Greece – Food – Part 3.
August 3rd 2005
Here’s my last thoughts on food in Greece, continued from Part 2. A little more rambly, but here it is. — Kate
Travelling Food
I’ve sketched in the food that we ate while on the island, but there was also quite a lot of food we ate while going to and from Antikythera. It took about 8 hours to get to Antikythera from Piraeus on the ferry, twice we went to Kithera (about 2 hours on the ferry), and the couple days we spent in Athens often meant we had to grab something on the run from one shop to another.
The stars of this section are the cheese pies. Tiropodi and Spanakopita. Crisp, buttery phyllo pastry wrapped around feta cheese, or feta cheese and spinach. I love these, and I am really glad they aren’t sold on every corner around here because I would eat them all the time.
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Tiropodi consumed: 8 Spanakopita consumed: 2 |
The best tiropoda I consumed was the one I ate the first time we went to Kithera on the ferry. The Myrtidiossa has a little canteen where a little round Greek man sells various pies, juices, soft drinks and beer. That morning I hadn’t really felt like eating breakfast, and the ferry backed into Potamos harbour about an hour later than scheduled (which we later found out was SOP), so by the time we got on the ferry, we were starving. We went to the canteen first thing and got tiropodi and orange juice. The pie was piping hot, crisp, and the choking diesel fumes from the vent stack only added to the experience. Off the island! Heading to civilization! It was exciting and wonderful and I will always remember that moment, licking butter off my fingertips and sitting on deck, the diesel scented breeze blowing through my hair.
The best spanakopita would be the one that I ate during the voyage home with James and Sue on the bus ride from Gythio to Athens. I won’t tell the full story here, but after arriving in Gythio, we had fresh squeezed orange juice and grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches in a little restaurant that had the comfiest chairs ever. Then we boarded the bus and we were off. An interminable amount of time later, the bus stopped at a 24-hour restaurant, which was in the middle of nowhere and was painted bright red and yellow. James went out to forage for food, and came back with juice, pastries, and a box of Jaffa cakes. Eating while sitting on the bus wasn’t without some hazards, though. Each bite we took would send buttery shards of phyllo down our shirts, and the openings on the tetrapaks were so large that we kept losing our straws down inside. Probably due to excessive tiredness, Sue and I thought it was hilarious, and we couldn’t stop laughing. All it would take was one sidelong glance after a shrapnel bomb of a mouthful, or a slight gesture with the tetrapak to set us off again.
Airplane Food
I just wanted to mention the highlights here. Overall, the airplane food was inoffensive, edible, and since it comes in fun little modular units, it doesn’t even really have to taste good. The standouts (good, bad, odd):
The Good
Olympic Airlines – Flight from London to Athens – This looked like it would be in the Bad category, but the dessert was actually kind of good. It was a sort of cheesecake square with a light crumb crust and a filling that was possibly soft sweetened yogourt cheese thickened with gelatin and mixed with grape preserves. It didn’t taste like anything I have ever eaten before, and despite some odd textural issues, it was pretty good.
Air Canada – Flight from London to Toronto – The hot meal came with a little square of good chocolate tucked beside the teacup. A nice little treat.
Olympic Airlines – Flight from Athens to London – The main entree was some kind of stir-fried pork with noodles. The reason why this falls in the good pile is that I was starving and there was lots of it. Sue, who is vegetarian, had to content herself with 3 soggy steamed carrot pieces, some limp greens, and a tiny quiche-like object.
The Bad
Olympic Airlines – Flight from London to Athens – A salad of iceberg lettuce, semi-crunchy white cubes that I think were supposed to be potato but had no taste and were not starchy like raw potato, tuna, and black olives. There were chopped herbs on top but I have no idea what flavour they were. It was vaguely reminiscent of a Salade Nicoise, but not very nice at all. Har har.
Olympic Airlines – Flight from Athens to London – A very strange chopped vegetable salad garnished with a quarter artichoke heart. The vegetables were slimy and the whole thing tasted like compost. I ate the artichoke heart and left the rest.
The Odd
Air Canada – Flight from London to Toronto – On the flight home, I heard one of the flight attendants say to my seatmate (who hadn’t eaten the hot meal) that he shouldn’t worry, because there would be pizza later. I thought that was kind of bizarre, and just assumed she was joking. Well, it was no joke, and after a mid-flight snack of chocolate chip shortbread cookies and tea or coffee, they came around with carts of pizza. It came in a little cardboard box, and it was an oval of dough covered in sauce and “4 cheeses”. There was also salami pizza available but I passed on that choice. The aroma of hot cardboard competed with the scent of the molten cheese, but despite all that it was edible. Just very weird. I never expected to eat pizza on an airplane before.
Kithera/Athens
There are a few meals I want to remember from Kithera and Athens.
The first couple nights in Athens, we ate in the Plaka, which is the area of shops and restaurants in the streets around the Acropolis. There are lots of touristy places, but there are also nice little cafes that Athenians like to go to that serve more authentic food. There is very little division between people space and car space, and the cafes aggressively colonise all free sidewalk and pavement for their outdoor eating areas. It’s really neat, because there is much more integration between all these separate parts. You walk through areas where people are dining, slip like a school of fish by cars slowly progressing down the thouroughfares, pause a moment to check out a storefront display, and all around you, hundreds of people are doing the same thing.
The first night in Athens, Sach, James and I got takeaway gyros from a little restaurant on the corner of two streets. We didn’t want to sit in the cafe area, so we ducked around to a little side alley and sat on someone’s front stoop to eat supper. As soon as we sat down, the local feral cats and kittens came out to see if we had any tidbits for them. A man drove up on a blue scooter and briefly played with a grey tabby cat, who didn’t want any part of that and hissed at him. He left, only to reappear as he opened the shutters of the grocery store across the alleyway from us (Since it is so hot during the day, stores close for siesta in the afternoon, and reopen in the late afternoon and stay open until pretty late at night). He then looked out the window at the grey cat, who meowed at him, and he talked to her for a while. She knew her cue, and jumped up into the window. He got out a square of cardboard, and opened her a tin of food. The kittens around us started getting frantic, because they knew there was food up there but they couldn’t jump the 4+ feet to get it. One little black and white kitten was
amazing. It climbed up on the man’s scooter, crept out to the end of one of the handlebar grips, and then leapt through an iron grate, using a tiny second leap from the grate to propel itself the 2 feet up through the window onto the counter of the shop. The grocer opened a second can of food in honour of the event.
The Rainy Meal
Our last night in Athens, we decided to eat someplace more authentic. While you circulate through the Plaka, the waiters at the various cafes importune you to come eat with them. We cruised around, looking for cafes where it looked like local Athenians were having pre-dinner drinks (we were out around 8:30 – pretty early for supper). One cafe we found was tucked up beside a walled monument garden with lemon and orange trees.
We ordered a selection of starters, including octopus, dolmathas, taramasalada, saganaki, tzatziki, battered eggplant and zucchini, horiatiki, and I think there was more even. We ate for a very long time, and everything was very good. Very fresh ingredients, that rely on the flavours of the components to shine through instead of heavy spices masking everything. We were situated for some prime people watching, and during the course of the meal, we saw the same tourist group a couple times. After declining to come and eat the first two times, they decided to stay on their third pass through. They didn’t want feta on their horiatiki, and they were really loud. Really really loud. It started to rain midway through the meal, and it was really funny to watch how the restaurant dealt with such an event. Large canvas umbrellas were stacked across the street by the main kitchen, and they were brought out and set up with alacrity. We weren’t in any particular rush, so we just sat and listened to the rain drumming on the canvas and periodically repositioned wineglasses to catch errant fountains of water from the corners of the umbrellas. It was a good evening.
Kithera Interlude
Twice I went to Kithera for the day. Tuesdays were a half-day, and Wednesdays the day off, and since there was a morning ferry to Kithera that returned later in the evening, it was a good chance to get off Antikythera, restock essentials, and bring home treats. Also to eat anything one couldn’t get on Antikythera!
Memorable things I crammed into my mouth on Kithera:
Frappe - James talked a lot about frappes before we left for Greece. It’s basically iced coffee, with a thick layer of foam on top. You can get it highly sweetened, medium sweet, and unsweetened. They are deceptively easy to drink, and I had my first one (apart from a taste of James’ on the ferry on the way to the island) at a little cafe by the port of Diakofti while we were waiting for the ferry to arrive (it was 2 hours late). Any time I had one of these I was completely wired, enough that I forcibly had to stop myself from fidgeting or running around to burn off excess energy. It is probably a really good thing that these aren’t easily accessible here at home or else I think I would be in trouble.
Fish - Libby and I were really surprised that fish was so scarce on the island. We just assumed that since it was an island that fish would be everywhere. Well, let me qualify that, fish was everywhere, it was canned tuna. Fresh fish was notably absent. When I went with James, Ismene and Nikoletta to Kithera, one of the things we ordered was small whole fish that had been roasted whole and seasoned with lemon, thyme and salt. Simply prepared, but they were so fresh that they stood out as a taste to remember.
Octopus - I liked this even more than kalamari. It was roasted and crisp on the outside, and tender and sweet on the inside, and was served with olive oil and lemon. James told me they have to beat the octopus on rocks for an hour or so to tenderise it, otherwise it is so tough as to be inedible. Poor octopus, but you tasted really good.
Fresh figs - We bought figs at a little grocery store that was kind of reminiscent of a Tardis because it definitely was larger on the inside than it looked from the outside. This store had everything. I hadn’t had a fresh fig in about 3 years, so the one I ate in the parking lot by the Jeep was lovely. It was sunny and warm, we had a couple hours to kill, a mission to accomplish, and a whole island in front of us.
The Dream of Food
I mentioned how at the beginning of the trip, Sach and I were a little skeptical about what James was telling us about how we would begin to think of food. This was of course because we had pretty much free choice at that time about the food we wanted. I feel haven’t really managed to convey why thinking, eating and talking about other foods became so important. Part of it was definitely due to the routine. A typical day’s meals consisted of breakfast, then a mid-morning break, lunch, maybe a second break, afternoon grazing/treats/etc. and then supper. I think the routine and the relatively narrow diet we ate on the island took a while to sneak up on us. At no point did I feel like saying “oh, not dolmathas AGAIN!” (although I did hear that more than once) at lunch, because, well, lunch always had dolmathas, and hey, I’m hungry! Even though the physical needs were met, mentally we did begin to miss the ‘exotic’ tastes and textures.
So while we were eating perfectly acceptable food, we would begin to mentally transmute that food by talking about other food. Shangri-La, Cockaigne food. So at supper one night, as we steadily worked our way through spaghetti with red sauce and cheese, when the question was dropped (”If you could be eating anything in the world right now, what would it be?”), and then hearing Olly talk about his Beef Wellington, or Sach his tofu, or Libby her Chinese food, it all clicked. We really were living in the Dream of Food.