Corfu
Vidos Island Corfu
Just beyond shouting distance of Corfu Town is the wooded tiny island of Vidos. Ferries plough pass by all day, all year, and from the boats you can see nothing of the tee-pee scout camps that lurk in the shade, elderly mattresses plonked haphardly onto camp beds; or the crumbling old Governor’s residence , stuffed full of scout paraphanalia. In summer months the island is also home to Corfu Town’s senior citizens who adjourn here for the cooler temperatures. All in all the island has a slightly down at heel municipal air. Read the rest of this entry »
Greek Greens and Skorthalia
The temporary vegetable market in Corfu Town has been settled into its tented accommodation for several years now. The new, EU approved, Health and Safety compliant sheds stand on the original site, 98% completed; and the only thing stopping everyone moving back are the rates the council want to impose. It’s the same scenario all over Europe. The local market gardeners are squeezed out and all you have left are the importers, the grocers selling hydroponically grown tomatoes from Holland.
Not all the traders have succumbed to standardised vegetables: Eleni and her daughter Irena, for example, sell produce from Pelekas in the centre of the island. I was about to leave the market without buying anything, but Eleni hustled me into a conversation (conversation is too grand a word for what happened, I keep inadvertently speaking Italian not Greek so she tried her version and between us confusion reigned) and that is how I had my first encounter with vletra. I am not sure that is how you spell it. It’s a type of horta, wild green, except that it isn’t often found in the wild, but volunteers in the veg patch. And if you know anything more about it, please let me know!
Anyway, Eleni’s method of serving vletra – or spinach when it comes to the rest of us – is to blanch the leaves, drain thoroughly, and then dress them in olive oil and lemon. So far, so standard; but she also likes to boil whole little courgettes and whole new potatoes and serve these three vegetables with skorthalia.
Now the trick with skorthalia is to remember it is a garlic and potato dip; not mashed potato flavoured with garlic. It is best freshly made and still tepid. I think making the mixture with still-hot potatoes cuts the sharpness of the raw garlic, but still allows a lovely warming pungency.
Eleni’s idea of serving this with courgettes is excellent – I halved and blanched 10 cm sized ones for 2 minutes so they still had a bit of bite and could plough through the dip without breaking.
8-10 cloves garlic, depending on size, skinned
1 teaspoon sea salt
150ml extra virgin olive oil
1kg potatoes, peeled and cubed
juice of one lemon
Crush the garlic with the salt to create a mush. Whisk this puree with the olive oil to make an emulsion. Boil the potatoes until tender, drain thoroughly, and blitz in a food processor, the engine running while you pour in the oil followed by the lemon juice – a bit like making mayonnaise. Add a little more oil if necessary and stop mixing when you have a smooth puree the consistency of hummus. Taste for garlicyness – add more if you fancy it!
This amount makes a good bowl full, serving 4 people as a side dish or lots more as a dip.
Another variation, a preference of Nikos Lekkas the local accountant, is to add 2 slices of 3 day old bread, crumbed, to the potatoes in the food processor. He adds even more garlic and treats himself every Friday so that his breath has two days to recover before meeting clients on Monday. Needless to say he loves it.
Meatball variations
Summer in the city: it’s a humid, grime-filled cacophony. The din from road and rail works in Borough have been joined by the TV blare of football matches and thumping music from countless open windows. Except for the DJs next door, whose music and fag smoke somehow finds it’s way through factory-thick walls.
It’s a long way from a tiny sandy cove in Corfu and the barbeque we enjoyed a couple of weeks ago. Read the rest of this entry »
Heavenly Greek Olive Oil
‘I’m not going again, it’s FAR too expensive!’, said Alex Ashcroft thereby leaving her husband Dave to lead an expedition to an olive oil producing nunnery. Less redoubtable men may have gone fishing faced with this prospect, but then Dave’s previous career incarnations as heavy metal rock guitarist and Cornish dairy farmer have given him a thick hide and a ‘I’ve survived worse than this’ gleam in his eye.
The Kamarela monastery at Agios Douloi – a small inland village in north Corfu – has gained a reputation for its organic, extra virgin olive oil ‘made in the Italian style’; natch I had to investigate. By the time Dave found the time to lead the pilgrimage, there was a whole posse of women wanting Holy Oil to make Divine salad dressing. Read the rest of this entry »
Greek Scrambled Eggs
Two weeks in Corfu without my father: the unimaginable is happening anyway. His ashes are currently in the drinks cupboard, the family like the idea he has good spirits for company. Just below the garden wall is a young walnut tree, next to where the old footpath to the sea zig zags across the hillside. It has the most marvellous views and the plan is to bury his ashes there, and build a stone bench so family – and passers-by – can spend time with their memories of him while contemplating myriad distant blues. Read the rest of this entry »
Mediterranean Spring Vegetable Stew
I am in the habit of an early morning cup of tea, drunk in bed while I consider my day. And I am particularly lucky at home in Italy because this is the view from my bed (thanks to door length windows). At this time of year the snow hasn’t yet melted off the Sibillini Mountains but the countryside has taken on the sappy greenness of la primavera. Spring.
Spring is the Goldilocks time of year: neither too hot, nor too cold, but just so; but porridge is not on the menu. Instead the markets are full of broad beans, asparagus, new potatoes and several different types of artichokes. All around the Mediterranean it’s the same produce but myriad regional ways to dish them up. And one of my favourite dishes is a spring vegetable stew, best served tepid, from Corfu.
The Greek habit is to stew vegetables very slowly in large quantities of olive oil – so add as much as you dare, or as little as you think prudent. If the broad bean pods are too big to cook whole – then shell them; if you are feeling really keen, skin the beans as it makes the finished dish look much prettier. If you are doing this, add the beans 20 minutes before the end of cooking.
This recipe comes from Vassiliki Parginos and it serves 4 – 6 people.
300ml olive oil
1 onion, sliced
2 heads fresh garlic, peeled and sliced
18 tiny new potoatoes, washed, not peeled, or 9 larger ones halved
18 artichokes, golf ball size, trimmed of outer tough leaves
1kg baby broad beans, or 400g podded beans
500ml water
zest of 1 unwaxed lemon
juice of 2 lemons
handful of fresh fennel herb, chopped finely
1 teaspoon rigani (dried oregano), optional
salt
500ml water
handful of parsley, chopped, to serve
Heat the oil gently in a casserole, then sauté the onion and garlic until soft. This will take about 5 minutes. Add the rest of the vegetables, the lemon zest and the juice of one of the lemons, the fennel and the rigani if you are using it. Add a teaspoon of salt followed by the water and give everything a good stir.
Cover and leave to simmer over a very gentle heat for about an hour, until you can plunge a knife tip easily into the artichokes.
Leave to cool and add more lemon juice if you think it needs it.
Scatter the parsley and serve with crusty bread.
Corfiot Farmer Wants a Wife
When lovely Claudia from The Invisible Kitchen exclaimed ‘I met this gorgeous farmer who’s trying to save the local pig from extinction. He wants people to adopt a sow’ – I had to know more! And was on the phone immediately.
Nikos turned out to be charming but a big vague, he thought there may be a film crew coming to visit at the same time. Well that’s okay my husband’s in TV, I know how to tiptoe over sound leads and keep well out the way; I took his hesitation as a yes, and rattled off down the mountainside.
Roggia Farm is 3 miles and a world away from the Corfiot tourist belt: the dirt track takes you through an elderly olive grove, and past a couple of orchid spiked meadows before you reach the farm complex consisting of the main family house plus a couple of houses for rent. The cool dude TV director from Athens was unloading his camera as I got there.
Chrysomallis Taverna
There’s always a dilemma for me about recommending places – would popularity ruin them? The taverna Chrysomallis is one example. It’s been around for ever, and is bang slap on the main tourist drag at the Liston end of Nikos Theotoki Street in Corfu Town; yet it remains happily oblivious to the milling throngs of visitors, most of whom don’t notice the unprepossessing front amidst the brightly lit clothes and jewellery shops. Read the rest of this entry »
Vasso’s Tsigarelli recipe
Thirty five years ago the notion of having a home Somewhere Abroad was thought possibly bonkers and definitely risky. But my parents, homesick for sunshine and unused to suburban England, took the plunge and found a house perched high above the beaches in Corfu. It’s always great coming home. Our early Spring ritual is: get out the car and breathe deeply while admiring the view; walk round the garden checking what plants have died over the winter; investigate the curtain size cobwebs indoors – and then decide it all can wait and drive up the road to have lunch at O Foros in Ano Perithia, run by Tomas and Vasso Siriotis.
Rick Stein recently featured them in his Mediterranean Escapes, which is great for them, but means the rest of us who have known and loved them for years sometimes grumble a bit at peak tourist times. Vasso is the cook; her son Spiro and his girlfriend Francesca are front of house to help Tomas, who this year is into self-sufficiency and rearing their own meat and vegetables. Read the rest of this entry »
