Submarine (Υποβρύχιο)

Supermarkets are clever at manipulating their customers' preferences. Products that are popular (usually through advertising) are placed on the shelves where the customer's eyes usually fall first, ensuring their continued popularity. The less accessible shelves are for products that aren't frequently in demand (eg tinned baked beans in Greece)...

It was much easier for me to take this photograph than it was to take down a can; note that the cheapest tin of baked beans (the Greek canning company's) was practically inaccessible to height-deprived people like myself. Baked beans are only bought by tourists in Greece.

...while the lower shelves are often used for products that are still in demand, but people are being swayed to buy an alternative item (eg bars of soap, slowly becoming obsolete due to the rise in popularity of liquid soap).

The shelves are filled with liquid soap products, while there was only one - yes, just one - with the traditional cakes of soap, which were all placed by my feet, below the liquid soap for hands (not the shower) and the toothpastes.

The demise of bars of soap in favour of the trendier liquid soap is only to be expected. Such evidence should be viewed as an inevitable consequence of progress. And so it is with foodstuff relegated to the bottom shelf; this could be viewed as a sign that they are bordering the obsolete.

This idea for the following discussion came to me after Allison received her book prize from my quiz. She thanked me for the book, as well as for the stamps that were placed by the post office clerk on the envelope, which included one depicting a dessert glass filled with water, with a teaspoon of a white gluey mixture dunked in it. This white blob is eaten like a popsicle, licked off the spoon and continually dunked into the ice-cold water. This is what is referred to in Greece as a 'submarine', although back in the good old days, we used to call it 'vanila' because of the flavouring we preferred: the creamy white paste is made with sugar and flavoured with vanilla or mastic. I've also seen pink and green vanilas floating around over the years (presumably flavoured with cherry and pistachio, respectively).

I still collect stamps, although they're much harder to come by these days. The stamp on the right depicts a mastic-flavoured submarine. The stamp on the right shows Dino Iliopoulos, a famous Greek comedian from the black and white era.

Growing up in New Zealand, we had this sweet regularly. It was one of the things Greeks often brought back with them (along with vlita seeds and Parthenon souvenirs) in their suitcases after a visit to the homeland, to give away as presents to other ex-patriot Greek immigrants. But my children still haven't even tried it, and they were born and live in Greece! This should not sound too surprising: sugary desserts are no longer fashionable among the health conscious food world, and there are so many other sweets and desserts cheaply available nowadays in Greece (including ice-cream which was once considered a luxury), so that the submarine is becoming almost obsolete. I would never ask for it now myself, as I am well-informed about obesity, dental problems and hyperactivity; what a shame, because now I know too much and cannot enjoy what I once did (although I must also admit that I find it too sweet for my liking in my older age).

I finally found old-fashioned vanila on the bottom shelf, below the tinned fruit and other Greek spoon sweets, near the pasteli and loukoumi.

Allison's message prompted me to go and look for some vanila, which I remember was always packed in a glass with a lid sealed by a piece of sellotape printed with the advertiser's name. It took me a while to find it, mainly because I couldn't categorise it according to the product allocation of the supermarket shelves. It wasn't a breakfast cereal or a biscuit, nor was it a kind of spread or syrup. After a lengthy search I found it on the bottom shelf, below the preserved cherries in syrup and other classic Greek spoon sweets, along with other less popular (but once highly revered) traditional Greek sweets: loukoumi, also known as Turkish delight (superseded by chocolates) and pastelli (now replaced by Mars Bars and other wafer biscuit bars covered in chocolate).

I chose to buy this jar of vanila (1.70 euro for 400g) because of its classic packaging: a (plastic) glass, sellotape seal over its lid advertising the manufacturer, and very old-fashioned labelling; not even the telephone number of the (local) manufacturer has been updated! Vanila is also sold in more modern packaging, but nothing beats this one for nostalgia.

Reviving the submarine tradition in my house creates a dilemma. There is no shortage of sweets in my kitchen at the moment, what with ice-cream, zucchini chocolate cake and watermelon (the best summer 'sweet' of all) at the height of its season. I felt as if I were behaving unnecessarily old-fashioned, acting in an obsolete manner, about something that is itself becoming obsolete. But I was deeply mistaken in my belief that it couldn't become a favorite hot weather treat, even in our own 'organically cooked' household. Both the children enjoyed their submarine, and my husband recounted his memories of this treat: it was the first thing he and his hunting friends asked for in the cafe at Lakkous after they had spent three days and two nights hunting in the Omalos plateau - their tired bodies were in need of sugar to regain their strength.

Submarine - Υποβρύχιο (ipovrihio)

Allison's message revived a memory from my youth that had been stored away in the attic of my mind, a memory I had never bothered to access for a long long time. It was in the same drawer (or was it a floppy disk?) where I kept my memories of old black and white Greek films and images of my grandparents. This prompts me to wonder what culinary memories my own children will lock away in their own minds when they are my age, and whether I'll be around to prompt their nostalgia for them.

Kinder Surprise vs. Submarine

I'm not so sure that they will remember my zucchini chocolate cake with the same pride that I make it for them; their sweeter memories will probably be related to the Kinder Surprise.

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The best malaka in the country (Mαλάκα XL)

And now, the news. An organised crime syndicate carrying out contract killings was recently busted in Greece. To the shame of the Cretan people, all fingers pointed to their compatriots. The outbreak of malaka that ensued could only be described in epidemic proportions on a regional scale, as it resonated across the island...

"All Cretans are liars," Epimenides of Knossos, a Cretan himself, once said (well, actually, he said "Κρῆτες ἀεὶ ψεῦσται "), creating the Epimenides paradox, a logic problem that arises in the case of a self-referential statement. Epimenides was himself a Cretan; his fellow compatriots may have thought he was a bit of a malaka because he didn't realise he was including himself in the statement. Perhaps Epimenides did realise the conunudrum, in which case he was purposely excluding himself, while assuming that all his compatriots were malakes instead.

The recent turn of events in the Greek news may actually lead one to think that Epimenides was wrong: all Cretans are not liars, they are all some kind of malaka instead. An organised crime syndicate was broken up by the police, in which the main links involved were of Cretan origin, the very fact which gave them away. The shipping magnate Pericles Panagopoulos who was kidnapped last January recalled that one of his kidnappers sounded Cretan: instead of saying 'ti', the standard modern Greek word for 'what', that feckin eejit kept using the Cretan phrase 'ida'. The whole country knows that only a Cretan would use that word, and he'd have to have been born and bred in Crete to make it come out naturally. What a malaka; it's a bit like Bugs Bunny wearing the full hijab using the phrase "What's up, Doc?" in his characteristic twang.

To make matters worse, Mr Panagopoulos' wife was told over the phone by a muffled voice that if she didn't pay the 100 million euro ransom (which was eventually bargained down to 30 million), she'd find her husband 'apothameno'. That (same) malaka didn't think to hide his tracks and just use the standard modern Greek word 'pethameno' (which means 'dead'). Instead, he used the Cretan dialectal equivalent; sounds like a case of malaka extra-large.

The biggest malaka would have to be the head of the crime syndicate, Panayiotis Vlastos, a prisoner serving a life sentence in a high security prison in Greece. Although not a Cretan himself, he inadvertently chose highly accented Cretans to help him execute the contract killings that he was organising - straight from his prison cell. The Greek public was treated to all the malakies he said during his tapped phone conversations, which he made from his mobile phone, which he was supplied with by some other Cretan malaka crony of his who was working as a prison warden.

Vlastos must have eaten a lot of this cheese in his lifetime.

Probably the biggest malakia Vlastos uttered was to his wife (also a member of the crime ring):

Vlastos: Do you know how many murders, how many kidnappings, how many robberies I've had to commit to give you a good life?
Wife: Mmm, I know, I know how hard you work.
Vlastos: I mean, take that car I bought you for instance, you know what it took to buy it for you, the murders, the kidnappings, the robberies...
Wife: Yes, yes, you're right.
Vlastos: Tell me babe, have you ever murdered, have you ever kidnapped, have you ever robbed? You haven't, have you?
Wife: Yes, you're right, I haven't.
Vlastos: You don't know what I go through for you.

Malaka big-time rings right through his dealings. His wife, herself some kind of malakismeni, knew all about the good life, as we know it down here in Crete.

Vlastos' wife must have had a taste for these kalitsounia made with malaka, which probably determined her locational preference.

She was infatuated by the place, as another tapped conversation attests:

Vlastos: When I get out of here, where would you like to live?
Wife: Crete, Crete, yes, Crete's the best place to live in the whole of Greece.
Vlastos: And what are you going to do there? Sunbathe all day?
Wife: Can you open up a spa for me?
Vlastos: A spa? A spa! That's it! A spa! We'll open the best spa in the area, it'll have manicure, pedicure, jacuzzi, everything. There won't be another one like it in the area. Find out which part of Crete doesn't have a spa yet...

Vlastos and his wife would probably love my kreatopita made with malaka.

Vlastos needed to get to Crete for this reason (to satisfy his wife's demands), so he started using his connections, and began arranging for a transfer from the high security prison in Trikala (where he was incarcerated), to the maximum security prison in Alikarnassos in Iraklio, Crete:

Wife: Good news!
Vlastos: What?
Wife: Your transfer's been arranged!
Vlastos: It has? How?
Wife: That nice one, you know, the good one...
Vlastos: Yeah? Him?
Wife: You'll be down there in a week.
Vlastos: In just one week? That was quick.
Wife: You need to thank that nice guy.
Vlastos: Yeah, we'll think of something...

The media is still trying to work out who that particularly nice malaka was: maybe it's someone in the government, maybe it's a Cretan, maybe it's both...

The chief prison officer in Iraklio wasn't quite convinced that Vlastos needed to come down to Crete to serve his sentence; what a shame he didn't stick to his guns instead of listening to another chief prison officer, this time from the low-security agricultural prison of Ayia in Hania, Crete. The head officer (now disqualified from duty until further notice) of this insignificant prison (prisoners are allowed to wander within the picket fence confines of the prison, they perform agricultural duties in the fields, and one prison day counts as two sentence days) showed 'special interest in the transfer of Vlastos to Crete', convincing the Alikarnassos head officer that Vlastos really did need to come down to Crete to serve his sentence (this latter decision heralded his own demise, suffering the same fate as his counterpart in Hania). The actions of one malaka after another created a domino effect, whose ripples were felt like a tsunami over the whole island (the whole fiasco was discovered just a few days before the transfer was to be made).

*** *** ***

Triple-A quality malaka (μαλάκα) from the Hondrakis (Χονδράκης) dairy station: 'hondromalaka' (χοντρομαλάκα) in its abbreviated form.

Just what makes a good malaka, then? A rudimentary knowledge of Greek grammar (you might like to try Babiniotis) will clarify a number of issues concerning the meaning of the word:

Ολα τα ονόματα σε -ακας δουλεύουν επί 8ώρου βάσεως:
(All nouns ending in -akas work on an 8-hour basis:)
π.χ. δασοφύλ-ακας, χωροφύλ-ακας, κτλ.
(eg forestry worker, guard, etc.)
Eξαιρείται ο μαλ-άκας ο οποίος δουλεύει επί 24ώρου βάσεως.
(An exception is 'malakas', who works on a 24-hour basis.)

Panayiotis Vlastos and his cronies are excellent examples of the 24-hour variety of malaka. Being the head of the crime syndicate indicates that Vlastos probably buys his malaka from the Archakis dairy farm, making him an 'archimalaka', while his cronies probably buy the more common variety of malaka available all over Hania, made by the Hondrakis cheese factory; that's why they're all hondromalakes.

The conversations included in this post are based on the real ones, as related to the Greek public through the television news reports. Nothing like a bit of malarkey for a laugh, is there?

©All Rights Reserved/Organically cooked. No part of this blog may be reproduced and/or copied by any means without prior consent from Maria Verivaki.

Barbounofasoula 'sans GMO' (Μπαρμπουνοφάσολα 'άνευ ΓΤΟ')

Genetically modified organisms have been on the 'bad' list ever since they have been offered as a viable alternative to food. With a growing global population (in 1970 there were 3.5 billion people whereas now there are 6.8 billion people in the world), a shortage of food among the poor and needy (with an excess among the wealthier people in the world) and the use of food as fuel (pushing up the prices for basic commodities and not distributing it to the truly hungry), GMOs are now being viewed more favourably as a solution to these problems (despite the fact that there are more than 300,000 plant species in the world and only 3,000 have ever been used as food; it is believed that there may be another 20,000 species that can be used as for food).

At my workplace, GMOs are investigated as part of the global interest in the advancement and development of agronomic issues, side by side with sustainable agriculture. As an English teacher with no scientific base, I'm not able to expand arguments one way or the other, apart from rendering my own opinion, but I'm in the privileged position to be given the opportunity on a daily basis to read up on the latest developments in both fields, by proofreading such work, from the fieldwork and laboratory experiments my students carry out in both disciplines.

Greece does not allow GMOs in the food chain; on a purely opinionated basis, I'm thankful for that. But this doesn't guarantee that we aren't consuming GMOs. Country borders do not always allow non-GMO crops to stay non-GMO, as the wind direction may cross-pollinate species in neighbouring fields (or even further away), so that what was initially believed to be non-GMO crop may in fact become GMO. Imported products also can't be guaranteed to be GMO-free, especially when they are imported from countries which allow GMO plants to be used as food (eg the US; the mere mention of Monsanto induces fear among those against GMOs), and do not always practice strict controls over the separation of GMO and non-GMO produce. This is especially the case where corn, wheat and rice (as well as other grains) are concerned, as these products are often ground into flour, further reducing their traceability in the food chain.

Most people associate plant growing with soil, sun, fresh air and large expanses of gardens and fields. Ignorance is bliss: countries with very poor soil conditions and/or lack of agricultural land (eg Holland, Israel) have used scientific advances to help them feed their populations by growing their vegetables using a technique known as hydroponics (known also as soilless culture). Holland even exports their hydroponically grown crops all over Europe (such products are also available in Hania). These non-GMO plants are grown under laboratory conditions without soil (they use porous substances like perlite) in a water-based system supplied with nutrients such as calcium, iron and other substances that are found in soil and are necessary for the nutrition of a plant, in the same way that a farmer provides fertiliser to his crops due to soil inadequacies.

Genetically modifying organisms doesn't necessarily mean you're going to end up with a product that looks or tastes different to natural organisms; it more likely means that the product will be easier for the farmer to grow (eg it might be resistant to common plant diseases), or it might have a better storage life (eg a tomato that doesn't have a good shelf life won't keep its shape and texture as well as one that can be kept in storage longer once it is picked). What many people don't realise is that for years (literally) farmers have been using natural selection to grow crops which exhibit better growing and keeping qualities. In other words, they have been selecting plants that show better genes than others, and these are what we mainly eat today. It's not as simple as organic vs. GMO; hybrid crop species are the result of interbreeding different varieties of crops that have desirable genetic features: that's how we get seedless watermelons, for instance. GMO technology gives this 'natural' selection procedure a helping hand by quickening its pace.

*** *** ***

Barbounofasoula - a bean variety of the common Phaesolus vulgaris - are members of the common runner bean. They have a beautiful mottled purple-white appearance, both on the pod and the bean. They're very popular in Greece in early summer. When I buy these, I never look to find an organic label near them; I look for other qualities. If they aren't picked and delivered fresh to the store for the customers to purchase, the pod starts to wilt, or it may be too fibrous to eat, even when cooked. They are sold with the pod, so it would be a waste of your precious cash (they are more expensive than other runner beans) if you were to shell them and chuck out all the pods.

My uncle gave me a bag of these, which he picked from his garden. They can be fibrous, so he advised me to shave off their sides and chop off their tips.

Their mottled appearance (both the pod and bean) makes them look very pretty, but it disappears once they are cooked. Perhaps GMO technology may fix this one day...

When cooked, these beautiful beans become as common as their name; they lose their pretty mottled decoration. In Greek, they are called μπαρμπούνια - barbounia, μπαρμπουνοφάσολα - barbounofasola, and χάντρες - hantres (which means 'beads'). They are cooked in exactly the same way as fasolakia; they have a smooth buttery texture and a nutty taste. These beans are also available in dry form, like all other beans (without their pods).

I'm still very thankful that I can at least to some degree feel that I am living in, as yet, a GMO-free world, under the blissful ignorance of a belief in the sustainability of the small farm providing me with my food needs. But don't for a moment think that most things I eat are organic - if we didn't use that NPK stuff, we'd be buying most of what we are growing instead.

I mustn't complain when my barbounofasoula lose their beautiful mottled red-white appearance when they are cooked. If GMO science could ever tempt me, it might be when I see a colourful plate of cooked barbounofasoula. Till then, I will have to contend with admiring them in their raw form before they are denuded of their colours in their cooked form. If they do ever end up staying mottled once they're cooked, I may start to wonder...

©All Rights Reserved/Organically cooked. No part of this blog may be reproduced and/or copied by any means without prior consent from Maria Verivaki.

Gardoumia - Koilidakia (Γαρδούμια - Κοιλιδάκια)

This story is a continuation of Bootcamp. You don't need to read the first one in order to understand the sequel (just like J.K. Rowling said about the Harry Potter series), but it might help.

After three years of rigorous, structured tasks in the army where I completed my military duty to my country, I finally came back home, back to the farmer's slow-paced no-hurry routine I had been used to before I left my family. It felt good to be able to wake up any time I liked, help out my parents and brother on the farm, wash in a clean bathroom without the wimpy city boys' clothes lying around the shower box (as if they expected a maid to come and pick up after them), eat my mother's home cooked meals meals and sleep in my own warm bed with clean white sheets, my days of smelly grey bedspreads being well and truly over. It felt good, all right, but it did not pay. After spending three years becoming an andra, I had also lost three years of my working life. As a high school graduate with no specific skills, I was unemployed and unemployable. A year after returning home, I decided to further my knowledge by studying tourism management - in London.

In the last week before I left the village, all my aunts, uncles and cousins invited me to their house for lunch or dinner. Every single day, I ate two feasts, one at midday and one in the evening, and no dish resembled any other that I had eaten on another day. Everyone cooked with my tastes in mind, and all my relatives conjured up sumptuous meals, often killing one of their animals especially for the occasion.

"You've seen them when they come here, Nikita," my Aunt Marika said to me, "all skin and bone, but no meat. Make sure you eat well before you leave the village, they might not have any food in Agglia," she joked.

"They probably cook a lot of lahanorizo," my brother replied, and we both burst out laughing at our private joke.

"Lahanorizo? Who cooks that these days?" she asked. Aunt Marika had no idea what it meant to be force-fed lahanorizo twice a day twice a week.

On Monday, I had avgolemono stew for lunch at her house, and stifado for dinner at her son's house, my cousin and best friend, if you can call your cousin your best friend. Upon finishing junior high school, Manolis had stayed with his parents helping them out on the farm and the olive trees. When he turned eighteen, he began his military duty in the navy. He preferred his own island to his base at Poros, he hated the petroleum-smelling cabins that the cadets slept in, he hated everything about his time there. When he finally came back to the village, he vowed never to leave the place, marrying a girl from a neighbouring village and setting up home here for good. He lived in a house which he had built himself, room by room, over his parents' stone-built rustic dwelling. He was only thirty years old, and had three children under five; his wife was expecting again.

"The hardest work is over," he said to me over dinner. "We might as well go for the jackpot and become politekni."

"But what if they're twins, Manolis?"

"They are," he replied. "What's the problem? I've got 200 stremmata - there's plenty there for all of them."

The menu for the rest of the week continued pretty much on the same meaty basis that it had started. I had never eaten so much meat before in that week alone, not to mention my mother's traditional Sunday roast prior to that. And no one dared to bring out a plate of horta or olives to the table. They were reserved for 'poorer', more 'sombre' days, while I had become an overnight cause celebre. What I particularly craved was a simple plate of stamnagathi, but when I asked my hosts once if they had any left over from one of their own meals, they looked at me as if I had no sense of taste.

"Horta? Mipos nisteveis? It's not the time to be fasting, Nikita," my Aunt Kriti scolded me. Her godfather had been a Venizelos supporter, who believed in the dream of a free independent Cretan republic. Custom dictated that the godparent choose the name of the child, and not the parents. No one could override the choice of name when the godparent chose it. He could choose it right at the last moment, before the child was being dipped into the baptismal font. And when the priest said:

"Βαφτίζεται η δούλη του Θεού...,"

everyone waited expectantly to hear what name my aunt's godfather had chosen.

"Κρήτη!" cried the godfather triumphantly.

"Κρήτη," repeated the priest, "εις το όνομα του Πατρός και του Υιού και του Αγίου Πνεύματος, Αμήν."

And Kriti she was, taking the name of the island where she would live her whole life. Her sister completed the picture when her godfather named her Laokratia.

*** *** ***

The Saturday before my departure was to be a special one. It would be spent at home in the company of my closest relatives. My father was going to kill a lamb and my mother would make one of my favorite meals, usually reserved for Easter. It was still warm in the middle of September, warm enough to sit outdoors under a verandah to keep away the chill of the evening as autumn approached the Mediterranean. Christmas was only a few months away, but the distance between London and Crete made it feel longer. Since I was embarking on a strange journey into unknown territory, Easter would have to come twice this year.

This is the second time in my life that I have made these on my own; I used the cleaning method my own mother used (having committed it to memory) when she made the same food in New Zealand, except that the size of each part of the animal there was twice the size of the spring goat I was using.

Just after the lamb was killed, my father brought a foul-smelling bucket into the kitchen and my mother set to work on it. Gardoumia could only be made freshly. She began to meticulously clean every item in the bucket: the stomach, the spleen, the intestines and the fat, taking care not to break them up too much. She let a running tap of water flow through the guts, which swelled up like a sausage balloon, the kind gypsies sell in the shape of a dog.

She then went out into the garden and brought back a thin twig from an olive tree. This was the tool she used to turn the intestines inside out to clean them thoroughly, so that all traces of scum had been cleared. As she cleaned all the inner parts of the animal, she washed her hands with plain water, so as not to taint the meat with the smell of soap. Then she smelled her hands; when she was satisfied that she couldn't smell dung, she knew that the guts were clean.

Cleaning the intestines is of utmost importance before they are wound round the animal's stomach to make gardoumia (also called 'kilidakia'). Compare the colour of the intestines in the left hand photo with those in the previous photos.

Then she called me over to help her cut the round spleen into one long thin strip of blood red meat. This she used to stuff the large intestine, so that it looked like a thin warped stiff sausage. She cut off uniform sizes of the tripe and fat. Tucking a little bit of fat into the tripe, she carefully rolled the intestines very tightly round it, fastening them off with a knot at the end, and snipping them off to repeat the process for the next gardoumi. When she had finished making them, she gave everything one last wash and placed them on a clean plate in the fridge.

The large intestine which holds the spleen is called the 'splinogardoumo'; unfortunately, it was either destroyed or not passed on to us when we ordered the kid at Easter, possibly due to EC regulations which demand that it be disposed of hygienically and not eaten to avoid the risk of transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSE), despite the fact that Greeks have been using these parts of the animal as human food since ancient times.

As it was the tail-end of summer, she picked the last zucchini crop from the garden and chopped them lengthwise into thick rods. These were fried in olive oil, strained on absorbent paper and set aside. Then she got the potatoes ready, chopping them in a similar way without cooking them. Tomatoes are still in plentiful supply at the beginning of autumn; she grated the reddest softest fruit into a bowl. Everything was ready for the gardoumia, which she knew I preferred to eat in a red sauce rather than the traditional way we ate them at Easter, in avgolemono sauce.

I had prepared the koilidakia just before Easter, but didn't want to cook them at that time, so I plunged them in boiling water for five minutes to kill off any contaminants. After letting them drain well, I froze them and cooked them in the summer with the new zucchini crop.

"Mmm, tastes rather like snails, doesn't it, Mum," exclaimed my 'good' eater, who has developed a refined sense of taste, recognising the same ingredients used in my summer snails recipe. My son turned down his portion. I know I'm spoiling them - how will they survive when they leave the family nest?

And that meal constituted the last one I was to eat in Crete for a long time. It was one of the biggest family celebrations I had ever been a part of in my life. I was the first person in my family to go to university, and to set foot in a foreign land. No one, not even myself, knew what to expect in the place I was setting out for...

Let's hope it won't be like what happened to that poor chap in North London...

*** *** ***

Although it's highly unlikely that you will make gardoumia yourself, here's the recipe for it.

You need:
the intestines of a lamb or goat, along with the animal's stomach and some fat lining the stomach, cleaned meticulously and prepared in the manner described in the story (these sausage-like rolls are called gardoumia)
1/2 cup to 1 cup of olive oil (this depends on how oily you like your food; this kind of meal tastes better in a lot of olive oil)
1-2 large onions chopped roughly
2 cloves of garlic minced finely
a cup of water
half a wineglass of red wine
4 zucchini cut into thick slices lengthwise, fried till golden, and drained on absorbent paper
3-4 potatoes cut into thick slices lengthwise
4 ripened tomatoes, pureed
1 tablespoon of tomato paste
salt and pepper

Heat the oil and saute the onion and garlic in it till translucent (do not let it burn). Add the gardoumia and coat them well in the oil. Add the tomato puree and tomato paste, along with the water, and mix well. Cover the pot with a lid and let the gardoumia cook for an hour. Then add the wine and cover the pot again, cooking for another 30 minutes. Add the potatoes and seasonings, cover the pot again and let the potatoes cook till nearly soft. Add more water if necessary (eg if you think there is not enough liquid in the pot and the food looks as though it is about to stick to the pan). Add the fried courgettes and let everything cook together for the last 15-20 minutes for the flavours to blend.

The gardoumia can be made with an avgolemono sauce instead of a red sauce. This dish is also cooked with lamb's legs - the intestines are wound round them instead of the tripe. Although it's made all over the country with regional differences, gardoumia is especially associated with Crete and island cultures. It is one of the culinary customs that Ibrahim's grandparents took with them when they left Crete in the 1920s and settled in Turkey, and taught their children (you can see Ibrahim's mother in Constantinople making them with trotters in the photo) to make them too, so that their grandchildren (like Ibrahim) could enjoy them nearly a century later.

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Fortezza Cafe (Φορτέτσα)

The old harbour at Hania is not just one of the most alluring points in the town; it is THE most alluring, and although there are other port towns on the island (Rethymno and Iraklio) which all have stone-built piers jutting out into the sea, none has a lighthouse. The 'faros' of Hania was renovated two years ago; the last time it was renovated before then was by the ruling Arabs in the early 1820s, after the fall of the Ottoman empire.

The best time to come and sit at the harbour is in the evening when you can see the sun set behind the lighthouse in a pastel-coloured sky, enjoying the cool breezy early evening air.

The atmosphere of the old Venetian port is very cosmopolitan. The mix of locals, economic migrants and tourists, all mingling amongst each other peacefully, combines the European ideals of a pluralistic society, conveying the sense that life has always been like this, which of course, is far from the case. After the fall of the Minoan empire and the hellenisation of Crete via the Dorians, Crete has been invaded and conquered by the Romans (west), the Byzantines (east), the Venetians (west again) and the Ottomans (east again), finally gaining its independence in the late 1800s. Greece has always been referred to as a country where the East meets the West.

It's hard to keep a look out for pirates and invaders when you've got this view on the other side of the harbour...

The air is crisp and salty as the ocean waves crash onto the rocks below the defence walls. The view is breathtaking. The pretty box-like pastel-coloured houses line the harbour, hiding the urban sprawl of the modern town behind it. The mountains give the scene depth. As the evening descends, the city lighting creates an air of romance, which at times is rudely interrupted by blaring rock music from the clubs that line the waterfront.

As the sun sets, the harbour changes colour, from soft pastel hues to solid dark shades. The harbour offers a wealth of possibilities for photography at this time of the day.

The history of the old harbour can be recounted simply by pointing out the old buildings. The Turkish mosque (top: left hand side) and the old ship yards (bottom: centre of photo) are now used as function halls and exhibition centres.

The various conquests over the island's sovereignty have left behind a wealth of variety in the town's architecture. Towards the east are a few remaining shipping sheds from the Venetian period. The water’s edge was further inland, and these old sheds were once used to build and renovate ships. These buildings serve as reminders of Hania’s wealthy history. In between these focal points are low lying pastel coloured buildings, now used as souvenir shops, hotels, restaurants, bars and cafes, setting the ambience of this picturesque corner in the middle of the Mediterranean.

The walk out to the pier gives you the sense that you are in the middle of the sea.

The pier leading to the lighthouse is accessible to anyone who wishes to walk out to it, and it's worth the short trip. Once you reach the lighthouse, you’ll feel as if you’re in the middle of the ocean watching out for insurgents and invaders through the holes in the pier’s walls, which once fired cannonballs at all the intruders.

A raft boat service takes you out to the cafe, but the walk along the pier is also worthwhile.

The remains of the old guard house in the middle of the pier make a great viewing point, providing one of the coolest spots in the harbour after sunset. The Fortezza Café operates at this point, where you can enjoy a cool drink (and some fast food served ever so slowly), as you listen to the waves crashing onto the rocks below.

Sometimes, the food is simply NOT important.

If you’re not up to walking back to the harbour, you can always take the little raft boat service (provided by the café) that will cruise you back to terra firma in just a little over a minute. It’s a pity that the boat ride is so short because you really don’t want the night to end so quickly.

If you only have five minutes to spend at the Venetian port of Hania, make sure it's at sunset. This will ensure that you'll be back, this time to stay longer.

Cost of walk: free; boat trip: leave a donation; 1 Corona, 1 cold barrel beer, club sandwich and small pizza: 20 euro, shared among four people.

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