Cooking with Eleni

As my friends and family know, I am a terrible cook and dislike spending time in the kitchen.  I have never tried to cook Greek food -- much as I like it -- because it takes a lot of time and uses a lot of oil, more than I am accustomed to consuming.  Thus, it is strange that I am now, in Lesbos, taking Greek cooking lessons.  Let me explain how this all came about.

Eggplants

My neighbors, Nikos and Eleni Yilaris, have a small farm just below my veranda.  They are in their 80s and come out every morning around 7 a.m., before it gets too hot, to attend to their plants and animals.  They always bring me gifts from the farm -- fruit, eggs, vegetables.  A few days ago, Eleni brought me two small eggplants.  I had to admit that I had no idea how to cook them.  

Eleni immediately decided to give me a lesson.  We cut the eggplants into strange looking flowers with long thin petals, salted them, and cooked them a long time in olive oil.  They were delicious.  Even better for me was our gossip about the village, Greek customs, and the life of a Greek farmer.

Zucchini

Today was my second cooking lesson -- zucchini, which has a much nicer name in Greek, kolokithakia.  We washed and scraped the zucchini a bit, cut them into slices, salted them, and put them in the refrigerator for a half hour to get them thoroughly saturated with salt.  People on low salt diets should definitely skip this step, although the salt adds a lot to the flavor.  Then we floured each slice of zucchini on both sides.  Then the SECRET!  We dipped the floured slices in a bit of water which keeps the zucchini from burning.  We cooked the slices in very hot olive oil for what seemed to be ten minutes for the first side, five minutes for the second.

The zucchini were simply delicious.  After the slices cooled, I put them in a "tupper," which is Greek for a plastic container.  I explained to Eleni the humor to Americans of calling it a "tupper," but I don't think she got the joke.  My next lesson will be skordalia.  This is a mix of potato and garlic that Greeks originated to compensate for the taste of a bland fish called galleos.  They got to like their skordalia so much, they now eat it on beets and eggplant.  Greece would be an easy place to become a vegetarian except that you'd have to give up lamb.

Sex Roles

During today's lesson, Eleni and I had a discussion about sex roles.  I explained that, as a feminist, I believed men should help cook and women should be able to hang out at the cafeneion.  Eleni told me that when her sisters from Australia came to Greece, their husbands often helped out around the house. 

I asked her if her husband Nikos helped in the kitchen and she looked at me with scorn.  She didn't want him in her kitchen and she didn't want to go to the cafeneion.  Feminism is hard to sell retroactively.  I'm not even going to try.  Still, I'm glad the younger generation of Greek women is hitting the bars, even though they rarely demand that their partners help out in the kitchen.

I am thoroughly enjoying my cooking lessons, as well as the the results.  Home-cooked Greek food is much better than taverna food, but even more, the conversation around the stove is teaching me a great deal about my village.