Photo credit: Jody Martin
The perfect feta is a balanced mix of salt and tang, creamy and crumble. It pairs well with extra virgin olive oil and oregano, crusty bread and a ripened tomato. Kalamata olives on the side are divine.
It's best enjoyed at a tavern by the beach, after a few hours of swimming and floating in waves under the baking sun, sand stuck to your feet and your skin slightly sticky from the salty sea, with a bottle of cold water (or beer) and a plate of fried calamari or smelt. Or, melted in the oven, with roasted red peppers and oregano, to dip with oven-baked pita.
The food of my Greek heritage is simple and good, filling and nourishing to both body and spirit: fresh vegetables or beans slathered in olive oil, fish and seafood pan-fried with a side of greens, white grilled meat or poultry, baked pasta or potatoes. And feta on the side of everything.
When I was a kid we could only buy feta at the Italian food store, also the sole source of kalamata olives and olive oil, which my mother used to measure out and mix with vegetable oil to make it last longer. Now, even McDonald's does a Greek salad with crumbled feta and black olives.
I've just returned from a too-short, two-week holiday in Greece, where we ate fresh figs and grapes plucked from our hosts' trees, and feta accompanied every meal: layered with phyllo pastry for breakfast, on a horiatiki (village) Greek salad for lunch, alongside a souvlaki or on baked pasta for supper. We swam in the Aegean, racing against the waves and calling out "There's another one! Watch out for that one!" under the bluest sky and the hottest sun. We trekked through the ruins of Mycenae and Knossos, the dust of thousands of years' past on our feet. We drove past blackened mountainsides, stark evidence of the previous month's wildfires in which over 90 people lost their lives as the wind propelled towering flames across acres of dry brush in the matter of minutes.
Now at home, and still jet-lagged despite several days back in the eastern time zone, I indulge in Canadian-made feta on toast for breakfast despite my husband's sideways glance. Outside, it starts to rain. The grass is green and the trees are lush in Ottawa, but the newspaper documents wildfires blazing in Western Canada.
I've napped each day this weekend, giving into jet-lag and lulling myself to sleep, imagining I am still in my beloved Greece, where the cicadas buzz with deafening cacophony, where the sea cradles me with refreshing waters and buoyancy, where the sun bronzes my skin despite lathering on the sunscreen, and where the hospitality and feta are plentiful.
To donate to recovery efforts from wildfires in Greece:
https://www.desmos.org/
To donate to recovery efforts from wildfires in BC:
