Family Feasting

Happy family

The immediate family indulging in some feasting

Smile, you're on candid camera

Remembering the rest of our extended family missing from this feast

Cheers big ears

Same goes big nose

A cup of 'tea' anyone

Nana, enough with the photos

Perched around the table

O Tzatzikios...the boy who loves tzatziki

And the men party on

Eat, play, work

Sorting out the store cupboard, putting away the summer paraphernalia . 

Treadmill games

How far can you run further in 5 minutes.  Whose gonna win?  Well, that's obvious, that one at the back with the longest legs.  The game kept them out of mischief for half an hour.

No, No, No

No, no, no, Mussolini, you will not invade and occupy Greece.  

On the 28th October 1940 the Italians issued an ultimatum to Greece, demanding free passage into the country and occupation of strategic areas.

The Greek Prime Minister replied 'Alors, c'est la guerre'.

The next morning Italy invaded over the Greek-Albanian border.  Greek forces fought them back over the mountain border in the harshest of winter conditions, women hauling food and ammunition.  The Italians were chased back into Albania and the battle became the first land defeat for Germany in WW11. Eventually in 1941  Hilter sent in the German occupation army who took over the country until the end of the war.  It was 1945 when the last garrisons of Germans were cleared from Aegean islands and Crete.

My father took part in the clean-up of the islands.  He was in the British Fleet Air Arm,  Captain of a  motor launch (ML1252) working with Greek commandos to ensure German troops had evacutated, island by island.

ML 1252 December 1944

Churchill recognised the bravery and determination of the Greeks saying
'Hence we will not say that Greeks fight like heroes but that heroes fight like Greeks'.

Today we celebrate this victory,  known as 'OHI DAY' (No, Day), with a military parade and fly past in the northern city of Thessaloniki, capital of  Greek Macedonia.  Every household should have the Greek flag flying. Every city, island, village will be having its own parade, wreath laying and official speeches.

Poros school children 

In local costume

28th of October is a national holiday in Greece and Cyprus and there will be parades in cities in the United States and Australia where there are large communities of people with greek heritage

.........

Happy Birthday Paul

Wishing you many more years with good health and happiness

Family Feasting ... preparation

It has been some time since I wrote about a family feast.  

We had a gathering of our immediate clan last weekend

Lots of preparations and lots of leftovers

We'll be eating well this week

Cheese pie in a roll

Instead of making one big pie or lots of little triangles I made long rolls and curved them round the baking dish like a snake.  Delicious any way.  Homemade filling was very simple,  Just crumbled feta cheese, an egg, a few spoons of bechamel sauce and chopped mint.  Sometimes I use nutmeg instead of mint.  The pastry was ready made very thin filo.

Snails alive alive o

Getting their last rites

Snails in the pot

Stewed with tomatoes, onion and garlic

Snails fried

with garlic, oil, salt, vinegar and rosemary

The men loved these and ate most of them as an appetiser with a glass of raki.

These ones were not from our garden. 

Dolmathes

Made with vine leaves I had blanched and frozen last spring

Sourdough

Ready to go in the oven

The smaller loaf has lots of grated gouda to melt inside

Plain and with cheese

Pavlova before decoration.

I made aioli again, the garlic mayonaise

Leftover egg whites were used to make a pavlova

I haven't made a pavlova in many, many years.  Usually I just eat them. It is really a very easy sweet to make and this one was devoured quickly

Pavlova going going gone

This is only some of the food that went out on the table.  We had to have pork of course.  K made a dish of baked meats.  Chunks of chicken, lamb and pork roasted in the oven with potatoes.  The coleslaw was one of our best.  It had apple, walnut, grated carrot, celery and cabbage in the salad then some whiskey in the sauce

The End

New Season Out of the Sun

Winter's a Coming

Wild cyclamens

Clumps of pink cyclamens decorate the sides of the roads

25 Snails

A friend told me recently that ash from the fireplace keeps away snails.  What a load of codswallop.  Our garden gets liberal dosings of wood ash every winter.  This winter we have an infestation of snails, along with the usual oxalis/clover/sorrel.  I uprooted the basil in this pot and there were 25 snails hidng inside.  Everywhere, EVERYWHERE, there are hordes of snails. We won't go hungry this winter, if I could be bothered collecting them.  I don't kill them, just throw them over the fence.  Never into Vaso's land I might add

The back garden has been cleared, dug deep and planted so far with lettuces, onions and rocket

More lettuces in the front garden

These are in a planter made out of half an old plastic wine barrel.  I planted them this way thinking maybe I could halt the tide of weeds.  We shall see.  More lettuces are in the garden next to it and already the oxlalis is popping up all over the place although I weed almost every day.

Styling

The old wheelbarrow is still useable but rarely necessary in such a small area. I stuck a pot of oregano in there. It really needs a pot of flowers which tumble over the sides. Flowers are a bit of a rarity at this time of the year. 

My new compost bin

These old tyres were another idea to separate the plants from the clover. The clover took over.

I'll fill it with compost waste till spring and then turn it into a big pot for a couple of tomatoes or peppers

Lemon Trees oh so Pretty

Time to prune the lemon trees.  We had an abundant crop this year and the freezer is full of frozen lemon cubes, bottles of lemonade concentrate and others with plain fresh squeezed lemon juice.  The trees now have a good crop of green lemons.  Our pruner says that many must be sacrificed for the good of future crops.

Friend, cafeteria owner, fisherman, oil producer, gardener and lemon-tree-pruner giving our trees a haircut.

The lemons that are on the branches being removed are hard and green but I'm collecting those as well.  Hopefully they will provide a little fresh juice till the others ripen properly

After all that hard work it was time for an ouzo

Vaso had been working over the road and popped in for a chat

She 'put them all to bed' three hours later

The branches were left for me to haul out of the garden.  I'm piling them up across the road .  They will be burnt in a few weeks when hopefully they've dried out a bit and don't need too much petrol to keep the fire raging.  The summer fire restriction has been lifted now but we are not setting light to these until it has rained again and surrounding grasses are no longer dry as tinder

The Best of the day

After the nana-nap a friend who is a surveyor arrived to measure up the house.  Parts of the house were built without papers and there is an amnesty on at the moment whereby we can get the whole building legalised without paying too many thousands in fines.  As usual it is all last minute.  The deadline has been extended for one month so we'll just squeeze in.

That took an hour more than necessary because of long political discussions and cups of coffee.  I passed the time by making a 'bucket' of very strong garlic sauce to go with the skate/ray to be fried when afore-mentioned serious deliberations came to an end.

We entertained Vaso's son and some more of her family to celebrate the closing of their wine barrels.  The wine has fermented and now  needs a (short) time to mature.  We should be drinking it by Christmas.

In the meantime we drank the last of the previous year's wine

Fried skate and garlic sauce, the traditional accompaniment to this fish

And a big bowl of the salted olives Vaso had brought us a few weeks ago in anticipation of a small favour required

Whilst watching K's favourite football team Olympiakos get beaten by Milan 2-1. 

So ended this day, rather late and with some of us not in such good humour after a lousy football game.

The rest of the day ....

Move it, move it.   Lets get through some more of this day 

I got an early morning phone call from a courier office that a parcel had arrived and would we come and pick it up.  Did I listen when they gave me the message?  Of course not.  I heard something, I heard wrong.  We have four different courier services here.  I trotted confidently off to the first.  After an exhaustive search there was a shaking of the head.  No parcel of spare parts for K.  There is a saying here 'those who do not have brains have legs'.  So off I went to the second and then the third office.  Finally found it at the fourth.  I didn't tell my dear husband though.  He's already certain I'm having suspiciously too many 'senior moments'.

Next off to daughter at the Accountants office to get a paper to pay our tax installments, personal and house.   That was easily done.  What will not be so easy will be paying them.  Like most of Greece we either wait till the last minute or until the pension is deposited.  There are always long lines at the banks at the end of the tax month.

K will be doing that.  He can catch up with his friends waiting in the queue and learn all the gossip.

Time for lunch.  Fresh tuna salad made from yesterday's left-over baked tuna, fresh from the sea.  This time it was a macaroni tuna salad with tomatoes and cucumber onion, and corn and an olive oil vinagrette.

And siesta.

The rest of the day was just as busy but more sociable so of course you'll be hearing about that too in due course.