh parsley, thinly sliced onion, olive oil and lemon juice.  This year it is a legume mix which my daughter brought back from a visit to a mountain village.  There are yellow split peas, red kidney beans, brown and red lentils, white navy beans, chick peas and what looks like green lentils.  It is prepared the same way and served cold as a salad.

Sea-urchins/kina/ahinous

These are cut in half and given a squeeze of lemon juice.  They are eaten by scooping those orangey insides out with a piece of lagana.  The taste is sea water.  An acquired taste.

Bulbs/volvous.

A popular Clean Monday dish.

After googling a little it seems these are the bulbs of the wild blue hyacinth.  I do know that a flat fertile area near us is full of them.  They are a devil to be dug up however as they are found quite deep down.   One of  K's cousins used to make a lot of money at this time of the year digging them up with a heavy pick.  He and his elderly mother then painstakingly cleaned off all the dirty outer layers and washed them before selling,  They are boiled and eaten with a dressing of olive and either lemon juice or vinegar.

K has ordered from his friend two octopuses which will be hung out to dry and then grilled on the BBQ to be sliced and served as an appetiser with a glass of ouzo.

The octopus has to be dried in the sun before being grilled.

Our backyard is in 'winter mode', full of weeds and rubbish.  Clean up time is nigh.  The sun is warming and the temperature perfect for outdoor chores.

The sweet today is 'halvas' made from semolina, sugar, olive oil, almonds, raisins and flavoured with cinnamon, not to be confused with the commercial halvas which is made from sugar, water and tahini and is eaten with bread during the meal.

Making a kite with light weight pieces of bamboo, string and coloured paper

Flying the kite outside with hopefully a little wind to lift it up and over the olives and into the sky. 

CLEAN MONDAY

The carnival is over.  Lent has begun.  We had  a leisurely Clean Monday, though K did not think quite the same.  He and Kyriakos sat outside in the cold bbqing, boiling and cleaning all the seafood.  Kina in the half 'shell' has to be cut in the middle with a special 'implement'.  Crabs have to be boiled lightly, octopus and kalamari grilled and a sort of shiny cockle opened ready for slurping.  Small children were entertained with squirts of lemon juice which made the cockles wriggle and squirm. Cockles and mussels alive, alive-o.

Kina (sea urchins, ahinous) were snagged by K from our local bay using a piece of fishing net on the end of a long pole.  They are an endangered species now, although you would not think so when swimming around our bay.

I made half a dozen loaves of flat sourdough bread and lots of taramousalata.   For 'pudding' we had fruit doused with honey and cinnamon and a big halvas, made of semolina, sugar and oil.

No one ate too much, no one drank too much, the kids were reasonably uninvasive.  We sat around the table with only close family and a good friend, chatted and gossiped, listened to the wind and rain outside and stoked the fire to keep out the damp.

Not a day for picnics or kite flying.

The last two days we have had southerly winds and dense clouds of red sand from the Sahara with just enough rain to make it all stick.  The red dust cannot simply be rinsed off, cars and outdoor fixtures have to be properly washed and cleaned to get rid of it all.  Our windows and doors are covered in thick red raindrops.

a small child dressed up as a kalikanzaro, a sort of naughty imp, wielding a yellow plastic cricket bat (from NZ of course)

clean Monday table

25th March - National holiday with parades, wreath laying, poems, dancing and feasting with those named Evangelina or Evangelos.

This day is a religious and a political holiday.  It is Annunciation day - announcement day in simple language.  The angel Gabriel gave Mary a lily and told her she was the chosen one and would give birth in exactly nine months to the Son of God.

Also on this day many hundreds of years later Bishop Germanos of Patras raised the Greek flag and started the revolution against the Turks.  The Greeks cried 'Freedom or Death' and began a 9 year war of independence.

There is a big military parade in Athens and in every village, on every island there is a parade of local bigwigs and school children, the laying of wreaths and patriotic music and dancing.

On the eve of the holiday our school kids have a small celebration at school where nationalistic poems are recited and there are small theatrical productions starring those historical heroes and heroines who took part in the long struggle.  Byron was also one of the heroes of the campaign and died in the swamps of Messalonghi in 1824.

The blue and white blue flag is flown outside houses and businesses and it is one of the few days of Lent when it is allowed to eat fish.  Traditionally this day the fish dish is salt cod and garlic sauce.

We went across to the inlaws on Galatas to celebrate with Kyriako's family.  His brother's name is Vangelis (Evangelos).  The salt cod has to be soaked for at least 24 hours to get rid of the salt and then it is fried in crisp batter.  The garlic sauce is made from stale bread soaked in water, lots of olive oil, many cloves of crushed garlic and a good dash of vinegar. 

Aunt Eleni, over 80, had fried 60 pieces of cod.  It is a large extended family.  The maiden aunts will feed  cod to all the cousins. uncles and aunts.With the left over batter she made a huge pile of little pancakes, great with wine and a few olives so I was told.

salt cod and garlic sauce - NOT fried fish and mash as I once thought.  What a nasty surprise

K puts up our flag

Me, left bottom corner with one of many glasses of wine

Refugees - Greece already had one million refugees before this latest crisis started - from the Balkans, India and Pakistan mainly.

Now almost 60,000 from Syria and middle east  and more arriving. 

15,000 refugees camped out in the mud in appalling conditons, and weather on the Macedonian border.

This route through the balkans is now officially closed but they refuse to leave and go to established camps......just in case.

5,000 refugees camped out along Piraeus harbor.  Also refusing to go to established camps. Fighting and protesting a daily occurrence.

Italian PM Renzi sent carabinieri to the help the Albanians secure their border with Greece.

Refugees now just a Greek problem  it seems. EU borders closed.

Is this Warfare by migrant invasion?

Je suis Bruxelles