Cook with love

The holiday season is here again. Cities are getting busier, islands are getting quieter. At five o’ clock in the afternoon, you look outside the window and it seems as the sea and the sky are one; a purple-blue veil covers the horizon and excludes all details and contours in a way that leaves you no choice than to focus on your steaming cup of tea.

There is also a desk full of paperwork and a plate decorated with reindeers that is was full of homemade kourabiedes. The amount of work done seems to be inversely proportional to the amount of kourabiedes eaten during work…

The truth is that Christmas sweets rarely make it to the actual Christmas day; when the fresh hot batches are coming out of the oven and the house smells like cloves, cinnamon and orange peel, childhood memories pop up and everyone want to return to those flavors. All the people I know that enjoy baking during the holidays, try to recreate the exact same sweets that they remember from their mother, or their grandmother. My mother and I, often fight when we bake my grandmother’s melomakarona, because we have a different memory and opinion about their exact shape and size. We both feel that we honor her memory by choosing her recipes and we love telling old stories while we cook, but we always somehow manage to come up with two different trays of two slightly different melomakarona that both disappear very fast.

I think it’s funny and charming, the way most Greek houses will serve you a kourabie or a melomakarono (or both of them) if you are a Christmas guest, but every sweet in every house has it’s own secrets and stories that makes it special and unique to the people that make it.

Our wish for this wonderful season is to cook with love. Even with the simplest ingredients, cook with love… And be merry.

photos by christos drazos