Food post!

Today was my trip to the weekly farmers market! It's on Friday mornings, the past couple of weeks I've either forgotten about it, or been on trips to other parts of Greece. But today I finally got my butt out of bed and went produce shopping. Its still too cold here for me to say it was a totally awesome experience, (Pretty much everything I do right now is marred by the fact that I didn't bring warm enough clothing) but its a really awesome resource to have around. There were so many delicious looking vegetables. So I bought a bunch, because I decided that I'm going to make ratatouille. I've never made it before, so I had no idea how much to buy of anything. As a result, I definitely overbought. And bought poorly in one case. A couple of the vendors had zucchinis with flowers attached. Looking at them conjured up mouthwatering images of fried zucchini flowers. When I got home I looked up how exactly one makes them and was sorely disappointed. I'd never seen flowers un-fried before, so I didn't really know what their supposed to look like. Mine are definitely too wilted. And I bought the female kind (the kind that's attached to what we think of as a zucchini), and apparently the male flowers are much tastier. And my flowers are attached to mature plants. Usually you buy flowers on their own (or attached to baby zucchinis) to fry. All of these are things I did not know. But now I do. I can't decide if I'm going to try to fry them anyways, as you can tell from the picture, they're pretty darn sad (and this guy, or gal actually, isn't even the worst of the bunch) But I'm so looking forward to veggie goodness in some form.

Unfortunately, I don't know when I'll really end up making it, because this weekend is the apex of καρνaβάλι, which is the Greek Orthodox version of Mardi Gras, which is way awesomer becuase it lasts for two weeks. Last night was Tsiknopempti, which literally means the Thursday of the smell of roasting meat. Everyone eats absurd amounts of meat to prepare for lenten fasting (which doesn't actually start for over a week, but I like that they're getting a head start). It doesn't feel quite proper to make a vegetarian dinner today, but I won't be around for the market again for quite some time.

Other food adventures. I attempted to make shakshouka earlier this week. This was a mishap-filled experience. I bought half as much crushed tomato as I was supposed to (they should warn me that 28 oz is super-huge can sized!) which wouldn't normally be a problem since we have a grocery store downstairs. But I didn't realize the error of my ways until well into the cooking process when the sauce had reduced. I also forgot to preheat the oven. And then I proved to myself that I am a fail at cooking eggs. I've never made eggs in a way that required me to know if the yolks have set. I'm all about the hard-boiled, scrambled, and omelet egg varieties. The way that shakshouka works is you make a tomato-based sauce, put it in a baking dish, break eggs in to it, and bake them in the oven until just set. It looked to me as if the eggs weren't setting, so I turned up the heat, came back in two minutes, to what looked like eggs covered in plastic.

After warning my roommates that I may have ruined dinner, we dug in. It was not a total disaster. There was enough food for three people, rather than four, which was fine since our other roommate ended up working late in the library. The eggs weren't horrible, they were basically just hard-boiled, but in the shape of an egg-over easy, and the sauce was, to my mind, very tasty. Then I redeemed myself with an awesome new find from the bakery for the dessert, and all was well.

Well, I'm off to the wine festival (its another part of carnaval). But, did you know that this is what a cashew fruit looks like? I did not. Now we both do.