The Tribal Tomato

My Ikaria is now available

‘My Ikaria is a kindly wake-up call to live a more mindful, meaningful and generous life – a joy to read.’ —Alice Pung

 

I'm delighted that my latest book, My Ikaria, is now available for purchase.

Thanking all who have helped it come to fruition, from my publishers at Black Inc./ Nero, to my agent Jacinta di Mase, to those in my writers' networks, and to the many supporters who have come to help launch the book and given me such wonderful feedback on my Facebook page - with special thanks to the many passionate Ikarians I met on my journey.

Here's the lowdown on how to find out more about the book and where to get a copy:

• Find out more, read endorsements or make media enquiries
• Read an excerpt
• Buy it in Australia (free delivery - gotta love that!)
• Buy it overseas
• Read an interview in Greek

I hope you enjoy it and very much look forward to your comments via my Facebook page, through my blog or via email.

Wishing you good health and happiness. 

Spiri

 

The powerful daydream

The smell of Marlborough cigarettes; the din of soccer finals on TV; the sound of dice against a backgammon board - my lover and I let it all wash over us as we drink cognac in the little seaside café. Outside, the rain pelts the muddy pot holes of the square, eventually washing out into the Aegean Sea. 

Image by George Mifsud

All it takes is a downpour outside the suburban café where I now sit, and I’m off – daydreaming about something that happened 15 years ago.  The rain is pounding the muddy banks of Melbourne’s Yarra, which looks nothing at all like the Aegean.

Daydreaming is the stuff of time wasters. No hopers. Dole bludgers. I’m sure that was what my grade six teacher was thinking when he wrote that ‘Spiri daydreams too long before she starts her work…’ in my school report. When, all the while, I was just getting my head ready to tackle those long-division sums.

There were lots of famous people whose daydreaming helped them creatively - John Lennon, Albert Einstein,  Sigmund Freud, Thomas Edison, Mark Twain and Edgar Allan Poe to name a few.

But you need not have Einstein’s IQ or Twain’s talent to be a daydreamer. We daydream for about one-third of our waking hours, according to Eric Klinger, a clinical psychologist at the University of Minnesota. And there’s compelling evidence to say that it’s good for us – it helps us to relax, and to create, to visualize and to hope. It’s so refreshing to be unavailable – even just for a few minutes. In a daydream there are no bleeps and flashes, no missed calls and bulging in-boxes.

For me, a daydream is a blissful pause; a decadent space where long forgotten memories can surface; where tricky problems may get solved. Occasionally I get lucky in a daydream, and the muse offers me creative gifts from a deeper place. The challenge then is to quickly find a pencil and a bit of paper on which to write my insights before they disappear into the ether of mundane thought.

There's no forumula for how to daydream. Relax and let thoughts float into consciousness, unbidden and unchecked, like a sentence without punctuation. It’s like a brainstorm; only there’s no one else there to tell you that your ideas stink.

I’m a daydreamer, and proud of it. After all, I’ve just come back from drinking cognac with my lover in a rain-soaked square on the other side of the world. And it’s helped me to remember why I still love the man who now takes the bins out after our kids have gone to bed.

Afternoons in Ithaka

Some years ago, I was in one of my favourite bookshops and saw author Arnold Zable, who I’d met briefly on a few occasions. I had long admired Zable’s storytelling ability, and his stance on refugees. I made my way up to him to congratulate him on the release of his new book, Sea of Many Returns. As I bowled up to him, I realised too late I’d interrupted a moment – he’d been staring at his book on the shelf, in a kind of reverie; clearly it was the first time he was seeing it there. I mumbled my congratulations and slinked off sheepishly, feeling like a stalker in a b-grade movie.

It takes a long time for a book to reach a bookshelf. And the moment of seeing it there for the first time is so fleeting. Now I’ve experienced it myself, I would do anything to give Arnold back his moment in all its fullsome glory.

For me, the process of creating a book started some years ago with nothing more than a vague idea that I would write about growing up in a Greek family, and on the many trips I took to Greece to find out where ‘home’ really was. Of course it would involve food. And lots of it. There was always the question: are these ideas/stories/grains enough to carry a book? I believe there’s no way of knowing the answer to this until you start writing – a word, a sentence, a page. Soon you might have some chapters and even a proposal, which you might show to a few people. They usually tell you where you’ve gone wrong (why do they have to do that?), and what you can do better. When you’ve honed the words, your agent puts these out to a publisher. Then you wait. And wait some more. Finally, a miracle happens and a very nice publisher asks if you could please provide another 60,000 words or more in the same vein. Something that has a beginning, a middle and an end; preferably something that might move people just a little.*

So you sit on your laptop day after day. Try to relax enough to let the magic alchemy happen. You let the words bubble up from somewhere deep within; sometimes inspired by a photograph, a strong memory; a smell. When you lose track of time, you know you’ve reached that elusive place that is the ‘zone’, where nothing else matters except the words flowing onto the page. A few hours later, that particular story comes organically to an end, and you think you’ve nailed a good first draft. It's your story, your voice, your experience. That’s all the matters.

You do more of this most days, trying all the while to ignore that irritating voice that pipes up occasionally– it says, ‘no one wants to know that you ate the thyroid glands of young lambs when you were a 10’. You push through it, feeling the satisfaction of stories finding their rhythm; chapters connecting with each other; the beginning and end eventually forming a circle, just like a Greek dance. You dig up poems you haven’t read for a while; re-discover anew how much you love the lyricism of the Greek language; wish you’d concentrated more in Greek school. Your wrists and back start to hurt but you keep going regardless, pruning the original draft. You shift a chapter here; cut something back there. Finally, after many months, you have something that resembles a manuscript.

Despite wanting to hold on to it for a few years to let the dust settle and fix those pesky dangling modifiers, your deadline comes around; you really do have to press the ‘send’ button. Some months later, your editor’s report uses words like ‘beautiful subtlety’ and ‘artful way’ to describe your book. But it also says your story has several individuals named George and half a dozen named Kathy – it’s hard to tell who is who. There is more work to be done. You have to explain things, add a chapter, prune a little more. And so begins the editing process, back and forth over months. The changes get tinier, until you’re staring at a bunch of typeset pages that include your husband’s beautiful photos. Your baby is nearly ready to see the light of day.

So you’re standing at your favourite bookshop and your son says, ‘I’m proud of you Mum.’ And your daughter beams. Your husband takes a few photos and then you shoo them away, a little embarrassed. But secretly pretty chuffed. This is your moment.

*That's in really insy winsy writing in the contract.

Afternoons in Ithaka is now on sale. You can purchase it at all good bookshops, such as ABC Books, Readings and Hill of Content, where the book will be launched on the Thursday 13 February.

For upcoming book- and food-related events and musings, go to the Tribal Tomato Facebook page.

The smells of summer

There are two smells I strongly associate with summer: that of zucchinis and tomatoes sizzling in a pan, and the smell of meat on a barbecue.

Our backyard is a treasure-trove of edible pleasures at this time of year thanks to my green-thumbed husband: fulsome eggplants, aromatic basil, pert zucchinis, juicy tomatoes, wee cucumbers, rosy peaches and the odd whitefly-afflicted corncob that’s a bit sickly-looking but still edible. With all this prolific bounty, our charcoal-fuelled barbecue is getting quite a workout, as is that of our neighbours judging from the smells wafting over the fence. I must say that after all the excesses of the festive season, it’s nice to load up the barbie with produce that has travelled from our garden to our barbecue (usually via the kitchen).

I’ve worked out that in order for vegetables not to dry out or burn on the barbecue, they benefit from a fair bit of basting. I’ve been marinading them in olive oil, lemon, oregano, salt and pepper. I regularly ‘reapply’ this marinade during the cooking process, and feel as if I am liberally covering them in sunscreen (another of summer’s quintessential smells) to protect their delicate flesh.

My beloved cousin Stathis in Greece has another Mediterranean-inspired marinade for vegetables on the barbecue: olive oil, balsamic vinegar, freshly grated tomato and sugar (1 tablespoon sugar to each litre of marinade). For best results, he suggests marinading vegetables at least two hours before cooking.  He feels that vegetable souvlakia make for a far superior ‘souvlaki’ to those with meat. The literal translation of ‘souvlaki’ is ‘little skewer’. He reminded me that the humble souvlaki has many guises, from skewers endowed with pieces of kid goat, to those with artichokes. Makes me want to run off to Greece this very minute.

 

Stathis with Australiana tea towel in the foreground, and barbecue in the background, Kiparissia, Greece

Stathi's mother, my thiea Kanella, visited us a few years ago from Greece. She was very taken with our public barbecues in parks and gardens: she felt it was very generous of councils to make them available to patrons free of charge. She said that if she had such barbecues in her town, she (and many of her friends) would never cook at home.

Hail then the humble barbecue, be it in our backyards or public spaces; and blessed be the bounty that our garden is producing to put atop it.

The fertile fruit

She has no trouble attracting a mate, what with her blushing scarlet skin and full, sensuous body. Prising her open is quite the challenge, as she protects her virtue very well. Cut through the fleshy exterior to find a thin, bitter tasting membrane. Peel this back to reveal the real treasure - her glistening ruby red seeds.

Welcome to the pleasures of eating a pomegranate, the ‘fertility fruit’ originating in Persia. Such was her beauty that she (or rather 'it') warranted a mention in the Book of Exodus, Homer’s Hymns and Shakespeare. The pomegranate is so lusciously fulsome, it reminds me of a fertility figure we saw some years back at the ancient Tarxien Temples in Malta.

Not only are they beautiful, but pomegranates are very good from you, with claims that they have everything from anti-ageing to anti-cancer properties.

It’s Autumn and pomegranates are flourishing in Melbourne. The seeds can sometimes be bitter and sour, but when you hit on a good one, the seeds will be sweet and aromatic. The best one I have had is one that my mother bought over recently.

The pomegranate tree in her garden grew from a tree we had in the garden of our first home. This in turn was given to us by a friend’s dad. I love this whole ‘going around’ business, as if the tree has its own history that can be traced back through the hands that have passed it on. If you come across a tree that bears good fruit, take a cutting. Simply snap off a branch from the bottom of the tree, at the point where it shoots out from the stem. Place this in a glass of water for a few days, then in a pot until it sprouts leaves. Plant into the ground. Say a little prayer to the fertility goddess and hope for the best.

How can you use the pomegranate seeds I hear you ask? Eat them a la naturale (my daughter sits there for ages, prising the seeds out), toss them in a salad, or make a sweet pomegranate syrup. In Middle Eastern cooking, a tangy pomegranate syrup is used to add flavour to stews.

Finally, for those of you wondering how to prise the pomegranate open, simply insert a knife into the flower-like top – when this is about an inch into the flesh, gently twist the knife and the pomegranate will break open in two – but be careful, your blushing beauty is very delicate.

Sciroppo di Pomegranate (Pomegranate Syrup)*

2kg of pomegranates, 4kg of sugar

Break the pomegranates and squeeze by hand. Leave juice in a pot for 24 hours. Filter through a muslin cloth. Place in a pot with twice its weight of sugar. Boil for 20 minutes. Allow to cool and bottle.

PS I haven’t yet tried this recipe – if any one does, please write in and let Tribal Tomato know how you went.

*from Preserving the Italian Way by Pietro Demaio

The mulberry tree

Well over a year ago now, my family and I visited my parents' ancestral homes in southern Greece. The visits were tinged with sadness. Since our last visit 13 years ago, my last remaining grandparent had passed away, as had my father. The homes and gardens my grandparents had worked so hard to cultivate were slowly crumbling.

(Vanada by George Mifsud)

It was this feeling of sadness that prompted me to write the story Shot Glass about my father's ancestral home. The story revolves around the mulberry tree in the front yard (not to mention a shot-gun toting koumbaro, my father's best man...). 

When my parents first returned to Greece for a holiday after migrating to Australia, my grandfather used to push us kids (and his young daughter-in-law, our mother) back and forth on the rope swing he had rigged onto the tree. Up in this very same tree, my father and a number of villagers built a bed made out of slats. This is where my mother and father slept all summer.

(My brother in white shorts, me in purple, my mother on the swing, and my grandfather swinging her...)

While my father’s ancestral home now lies nearly in ruins, the mulberry tree still stands tall -- the mulberries sweet and juicy as ever.  Our children filled a bag with them, their sticky juice pooling at the bottom.

Despite the ruins around me, there was still life in that stately old tree. I fancied I could feel my grandfather nearby, watching over his great grand-children, who were almost exactly the same age as my brother and I were when we first visited Greece.

The experience of visiting the homes inspired my husband George to take many photographs. We have compiled these into a beautiful book, Stories of My Greek Home, based on three village homes – my father’s home in Vanada, my mother’s home in Petalidi, and my aunty’s home also in Petalidi in the south of Greece.

My hope is that the mulberry tree continues to thrive. Because that's the kind of man he was, I'm reckon my grandfather will make sure that it does.