Agostino, Andros & Gemista

Agostino, Andros & Gemista

The other day I was driving home from picking up my son from nursery when I saw something moving in the middle of the road. It was small, domed, brown and black. It was a tortoise crossing the road.

I pulled over, planning to pick it up and ferry it into the hedge, but before I could do so a car coming the other way hit it with a resounding thwack; a sound like it was hitting a bowling ball. The shell rolled and then settled, motionless, the legs and head had disappeared deep inside. Before I could get to it there came another car which hit it again. Another deafening crack. At last I managed to pick it up to survey the damage, noticing pale red seeping in cracks beneath the shell. It was bleeding inside.

I put it on the driver’s seat and drove it home, where I placed it gently in the garden next to our other rescued tortoise, Ferdinando. After some fairly gory Googling I decided that the damage was actually – fortuitously – fairly minor (which seemed extraordinary considering the double hit-and-run) and thus hoped he would recover.

(an aside: sexing a tortoise is nigh-on impossible, as far as I can tell. I have decided it is male and have named it Agostino after the saint, because if anything will make you believe stoically in some kind of divinity, it’s getting run over twice)

Regaling my parents-in-law with the story, I told them how odd it was that the two drivers didn’t see the tortoise in the middle of the road, seeing as he is about the size of a small melon, and not easily missed.

My mother-in-law replied with a shrug, ‘chi non guarde, non vede’. He who doesn’t look, doesn’t see.

I turned this phrase over and over in mind for the rest of the day, because I liked it. Apart from sounding a little bit holy, I also thought it sort of summed up a lot of what we had been talking about for the last week, at the food & writing retreat I co-hosted in Andros.

We had talked about what writing was, why bother writing at all, what it meant, if anything. And we had talked about observation, because being a writer is a lot about being an observer, about seeing things, about noticing things. These may be tiny things, in the case of the food writer they often are (the way a spoon disturbs the surface of a cooked custard, half an ancient nutmeg lost deep in a ceramic pot), but they are rendered meaningful by the writer because they have looked at these things, and they have seen them, and by explaining what they have seen in (the right) words, writing is born.  

After two years of pure mush in my mind (I never knew what the terrible phrase ‘baby brain’ meant until I had a child and the contents of my mind mirrored exactly the smooth, pale green and boiled potato-tasting puree I was feeding my son) it was enormously stimulating to think about writing, to talk about it with other writers, and to read aloud, and hear what others had written. We read poetry, my co-host is a poet and selected some brilliant poems, and talked about them. We described what we were eating and the preparation of dishes I had taught during the few days.

We also ate exceptionally well. Partly because I was working with a brilliant Greek/Australian chef Sappho, partly because you can’t fail with Greek ingredients, and partly because we lit the wood-fired oven, and cooked in traditional clay pots and over the fire or in this oven, which makes everything taste extraordinary. I could copy and paste the whole menu here but I’ll just list a few of my favourite things; preserved lemon and green olive chicken tagine (from Lemons the book), fresh levash flatbreads with smoked chilli and garlic butter, hibiscus and pomegranate jelly trifle with lemon, fennel seed cake as the base (again from Lemons), pumpkin ravioli with wild sage butter, grilled octopus with crispy fried capers……and then the classic and unmissable staple of the Greek grandmother kitchen, Gemista.

This is something I have always looked forward to eating every time I have ever been to Melisses, and I have been working with/for Allegra now since she opened in 2018. It is a taverna staple, though the best version I have ever eaten (up until this one) was made by Ana, who works with Allegra. Everybody has their own recipe, and this is Sappho’s version, taught to her by a Greek grandmother near where her father is from, close to Kalamata. The trick, Sappho told us, is a whole cup of olive oil. Anyone that knows my cooking will know that I use prolific amounts of olive oil, so this made instant sense to me. The Greek women all do everything by eye, of course, as I did too, but I have tried to write a recipe out here for you. It is a dish of infinite comfort; crowd-pleasing, simple and forgiving, and for me, it will forever be the taste of Greece. It is also a wonderful example of the alchemy of cooking, of something looking messy and somehow wrong and then after a few hours in the oven emerging burnished and perfect. The potatoes are magic (you can eat a million things in a million ways in a million places, and yet it is always the bread and the potatoes that stay with you). And the juice that forms in the bottom of the dish around the occasional cluster of crispy rice is golden.

Meanwhile, Agostino ate the hats of some of my tomatoes from the Gemista, and seems to be making a slow but steady recovery. And I have begun a new book.

He who looks, sees.

Gemista, an approximation

This is the ideal recipe for making the most of a late summer glut from the garden (tomatoes, peppers, aubergines…) Here in Sardinia it’s perfect for this time of year, but perhaps in the Uk you might need to wait until next summer. Or just eat it in your minds, which is almost as fun.

Again, is not the sort of recipe where you need to be precise. This is grandmother cooking at its finest. You can also use courgettes but I had none. In this case you don’t make the hats but simply cut the courgettes in half lengthways and scoop out the insides in the same way.

Feeds 4-6

2 aubergines

3 peppers

About 5 potatoes

3/4 large ripe tomatoes

Rice (I used risotto rice, short grain rice is also good)

Salt

A cup of good olive oil!

Lots of chopped parsley, mint and dill (a handful of each) I used basil as had no dill

Pepper

Lemons, 2

1 large red onion, diced

A little honey

First choose your roasting dish, everything needs to fit snugly in one layer with not too much space between.

Oil the roasting dish with a drizzle of olive oil.

Cut the tops off your vegetables to form little hats and scoop out the insides, discarding the pepper insides but saving the tomato and aubergine and placing in a bowl. It’s easiest to use a knife first with the aubergine to cut a rim and then scoop with a spoon.  

In a saute pan, saute the onion in some olive oil, until soft and smelling good. Add a tablespoon full of rice for each vegetable, plus 2 for the pot, into the saucepan and saute over a low heat for a few minutes (this is not always done, but lowers the oven cooking time, which is helpful).

Now mush up all the tomato and aubergine filling with your hands until more or less a puree, and add the rice and onion to it. Add a lot of salt (taste as you go) and fresh black pepper, the whole cup of olive oil and the juice of a lemon and some zest. Add a little honey. Taste and make it very flavoursome, with good acidity and saltiness and a little sweetness too. Add all the chopped herbs and mix, tasting and adjusting seasoning again.

Now place your vegetable receptables in the roasting dish, cavities facing upwards ready to be filled, and sprinkle them with salt. Fill them about 2/3 full with the rice mixture. Peel and chip the potatoes, toss them in some salt and more olive oil and dot them around the veg. Spoon any leftover rice around the veg in gaps too. Add the tops back on the vegetables, sprinkle with a touch more salt and drizzle generously with more oil. Now cover with foil and cook in a 190 oven for about 50 minutes, then take off the foil and allow to caramelise for another 20-30 minutes or so, until the rice is cooked and the vegetables burnished. Serve, not piping hot, but once it has rested a little.