Family Olives

A  family that stays together picks olives together.

It's the law of the land, family land, family olives.  Or in this case olive, single.  One olive tree in the back yard.

Our daughter's family went the whole hog and picked their olive-s this year.  You have to go the whole hog whether it's one tree or a hundred.  Out came the nets, the rakes and all the paraphernalia

Tall grandson came home for the weekend to gather the family olives  ..

I would say if that was true.  But he did help while he was here

Laying the net

A bumper crop 

Not 'bumper' enough to send to the oil press

These ones are for eating

They are picked over one by one, leaves removed, mishapen ones put aside.  

Unforunately most of them are infected with 'dako', a nasty worm which burrows into the olive.  Serious growers will spray to prevent infestation.  These olives are 100%  organic.  No sprays, no chemicals

Enough for a few bottles of home pickled olives.  First they must be soaked in water for a few days to remove the bitterness

The rest are piled under the olive tree as compost

Our neighbourhood is buzzing with olive pickers this week.  Vaso and her family have started picking and taken the first sacks to the press.  They'll be picking till well after Christmas.

Further down our road a team of Albanians are picking for a family who live in Athens and no longer come for the harvest.  The pickers receive half the oil as their 'reward' and sell it privately or sell it to the oil press.  

I went out one morning to find a friend of ours picking the olives in the field next door.  These olives are virtually abandoned but every second year they produce a heavy crop.  One of the neighbouring families picks the olives for absent owners.

The olive tree, they say,  will thrive if you leave it alone but once you start watering and giving it nutriment then you must keep on doing so.  

There are olives everywhere, even along the footpaths on Poros

Food Myths

Today's truth is tomorrow's myth.  I was watching an old food programme the other day and a dietician was sprouting on about how important it is to eat breakfast, you shouldn't eat too many eggs, fats are bad and all that old stuff programmed into us for decades.  She was way past her 'sell by' date.  

 Drink red wine, its good for the heart.  Latest studies show that drinking any sort of alcohol in moderation is good for you.

 Eggs are filled with unsaturated fat, vitamins and minerals.  Eat them, lots of them.  Truth.

Of course you'll possibly find, I didn't look, ten articles on the web to refute all this.  Believe what you want

Eating breakfast wasn't a commonplace thing until Kellogs and Quaker plugged the idea to sell their products.    Breakfast is not the most important meal of the day and no studies have proved it helps with weight loss.  It could have the opposite effect.  In one test people who ate breakfast ate 260 more calories than those that skipped it and weighed 1 pound more.

If you enjoy breakfast then eat breakfast. I don't. I have more energy if I leave my first meal till later

Drink 8 glasses of water a day.  I asked my doctor.  He said 'drink when you are thirsty, your body tells you what you need'.  50 years ago did everyone go around carrying a bottle of water?  No, and they were a darned healthy generation with
far less plastic pollution.

Eating fat makes you fat.  Total myth.  Increase your 'good' fat intake and reduce the refined foods!  Then you'll lose weight.  Avoid 'lite'

Brown sugar is better than white.  No. Sugar is sugar no matter  its colour and form.

Eating a lot of small meals a day will keep your metabolism revving.  Nope.  It will just give you more opportunities to overeat. Depends on the individual, your daily routine, climate and a dozen other factors as to what and when you eat.

Salt is bad for you.  The jury is still out on that one.  You need more salt in the summer when you're sweating and losing minerals 'so they say'.    

Google 'food myths' and you'll find a hundred more '.  But who really knows?  Not even my doctor.  

 Eating  5 fresh fruit and vege a day will give lots of  healthy nutrients.  That number is a bit of a myth as well but it's got be  better than eating 5 hamburgers and a couple of donuts.

Walking 10,000 steps will keep you feeling fit and happy.  The 10,000 steps  is a myth but it's a good goal to aim for.  Half that will keep you young.  My doctor says half an hour a day 3 or 4 times a week will benefit the heart.  Sounds good to me

As for super foods, eat the super foods in your own 'backyard'. What the hell are goji berries. Eat fresh cherries or blackberries, eat spinach, cook with parsley or herbs or whale blubber if you're an Eskimo.

If you keep busy with stuff that brings you joy, if you have good genes, if you avoid goji berries, if you're lucky and don't get  struck by lightening or bitten by a rabid dog then you may, possibly, live to 100 and get a telegram from the queen, only then it will be the king

Invasion

Every time it rains we get an invasion of earth worms.  Huge worms.    They look like gentically modified earth worms.  They wiggle like mad and can escape from a paper towel or napkin with which I squish them with the swish of a tail.  

Everytime it rains these huge monsters somehow struggle under the front door even though there is a draught excluder glued on to the bottom of it and try to flee across the tiles .  I open the door in the morning after a downpour and there are half a dozen curled up on the doorstep.

Not nice.  I don't want you inside my house crawling under the furniture

Making a beeline for the interior

I don't want you either.  Look at the dirt they leave behind

Yuck

As for these things...

at least they weren't alive when I found them, in the autumn clean up.  Called forty-feeters in greek.  Believe me I didn't count their feet.  But I did hold on to them long enough to take a photo and show the grandchildren.  Look what Nana found where you were sleeping.  Naughty Nana

Fish, The Family Dish

The mediterranean is no longer full of fish and finally local fishermen have been stopped from discriminately putting out nets and hauling in greedily whatever is on the sea floor.  Amateur fishermen are no longer allowed to lay nets and the fish that are caught must be a certain weight and  in season.

There were always laws but mostly no-one took any notice of them.

I hope it's not too late to save what fish is left in the med.

Fortunately we have a fisherman in the family

He doesn't often go out but when he does he will bring home supper, for us and the rest of the family

Fish must be eaten 'so they say' with some sort of greens.  If we don't have a lettuce salad or some boiled greens then these big watery squash are just as welcome.  The seeds are discarded, in fact I got told off for not removing them before serving.  The squash is covered in olive oil, lemon juice and oregano

This is a very good catch.  I don't know what they are but a couple of them are small tuna.  Enough to feed four families

The family fishing boat

Edible tidbits

This post should have gone out ages ago but it somehow slipped down the list.  Never mind, it gives you another glimpse of summer as winter begins and downunder summer is somewhere in the air.

Dill

We use a lot of dill in our cooking.  In the winter a lettuce salad is not greek without some finely chopped dill.  It's essential for any spinach dish and stewed peas with tomatoes always have a good handful of fresh dill.  Or freshly frozen.  It can be hard to find in the summer so I wash it and freeze it in bunches in plastic bags.  When I need it I don't need to defrost, it crumbles easily straight into the pot

Capers are at their best in July when they are picked and preserved.  I love the leaves and the buds but leaves are hard to find.  My daughter always brings back bags of salted capers when she visits her sister-in-law on the island of Paros (not Poros). They are extremely salty which means they last for ages.  I put the capers in a big jar and fill it up with water, nothing else.  The water becomes salty and the capers less so.  I love them in salads.

We do have capers growing around us but the plant has big sharp thorns and it is a lot of hard work picking enough to pickle.  They are also mainly found on the side of the road and I'm put off by the thought of car fumes and dogs lifting legs.

The last of my sourdough.  I lost my starter when the power went off for two days.  Being mid-summer, and a heat wave, it was in the fridge and I didn't even think of it as the fridge temperature went down and the sourdough temperature went up.  By the time I found the bowl it had actually formed a thick layer of green mould.  Such a pity.  I had that starter for over 5 years.

Preparing fresh tomato sauce to freeze for the winter

A simple Greek salad

On every table at just about every meal

Thank goodness it's the season for lettuces and cabbages!

 

                                         

Watermelon is another summer staple.  This year we found much smaller ones with a thinner skin at the market.  They were perfect for us.  Those huge 10 kilo watermelons were just too large for two people to consume.

Sweet Greek Pumpkin Pie

14 November

St Philip (Agios Filipos) in the Greek orthodox calendar.

K says it is/was the tradition today to make pumpkin pie, greek style.  He says he will grate the pumpkin, which is actually squash. You can't get real pumpkin here. Ok I say. Go and get a squash, and raisins, and walnuts. So he did. He must have been dreaming last night of pumpkin pie he's so eager to make it.

Meanwhile the in-laws from across the water phone today to  say good morning. When I mention pumpkin pie they are mystified. Seems pumpkin pie is made on St. Theodora's day, in April.

Beef is eaten on St Philips day even though the 40 fasting days before Christmas have already started.  St Filip came home hungry after working in the fields all day and slaughtered his ox (cow?) to feed his family.  When he went out to the stables the next day there was the ox alive and well.  A miracle, I would say, if I believed in miracles.  Anyway, that's why everyone around here eats beef on the 14 November

Back to pumpkin pie -

Now we have the squash, raisins, walnuts and the appetite so we make it anyway.

First prepare the squash.  Peel it, de-seed it, cut it into manageable pieces and grate it.  You need about a kilo of grated flesh for a large baking dish of pie

Hard work.  You need a strong man to grate a kilo of pumpkin

 I made the pastry myself and my man rolled that out as well.

It should really be that thin filo pastry.  He just rolled mine out as thinly as possible.

The finished pumpkin pie

And the seeds which I have dried and put aside to plant in the spring.  My squash usually do very well and I end up with 4 or 5 to harvest at the end of summer.  This year there were none.  And the NZ pumpkin seed produced leaves and flowers but no fruit.  Twas not a year for any sort of squash or pumpkin.  

Recipe for Greek Pumpkin Pie -

pastry of your choice

1 kilo grated pumpkin

4 spoons of semolina

1 cup of sugar

3 tsps cinnamon

1 level tsp ground cloves

2 cups of raisins and sultanas

1 cup crushed walnuts

icing sugar to sift over the top

Once you've grated your pumpkin then pick it up a handful at a time and squeeze all the juice out of it.  This needs a man's strong hands too.

Mix all the rest of the ingredients into the squeezed squash.

Oil or grease a baking dish.  Roll out and lay pastry on the bottom, so it over hangs.  Spoon in the filling.  Cover with another layer of pastry.

Bake at 180o for about half and hour.  Till it is nice and brown on top.  Sift icing sugar over the top.

Savoury pumpkin pie is made with feta cheese. I'll make that another day

Kali Orexi

A Taxi Tour

The last post about our end-of-summer visitors.  As you can see, October was all about short sleeves, days on the beach and even the tortoises hadn't gone into hibernation.  

My niece visited with her two young children and had the great idea to have a taxi driver take her and the children around the island on a 'tiki-tour' as they call it in New Zealand.  As always we had a member of the extended family who fit the bill.  Manolis  is the son of the godmother of my sister-in-law's son (my greek nephew).

The last I heard he was driving the rubbish truck but he has moved on to a taxi now and can now add  'tiki-tour' guide to his curriculum vitae.

Exploring the ruins at Poseidon's temple...

inspecting the few stones that remain.  There's not much left up there now but the view down towards Vagionia Bay and the ancient harbour is magnificent.  Our kids used to love climbing over what little is left of the marble walls and even digging in the dirt.  The few marble blocks that remain are mostly fenced off now and digging is a 'no, no'  but  this site is unsupervised, free to visit and all need is a good imagination and the knowledge of a local to enjoy a brief visit.

On to the church at the monastery to light a candle and even kiss a few icons, if you're 'of the faith'.

Manolis shows them the resin from a pine tree.  Poros is covered in pine trees and once upon a time there was good money to be made tapping the trees and  collecting the sticky punguent resin.  Think maple syrup.  Well, maybe not.  But the maple tree is tapped the same way for it's syrup.  Do correct me if I'm wrong.

Meeting the 40 or so wild cats at the Church of the Holy Belt.  Kittens are often dumped here and local cat lovers come up every day rain or shine to feed them.  They are sterilised by volunteers but still seem to multiply.

Julie and her band scrambled up to the clock tower above the harbour, and explored the back streets.

                                               

Another of the highlights was a trip across the bay on the 'Socrates', the water taxi owned by my son-in-law.  They drove the boat and dived off into the sea.  Great fun!

Poros has something for everyone whatever the season!