The annual Wellington Cretans Association picnic

My idea of the perfect picnic was one where the picnic site was covered in green grass, the picnic was placed on a blue-and-white gingham tablecloth, the plates and cutlery were all contained in a picnic basket, and the food did not resemble the kind of food we ate on a daily basis at home. I imagined pies, muffins, prepared juices, and all kinds of food you could pick with your fingers without getting dirty. Our family picnics never turned out that way, or at least the one and only picnic we went to every year. It was never a gingham-tablecloth affair. Instead, it was a hullabaloo of expatriates from the Mediterranean island of Crete, playing Cretan music from ghetto blasters hooked up to car batteries, breaking out into Cretan jigs and eating barbecued New Zealand lamb - the annual Cretans' Association of Wellington summer picnic.

(Click the link if you want to read the whole story.)

Odd shots Monday: the motorway

The view from my house entails the motorway (highway, freeway - in Greece, we call it the National Road). This is what it looked like when I took a close-up of it in the evening from the balcony of our house. (The view of the ship isn't visible in this shot.)

Camera critters: Butterfly

Butterfly on a thyme bush: Fournes village, Hania.

Offal

It's a load of old waffle
that awful is OFFAL.
It may not look good
to treat it as food.

But once you have cut it
and floured it and fried it,
believe me, there's nothing
that tastes quite just like it.

Maybe it's hiding
in that little SAUSAGE
you ate as of late
in your wholemeal bread sandwich.

So next time you're buying
a small spring-born lamb,
you might think of eating
what you thought was spam.

It's liver and kidney
and sweetbreads and heart,
the kind of things chucked
in a steak-kidney tart.

Let it all cook until it is crunchy;
just think of it then as a squidgy BIFTEKI.
And when it's all done, it needs very little:
some lemon juice, salt and horta to fill you!

©All Rights Reserved/Organically cooked. No part of this blog may be reproduced and/or copied by any means without prior consent from Maria Verivaki.

SkyWatch Friday: Castle in the sky

The minaret used to be called the leaning tower of Hania, because it was in such a bad state of disrepair that it needed to be repaired or demolished. It was literally leaning to one side in a rather built-up area where the houses have been built so closely together; if it had fallen, it wold've been difficult to get the rubble out, let alone repair it. This kind of building can't be demolished; it is under protection orders, but it's allowed to fall down of its own accord. Its daily presence in Hania involves a significant part of the history of the town, which was once ruled by the Ottoman Turks who presided in the area for four centuries.

Right now, the minaret in Splantzia looks like it could be mistaken for a castle spire - maybe Rapunzel's going to throw her golden hair over the balcony...