Greek Delights

I just went on a 10-day trip to Greece with some Greek friends of mine. The last time I had been to Greece was in high school when our class went there on a more or less educational trip. This trip was quite a while ago so Greece felt almost entirely new to me. We started off in Athens and from there did a round trip of the Peloponnese peninsula. There are many amazing places to discover in Greece, such as the archaeological sites and the beaches. 

I made so many food experiences on my trip I don’t even know where to start. Maybe I should start with the food served in the airplane (a Swiss airline). It was bad. All we got was a pizza pocket. You know how most food that's bad for you at least smells good? Well this smelled bad! But I still thought, how bad could it possibly be? It turned out to be a gooey dough thingy filled with tomato sauce and some cheese and, quite unfortunately, some of the dough inside was uncooked. YUCK! I took a few bites and then decided it just wasn’t worth eating. I was better off starving. And then on the flight back I thought, okay, they can’t do much worse than this pizza pocket thingy. I wonder what they will serve this time? And then…da da daaaaa…came the PIZZA POCKET. It was deja vu of the worst kind! I immediately declined the flight attendant's friendly offer of the pizza pocket. Fortunately, I didn't have to starve completely since they handed out chocolates in the shape and design of soccer balls (as a reminder of the current Euro soccer cup). The chocolate almost made up for the horrible pizza pockets. 

The first really good food I had in Greece was dinner in Athens the night we arrived. It is important to note that dinner in Greece doesn't happen at 6:30 pm, 7:00 pm or even 8:00 pm as is customary in the US or Germany. Dinner usually happens much later. The first night we started our dinner around 11 pm! We were a group of 9 people and my friends just ordered a bunch of dishes to share. Since I couldn’t really understand the menu (the Ancient Greek I learned in high school was not helping much) I was interested to see what they had ordered. Bread, salads and other cold dishes were brought first followed by the other warm meat and vegetable dishes. I really liked the salad that was made of a special type of dried bread, tomatoes, feta, dried herbs, and olive oil and vinegar. I could taste the olive oil in the salad and it was so different from any olive oil I had ever had before. It tasted fruitier and more aromatic and generally had more flavor. Other dishes we had that night included a dish of cooked peppers and bacon in cream sauce, and pork in a cream mushroom sauce served with rice. Some of the dishes were a little on the salty side, but the flavors were outstanding. Finally came the dessert (see photo below). We ordered mosaik (on the left), halvas (on the right) and ekmek (in the middle). Mosaik is a dessert made of cookies and chocolate made to look like a mosaic. Unfortunately, this mosaik was way too dry and quite unexciting. The halvas (a dessert made of semolina, sugar, oil, almonds, and cinnamon) also wasn't very good. It tasted too bland and oily. My Greek friend definitely makes better halvas! The ekmek, however, was quite good. Ekmek is a dessert made of three layers: a base made of kataifi (shredded phyllo dough) drenched in syrup followed by a layer of creamy custard and topped with whipped cream. 

We had this type of large meal a couple of times during our trip. It’s fun because with lots of people you can order many dishes and try lots of different foods. The second day of our trip we went to the restaurant Eleon in Athens for lunch, which I highly recommend. My favorite dish there was the beef filet in ouzo cream sauce served with rosemary baked potatoes. Another delicious meal we had was at a restaurant on the beach near Karaifa in the Peloponnese. There we had grilled sardines and some other type of small fish that was battered and fried as well as grilled octopus (see photo below) and grilled filled squid. When the waiter brought the octopus I was kind of grossed out because it was just a long tentacle lying in oil. It kind of made me sad because I imagined an octopus swimming around in the ocean missing a tentacle (which is complete nonsense, of course). But that tentacle was the best octopus I had ever had! The skin was crispy and the inside was soft and succulent unlike the calamari you usually get at Greek restaurants in Germany, which often have the consistency of chewing gum and taste way too fishy to be fresh.

Seeing that I have a mouth full of sweet teeth I obviously had to try some of the traditional Greek sweets. Generally, the sweets in Greece are pretty sweet (even for my standards). Many of the traditional sweets are drenched in oil and syrup, such as baklava. Thanks to a recommendation made by the NY Times I had some of the best baklava in Athens at a shop called Karavan (see photo below).  I actually went there twice: once to try and once to buy some baklava to take back to Germany. Both times I bought a 500g box of baklava (it was the smallest size, oh darn!). Karavan makes all sorts of baklava: baklava with nuts, fruits, chocolate. And they all taste really fresh! My favorite ones were the ones with nuts and also the baklava with coconut and chocolate. 

We also had some very good ice cream. There were two notable places. One was a place in Kalamata, called Athanasiou, which sold gelato style ice cream and other Greek sweets. There I had honey walnut and pistachio ice cream. Both were very good. The other good ice cream place we came across was in Nafplion. It was an Italian gelateria called Antica Gelateria di Roma. We happened to come across it while walking through the old town and kind of just stood at the door and looked inside. Unfortunately, one of the women working there (maybe the boss) saw us peeking inside and lured us in by offering us tastes of ice cream even though we had just sworn we were done with desserts for that day (we had had ekmek and galaktoboureko, a milk pudding in phyllo, one of my favorite Greek desserts, earlier that day). Unfortunately, the ice cream samples were really good and we also felt bad leaving without getting anything (obviously part of the boss' tactic) so we shared gianduja and torrone ice cream. It was very, very good and tasted homemade (which makes me think I need to make some homemade ice cream soon!). The next day I even went back to get some more: cherry yogurt and tiramisu. The flavor and texture of the ice cream were really good, but the tiramisu had a little too much alcohol in it for my taste.

One of my favorite things in Greece were the many places to buy savory pastries. The best bakery we found was in Nafplion where I got the best spanakopita (pastry filled with spinach and cheese) I have ever had. The dough was crispy and tasted only slightly oily (but a good kind of oily) and the spinach cheese filling was very flavorful. The pastry was in the shape of a snail so I ate it by unwinding it piece by piece. 

Of course Starbucks has also set foot in Greece. But, fortunately, Greek cafés serve delicious iced coffee drinks so I didn’t have to go to Starbucks to get my caffeine fix. My favorite drink turned out to be cappuccino freddo metrios, an iced cappuccino with a medium (metrios) amount of sugar (see photo below). The waiter asks beforehand how sweet you want it so that she can stir sugar into the hot espresso so it dissolves (it’s very hard to dissolve sugar in a cold drink). Other drinks that were commonly found on the menu were espresso freddo and Nescafé. I didn’t try Nescafé because I try to avoid supporting Nestlé as much as possible seeing that it is such a big company that litters the world with processed foods with low nutrient density. 

One of the most notable food experiences I had throughout the whole trip was dinner made by the mother of my Greek friend. She served us grilled fish, horiatiki (tomato, cucumber, olive, and feta salad with dried herbs, olive oil and vinegar) and horta. Horta is a name for various different types of greens. One common way of preparing horta is by boiling them and serving them warm in a puddle of olive oil with freshly squeezed lemon on top. I was not a big fan of this dish because it was incredibly oily, but the greens themselves were tasty. Another noteworthy fact is that the olives and the olive oil used in the dishes came from my friend's family's orchard. So that was a very special treat!