Greetings from sunny Crete. Today, after several days in the very chilled yet charming seaside town of Sitia, we are driving down south to our next destination, Ierapetra. Apart from one slightly annoying day where we had issues with both our car hire and accommodation, we’ve been having a very relaxing time so far and we cannot believe we are halfway through our time here already.
It’s incredible how effortlessly we’ve managed to slip back into the old habits we learnt while we lived here. In some ways Greece still feels like home. Although we try to blend in, we are a bit of a curiosity to the locals. The pesky Greek alphabet means that most tourists do not succeed at learning more Greek than the obligatory ‘hello’, ‘thank you’ and ‘excuse me’, yet we seem to have retained a fair amount of words, it’s just that we are no good at stringing them together into coherent and grammatically correct sentences. While the Greeks seem impressed by how extensive our vocabulary is, we are pretty sure that had they known we lived here for four years they would shake their head in disbelief saying ‘ποπο’ (popo) 😉 , so we don’t advertise it much… Recipe-wise, I have a nutritious and fibre-rich lunch bowl for you today – something I ate a lot of before we left for Greece (now it’s all about tomatoes, zucchinis and olives on repeat). It’s easy to make and absolutely perfect for batch prep – make all of the cooked ingredients in bulk, at the beginning of the week, add salad elements in the day and voila – work lunch is taken care of! When I made it for myself, I made it completely oil-free as I was going through a phase of logging all my food in an app, which me realise that I would rather have a few squares of chocolate with my afternoon coffee than oil in my dressing to stick to my daily calorie target. I am on holidays (in the olive oil land!!) so I stopped bothering with it for now, but I am mentioning this in case you follow the forks over knives diet or are simply not too keen about added oil. This sweet potato bowl has so much going on, a lot of contrasting textures and flavours, a lot of satiating fibre and some healthy fats in the form of avocado and pumpkin seeds that if you decide not to use oil, you will not miss it, I promise.
