In the seven Greek Detective books I’ve written to date, Hermes has sampled many culinary delights but never, yet, moussaka. It’s the one Greek dish everyone’s guaranteed to have heard of, and that makes it something of a cliche, sadly as likely to revive memories of some dried-out, twice-reheated disaster in an overly commercial taverna as it is to stimulate fond reminiscences  of a piquant and meaty sauce layered with garden-fresh vegetables, and creamy, fluffy bechamel topped with golden-toasted cheese.

Is your appetite whetted? Well, I reckon moussaka season’s upon us. There’s a nip in the air, and moussaka’s the perfect autumn weekend dish, warming and satisfying, real comfort food. I won’t lie to you – done properly, it takes a while to make, so make plenty whilst you’re at it and put one in the freezer.

What follows is my mother-in-law’s moussaka recipe. It’s a method she learned from her mother, and the quantities are instinctual. But that’s one of the joys of moussaka recipes – each one is slightly different, and you can vary it according to what’s in season. Be Greek about it – improvise, be generous with everything you throw in, and you’ll find it very difficult to go wrong.

Yorgia’s Moussaka Recipe

Olive oil
A couple of aubergines, or 3 or 4 courgettes
Several good-sized potatoes
A large onion
Plenty of garlic (2 cloves minimum, you could go as high as 4)
A teaspoon or so of ground cinnamon, cloves and cumin
A little dried oregano
500g minced lamb or beef
A carton of passata

For the bechamel:
Milk
About a soup-spoon of butter
About a table-spoon of plain flour
Well-flavoured cheese
2 eggs
Nutmeg, whole to grate (best for flavour) or ready-ground

1. Pre-heat the oven to 180C. Cut the aubergines or courgettes lengthways into slices about 1cm thick. Either lay them on oiled baking sheets – it doesn’t matter if they overlap – brush with olive oil, sprinkle with sea-salt and bake until soft and going slightly brown (20-30 minutes), or if you want to be authentic and you don’t care about the calories (and Hermes certainly wouldn’t), deep fry the slices until golden and drain on kitchen paper.

2. Tackle your potatoes. Peel them, and either boil them until slightly underdone and then slice them (again, about 1cm thick), or use the Hermes method – slice them raw into rounds and deep-fry them too.

3. Prepare the meat sauce. Put a good splash of oil in a large frying pan over a medium heat and cook the chopped onion until soft. Add the garlic and spices and cook for another minute, then stir in the lamb or beef, cooking until brown. Add the passata, oregano, half a teaspoon of sugar and a couple of bay-leaves if you have them, season well and simmer until the liquid is well reduced.

3. Meanwhile, make the bechamel. Melt the butter in a saucepan, add in the flour and cook briskly for a minute or two, stirring constantly. You’re looking for the consistency of thick cream; if you haven’t got that, add more flour or butter as appropriate. When this mixture is nicely blended, start to add milk a little at a time, heating after each addition and beating strongly to ensure the sauce is smooth. When your sauce is thickened to the consistency of yogurt, season and remove from the heat and allow to cool.

4. Arrange a third of the aubergines or courgettes in the base of a large oven-proof dish, and add layers of potatoes and meat sauce. Repeat until you’ve used all you have to hand. Mix the eggs into the bechamel until well blended and pour the sauce over the vegetables and meat. Grate over a generous amount of nutmeg, and sprinkle with cheese. Bake for about 45 minutes until well browned, and then leave to cool for half an hour before serving.

Fabulous.

Food for the Gods?

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A few weeks ago, I was interviewed by Dan Saladino, presenter of Radio 4′s wonderful Food Programme. Dan was putting together an in-depth analysis of food in crime fiction, and he came up with a fascinating review of fictional detectives with a passion for good food, which naturally included the Fat Man.

If you missed it at the time, you can still read an entertaining article on the subject on the BBC website.  And you’ll be pleased to know the page includes four Greek recipes, including one for loukoumades - mini-doughnuts drizzled with honey or syrup and liberally sprinkled with cinnamon. I’m personally very partial to loukoumades – they feature prominently at many church festivals in Greece, and are ideally followed with a demi-tasse of strong Greek coffee to cut through the sweetness. I’ve never tried making them, though, so perhaps it’s time to give them a go.

Syrup-drenched loukoumades – irresistible, but not one of your five-a-day

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I know January’s the season for resolutions and abstention, but there’s no antidote to howling gales and drenching rain in salad or steamed vegetables. For me, the grey chill of Christmas-gone-by calls for unctuousness and soft textures, for slow-simmering, fragrant stews and heavily buttered carbohydrates, so resolutions be damned. I’m in the mood for the kind of comfort Greek winter food brings.

If you’ve read The Messenger of Athens, you’ll know the Greek islands can be bitter cold in winter. Our old stone house was draughty and damp, and to fight the chill I spent a lot of my time cooking traditional island dishes – stuffed cabbage leaves, chick-peas, lentils, soups, pasta and rice pudding. In winter, we ate very little meat; off-tourist-season, money was tight, and meat was expensive. By December, our boat was in dry-dock, so there was no fishing for us. The winter months were tough, time to be thrifty and resourceful, and to make use of what was plentiful, and cheap – oranges and lemons, wild greens we gathered ourselves, lettuce and onions from the garden, nuts and eggs from the backyard.

Greek winter food – chickpea and wild green soup

I felt the cold terribly, but I was resourceful in staying warm and keeping the electricity bill manageable at the same time. I had a cunning plan: I used to bake.

Greek women are wonderful bakers, especially at the major festivals of Easter and Christmas, where they turn their talents to intricate cookies, savoury pies and syrup-laden pastries. But for everyday consumption, the dish of choice is cake, one of the best of which is a moist, sticky orange and almond cake.

I love this cake so much, I served it to Hermes for breakfast in The Lady of Sorrows, along with fresh figs and a dish of chilled, creamy yogurt. Hermes ate his slice of almond cake at the height of summer, but it comes into its own at this time of year when oranges are at their sweet and juicy best. It’s comfort food as the gods intended. Try it, and you’ll see exactly what I mean.

Orange & Almond Semolina Cake

Ingredients
For the Cake:
1 big or 2 small oranges
125 g ground almonds
175 g softened butter
175 g caster sugar
3 large eggs
250 g semolina
4 teaspoons baking powder
For the Syrup:
5 tablespoons water
5 tablespoons orange juice
225ml honey
1 tablespoon lemon juice
A piece of cinnamon, or a teaspoon of ground

Method:
Preheat the oven to 180C. Prepare a 22 cm cake tin.
Remove the pips from the oranges. Cut the fruit into wedges and reduce to a puree in a food processor.
Blend the remaining cake ingredients until smooth and fold in the orange puree. Spoon the mixture into the prepared tin and smooth the top.
Bake for 35-40 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean from the centre of the cake. If the top is becoming too brown, cover with a piece of foil.
In the meantime, make the syrup by simmering all the ingredients until thickened but still runny. Allow to cool to just above lukewarm.
Leaving the cake in the tin, pierce all over with a skewer and pour over the syrup.
Allow to cool before removing from the tin.
Serve, if you like, with thick Greek yogurt or marscapone.

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Recently one of my Twitter friends remarked she was having trouble tracking down a sweet treat Hermes enjoyed in The Lady of Sorrows. The confection in question was milk pie – unsurprisingly (since I decide the fat man’s menus) a favourite of mine, too – so I thought it would be a good idea to share the recipe with you.

Milk pie comes in two forms, with filo pastry (galaktoboureko) or without (galatopita). The sharp-thinking amongst you will already have deduced that the names originate from the Greek word for milk – gala - and they’re originally country recipes, straight from the farm kitchen where there’s often a surplus of dairy produce. The pastry version is a staple of Greek bakeries everywhere, from the new wave of designer patisseries you can now find in most major cities

The fabulous Ble bakery in Thessaloniki

to the long-standing, passed-down-through-generations wood-fired village bakeries of the islands

Village bakery in Lesvos via Hungrymouth blogspot

Of course there are arguments about recipes for the perfect and authentic galaktoboureko, but if you can produce one that looks anything like this, you won’t be going far wrong. It’s definitely got the Wow factor, but trust me, it’s not as tricky as it might look.

Galaktoboureko for Margaret

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I’ve been inspired to another food blog by another Twitter friend – Sia of @GreekWeddings, who has a lovely website whether you’re getting married or not. Sia is running a Greek Cooking Challenge throughout 2014 and February’s dish is pasticcio.

Pasticcio is both an everyday dish, and food for celebrations. It’s easy to make in large quantities, and will comfortably feed a crowd without breaking the bank if you want it to. Not unlike Italian lasagne, it’s a winning combination of pasta, meat sauce and bechamel, so it’s easy to have a go if you’ve never tried it before, or if you’d like to recapture memories of last summer’s dinner at that waterside taverna.

There are two tricky things about pasticcio. The first is how to spell it in English, and you’ll see all kinds of variations – pastitsio, pastichio, and my preferred Italian version – but however you spell it, it’s a rich and satisfying dish. The trickier thing is getting hold of the ‘correct’ pasta. If you were in Greece, you’d pop into your neighbourhood grocer’s and there’d be packets and packets of the right stuff on the shelves, but here in the UK I’ve struggled for years to find the long, hollow pasta you ‘should’ use. Then, lo and behold, in a wonderful moment of serendipity, as I was thinking about this blog and how it was about time we had pasticcio for dinner at our house, I wandered into a continental grocer’s in Nottingham, and there it was!

If you can’t get mezzani, it really doesn’t matter. Macaroni is an excellent subsitute, as are pasta spirals or shells or whatever else you have in the cupboard that will hold plenty of luscious sauce.

Remember this is Greek cooking so be generous and bold with your seasonings and quantities (I always add a bit more of everything than the recipe says, except if I’m baking when careful measuring is important). And taste as you go, especially with your meat sauce. You’re looking for that distinctive fragrant Greekness to come through. If your component parts are right, your assembled dish will be delicious.

If you have a go, why not sign up to Sia’s Greek Cooking Challenge and post a photo of your finished dish? And definitely Tweet a pic to me @AnneZouroudi.

Kali Orexi!

Pasticcio  (Serves about 4)(it’s so hard to judge, isn’t it? But people will probably want seconds)

For the Meat Sauce:

A little good olive oil, the greener the better (more colour equals more flavour)
500g beef mince
1 largish onion, chopped finely
2-3 cloves garlic (you can use less, or none, but we’re cooking Greek here)
Salt and pepper
Ground cinnamon, cloves and cumin
Oregano and bay leaves
1 carton of passata
1 egg

Bechamel Sauce:

75g butter
Plain flour
About 500ml milk
1 egg (plus the two yolks from above)
salt and pepper
nutmeg
Grated cheese
1 egg

1 pack dried pasta – mezzani, macaroni, spirals or penne

To make the Meat Sauce:

Heat the oil in a large pan over moderate heat and cook the onion until just turning colour. A little browning is fine. Towards the end of cooking add the crushed or chopped garlic, giving it a couple of minutes before you add the meat. Break up the meat with a spoon as it browns. When all the meat has turned colour, add the spices – a good teaspoon of cinammon, half a teaspoon of cloves and cumin. The spices should be coming through quite strongly; if you can’t smell them, add a little more. Season well with salt and pepper, stir in the passata and two tablespoons of water (or red wine if you have it to hand), sprinkle on a little oregano, drop in two bay-leaves and let the sauce simmer over low heat until it’s thickened and the oil has separated to the top, ten to twenty minutes, more rather than less. Turn off the heat and allow to cool to no hotter than blood heat. When the sauce is cool, remove the bay-leaves and stir in the egg being sure to mix it right through. Warning: if the sauce is too hot you will have omelet in your meat sauce: not fatal but not attractive either.

Whilst your meat sauce is cooking and cooling, boil the pasta until al dente, drain, drizzle with a little olive oil and mix to coat and  prevent sticking. You might add a touch of salt if you like. Another warning: if you’re using mezzani for the first time, you’ll find it pretty lively and unwieldy; it’s pasta with a mind of its own.

To make the Bechamel:
Melt the butter over a medium/high heat – you want it hot but take care not to brown it. When it’s melted stir in the flour a soup-spoon at a time, blending it and letting it bubble, adding more until all the butter’s absorbed. This is a blond roux. Let it cook a minute or two, then take the pan off the heat and add a splash of milk, stirring quickly to incorporate it. When your butter/flour mix is smooth, add more milk a splash at a time, stirring after each addition until you have a sauce the consistency of thick cream. Don’t make the bechamel too thin. Season well and allow to cool to blood heat, then beat in the egg.

Asssembly:

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Combine the meat sauce with the pasta. Choose a dish big enough to hold everything comfortably (a lasagne dish for example), tip in your pasta/meat mix and level the top (if you’re using mezzani, this may be a challenge so don’t worry about any bits sticking up). Pour over your bechamel, grate on a light sprinkling of nutmeg (ground nutmeg is fine but  freshly grated is more aromatic) and scatter generously with cheese.

Bake until golden brown and fabulous, 30-40 minutes. Cool a little before cutting into rectangles and serving.

Imagine yourself here as you eat and it will taste even better…

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I’ve been having a wonderful time trying to decide what dishes would make the perfect introduction to the Greek food Hermes enjoys in my books. I’ve been thinking and planning and consulting and experimenting, and I think now I’m pretty close to pinning down the menu for the inaugural Cooking the Books class, to be held in beautiful Bakewell on 23rd October.

The menu’s still not cast in stone – it’s not likely to be until much closer to the date, because what we’ll be cooking will depend on top-quality fresh ingredients being available on the day, so there’ll have to be an element of flexibility. But there’s likely to be a seafood dish, and there’ll be a slow-cooked classic for the main course – I’m thinking a beef stifado, but you won’t have to worry about peeling dozens of baby onions, I have volunteers standing by to peel them for you ahead of time. And you will definitely be trying your hand at baking cinnamon-sweet bougatsa.

Of course you’re invited for lunch: olives, feta and good bread, and there’ll be a few savoury delights, maybe a traditional soup, maybe a slice or two of syrupy semolina cake. Plus there’ll be a small gift from me to take home with what you’ve cooked.

If you don’t know Bakewell, you’ll find it full of Dickensian charm, with little alleyways to explore for souvenirs and tea-shops where you can try a slice of the famous Bakewell pudding or tart. You’ll be within minutes of Chatsworth’s grandeur and the wild landscapes of the Peak District National Park, so whilst there’s no guarantee of Greek-style sunshine, you will discover some of the most beautiful scenery in England.

Places are very limited, so please get your booking in early. I’ll look forward to seeing you there.

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‘They looked down on a roasted lamb, its skin glistening bronze, flesh falling from its bones… and though only the charred, twiggy remains of mountain oregano and thyme poked through the haphazard string stitching of the belly cavity, a fragrant steam affirmed that all the herbs’ sweet essences had melded with the meat.’

(From The Feast of Artemis)

Literally stolen or bandits’ lamb, kleftiko originated with sheep-rustlers in the mountains of Greece. They would dig a fire-pit to bake a stolen lamb whole, sealing the makeshift oven with earth as the carcase cooked to prevent smoke – and the delicious smell of the roasting meat – giving away their hiding-place.

Interestingly, it is very like the roasting lamb cooked over fire-pits in the high hills of Croatia in Rick Stein’s wonderful cooking/travel series, From Venice to Istanbul.

Happily you can enjoy the same melting, flavoursome lamb without heading for the hills with a shovel or running any risk of arrest. The key to great kleftiko is to let it take its own sweet time – it’s slow food for a feast with family or friends – and the best part is, once it’s assembled, it will pretty well look after itself.

Directions

• First make your marinade by combining the olive oil, garlic, a good teaspoon of sea-salt, pepper, lemon juice and herbs. Put the lamb in a baking dish and pour the marinade over, using your hands to work it into the meat. Cover and chill for at least two hours or overnight.
• Pre-heat your oven to 150C.
• Lay four long pieces of baking parchment across a roasting tin, one each side to side and front to back, two across the diagonals. Slice the onion thickly and spread it over the base of the parchment-lined tin. Place the lamb on top of the onions and pour the marinade over with an extra sprinkling of salt.
• Gather up the baking parchment to enclose the lamb in a parcel and tie it up tightly with the string.
• Place the lamb in the oven and roast for 3 hours.
• Remove the lam b from the oven and turn up the temperature to 220c. Open up the parchment parcel, fold down the paper or cut it away and return the lamb to the hot oven until golden brown.
• Allow the lamb to rest for at least twenty minutes, then serve with accompaniments of your choice – try roast potatoes, Greek salad, tzatziki and fresh bread.

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Oranges growing in a garden on the Mani peninsular

It’s the season, in Greece, for oranges, and oranges are everywhere you look, splattered on the pavements of city streets, heaped up for sale at the roadside, dangling from branches overhanging garden walls. Oranges at this time of year are plentiful and little more than pennies a kilo, a healthy, sweet dessert for any winter lunch.

A couple of years ago, I spent a winter week in the picturesque coastal town of Nafplio, in the Peloponnese. The drive down from Athens was beautiful, the road following the coastline as far as the Corinth canal, then passing the site of ancient Mycenae before reaching the orange groves which surround Nafplio – acres upon acres of fruit trees, all bending under the weight of their crops, and truck after truck on the road heading back towards Athens, ferrying the fruit to the city markets and processing plants. I stopped the car to take pictures, and the sweet scent of oranges was everywhere, carried from the orchards by the cold breeze.

In Sitia, Crete, the weekly market in winter is almost buried under oranges, with the stall-holders vying to outshout each other to bring customers to their stalls. And wherever you buy your oranges in Greece, there is never any question of taking a polite three or four, or even five or six. Bags must be filled to bursting with several kilos of fruit, which lengthen the arms and strain the back on the way home.

Buying oranges by the bagful in a Cretan market

What to do with all that wonderful, flavourful fruit? When you’ve eaten your fill, you can juice it, of course. In Nafplio, even the Goody’s burger joint would press you a fresh glass right before your eyes, and on the way home, there was a bar selling fresh-pressed orange juice at the airport. When you’ve had enough juice, try baking – have a go at my traditional Greek recipe for orange and almond cake – or dig deep into the retro roots of French cooking and make a classic duck a l’orange.

But not all Greek oranges are dessert oranges. Much hardier than the sweet orange tree is the bitter orange or Νεραντζάκι (nerandzaki), which gives neroli oil, an essential ingredient in many perfumes including Hermes’s seductive French cologne. The bitter orange will flourish in cold and inhospitable conditions where the sweet orange would wither, including city streets and windswept hillsides.

When I was living on the island of Symi, I remember going every winter with my then-husband to pick bitter oranges from a single tree which grew at a remote chapel high above Pedi bay. The route passed the cemetery and crossed a ravine behind it where there would occasionally be broken coffins amongst the rubbish of dead flowers and discarded plant pots, hauled from ground when bodies were exhumed (if you’d like to know more about Orthodox rites of exhumation, I wrote about it in The Whispers of Nemesis). The walk was rugged and rough underfoot, but worth the effort for the exhilarating views across the Aegean from the chapel – reward enough in the years when someone else had got there first, and there were no oranges to be had.

Why trouble to pick oranges too bitter to eat raw? In Greece, you might make spoon sweets, traditional confections made to welcome guests. The juice can be used in cooking, and goes particularly well with pork (and duck, of course). Best of all, make marmalade. In the short winter weeks when bitter (Seville) oranges are in season, there’s no better way to spend a chilly afternoon, and nothing like the glow of satisfaction when you’re admiring your freshly filled jars of golden orange preserve. Sunshine for the table.

Picture from lovely foodie blog www.poiresauchoclat.net

Bitter (Seville) Orange Marmalade

INGREDIENTS

6 Seville oranges
1 unwaxed lemon
2kg preserving sugar (this is belt and braces. With the lemons and the preserving sugar you should get a good set)

METHOD

Take your time! Making good marmalade is a job not to be rushed.

1. First, make sure your jars and lids (you’ll need about six, depending on their size) are sterilised. (Warning: Don’t skip this step thinking your jars look clean enough. They’re not.) The easiest way to sterilise jars is to put them through a dishwasher cycle and leave them shut away in there until you’re ready to fill them. If you don’t have the luxury of a dishwasher, give the jars a good wash, rinse in hot water and stand them on a baking tray, then pop them in the oven on its very lowest setting for at least fifteen minutes.

2. Sit yourself down with the oranges, lemon and a sharp knife and cut away the outer rind, leaving behind the white pith. Cut the rind into strips as long and thin as you’d like to have on your breakfast toast.

3. Squeeze the juice from the rindless oranges and lemon and pour it into a preserving pan or the biggest pan you’ve got. Add the sliced rind. Gather up the pips and squeezed-out remains of the fruit, tie them in a muslin bag and pop the bag into the pan.

4. Add the sugar and 2 litres of water and put the pan on a low heat. Bring slowly to the boil and simmer very gently for about an hour and half, until the rind is very soft and the liquid is reduced by about half.

5. Increase the heat under the pan and boil rapidly until the marmalade reaches setting point – about fifteen minutes. To check for setting point, spoon a little of the mixture onto a cold plate. If wrinkles form when you draw the spoon across the marmalade, you’re about there. If not, boil a further five minutes and test again. Be patient and be sure your marmalade is ready. If you’re not sure, keep boiling – how long it takes to reach setting point depends to a large extent on your fruit.

6. When you’re happy you’ve reached setting point, turn off the heat and let the marmalade relax for about fifteen minutes, then pour into your warm, sterile jars. Cover with a wax disk, and leave to go cold before you seal and label the jars.

Kali orexi!

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