Clean Monday - Καθαρή Δευτέρα

Today in Greece, we celebrate what is called Καθαρή Δευτέρα (pronouned kathari deftera). Also known as Clean Monday and Ash Monday, it marks the first day of the Christian Orthodox lent. This traditional day is a bank holiday in Greece and so families are able to gather together and feast upon a great meat-free meal.
Only on this day of the year a special type of bread is baked and sold by the vast number of bakeries in Greece. It is called 'lagana', and is simply a large loaf of bread which contains no yeast and so is very thin and has sesame seeds sprinkled over the top. Every year my dad and I would go to the bakery early in the morning and get 10 of these. They would be piled up in large baskets, and you could ask for softer ones or ones which had been baked for longer and so were a lot crispier. They would then wrap them in paper and place them in a bag for you. Without fail, on the way home my dad and I would always break off a few chunks of the warm, crusty bread to nibble on till we got home.
Another tradition which children and adults of all ages engage in on this day is kite flying. People set out little stalls all along the streets and pavements and sell kites of all different colours and patterns. You begin to see kites in the sky from about miday and as it gets later you can count hundreds of them.

The food menu on this holy day is endless. My grandmother (and all other women of the family) spend days preparing for this glorious feast. The dishes you typically see served on this day include:
-taramosalata - a dip made from fish roe
-φάβα (fava) - a dip made from split peas
-γίγαντες - broad beans with a tomato sauce baked in the oven
- fish
- squid and octopus
all obviously accompanied by the lagana bread.

Then usually for desert there are a number of things to choose from, as in the Greek culuture if you are visiting someone you will always take something with you. So on this day all the guests tend to bring a desert they have bought from one of the hundreds of pastry shops (zaharoplastia-ζαχαροπλαστία) dotted around.
However the traditional desert for this day is χαλβά, halva. This is a sweet, dense confection. There are two types, the most common one is made from tahini (sesame paste) whereas as the other (χαλβά φαρσάλων) is slightly more gelatinous and is made from semolina and flour. Other ingredients are added such as pistachios or almonds. The most common type comes in different flavours as well, you can get plain, vanilla or chocolate or a mix. My personal favourite is the vanilla halva with almonds.
Over all this is a great day for everyone. Friends and families come together and celebrate the start of lent with a great meal along with a great atmosphere.

Cream Tea

Last weekend a couple of my closest friends and I met up and spent a lovely weekend together at my friend's apartment in Earls Court. We woke up on Saturday morning and thought it would be a great idea to walk to the Kensington Palace Gardens. We had a 'hearty' breakfast of cereal and set off for the day.
The weather wasn't great but every now and then we did get a few lovely, golden rays of sun warming our cold skin. The grounds of the palace were amazing, all lush and green. With people out for their morning jog and families walking their dogs and pushing their babies around in their prams.

We had been walking around for a couple of hours when we decided we had had enough of the cold and decided to find somewhere for a drink. One of my friends had mentioned earlier that there was a tea room somewhere on the grounds, so we headed there.

We reached our destination and were guided through the tea room to a table for four. The tea room was amazing. All pristine and white inside. Each table had a little plant pot in the centre which appeared to be a mini orange tree, wisely chosen after the name of the tea room, 'The Orangery'. As the hostess guided us to our table we passed the centre piece of the room. An array of cakes and scones were neatly presented on a large table. There was a carrot cake, coffee and walnut cake, a lemon loaf cake, fruit scones, cheese scones, an Orangery cake, a tart of some sort and a selection of cupcakes. They all looked mouth-wateringly good.

We all decided to treat ourselves and go the whole hog; a scone with clotted cream and strawberry jam, one of my friends was the exception and ordered a piece of carrot cake (but later ate half of my scone as well). The scones were light and fluffy, and tasted absolutely divine with the rich, velvety cream and ruby red jam. Simply amazing!

I would suggest anyone go there if they are out in London and want to treat them selves to a little guilty pleasure.

I have realised that in blog entry that I put up about the Apple pie, there was a bit too much going on in the recipe instructions and found that there's too much unnecessary information . So in order to make this recipe easier to follow I have simplified it down for you.

Apple Pie

For the pastry:
425g
1/2 tsp salt
100g sugar
250g unsalted butter
1 egg
2 yolk
For the filling:
100g sultanas
1/2 an orange, juice only
1 tbsp of semolina
8 large apples
100g sugar
4 tbsp cinammon
1 egg

Dish: a high sided 20 cm spring form cake tin or a 23 cm shallow pie dish

1) Place the sultanas into a bowl with the orange juice to let them soak.
2)To make the pastry:
place all the pastry ingredients (apart from the eggs) into a food processor and blend until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs.
3) Gradually add the egg and egg yolks and blend well until it comes together to form a ball. Take the pastry out and wrap with cling film. Place in the fridge for 30 minutes.
4) Grease your tin and roll out 2/3 of the pastry on a floured surface into a rough circle. Carefully lift up your pastry and place it into the greased tin . Gently press the pastry into all the corners of the tin, or all the dips of the pie dish.
5) Prick the base a few times with a fork.
6) Place a large sheet of baking paper over the pastry and fill it with baking beans or just use any rice or dried beans you have lying around.
7) Bake the pastry at 180C for about 15 minutes and then remove it from the oven, take out the beans and baking paper and place back into the oven for a further 5 minutes. Once it's ready take it out and leave it to cool.
8) For the filling:
you want to peel, core and finely slice the apples. In a separate bowl mix the sugar and the cinammon together. Before you start placing all the remaining ingredients into the dish lightly sprinkle the semolina flour over the bottom of the pastry.
9) Place a layer of the apples onto the base of the pastry case and then sprinkle over some of the cinammony sugar mixture and scatter a few of the soaked sultanas over as well. You want to repeat this layering process until you fill the dish. If you have any sugar or sultanas remaining just sprinkle them over the top of all the layers.
10) Beat the egg and brush some onto the rim of the pastry case, this will make sure the pastry lid sticks to the rest of the pastry.
11) Roll out the remaining pastry into a circle and place on top of the pie. To seal the lid, simply take a fork and crimp the edges. If you find that there is a lot of excess pastry hanging over the side of the dish simply cut of the excess pieces.
12) With a knife make a small hole in the centre of the lid to allow any steam to escape. Then brush the lid with the remaining beaten egg.
13) Bake at 170C for 35-40 minutes until golden brown.

Serve with warm or cold, accompanied by ice cream, warm custard or cream.

Gingerbread House

In an earlier blog, I had mentioned that I was going to build a Gingerbread House for Christmas. It took me two gruelling days during the holidays but I managed to pull through and construct an amazing 'humble' abode.
I had made one for Christmas 2008, but this time I was aiming even higher. I wanted a bigger, better and brighter house! So I made a much larger template for the walls and roof, used way more sweets, and for the 'cement' (keeping all the walls together) I used a concoction of egg white and icing sugar instead of your normal icing sugar and water mix.

Off course it wouldn't have been right if something didn't manage to go wrong. It begin as I was trying to patiently stick the walls and roof together. I had to pipe some of the 'cement' onto one wall at a time but found that I could use glass tumblers to keep the walls upright until they dried. So after doing this four times and using 8 large glasses( one on each side of the walls), I moved on to tackle the roof. Half an hour later, I had managed to stick the 2 remaining slabs of gingerbread biscuit onto the top, leading to the completion of the foundations of my house.

As I sank into the kitchen chair, admiring my house, I moved the board it had been assembled on to see what it looked like from all angles. "This seems really heavy" I thought, I suddenly looked through the space of the little door and could see something reflecting back at me. I realised that I had forgotten about the support system. I had stupidly managed to 'brick' in 4 large and heavy glasses!
I had come too far to give up now (after spending about 6 hours, making the dough, rolling it out, baking the biscuits and assembling all the pieces). I simply had to remove the roof and get the glasses out of my house and then just glue it back together, and that's what I did. Finally I was able to sit down and relax thinking that tomorrow my artistic skills would be put to test as I decorated the outside of the house.

I can proudly say that this year's house was better than last year's, and although it was sad to have to demolish it ( on the day that I left home to go back to England) the joy of eating the walls and roof made it all worth it!

Sweet as Apple Pie

I have always wanted to make a apple pie simply because it would just be wonderful to open the oven and have that warm smell of cinammon and apples waft out into the kitchen. I think another reason why for ages I have wanted to make this pie is because I vividly remember watching the scene in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs where Snow White is making one herself and the birds come along and help her crimp the edges by stepping on them with their tiny feet.

So last year, it was the end of the summer and I noticed we had a couple of these particular apples lying about which none of us really liked. I'm always trying to be resourceful with what I bake and try to use up ingredients that are just lying about untouched. So this was a great opportunity to make my apple pie.
I went through about a thousand recipes before I selected a particular one. When I begin looking for a recipe I usually know what I want out of it, for example in this case I didn't want anything fancy, just a simple shortcrust pastry, apples and a few spices. I also wanted an apple pie that would keep its shape and wouldn't have to be served from its dish, I wanted to be able to present it nicely on a plate out of its baking tray.

So I chose the following recipe and added a few tweaks of my own.

Apple Pie

For the pastry:
425g
1/2 tsp salt
100g sugar
250g unsalted butter
1 egg
2 yolk
For the filling:
100g sultanas
1/2 an orange, juice only
1 tbsp of semolina
8 large apples
100g sugar
4 tbsp cinammon
1 egg

The original recipe called for a high sided 20 cm spring form cake tine, but I used a 23 cm shallow pie dish and it worked out fine for me, so you can use whatever you have.

1) Begin by placing the sultanas into a bowl with the orange juice to let them soak, this should give them enough time to absorb some of the liquid to swell and plump up.
2)To make the pastry place all the pastry ingredients (apart from the eggs) into a food processor and blend until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs.
3) Gradually add the egg and egg yolks to the mixture and blend well until it comes together to form a ball. Take the pastry out and bring it together with your hands. Then wrap with cling film and place in the fridge for 30 minutes.
(When recipes call for placing pastry or dough into the fridge I sometimes place it into the freezer just because I feel that the freezer will do what the fridge would for the pastry but in half the time. I don't really know if that's the right thing to do but it always seems to work for me)
4) Grease your tin and roll out 2/3 of the pastry on a floured surface ( making sure to use enough flour to prevent the pastry from sticking) into a rough circle. Then carefully lift up your pastry and place it into the greased tin (don't worry if the pastry falls apart slightly all you need to do is a bit of patchwork and just try and press the little pieces together). Gently press the pastry into all the corners of the tin, or all the dips of the pie dish.
5) Once the pastry is nicely lining the tin prick the base a few times with a fork.
6) Place a large sheet of baking paper over the pastry and fill it with baking beans or if you don't have any, use any rice or dried beans you have lying around (this process is called 'blind baking' the pastry).
7) Bake the pastry at 180C for about 15 minutes and then remove it from the oven, take out the beans and baking paper and place back into the oven for a further 5 minutes. Don't worry you will be able to tell if it's cooked or not as it will be dark in patches if still not perfectly cooked through. If it's still not completely cooked just place it back in the oven for a few more minutes, keeping an eye on it. Once it's ready take it out and leave it to cool.
8) For the filling, you want to peel core and finely slice the apples and in a separate bowl mix the sugar and the cinammon together. Before you start placing all the remaining ingredients into the dish lightly sprinkle the semolina flour over the bottom of the pastry to ensure that any juices from the apples don't' make the pastry soggy.
9) Place a layer of the apples onto the base of the pastry case and then sprinkle over some of the cinammony sugar mixture and scatter a few of the soaked sultanas over as well. You want to repeat this layering process until you fill the dish. If you have any sugar or sultanas remaining just sprinkle them over the top of all the layers.
10) Beat the egg and brush some onto the rim of the pastry case, this will make sure the pastry lid sticks to the rest of the pastry.
11) Roll out the remaining pastry into a circle and place on top of the pie. To seal the lid, simple take a fork ( or if there are any kind birds around to do it for you) and crimp the edges. If you find that there is a lot of excess pastry hanging over the side of the dish simply cut of the excess pieces using some scissors or a knife.
12) With a knife make a small hole (about the diameter of your thumb) in the centre of the lid to allow any steam to escape. Then brush the lid with the remaining beaten egg.
13) Bake at 170C for 35-40 minutes until golden brown.

The best way to serve this in my opinion is with some good vanilla ice cream, but I know that most people's topping of choice would be custard or even clotted cream. You can serve it hot, immediately from the over, but I personally preferred it when it had completely cooled.

Enjoy!

Greek honey biscuits - Melomakarona

Melomakarona are a Greek sort of biscuit which are traditionally made for the Christmas period. They are typically made with flour, olive oil, semolina, sugar, brandy and then with spices such as cinammon, cloves and oranges.
Every year the women of the family set out to make these biscuits and then in typical Greek fashion offer them to visitors. So every Christmas we would go around visiting neighbours and relatives and end up coming home with plates and boxes full of them. However, everyone's recipe is slightly different. Some add more spices and others add less and some may even add walnuts to the biscuit mixture. Which means that every family pretty much has their own unique recipe for these amazing biscuits.

For the Christmas period there are three traditional types of sweets that they make in Greece. These are the melomakarona, kourabiedes and diples. Kourabiedes are crescent shaped biscuits which are made with rose water, ground almonds, sugar and butter and are topped off with heavy mounds of icing sugar. If I were to compare them to any other biscuit I would say that they are most similar to the english shortbread or butter biscuits, in the sense that they delicately melt in your mouth. Diples are deep fried strips of a specific type of pastry which are then topped off with drizzles of honey or a sugar syrup and then sprinkled with crushed walnuts.
My grandmother has always made diples and kourabiedes however my sweet of choice during the christmas period are these melomakarona. So after many years of eating these honey biscuits given to us by neighbours and friends, or given to us as presents, bought from one of the many sweet shops (or as they are called in greece, zacharoplastia) that make thousands upon thousands of these over the seasonal holiday. We decided, a couple of years ago that we would find a recipe and make our own.

On searching through my grandmother's recipe books we found several recipes for the biscuits but decided to settle on one which was labelled 'Anna's Melomakarona' (Anna being an old relative of ours). The recipe called for vegetable oil, fine semolina, sugar, zest and juice of a couple of oranges, cinammon, cloves and brandy. The ingredient list also included ashes, which were commonly used in many greek recipes in the past however we decided to omit this specific ingredient. Once the biscuits have baked in the oven you then immediatly place them into a deep dish and using a ladel, pour over a honey sugar syrup that has been boiling away as the biscuits were cooking. The biscuits are then left, to seep, in the syrup for a couple of minutes and then turned over on the other side in order for the syrup to reach the top of the biscuits as well.

After they have turned a wonderful golden brown colour they are taken out of the dish and placed onto a tray where they are then sprinkled with a mixture of crushed walnuts and cinammon, just enough of the spice to give it a wonderful smell.
These honey biscuits are my absolute favourites during Christmas and sadly they are not made during any other time of the year. But that's why they're so special when you do actually have them, as you have been waiting for a whole year to be able to enjoy them.

New Year...New Entries

I feel I may have let you, the few people that read my blog, down. Although I had set out to be dedicated to this blog, I have realised that it is very hard balancing my time between university work and my free time.
I have been incredibly busy these last few weeks with revising for exams and all. However, today I finished my last exam which means I can begin writing more for this blog.
In the last 3 weeks I have not been able to cook myself a proper, decent meal and instead I have been living off tinned tuna fish and omelettes. So, my first blog entry of 2010 will be about an amazing chutney recipe that my dad and I came across during the Christmas holidays. We were trying to find a way we could use up some dried figs, which were from figs collected in August off our own fig tree. They seemed to be a lot less popular than we had expected and so were trying to find a way to, simply put, get rid of them.
While searching our recipe books and looking through recipe websites, we found that there are not that many recipes that ask for dried figs. However we suddenly came across a chutney recipe which although its main ingredient was apples, it did actually include dried figs in its ingredients list.
We had never made a chutney before, marmalades, yes! but not chutnies! So we set out quite apprehensivly: chopped up all the ingredients, boiled them up with some sugar, and were extremely pleasantly suprised with the results! This chuntey recipe was both simple and easy to follow, even for chutney virgins like us. The sultanas and dried figs gave it an amazing amber colour but also gave it a lovely texture. It was not as smooth and baby-food like as other chutneys, but rather had oompf and a zinginess to it. The cayenne pepper also gave it warmth and heat. Overall this chutney was absolutly amazing and we found that it worked best with cheeses rather than cold meats. I, as well as other members of our family who tried the chutney on Christmas day, loved it so much that we made another batch of it in the last few days of the holidays. We gave one large jar to my grandmother, my parents kept another jar and I brought a small jar back to university with me. I have been greedily getting through it, by topping off a piece of cheddar cheese on an oat cracker with a spoonful of this amazing chutney.

Apple, Dried Fig and Apricot Chutney

5 apples
3/4 cup dried apricots
3/4 cup dried figs
1/2 cup raisins
4 cloves of garlic
2 by 1 inch cube of ginger
1 3/4 cup of sugar
1 1/2 white vinegar
2 tsp salt
1 tsp cayenne pepper

1) Peel, core and chop the apples into small pieces, depending on how fine or chunky you want your chutney. Chop the dried figs and apricots into pieces as large as thoughs of the apples and add them along with the raisins, to a medium sized pan.
2) Mince the garlic, grate the ginger and add them to the pan.
3) Then add the vinegar, sugar, salt and cayenne pepper and give the mixture a good stir.
4) Bring the mixture to a boil and then turn the heat down to medium-low heat for about 40 minutes, until it reaches a thick consistency similar to jam.
5) Stir the mixture every now and then, to make sure it doesn't stick to the bottom of the pan.
6) Once it's ready, let it cool completely in the pan before pouring into jars.

This recipe should get you about 3 small jars.