Stories from a Greek table and that food advice

 "Keep it simple, keep it fresh and use whatever is available".

Simple dish, 2026

It’s the sort of advice that could roll off the tongue of any one of a range of TV cooks or from the pages of those glossy recipe books.

And just for good measure the message is accompanied by heaps of pictures of far away places and the odd real story of authentic farmers in remote villages as yet untouched by the modern world.

Put all of that together and some happy suburban chef will not only offer up the meal to stun friends and family but regale them with tales of cooking over a stove in a rural village.

Always it will be from a friend of a friend  who passed through the place  before the young villagers disappeared off to the towns and cities.

Leaving the old, less adventurous and traditionalist to live amongst the abandoned cottages falling into ruin.

Abandoned in Assos, 2019

And that brings me tonight’s pasta dish. 

It took roughly 15 minutes to make and transported me back to a tiny taverna off the beaten track on an adventure across one of the Greek islands.

Ten minutes out from the Piraeus, bound for the islands,1981

Back then the holidays like the food we ate were simple.  

You flew into Athens on a midnight flight, waited around the Piraeus till the ferries started and by degree island hopped.

After which you caught a local bus or splashed out on a taxi.

On one occasion the bus set us down in a small town square, and that was where we came across the restaurant.  

It was small, the menu limited to what had been brought in from the fields and the local wine came to the table in an old recycled juice bottle.

The place to eat, beyond the square by the sea, 2017

And on that day in that taverna  what was on offer was pasta tossed in tomato sauce with a handful of olives.

Simple quick and perfect.

And this evening because l had some tomatoes and olives I replicated that dish.

Pasta, tomatoes, olives, capers and cauliflower, 2026

The tomatoes made a light sauce to which I added the olives a handful of capers and some peas, and a bit of  cauliflower. 

It was essentially just bits waiting to be used up, and probably the next time because the bits will be different the dish will also go off in a new direction.

And so to the pasta.

Our cupboard is full of different types and while I know each should be used for different dishes  I just please myself, and so on a whim, I used my new favourite, a thick long pasta with a hollow centre, called Bucatini.  It has that added attraction that bits of the sauce end up in the hollow tube.

It wasn’t quite that long past Greek meal, but it delivered that mantra “Keep it simple, keep it fresh and use whatever is available".

Location; our kitchen

Pictures; scenes from the Piraeus, some Greek islands, and that pasta dish, 1981-2026 from the collection of Andrew Simpson 

Walking the islands ….. Greece three decades ago

It is easy to be sniffy about how things were done in the past and even more so in other countries.

So, it now seems very strange that once if you wanted to talk to someone by phone you had to go out and put coins in a machine to do so, and equally strange that packets of unflavoured crisps came with bit of salt inside a twist of blue paper.

All of which makes it less bizarre that this man should be plastering the upstairs outside window by standing on a window ledge.

Or that just down the road in the same Greek village a woman was whitewashing a wall using simple brush made from straw bundled together and tied to a stick with string.

But then back in the early 1970s just outside Seaham Harbour in the North East the scaffolding surrounding a construction consisted of old telegraph poles to which were lashed planks.

At the time I marvelled at the Heath Robinson approach to building but then I had yet to visit Greece.

As I said it is easy to be sniffy, but how things were done in the past was just different.

Location; Greece

Pictures; doing it differently, Greece, 1981, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

A night flight ... the ferry ... and heaps of Greek sun

 I was too young to have gone island hopping  across Greece in the 1960s and a decade later too busy earning a living and making a career.

Ten minutes out of the Pireaus,1981

So it wasn't till 1981 that l did the thing usually reserved for 18 year olds short on money and big on adventures.

By then l was 32, with a bank balance but doing Greece on the cheap still appealed.

Arriving, 1981

It started with one of those midnight flights to Athens and a few hours to kill at the airport before heading to the Pireaus, finding the right ferry and leaving with hundreds of others east for a succession of islands.

Always find the shade, 1981

The trick was to avoid the open deck and go for a seat under canvas. The foolhardy who missed the shade suffered under the relentless sun as one after another island hoved into view and disappeared to be replaced by yet another.

The beach, 2008

The reward of course was the final destination, a week in the sun with cheap booze and amazing food.

Friends still chanced sleeping on the beach but we preferred a bed. Not that the holiday apartments were anything to write home about.

A room, a bed and a basic shower. The rooms were usually over a taverna which solved breakfast and the beach a few minutes walk away.

And that was all you needed.

The apartment above the shop, 1981

The return was much the same with the prospect of hanging around at the airport for another grim flight.

Only improved one year by a late meal in an unpretentious restaurant at the foot of the Acropolis drinking retsina from old glass jars which once held orange juice.

Crossing the island, 2010

Today we fly direct and check the rating of the accommodation and customer comments, book a car to  cross the island, and wonder what it would be like to travel again on those old green and cream buses.

Location; Greece

Pictures; across Greece, 1981-2010, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Adventures in Greece ........ a ferry and a trip into the unknown

My uncle was just 19 when he washed up in Greece, while I was 32.

Arriving by sea

He went onto Basra, and the Far East having already travelled to Cape Town and up the Suez Canal.

By comparison I had done two long weekends in Paris by the time I was 31.*

But his journey’s had been with the RAF, and South Africa and the Suez Canal were stopping off points on his way to war.  His arrival in Greece coincided with the German invasion, which ended with the Fall of Greece and the British retreat to Egypt, while his arrival in the Far East happened just as the Japanese captured Singapore.

Scenes from off the beaten track

All of which made my travels very tame.

But I did get to Greece in the summer of ’81 and while my contemporaries had blazed a trail back packing across the country a decade earlier, I was happy enough to have got there just forty years after Uncle Roger.

Nothing ever quite prepares you for that wall of heat that meets you as you disembark from the aircraft, or the sight of your first Greek island from a ferry which left the Piraeus in the early hours of the morning.

It is easy after a while to get blasé about the view from the sea of a Greek town with its untidy collection of buildings rising in steps from the harbour up to the skyline.

But every time we have done it I never lose that sense of excitement and while I have done my share of bars and “authentic Greek restaurants” I have also taken myself off and explored the quieter places.

The ferry adventure

Often they are the back streets, which during those hot hours of midday till three are usually deserted, with everyone choosing to rest inside their houses.

But of course tourists and especially those from northern Europe, like the famous song, are the  ones to “go out in the midday sun”, accompanied only by mad dogs and other Englishmen.

Still at the time it fed my sense of curiosity and that was all to the good.

Although left to my own devices I was able on occasion to get hopelessly lost, like the time I took the short ferry ride from where w were staying to the main harbour.  The trip took minutes, but the return journey lasted an hour as I had chosen a ferry travelling around the island.

After a day on the beach

And while I remained calm I did ponder on just how far the journey would take and what I might encounter along the way.

Still to this day I burn with embarrassment at the mistake, but it was an adventure and of those at 73 I still revel in.

Location; Greece, 1981

Pictures; Poros in Greece, 1981 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*It would spoil the story to admit that I had at 19 been taken on a trip across the Mediterranean visiting Naples, Athens, Istanbul and Majorca but I was very young and the attractions of the cruise ship won over the sights of three ancient cities.

Travels with Friends ...... no.2 .... down a Greek street

It was August 1981 and the first time I had visited a Greek island.

Location; Poros

Picture; coming home with the shopping, Greece, 1981, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Pictures from a past ....... no. 1 the Greek island

It is a sobering thought that the young boy who happened to being walking down the flight of stairs in 1981 will now be well into middle age.

It was my first time in Greece; and everything was bright, fresh and different with everyday a promise of a new experience.

Never underestimate the impact of a foreign country on a lad from south east London, the extent of whose horizons were bounded by Manchester in the north and Brighton in the south.*

It began when the door to the plane opened at the airport and you were hit by that wall of heat, intense sunlight and unfamiliar sounds, carried on with the ferry hoping journey from the Piraeus across the Aegean and ended on a tiny island burnt brown by the summer sun.

I can’t now remember where I was when I took the picture, and for over thirty-five years this image along with countless others sat half forgotten in our cellar.

Location; Poros

Pictures; on the stairs, Poros, 1981 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*This precludes a long weekend in Paris the year before, or the cruise holiday to Istanbul, Athens and Naples in 1969 paid for the parents of my by then girlfriend.  Neither count as they spoil the story.