↓
 
  • Home
  • Contact
  • About

Nisakiman

It's all Greek to me

Nisakiman

Post navigation

← Older posts
Newer posts →

Olive oil

Nisakiman Posted on 3rd February 2018 by Nisakiman3rd February 2018

 

I’ve been a big fan of olive oil since the first time I was in Greece in 1967, when I discovered that it was a significant part of the Greek diet. Prior to that, my only awareness of olive oil was that it came in tiny bottles which you bought at the chemist, and kept in the medicine cupboard at home. I seem to recollect it was used (slightly warmed) for trickling into wax-blocked ears, or something like that. I had no idea that you could eat it. But those early days in Corfu made me realise what wonderful stuff it was. Very often, I would make a meal out of fresh bread dipped in olive oil, with maybe a sprinkle of salt and a few drops of freshly squeezed lemon. And it was delicious.

Olive oil has been produced in the Mediterranean since 6000 BC. I always wonder (and this applies to many foods, not just olive oil) who first had the idea to get oil out of olives. Because it’s not a naturally obvious thing to do. Olives, when picked, are inedible. Hard and bitter. But some bright spark somewhere down the line decided to marinade them in salted water for a couple of months (now why on earth would you do that?), and discovered that after having been marinaded they became eminently edible, albeit for many an acquired taste. And someone else, a couple of millennia further down the line, for some bizarre reason thought “I know, I’ll get a sack of olives, crush them up, seeds an’ all, and then stick the resulting paste in a press, squeeze ’em hard, and see what happens…” .

And what happened, of course, was olive oil. As well as being a delicious culinary ingredient, it also had other uses (lamp oil, medicine, soap etc), so became a valuable commodity, and as such worth cultivating. And since the Mediterranean climate provides ideal conditions for the olive tree, just about every country in Southern Europe and North Africa, Turkey, and the Levant, to a greater or lesser degree, grows olives as a commercial crop.

The biggest producer of olive oil by a country mile is Spain, producing six times as much oil as second-placed Italy. Greece comes in at number three, followed by Tunisia and Morocco.

However, there are a lot of dodgy dealings going on with the olive oil trade, such as the fact that Italy exports considerably more oil than it actually produces (?), and I remember when I lived in the far south of Greece in the 1990s, during harvest there would be small (one or two thousand ton or thereabouts I’d guess) tankers tied up in the harbour loading lower grade oil for export to Spain. Not to mention unscrupulous merchants who mix rapeseed and other cheaper vegetable oils with it and sell it as ‘Extra Virgin’ olive oil. And it seems to be universal. The most publicity has been about dodgy oil from Italy and Spain, but there have been a couple of recent articles in the local news here about ‘olive oil’ factories (in reality small warehouses) getting busted making ‘Extra Virgin Olive Oil’ from rapeseed oil, colourings and flavourings. Small-scale, two-man operations, but there’s money to be made in dodgy oil, so one has to be careful when buying. As far as I know, none of the big Greek brands have been implicated in the ‘Not-Quite-Extra-Virgin’ oil scandal; mostly they’ve been Italian and Spanish.

The Greeks, although coming in at number three in terms of production, are way ahead of the rest when it comes to consumption.

When you sit down to eat in Greece, there is always a bottle of olive oil on the table, and it is applied liberally to (among other things) salads and Horta (Χόρτα) a dish of boiled greens very popular here, and often whimsically translated into English on menus as ‘wild weeds’. It’s delicious, and is always served with lashings of olive oil and freshly squeezed lemon.

Χόρτα βραστά

 

A few years ago, the EU, in its wisdom, decided that refillable jugs and bowls of olive oil would be banned (they do love banning stuff, don’t they?), and that henceforth all olive oil must be presented in either non-refillable bottles or those little plastic sachets like ketchup and mustard come in at fast-food joints. Naturally, there was an immediate outcry, both from the restaurant trade (particularly in Greece) and the public. Many Greek restaurant owners have land with olives, and serve their own oil in the restaurant. This would no longer be possible under the proposed regulations unless the owner went to considerable expense to have his oil packaged in the approved manner. Fortunately, the sheer volume of protest at this proposal persuaded the EU to drop the idea.

I use a lot of olive oil. I use it for everything – cooking, salads and as a skin moistening oil. My wife uses it on her hair to keep it lustrous. And to my mind, Greek oil is the best. It can vary from region to region, depending on the type of olive, the terroir, the climate, and how the trees are looked after and the harvest collected.

Corfu is famous for its olive trees. Many of them are more than six hundred years old, and are magnificent to behold – huge gnarled edifices that have made Corfu what it is. The Venetians, when in occupation from the mid 14th century to the late 18th century, paid the Corfiots to plant olives, which the islanders did with enthusiasm. As a result, the land built up a rich topsoil, held in place by the many root systems, which has made Corfu the greenest of green islands. [In contrast to most other Greek islands, where the inhabitants chopped down all the trees to build boats. With no roots to bind the earth, the topsoil was washed away, resulting in most islands being reduced to arid, rocky outcrops with little vegetation.] In fact it is so luxuriant that it has its own microclimate, producing lots of rain throughout the year and thus maintaining its verdant characteristics. However, when it comes to olive oil, the stuff Corfu produces is, I’m afraid to say, crap. The trees are too big for good olives, and because of their size, harvesting is a very hit and miss affair, with most people opting to put nets down under the trees and just allowing the olives to fall naturally. Every week or so, they will gather the olives that have fallen and put them into sacks to take to the olive press. This means that many of the olives gathered will wait a week or more before pressing, which is not good, as once off the tree, olives degrade fairly rapidly. In other more commercially minded olive growing areas, the trees are pruned every year to keep them at a manageable size (which also has the effect of producing better fruit), and when it’s time to harvest, they will spread the nets under the tree, and use a mechanical harvester, which strips all the fruit off the tree in one session. This is then bagged up and taken to the olive press, ideally within 24 hours of being harvested. The rapid tree-to-press timeline produces good, fresh smelling and tasting oil.

As I already said, I use a lot of olive oil, and even here in Greece, it’s expensive. In the supermarket, you’re looking at between €5 and €8 per litre (it tends to be cheaper when you buy the 4 or 5 litre tins rather than 1 litre bottles). However, if you can find a producer, he will usually sell it for closer to the wholesale price, so a week or two ago I asked my landlady (of the workshop I rent) if she knew anyone in the area who sold olive oil. “Ah yes”, she replied, “my brother has olives”. So arrangements were made. I bought one of the large 17 litre tins known as ‘tenekes’ (τενεκές) that are traditionally used for olive oil here, and gave it to her, along with the money, so that next time she saw her brother (he visited weekly) she could get me a tin. These normally are sold by producers for €70, which works out to €4.12 per litre, but because my landlady likes me, I paid €50, which comes out at €2.94 per litre – a considerable saving on the supermarket cost.

My ‘tenekes’ of olive oil. The 1.5 lt bottle of water is for scale.

 

The oil is unfiltered, as many of the producers prefer it that way, saying it tastes better. And it would seem that cloudy olive oil is becoming quite trendy these days, and commanding a premium price.

Unfiltered oil.

 

Personally, I’m not really bothered one way or the other – it’s not something I’ve ever thought about. But cloudy or not, this oil is delicious. Hints of fresh-cut grass and a spicy, peppery flavour. Probably the best oil I’ve tasted. Less than a month ago, the olives were still on the tree, and that freshness comes through, too.

This tin should see us through until next year’s harvest, even taking into account the liberal way in which I splash it around!

Yet another reason to be living in Greece…

 

 

Posted in Greek Stuff, Uncategorised

The In-Laws – Reprise

Nisakiman Posted on 27th January 2018 by Nisakiman27th January 2018

 

Last September, I wrote a post about my first experiences with that dreaded institution, the in-laws. Having been married three times, I’ve had the pleasure (?) of dealing with three sets of in-laws, all very different.

My next in-laws, or in-law I should say, as father had died before I arrived on the scene, was French.

I had by this time returned to UK from Australia, and was living in London, which is where I met my second wife. My social life was somewhat curtailed at that time, as I’d returned to UK with the eldest of my two young sons, who was six (it’s a long and complicated story). Still, I did get out and about a bit, and had a circle of friends who I’d known from before I left for Australia, so I wasn’t exactly a hermit, and did manage to have the odd liaison, one of which, obviously, turned into more than just a liaison.

Her father had been a Yorkshire miner, and had met her mother during the war when he was in the army. A dour man by all accounts, it was probably just as well he departed before I arrived. Mother-in-law, despite having been married to a coal miner, displayed that kind of arrogant haughtiness that the French seem to do so well. The ‘you’re not good enough for my daughter’ attitude suffused every meeting; and it was a sentiment that never really changed, despite my second marriage lasting about twenty years. She was a real battleaxe, albeit embodying the grace and elegance that French women (what is it about French women?) carry off with such aplomb. And I was on my best behaviour when I first met her, too. I didn’t get rat-arsed drunk and throw up all over her furniture, I didn’t swear, nor was I rude (I don’t think).

But she never liked me, and never missed an opportunity to point out my shortcomings. She didn’t like my drinking; she didn’t like my smoking; she didn’t like my friends; she didn’t like the way I dressed; she didn’t like my old cars; she didn’t like the way I moved from one job to another; she didn’t like my going into business for myself; she didn’t like me dragging her daughter and (at that time only) granddaughter off to Greece for over a year; she didn’t like that I wasn’t rich, or a professional something or other; and most of all, she didn’t like my being married to her daughter. In fact, in her eyes I didn’t have one redeeming feature.

Oddly enough, I rather liked her – an affection born of a grudging admiration for her bolshiness and her refusal to be browbeaten by anyone. And according to my daughters (her granddaughters), who still see her, she’s still the same at 102 years old. And by all accounts, still as sharp as a razor. I’d like to say that underneath her hard exterior, she had a heart of gold, but I’d be a liar if I did. She was a hard bitch right through to the core.

Fortunately, she lived in the Midlands, which although not a million miles from London and the South (which is the part of England I chose to live when I was there) was far enough to preclude frequent visits. I was always worried that I might overindulge and start saying things which I would regret later. I’m essentially a peacemaker, and prefer to avoid antagonising people unnecessarily, particularly if they are going to be around for the foreseeable future. And although my wife would tell her what she thought, if I were to do so, I would have got it in the neck both from mother-in-law and from my wife as well. So better to keep the visits to a bare minimum and just keep schtum. Damage limitation was the name of the game. I have a finely honed survival instinct, developed over years. Marriage has that effect on you.

So the years passed, the girls grew up, the marriage ran its course, and came to a predictably messy end.

I was by this time in my mid-fifties, and not getting any younger. I decided that marriage wasn’t all it had been cracked up to be and that I would be better off avoiding it – if indeed it ever came my way again. I also decided that it was time for a last hurrah, so for the next few years I made regular extended trips to Thailand (which I knew of old) and Cambodia (which was new territory for me) and immersed myself in the sort of unbridled hedonism which is just not available to a married man with kids. It was magnificent, and I revelled in it. I’m not sure whether I took years off my life, or added years on, but whatever, it was worth it.

But despite the course I was cleaving, paradoxically, I happened by chance to meet a Thai woman who was far removed from that furiously hedonistic lifestyle. An accountant, no less. How much more un-hedonistic can you get than the accounts department? She wasn’t even an accountant who moonlighted as a pole dancer. Just a straightforward, very correct, normal accountant who was the manager of a small accounts department in a small company in Thailand.

One thing led to another, and all my fine resolutions to stay single started to look decidedly raggy at the edges. Six months on, and they were just about in tatters. We were by this time sharing an apartment in Bangkok, and the inevitable was looming – the ‘Meeting the Parents’ scenario. My little accountant had by now completely shredded my fine resolution to never marry again, so it was decided that we would travel to the city where her parents lived and have a Thai wedding ceremony there.

Gawd, what had I let myself in for?

 

Posted in Uncategorised

Greece and Marijuana – The Next Stage?

Nisakiman Posted on 22nd January 2018 by Nisakiman22nd January 2018

I wrote a post a few months back about the news that Greece was mooting moving into the medical marijuana business. This would involve quite a lot of legislative changes, and approval on a number of levels, so I was frankly not very optimistic about it passing through the various channels of government to actually become reality. And in the intervening several months, I’ve read nothing new on the subject, which didn’t really surprise me.

However, today I came across an article in ‘Bloomberg’ which intimated that the necessary legislation is imminent, and that it could swing into action by the end of the month! I find that hard to believe, to be honest, but they may well be spurred on by the fact that:

The Veroia site will create more than 2,000 jobs in the next two to three years, according to Georgios Zafeiris, chief executive officer at Golden Greece Holdings, the company responsible for coordinating the project’s group of 10 investors from countries including Canada, Kazakhstan, Poland and Israel. The first round of investment is seen at 400 million euros ($488 million), rising to more than 1.5 billion euros, and 80 percent of the jobs in areas like cultivation, trading and transport could go to Greeks.

Those are tempting figures to a government that is broker than broke. A powerful incentive to expedite the necessary steps sooner rather than later.

The other interesting part of the article was this:

While initial plans will focus on extraction, processing and packaging of medical marijuana, investors are also looking into an eventual recreational cannabis market in the country, provided the government opts for fuller legalization in the future, according to Blady. (My bold).

That really would be a departure from previous authority attitudes to weed, and signals massive earning potential for Greece. Can you imagine the uptick in tourism this would herald? But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. First, with the medical CBD product, there aren’t many countries that have the combination of climate, terrain and legislation to produce and legally export a consistent and high quality product, so there’s a large (and growing) market out there. [I think the USA, although it has the infrastructure in a few states to operate in a world market, and could undoubtedly be a world leader in the field, is hog-tied by federal law]. Secondly, if Greece legalised recreational use, they for sure would have a small but enthusiastic local market. But more importantly, once it became legal for recreational use in Greece, I believe that other countries would follow suit. Nobody wants to be the first to jump, particularly on a subject as controversial as marijuana, which has been subject to the same sort of misinformation and negative propaganda as tobacco has. But if a neighbouring country legalises it, and does so without dire consequences, then I think the appeal of all those extra taxes might just make those countries around it re-consider their marijuana laws. And if you want to legalise it, and tax it, then you need to control the supply. And if you have a fellow EU member next door who happens to be set up both legally and agriculturally be able to supply you with an abundance of quality gear, then it’s job done – nice and easy. Customs union, and all that.

And Greece would be laughing all the way to the bank.

One would imagine that once you have maybe two or three countries enjoying the fruits of legalisation, then the domino theory will start to take effect, further increasing Greece’s market.

There is salvation for Greece in this if the politicians are brave enough to grasp the nettle. Greece could go from being the pauper with the begging bowl to the svelte Southern Mediterranean businessman with the Cuban cigar and the expensive car.

Posted in Uncategorised

Post navigation

← Older posts
Newer posts →

Try a Random Post

Recent Posts

  • Smoking Bandits
  • Throwing down the gauntlet?
  • Free stuff
  • Sorted – sort of
  • It all started out so well…

Recent Comments

  • James Higham on Smoking Bandits
  • Gary Kayser on Smoking Bandits
  • RdM on Throwing down the gauntlet?
  • Nisakiman on Throwing down the gauntlet?
  • RdM on Throwing down the gauntlet?

Archives

  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017

Categories

  • cars
  • drinking
  • driving
  • Greek Stuff
  • Pensive peregrinations.
  • smoking
  • Thailand
  • Uncategorised

Meta

  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org
©2021 - Nisakiman - Weaver Xtreme Theme
↑