by Cathy
This past weekend, as I was busily preparing our Sunday dinner of grilled steaks and onions, Greek village salad and fittingly, Mexican rice, I realized that my glass olive oil dispenser, the one that sits at the ready on my kitchen counter, ever so full of its Greek homeland pride, had only a few drops of precious oil left.
Normally, I would panic - a panic that only a Greek without olive oil could experience - but I knew I could fall back on my trusty vat of olive oil I have on reserve. Instinctively, I picked up the fancy dispenser and headed straight to the corner of my kitchen where I keep my jumbo tin of Greek olive oil.
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| Don't let the picture fool you; this sucker is BIG |
I swung the nozzle around, fit it carefully into the opening of the glass bottle and started pumping fresh Greek olive oil from the container into the carafe. Instantly, as if I was teleported to the olive groves of the Peloponnese and back, I was armed with a fresh, newly filled bottle of olive oil.
Then I wondered: How many other people have a vat of olive oil sitting in their kitchen for refills? Mine just happens to be shipped directly from my brother-in-law's olive groves in Greece, so the container is much larger than one could buy at a store, unless of course, it was Costco, and even Costco has nothing on the size of these imported olive oil containers. But seriously? Who has that?
Pondering this with a smile on my face, I recalled my childhood (the food we ate, how we ate it) and laughed out loud when I remembered that once, my mother asked me to go to our indoor porch out back and fetch some potatoes for that evening's dinner.
"Where are they?" I asked.
"Oh, you'll see them." she said. "Grab about five or six."
I swung open the back screen door and glanced around, looking for a small bag of potatoes that, say, a normal person would buy from the store. I couldn't believe my eyes when I spotted a SACK - I'm talking the burlap sacks of potatoes you see donkeys hauling in foreign countries, which were about my size and height at the time. I got closer and opened up the sack, expecting to find something or actually, someone in there along with the potatoes, simply because of the sheer size of the thing.
Looking back now, I remembered that I barely flinched at the fact that we had an industrial-sized sack of potatoes on our porch (and now I flinch because, did we really eat that many potatoes?); it just seemed normal to me at the time. Just like it seemed normal that we roasted a whole lamb for holidays or that would throw a half carcass of lamb into the oven - with probably half that sack of potatoes - when we were having people over. Just like it seemed normal to buy and store our wine by the case, not by the bottle. Just like it seemed normal that my dad would bring home wheels - heck, tires - of yummy Greek cheese. Sometimes it would be crates of oranges; other times, it would be gallon-sized containers of olives. Yes siree. We Greeks did bulk waaaaay before Costco was even a glimmer in our all-consuming eyes.
It helped that Greeks are mostly in the food industries: restaurants, diners, banquet halls, supermarkets, produce stores, butcher shops. All the connections came in handy (and still do) for the Greek Costco Connection, or Greekco as we so appropriately call it in our family.
Since my sister and I have gotten married and moved to our respective homes, Greekco has now become Momco. It never fails that every time we visit our parent's house, we will undoubtedly leave carrying some type of food item: pork chops, lamb chops, ground meat, large bags of grapes, oranges, grapefruits, steaks, fish, chicken breasts, chicken thighs, whole chickens, fresh chickens, frozen chickens - we're always carrying some variation of friggin' chickens in addition to whatever else they ziploc, tupperware or aluminum foil up for us to take home. The ongoing joke when returning from the parent's house is: "We're always carrying chickens."
Deep down there is something comforting about keeping up this Greekco tradition in my home and perhaps one day, my children will look back and think how funny and odd it was that we had a vat of imported Greek olive oil in our kitchen. But it will remind them of home, just like it does for me. And as long as they come to visit me after they move out, you can bet that my Greek need-to-feed gene will mutate from Greekco to Momco.
