The Tribal Tomato

The autumn harvest and sharing food

Shared eating around the world

French families are cooking food for their families and 'selling' their extra portions to their neighbours, Melbournians are having food adventures with strangers, and 'Mammabakers' are cooking together...it's a shared eating feast. Check out what's happening in the shared food movement around the world with this great article in Shareable magazine.

Autumn harvest

It's a particularly fertile time here in Melbourne with the autumn season offering up treasures of the olive, fig, pomegranate and quince variety, all awash in a beautiful dappled light. Our garden and those of friends are practically bursting.

 The Easter day olive harvest

  The all important scoring process before they go into hibernation for the winter...

 
Submit a recipe for what's growing in your garden...

Even better if it comes attached with a story of how you came to the recipe, fond memories of cooking it with someone, or eating it at a shared table...

A tribe of tsourekia

It's been a big week of Easter rituals, including making tsourekia as flagged in the last post. 

We started early, loading up our basket of goodies and taking it all to my mother's house.  We used yiayia (grandma) Frosso's divine recipe, which was given to her by her Greek elderly neighbour many years ago. Her neighbour showed her how to make tsourekia one Easter, and every Easter after that, they would make them in their respective homes and gift one to each other over the fence.

Her neighbour has since died, but yiayia Frosso continues the tradition by giving a tsoureki to her neighbour’s widower husband. Though she now has arthritis in her hands, she continues to bake these delicacies. She says “nothing will stop me from making tsourekia!”

And so, in my mother's garden, and bungalow, and kitchen, we continued the tradition...

 
Dolores crushes the mahlepi...

 
I tell Dolores it's all in the kneading...

And then my mother shows us how it's really done...

 
More kneading the second time around...

Basking in the afternoon sun...

 
A slightly overcooked tribe of tsourekia comes out of the oven...

Continue the tradtion yourself -  Download Yiayia Frosso's Tsoureki recipe.

A tribe of eggs eats chocolate

When I was a child, Easter week was frenetic in our house: countless church services, cleaning, baking and fasting. All roads led to a late mass on Easter Saturday, where young guns popped fireworks before the designed time, and the masses clamoured and pushed their way to get the holy light from the priest. Once your candle was lit, the challenge was to get it home without setting the interior of your car alight.

Once you were home, the real fun began with a middle-of-the-night feast: lamb offal soup for the adults, chicken soup for the kids. And then there were the red eggs. In the Orthodox tradition, red eggs symbolise that Christ has risen, representing new life. We clinked these red eggs together with much aplomb. It was said that the egg that remained uncracked after doing the rounds of the family would give its owner good luck for the rest of the year.  The idea was then to eat the egg. Often we kids clinked two or three eggs in a bid to hit on a 'winning' egg, our uneaten eggs discarded onto a plate.

As if all this food wasn't enough, the next day we got together with the extended family and meat was shovelled into us until we couldn't move. This well and truly made up for any deprivations in the lead-up to Easter.

These days, Easter is still very much about having family time, but some of the more heavy-duty rituals have fallen by the wayside. Even though the elusive Easter bunny leaves lots of eggs in our backyard, one tradition we still love is painting eggs each year. No matter if you don't get into the whole resurrection thing - dying Easter eggs is a great thing to do with young kids, and is a chance to find out more about the many decorating traditions around the world. After all, it's doesn't always have to be about chocolate.

Dolores and Arshia dye eggs 
Getting ready... 

  
 In they go...

 Out they come...

Drying...

 
And they're ready... 

Dying eggs

1. Purchase a dozen (or more if you like) eggs, and a packet of red (or blue, or yellow...) egg dye. One pack is enough for 24 eggs. The dye is available from many delicatessens around Easter time, as well as from some supermarkets. There are two types of dye - the cold water variety where you boil the eggs first, and then soak them in the dye; and a hot water variety, where you boil the eggs in the diluted dye. I prefer the latter as it seems to have more vibrant results. Feel free to let the eggs soak for longer than it says on the packet.
2. Recently I also came across an intriguing natural method to dye them with onion skins. If anyone tries this method, please can you let us know if it actually works?
3. If using commercial dyes, follow the simple instructions on the pack. Most recipes call for a small amount of wine vinegar.
4. When the eggs have cooked through (they must be hard boiled), remove them from the dye and let them dry. It's all very messy, so use your oldest pots, and a tray to catch any spills.
5. When cool, wipe them with a cloth dipped in a bit of oil until they shine. This was always my job as a kid, but by this time my daughter and her friend had lost interest and returned to the barbies. You can't win them all.

Divine Easter bread...

Now, another lovely cooking ritual around Easter time is that of making tsourekia, a sweet egg bread. The best are moist, chewy and not too sweet. The ingredients that lift them to divine status are mahlepi and mastih, the latter an aromatic resin only found on the Greek island of Chios.

It just happens that I have a connection to the equally divine Yiayia (Grandma) Frosso, who makes the best tsoureki outside of Greece.  She could not be led astray from her church duties to show us how in the lead-up to Easter, but has promised a mentoring session soon after the festivities come to an end. No doubt there will be a full report in this blog. In the meantime, she has parted with her recipe, loosely translated from the Greek. As tsoureki is notoriously hard to get right, we have booked in to make these with my mother later in the week. In the next blog, I will share the results, be they good, bad or just mediocre, and the recipe. Stay tuned.

Welcome to The Tribal Tomato

Welcome to The Tribal Tomato. This is my first foray into the heady world of blogs. As some of you might know, I am very unbloggish. I still think email is the height of technological sophistication. But it's high time I got with the game. To get me started, I have harnessed the kind help of some people in the know.

Those people include my lovely husband George Mifsud, talented photographer. His are the wonderful photos you will see peppering this blog to help make it more fun and palatable. And thanks is also due to my clever friend, designer Pauls Sloss. He helped to get me started with all things bloggish, and bought to life the tribe of tomatoes you see in the banner.  Check out their websites in the links page of this blog.

Now, to the point of this blog. It's about food, family and connection. A very broad topic I know.  More specifically, it's about how food can bring us together. How we can share it. How we can barter with it. How we can sit around a big table and talk until the sun sets. It's about returning to some of the things our parents, or even our grandparents, might have done. Things we have (almost) forgotten about in our busy, urban-dwelling lives.  It's about connecting with the people around us, be they family, friends or neighbours. And it's about re-connecting with the food that we eat, in all its glorious, juicy deliciousness.

I have some ideas about what I will post - starting with revisitng some of the Easter cooking rituals of my childhood. This week we make tsoureki (Greek Easter bread), dye red eggs and make bread. I will keep you posted.

I am hoping that you are going to help me by divulging your stories of shared food experiences that have given you joy. Or perhaps even some old photos of things your family did, like this one of my dad and a friend turning the lamb on a home-made spit . If you like the idea of connecting over food, follow the blog, post your own ideas, and even send in your photos. It's even possible to Email Me. Now, how old-fashioned is that?