Top 10 things to eat in Greece

After last week's rantings about my experiences travelling in Greek taxis, my wife was concerned that I might have created the impression that the entire country spends its whole time being rude to each other, getting drunk and driving at high speed to the wrong place. This is of course not true. There is a lot of eating.

There's other stuff I could add to this list of course. What you should note is that this is a list of things to eat in Greece. It isn't a list of great Greek cuisine which might be a very different list.

The TV Chef Anthony Bourdain admits in his book 'Kitchen Confidential' that the finest cuisine is never going to compete with simple food that you eat when you're in love or when you're sitting on the beach as the sun sets. I realise that as I write this list there's always something else that's an extra ingredient. Family, setting sun,or just the helpful ingredient of being slightly more hungry than normal. I rather one of the crucial ingredients of Greek cuisine is Greece. So if you want to enjoy them, my suggestion is to go there, or even better, befriend a Greek person, be very nice to them and get invited to visit. Just remember to start firmly and rudely saying "Oxi" to all offers of food after the fourth meal of the day.

1. Tomatoes - on several occasions I've encountered tomatoes that were tasty beyond anything that you could legitimately expect of an ordinary tomato. Once I was on my honeymoon in Naxos where we bought tomatoes from the local farm cooperative shop. They didn't look like supermarket tomatoes, they were gnarled like arthritic fists and flecked with yellow and brown. I resolved not use them for salad but just to make a sauce for the green beans I was buying.

But when I started cutting them up for the sauce - the smell aroma, I think is more the word. Never mind about the taste. I'm dreaming of it now, it made my mouth water and when I tasted them it was like someone had taken the most powerful possible taste of tomato but made it light and delicate and so fresh that all I wanted to do was eat some more.

In Crete in the 50's a visiting Dutchman who knew a thing or two about tomatoes pointed out to the local farmers that if they grew tomatoes in poly-tunnels they could grow and sell tomatoes all year round. To show their appreciation the Cretan farmers erected a statue to this Dutchman. I've had Cretan tomatoes. If you can't get any from Naxos, they'll do.

2. Olives. The Greeks have a religious relationship with this weird little fruit/vegetable, believing that it was given to them by the goddess Athena. Just about anything you eat in Greece has olive oil poured over it or mixed into it. The best olives I ever tasted were pungent little black salted ones that we were served for breakfast with jam, brown bread and Greek coffee by the monks at Stavro Nikita monastery on Mount Athos. But I've eaten mountains of the pinkish ones pickled in brine and intend to eat a lot more.

3. Lamb at Easter - one of my first memories of Greece is helping the man who would eventually become my father-in-law ram a massive iron spike through the skull of a sheep. This is just the beginning of an entire day of barbecue action with not a Quorn burger in sight. The salty, fatty skin of the lamb as it comes straight off the barbecue is just perfection.

Easter lamb provides one of the few areas where an English person can teach the Greeks a thing or two about food. English mustard is unheard of in Greece, as is mint sauce. Both can be good presents and a great help if you're staring at a mountain of lamb. Also, Greeks don't seem to be too imaginative about leftover recipes for the lamb, so this might the time to step up and produce a shepherd's pie. Probably best not to get to cocky and start throwing together a lamb Jalfraizi unless you want to end up on a skewer.

4. Kontosouvli - pork kebab. Vivid memories of cooking this on an open fireplace in my wife's uncle's "shag pad." Which tellingly had an open fireplace on which you could barbecue, a double-width bunk bed and about 1000 bottles of his own wine.

This is rough cut lumps of leg and belly pork about the size of snooker balls, marinated in lemon and salt and then barbecued on an open charcoal fire. It's full on stuff that you certainly need lots of good wine to wash down. And after that? Maybe a lay down in the doublewide bunk bed. Actually, my wife and I ended the night staggering home under the weight of a crate of wine each.

5. Kokoretsi - this is a lamb's offal kebab, most commonly done at Easter on a skewer the size of a broad sword. It is absolutely perfect for the first 30 seconds of it's life off of the barbecue. I'm so glad that my principle of saying "yes" to everything that I was offered the first time I went to Greece resulted in me trying this. I know, I know it doesn't sound great, it's fabulous.

6. Melomacarona - christmas biscuits, stuffed with walnuts and raisins with a clove on top and then bathed in an orange and honey syrup. Not as sweet as some other Greek sweets. I have to resist the temptation to put away half a dozen after dinner when they're in the house. They go great with English tea.

7. Kotopoulo me Bamnies - Chicken and Okra. You're going to have to try hard to get this one. For me this has always been cooked with one of those extra ingredients I talked about. With love, by my mother-in-law Athena for her daughter my wife. As someone who tries to cook occasionally I find Athena deeply impressive because she never seems to break a sweat when she's cooking and everything she cooks tastes marvellous. I've never tried cooking okra myself, but I understand that it's tricky stuff. If you're careful it can taste like glue. Every time Athena has made it has been perfect.

8. Horta - it's hard to figure out exactly how this vegetable translates into Englsh. It seems to be a plant a bit like spinach, a bit like rocket, a bit like dandelion leaves. Very often, it's picked wild and boiled long. It's a great, great thing to eat to aid digestion whenever you find yourself faced with a table creaking with all the other things on this list.

9. Loukanika - the Greek take on sausage is robust. Powerfully salty. Sometimes it's got leeks in it. Sometimes it's even got chillies - one of the few places where you find these in Greek cuisine. When we have it in our freezer at home in London it finds itself serving as a late night drunken snack a lot. You need to put it in the freezer though, the fridge isn't enough, because when they're fresh they smell, they smell of farts truth be told. To my eternal shame I made my wife throw some sausages away once because they smelled and I was worried our landlord, who wasn't that tolerant of foreign food would throw them out. I wonder where those sausages are today. They keep so well, they probably be fine after half an hour in the oven.

10. Peas in Dill and Tomato Sauce. Another one from Athos. It's a simple, simple dish. Peas, tomatoes (remember the ones from Naxos, they would be great) and Dill which grows like a weed in Greece. Ok, maybe an onion. Serve with rice, or pasta, or potatoes.

11 (and 12) Octopus and squid - I know I said ten, but I hadn't even mentioned any seafood. Grilled Octopus, fried squid, stuffed squid. Atherina - little tiny deep friend fish. And I haven't mentioned cheese pies and the kind of fried cheese they make at the end of the night on Easter Sunday. Or yoghurt with honey and nuts for breafast or pork giros. Look, just go to Greece, eat stuff. It will be great.

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