Greek delights: eating peinirli in Volos

Imagine something that is very much like my mushroom pie, just a lot bigger and stuffed with cheese instead of mushrooms. Now heat it up, cut it half-open, so you've got a pocket. Fill it with French fries and your favourite ketchup or yogurt sauce. Got that?

Well done! You've just imagined a Greek fast-food called peinirli. It looks like this:


A peinirli from "Rainbow", Volos

Peinirli is what my friend Anna and I had for a snack in the port town Volos one afternoon just over half a year ago. Although the main reason for my Greek trip last June was a wedding on Santorini, I had arrived a few days in advance in order to visit my Edinburgh friend Anna and her young family. When I asked Anna to introduce me to something that is typical to this specific Greek town, she took me to a popular peinirli joint, Rainbow.

Peinirly derives from a Turkish word 'peynirli', meaning 'cheesy', and came to Greece in early last century with the refugees from Asia Minor. Peinirli always has a cheese filling (usually a mixture of kefalograviera and kasseri cheese), but only the sky is a limit. You can add bacon, eggs, ham, minced meat or anything else you fancy into a peinirli. Whereas usually peinirli is an open boat-shaped yeast pastry with a filling (see here), then the Volos version is closed a la calzone, baked and then filled with stuff to order (above). Quite interesting - not something you'd eat every day, but a perfect snack after promenading on the seaside.

If you're wondering how come I write about something so summery in the midst of January, then let me tell you. It's snowing so heavily outside at the moment, that I could hardly see where I was going when I returned from lunch an hour ago. I thought it's a perfect opportunity to blog about something so distant and different and out of my ordinary to bring some warmth and sunny memories to my day :)

Rainbow
Iasonos 135
Tel. 35557
Volos, Pelios

Vacation memories: Dining on Santorini

I've already praised the breakfasts with wonderful views that I had a pleasure of enjoying on Santorini. But it wasn't just the breakfast that was noteworthy, the food in general was great. There was the wedding feast, of course, but I also had tasty Greek food in small restaurants on the island. I wish I had been able to eat at Selene (above), as its menu, focusing on local ingredients and modern takes on traditional dishes ('Favaballs stuffed with caper and tomato' and 'Baked mackerel with caperleaves and tomato wrapped in crepe of fava' especially tempted by tastebuds), but I guess I must wait for my professorship first :)

Still, there was great food to be had on the island. Here are some of the pictures I took.


Santorini at night, June 2006

You've probably all heard of Horiatiki, or the so-called Greek salad that appears under various disguises across the world (do you use lettuce as in an American Greek salad or not? Green or black olives? Red or yellow onions? etc.) Santorini salad is quite similar to its 'Greek' mother, but it uses local tomatinas, Chloro cheese, local capers and lettuce leaves.

We ate this fava in a small restaurant at the centre of Fira. Not bad, not bad at all, but my yellow split pea 'fava' tasted nicer (yellow split peas, as opposed to fava beans, are the closest substitute for famous fava lentils of Santorini). I bough a packet of real fava lentils, so I'll give this 'fava' dish another go soon and decide which version I like most:)

This roasted aubergine/eggplant dip, melitzanosalata, was wonderfully thick and creamy, with a strong smoky flavour. A clear winner in my eyes.

The famous tomatokeftedes or meatless tomato balls of Santorini. I remembered these from my previous trip, and was pleased to find them at the wedding table. I had also ordered tomatokeftedes at the restaurant on the previous night, but I really loved these plump and juicy specimens at the wedding.

Freshly squeezed watermelon juice, anyone? A truly refreshing treat after a substantial meal. If you fancy making your own, then check out Stevi's instructions. And just like you can enjoy fabulous views on Santorni in the morning, you can do that in the evening - the night-time photo was taken while sipping this watermelon drink.

Eestikeelsed retseptid:
Santorini läätsepüree
Santorini tomatikotletid
Kreeka pommusalat

Cafés with a view: three breakfasts on Santorini

I will write soon about my three days in Volos, Greece, but here are some pictures from Santorini. I spent 3 days and 2 nights on the island, where my friends Annemieke (Scottish) & Georgios (Greek) got married in a beautiful ceremony on Saturday night. Three days on the island also meant three breakfasts with gorgeous views in the capital, Fira. Now - this being Santorini - the views are always gorgeous, especially if you're eating on the Caldera side of the island. However, you do pay a premium for those vistas. While I'm sure we could have had a breakfast for a fraction of the price on the other side of the town, we were actually happy to splash out a bit for a the visual privilege. It's not every morning that I can sip my frappé while watching cruise ships, ferries and yachts passing by below.

In the interest of research, I had a coffee (cappuccino freddo on day 1 as featured on my new profile photo, frappe on days 2&3) and yogurt with fruit & honey for every breakfast.

Day 1, Friday: Café del Mar e Sol



Best - though priciest - breakfast of the three. The yogurt was thick and creamy, accompanied by lots of fresh fruit and a generous drizzling of honey. Exactly what a girl needs after floating on the sea for 12 hours.
Frappe €4.50, Cappucino freddo €6.00, Ice tea €4.50 Yogurt with fruit & honey €9.00

Day 2, Saturday: Café Ocean


Most disappointing - if cheapest - of the bunch. The fruit salad had obviously been made in advance (or maybe it was me having a particularly late breakfast?), and the bananas had become all mushy. Nice sprinkling of nuts though.
Frappe €3, Yogurt with fruit & honey €6

Day 3, Sunday (morning after the Greek wedding party): Hotel Enigma Outdoor Café



Though the yogurt only came with apples and bananas, these were freshly chopped and the breakfast was a very good value for money, especially considering that the café is part of the pretty expensive Enigma Club entreprise.
Frappe €3.50, Yogurt with fruit & honey €6.50

Now. I'm still not sure which view did I like best. Which one would you choose?

Café with a view: Akropolis in Plaka, Athens

This must be one of the nicest places to kill a few hours during lunchtime in Athens. The café is called 'Akropolis' (surprise, surprise:), and it's in the old district of Plaka. I had been in that café on my first night in Athens with my friend Spyros for some questionable Greek beer (sorry!) and some mezedes ('varieties', including dolmades, tzatziki, fried calamari, meatballs, filo cheese triangles, saganaki, tomatoes, mini sausages, and limp fries).

On Monday, my first full day in Greece, I had couple of hours free time between checking out of my hotel and catching the train to Volos. And however much I would have wanted to go and visit Akropolis again (I had already been there in 2002 and 2003), the high temperature (ca 35C), intensely bright sun and heavy rucksack meant that I decided against it. Instead, I found my way back to the same café - you take the metro to Monastiraki, then walk for 5 minutes along streets packed with tiny shops towards Plaka - and enjoyed the view of Akropolis from the comfort of my table. The café was pretty much deserted at noon, as it was too late for breakfast, yet too early for lunch. I sat in the corner table, shaded by a palm tree, enjoying the mildly cooling breeze and simply read and solved sudokus for just over two hours. Bliss, and perfect way to gently get used to the heat!

The service was very friendly, promt and attentive, involving questions about my country of origin and purpose and length of the trip. When I told that I'm from Estonia, but live in Edinburgh, the proprietor, beamingly, told me he had heard good things about Tallinn, and that he had once spent a month in Glasgow. Another waiter then went on giving me an update about the Ukraine's performance at the World Cup, which left me somewhat puzzled:)

I also had my first Greek village salad - horiatiki - in this establishment. It was flavoursome and tasty, and truly the perfect & refreshing lunch in that heat. I enjoyed the ripe flavour of tomatoes, and soaked up every last drop of tangy olive oil on the plate with the bread that was provided as part of the cover. Note that the feta cheese is laid as a block on top of the salad, and not crumbled or cubed - this was the case with every Greek salad I had during my trip.

Cover € 1.00, Frappe €3.00, Ice tea € 3.00, 'varieties' € 15.00 for 2 persons, horiatiki € 6.00

Estiatorio 'Akropolis'
Plaka, Athens
Tel. 3215737

Vacation alert 2006:1 - Greece

There are still of lots of food-related Paris memories to share, recipes to try and dishes to report about. But not now. I've been rather busy at work the last few weeks, and tomorrow morning I'll go on a well-deserved short break. My Edinburgh friends Annemieke & Georgios have decided to tie their knot on Santorini and I've been invited. On Sunday morning I'll fly to Greece and will be enjoying the scorching sun & blue sea & burning sand for a week. I'll start in Athens, then visit my dear friend Anna and her family in Volos for a few days, then attend the wedding in Santorini before returning to Athens. I've been both to Athens and Santorini before, whereas Volos will be on my itinerary for the first time. Suffice to say that I'm very much looking forward to the trip!

But first stop - London. Johanna and Jeanne - both of whom I had a pleasure of meeting in London back in March - are celebrating their foodblogs' second birthdays - both of them*. There is going to be foodblog birthday party. Johanna has promised 'a merry get-together with crates of pink bubbly, baskets of strawberries dunked in white chocolate and platters of divine finger food'. How can a girl resist such an invitation!!!

So I'll be out of town - and not blogging - for a few days. While I'm gone, may I suggest you go and visit two Athens-based foodblogs. Stevi, who lived in Edinburgh for a few years, blogs over at Bread & Butter - she has written about some very tempting Greek vegetarian dishes that I've been planning to try for a while. Tülin, though originally from Ankara, also lives in Athens, and has a great blog covering a variety of Greek and Turkish dishes, called Domestic Cat. I will be meeting up with both of them while in Greece!

* My little foodblog is having a small anniversary, too. It has just turned one - I began blogging in June 2005 :-) Thank you all for being (t)here - it's been one great and fulfilling year.

PS I just realised that Vacation alert 2006:1 is probably slightly wrong. I've already been to Paris and Amsterdam this year, so it is really 2006:3. Oh well. I wish I had decided to start numbering my vacation alerts earlier:-)

Suggestions, suggestions

Like many other foodbloggers, I have a list of favourites on the right hand side of the screen: other foodblogs I visit, favourite places to shop, books I like, books I want etc. Mainly it's a way to provide shortcuts for myself - I find it's easier to click from my site than to go to the favourites' bar in my browser and look up bookmarked websites. It's also a sneaky way to suggest what to get me if someone is struggling with birthday/Christmas/random gift ideas:)

My Greek beau moved to Amsterdam to start his PhD at the end of August, and came over for a visit last weekend. Few days earlier I had received a parcel from Amazon. I was a bit confused, as I hadn't ordered anything from them recently. At least I couldn't remember ordering anything from them lately. When I opened the parcel, I realised immediately what was going on, and it brought a big smile to my face. The parcel contained a book I've wanted for a while, The Real Greek at Home. My Greek beau claimed that he only ordered it because it was at the top of my Books I Want list, although I suspect he had some alterior motives. I think he was suggesting what I should/could cook this weekend. Just in case I was struggling with the idea:)

I must admit that although my usual food repertoire includes some Greek dishes (my feta-spinach pie has been one of the favourites for almost a decade now and I'm quite a fan of tzatziki), my love affair with a Greek food is new. I went to Greece for the first time in July 2002, to attend an IVSA conference on Santorini (see the pic on the right). And to be honest, I didn't eat much. It was 40 degrees Celsius, it was hottest and sunniest place I'd ever been to and, to be frank, I was struggling to stay alive (interestingly, dipping in and out of a 100˚C sauna doesn't seem to drain me as much. Maybe it's the sun?) In any case, food was the last thing in my mind, and I was on a diet of frappes and gallons of water for two weeks, having some light nibbles in the evenings when it was cooler. And even then I was on a self-imposed diet - as most of my friends were keen to try various seafood dishes in various seaside establishments - deep-fried squid, grilled octopus etc - I was inevitably left with another plate of horiatiki. I don't eat shellfish & molluscs, you see.

I spent another few days with a Greek friend on Sifnos after the conference, where I had a pleasure of trying his Granny's fabulous meatballs and a traditional Sifnos chick-pea dish - tsoukali revithia alias 'revithia se sifniwtiko tsoukali'. My friend Stam (who was also a student in Edinburgh, but always returned home for summer) mixed chickpeas, oil and seasonings in a special clay pot - tsoukali revidion, which he then took to a communal oven in the evening (see pic, it's hard to see but all clay pots have family names written on them), where it slowly cooked over night. Apparently it's done every Saturday night, and the chickpeas are then picked up on Sunday morning and eaten during the day. I also brought along some really tasty almond and nut biscuits from the local bakery which I still miss occasionally.

But overall the culinary side of Greece remained somewhat unexplored back then. I did buy a Greek cookbook on the way back in the airport, but that turned out to be utter crap - for instance, it has a taramasalata recipe that forgets to mention fish roe etc, it's full of typos and it annoys me more than educates me.

I was again in Athens in October 2003, this time attending a really beautiful and romantic wedding of my friends Anna & David. As it was much cooler - the temperature was a very agreeable 20˚C or so - my appetite was much bigger. And I got to try some really lovely Greek dishes at the banquet and dinner.

Since early this year I've been flirting much more regularly with all the delicacies Greece has on offer. I've read a lot about Greek food, and tried out several dishes. Mostly with a great success. Only my Cypriot halloumi & mint bread got a lukewarm reception, but I think this had more to do with personal politics than my cooking skills, as the bread was finished quickly by non-Greek eaters:) I made tsoureki and stifado for Easter, and have cooked spanakopita, moussaka, gigantes beans, paputsakia, Greek meatballs, roasted feta with olives and red peppers, on other occasions. To sum up - feta cheese and Total Greek Yogurt are some of my kitchen staples nowadays. And last weekend saw me preparing another Greek meal. For inspiration, I scanned both The Real Greek Food that suggestingly appeared in my mailbox, as well as the fabulous The Olive and the Caper that I had bought few months ago. Eventually, as I was running out of time and could not lovingly simmer a tomato sauce for an hour before baking it for yet another, I stuck with an old and tested favourite - hob-to-table moussaka. And I'll tell you all about it soon.