Stewed octopus recipe: χταπόδι στιφάδο, jazzed up a tad

Greek recipes are nearly always straightforward, relying on the quality of ingredients to achieve the desired oomph. Even the notoriously difficult to get the knack of avgolemono requires skill rather than any convoluted kitchen gymnastics - and, of course, locally grown organic produce that in Greece is known simply as food. That's, perhaps, why it's so hard to achieve that gobsmacking level of meals so common in Greece when cooking Greek elsewhere.

So I decided to commit a sacrilege and spritz up the good ole octopus stifado with just a couple of very modest innovations. It has proven a major success when I made it for dinner in our vacation house in Lanzarote.

So here are the cooking instructions:

1. Warm up a very generous glug of olive oil in a thick-bottomed pan. Add the spices you are planning to use to infuse the oil with their essential oils. This time I used adobo canario, to pay homage to the host land.

2. Sautee one and a half heads of garlic until golden brown, then add three finely sliced red onions. Sautee until golden brown.

3. Add one gutted, cleaned and chopped up octopus (about 1 kg weight) as well as one and half heads of garlic broken down in cloves but unpeeled. Turn down the heat and stew until tender. Takes about an hour.

4. Add 700-800 g of chopped tomatoes, salt and ground pepper to taste. Stew 10-15 more minutes.

5. Serve with papas arrugadas - potatoes boiled in skin with lots of salt (or even better n sea water) until they get all wrinkly.

Black olives flavoured with sage, garlic and lemon rind

Turkish cuisine offers a slew of marvelous ingredients that in the loving hands of a Turkish mama turn into exquisitely heart-warming treats.

Take for example salted olives, provocatively called in French à la mode grecoise. Those are black olives in salt, full stop. On their own, they are definitely an acquired taste: a complex mix of tart and salty, rich in flavour, lacking in fragrance, and somewhat on the dry skinny side.  

Now the task is to imagine oneself a Turkish mater familiae and think how to bring out olives' strengths and make good for their weaknesses. This is my take.

I peel and slice thinly one head of garlic, part a lemon with its rind and crush a handful of dried sage. I fold all that into a 200 ml olive oil, shake well and mix with 1 kg black salted olives in a glass jar. Let stay in a cool place, NOT in the fridge, for a couple of days, to allow all the flavours to fuse. Serve with Turkish bread, grilled halloumi cheese, sliced ripe tomatoes and whatever Mediterranean dainties you can get hold of.

Latino Taverna: Zorba in Windsor

have promised to myself umpteen times to shun tourist restaurants like plague. See, unlike neighbourhood restaurants, these do not have faithful clientèle. There is no incentive for them to try to lure punters into coming again. They just churn out generic victuals just good enough not to have people complain.

But, as I haul my butt around this planet quite extensively, it can be hard to totally avoid such establishments. This time we went to Liz's for tea to Windsor. Unfortunately, she did not show up although we did see the royal standard billowing on top of the keep. Once we were done with sightseeing at the castle, we went to town to refill. Windsor is a pretty town and, blessed with royal-obsessed visitors, boasts quite a choice of places to eat. All of them, naturally, catering to mostly tourists. Such was our luck that we happened upon such. Latino Taverna, despite its name, is a Greek eatery. It is set in a picturesque location, on the cobbled slope of a curvy lane.

We went for a lunch choice of half meze, which at 11.95 a head included

• a wee bowl of taramasalata;
• a wee bowl of tzatziki;
• a wee bowl of potato salad;
• a wee bowl with a few olives;
• a wee bowl of melitzanosalata;
• a wee bowl of bean salad;
• a wee bowl of tabuleh.

Those were closely followed by

• four deep-fried calamari rings;
• a wee sauce with mussels;
• a bowl of Greek salad;
• a grill platter: 2 loukanika pork sausages, 2 keftedes (spicy meat balls), 2 chicken breast skewers, two slices of haloumi cheese.

By the way, "a lot of fresh Greek bread" advertised in the menu stands for a tiny sliced pita re-warmed in the grill. For each additional tiny pita you will be charged 2.20.

Lemon squash and soda was very nice: obviously home-made, it tasted like old-fashioned lemonade, refreshingly non-sweet.

Pro's: Great location basking in the sunshine around lunchtime.

Con's: Brisk service.

In a nutshell: Alright for a quick refuel in Windsor, if you don't mind your lunch taste like an in-flight meal.Latino Taverna3 Church Lane
Windsor SL4 1PA

Grape leaves for stuffing and wrapping

rapping is a great way of cooking. Russians use cabbage leaves, Thais - pandan leaves, the Chinese - lotus leaves, the Japanese - bamboo leaves, Indians - banana leaves, Mexicans - corn husks. In Laos and Vietnam they stuff food into pieces of bamboo trunk. The whole shebang is about letting the wrapping flavour permeate the rest of the ingredients.

In the Near East, a vaguely defined area spanning from Greece and Romania to Armenia and Syria, grapes leaves (a.k.a. vine leaves) enjoy a wide coinage. Their flavour is not that strong but the pleasantly sourish kick they bring to food is well worth the trouble of wrapping. My parents are lucky to use fresh ones from their garden but I have to buy them jarred. Most of the preserved varieties I see in Europe are imported from Turkey. I buy mine in an Iranian-run shop at Brixton Market. The first dish I cooked in London using grape leaves was charcoal grilled sardines.