“Thank you for an exceptional week and for welcoming us into your home and community. I was so immersed that I forgot about our life at home—-a true sign of a successful vacation.” Comments like this, coming from our guests across continents, are our greatest reward at the end of yet another successful Kea Artisanal year. In 2009, once more we had the chance to meet several wonderful people who became our new friends:
Editorial
Pottery and Food
A new and exciting workshop will take place in Kea next June (21 to 26): our ceramist friend Vicki Snyderfrom Santa Fe, who set up Terra Kea, her Greek studio on the island, together with the famous San Francisco ceramist Christa Assad will give pottery classes in a joint seminar with Kea Artisanal.
We will provide food and some extra stimulation, we hope. The workshop is already sold out, but let us know if you are interested, because a second one may follow later in the season.
The Last Tomatoes, Green & Red
I know that for most of you fall, if not winter (was that a snowstorm in Boston last weekend??), is advancing rapidly, and your local, fresh vine-ripened tomatoes flower and plump in the memory alone. In our corner of the world, though, we still enjoy warm days and only somewhat chilly nights, so our tomato plants continue to produce fruit. We had a good harvest this summer — lots of dark red, pink, and orange fleshy heirloom tomatoes, as well as plenty of red cherry and tiny pear-shaped sweet yellow fruits, quite rare in Greece, that our guests admired enormously.
Oxford’s Intellectual Feast
The select group of people who take part at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery expect to be intellectually stimulated, educated, and inspired, listening to lectures and taking part in discussions that dissect all sorts of food-related subjects according to each year’s theme. Ironically, however, they hardly expect to have a memorable gastronomic experience.
The Pious Cake
Last week my hairdresser, Vagia, asked I if had a good recipe for fanouropita. I had known about St. Fanourios since childhood and his feast day, August 27, the day specially baked cakes were brought to the church. I thought the tradition was ago forgotten.
“Oh. You cannot believe how many cakes were brought to the church last year.” Vagia said, filled with pride for her own special fanouropita. She then leaned over and whispered that she did cheat sightly by using real butter instead of olive oil which the tradition called for. The tradition also mandated that the fenouropita be made with either seven or nine ingredients. (more…)