A Taste of Roda

Volume 2, Issue 4

September 2009

peppers, red onions, kalamatan olives and a slab of feta cheese sprinkled with dried oregano. Everything is roughly cut into chunks and prepared at room temperature for maximum flavour. The dish is usually brought to the table first and everyone tucks in with relish while waiting for the

same as when they were in Roda, but don’t forget that the salad you enjoyed so much in Corfu was assembled from vegetables picked that day, often from the restaurant owner’s garden, or provided fresh in the afternoon by a local supplier. To achieve something like the same taste, you do need to get as close as possible to these conditions.

Kali Orexi!

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The Greek style of eating brings several dishes to the table at the same time. There is something for everyone, you can eat as little or as much as you like and everybody helps themselves. Restaurant main courses often seem to be lacking in vegetables and people are led, wrongly, to the belief that Greeks do not eat vegetables. Nothing could be further from the truth and no meal would be complete without plates of boiled, grilled or roasted vegetables and the ubiquitous Greek salad.The salad is the mainstay of the meal, providing all sorts of trace elements, vitamin C, calcium, folic acid & beta-carotene. It is good for digestion, good for the blood, liver & kidneys and contains protein. As if that isn’t enough, it is dressed with olive oil & lemon juice which add significantly to the benefits.

There are all sorts of variations on a Greek salad, but the basic one comprises nothing more than tomato, cucumber, raw

A few kilometres south of Triklino Vineyard, the village of Ano Garouna celebrates a wonderful Corfiot wine in the words of the local song. "High on the nightingale hills, planted vine by vine, the grape is red, blood-like the wine". That blood red wine is ‘Skopelitiko’, one of Corfu’s most famous and widely-grown varieties which, it is thought, was originally introduced to the island by monks from Skopelos. For hundreds of years before the phylloxera blight of the 1940s,

Skopelos was a major producer of wine but their reputation never recovered and the heritage of this famous grape lives on today mainly in Corfu. Skopelitiko is a classic dry red

Corfiot wine which is particularly suited to the island’s unique climate and limestone slopes where it is produced far & wide by local families for their own consumption. In the past, it has been widely exported for blending with other wines, but this beautiful wine needs to be sampled unblended and just as it comes.
As far as we know, ‘Skopelitiko’ is not available in the island’s shops

rest of the meal. This stimulates the digestive system in readiness for the heavier foods that follow on - a very logical thing to do.

There is very little need to create a recipe here, as everything can be seen in the photograph we took recently in a Corfiot restaurant. The thing to remember is to use only the finest of ingredients – make sure the tomatoes are fully ripe and very red, the cucumber fresh and juicy, the peppers crisp and the onions firm. People often say that the food they prepare back at home doesn’t taste the

and anyone wanting to sample this rich ruby coloured wine will have to seek out a local grower.

Our bottle came from the Triklino Vineyard which produces just a few thousand bottles each year, for sale from their vineyard & museum in the centre of the island.

Visit Maggie’s Place, opposite the church in the Old Village.
Open daily from 2:30 pm until late!