Slower Food

Fraudulent May is usually thus accused because May weather pretends to be summer but is in fact winter wearing a yellow shirt. My May weather was much better, as I spent the month in sunny Crete. However, this has meant that May has fallen off the calender as far as this site is concerned.

This does not mean that I haven't been thinking about food. Far from it. I've been eating so much olive oil infused fare that I've probably gained several pounds. The food in Crete was amazing. While, I've long recognised the importance of the Slow Food movement in terms of sustaining small producers, I'm glad to discover that there are places where these kinds of organisations are unnecessary. In Crete, taverna owners also own fields where their vegetables are grown, their lamb is raised and rabbits are hunted.

The fish restaurant we frequented was run by a family whose son was a fisherman. The menu varied each day depending on his catch. Instead of the names of fish being presented on a blackboard, customers were invited into the kitchen to look at a the tray of today's offerings (kept in the fridge) and asked to choose exactly which fish it was that they wanted to try. The little red mullet, dipped in flour and fried whole, were so crispy and tasty that you could eat everything (including the fins) except for the head and back-bone.

My mother's favorite taverna George's and Georgia's (where she was allowed one day to roll dolmades in the kitchen), served rich and cinnamony rabbit stew, sweet and tender pork and wonderfully oily stuffed vegetables. (My skin feels so much better after my two weeks away. I can't decide if it was the olive oil, the sea or the weather that made the difference.) On our last day, we had the treat of perfectly ripe apricots fresh from Georgia's tree.

I'm determined to include more cinnamon in savoury dishes from now on and I'm less afraid of the amount of oil that a spongy aubergine is able to absorb. (I'm sure that is what Demeter, the Greek god of agriculture, made them for.) I hope also that I'll be able to expand my range of green vegetables. The field greens (Horta) which varied from taverna to taverna looked sometimes like wild spinach and sometimes like dandelion stems. I just hope that I can find some as interesting as those served in lemon juice at the Fenari Taverna.