A recipe directly from my mother, which is different than the main courgette pie recipe found in Northern Greece (it’s less sweet). This is one of my favorite pies, and very few people know this particular version of the recipe.

Ingredients (for 10)
* 1 kg mexican courgette/zucchini (it must be this kind, rather the more common kind)
* 1 cup of olive oil
* 1 big onion, chopped
* 1.5 to 2 cups flour (use 1 to 1.5 cup of almond flour for Paleo version)
* 1 egg (2 eggs for Paleo version)
* chopped mint
* some salt
* some water
* 1/2 cup raisins (optional, for sweeter version)
* 1/2 cup crumbled feta (optional, for savory version)

Execution
1. Peel off the courgettes and cut them in very thin slices inside a big bowl. We add some salt on the slices and we use our fists to dry out their juices completely (by struggling it). This is the most difficult part of the recipe, as you need to put out quite some physical strength to dry out the courgettes from their juice. Place the dried zucchini on a separate bowl and throw away the juices on the first bowl when done.
2. Later, we add and mix in 1 cup of flour, 1/2 cup of olive oil, the chopped mint, and the onions, and we stir well, for all ingredients to become one. We oil a big baking pan, and we put the mass everywhere in the pan using our fingers to even everything out in the dish in a thin layer.
3. [Optional Step] In another bowl we add salt, the second cup of flour, 3 tbspoons of olive oil, 1 egg, and a bit of water, and we beat them all in order to make a non-stiff batter. We add that mix on top of the courgette mass on the baking dish and we use our fingers to evenly distribute the batter too in a thin layer.
4. Add the rest of the olive oil on top and distribute it too, and we then bake it at 250 Celsius (over 400F) in an already warmed-up oven, for about an hour, until well golden brown.

Here in Greece I am using the IBM T23, with the latest Ubuntu Linux in it. It generally works ok, but wifi and dialup is a pain in the ass. While I never had a problem with my netgear pcmcia wifi card in the USA, we had to set the router’s channel number to 6 from 12 in order to get the laptop to connect in Greece. It would just refuse to connect otherwise, and we even tried with another usb wifi stick, that was bought in Greece. It seems that somehow Linux keeps as default internally the channel number of the country you first use wifi with, and if you travel, well, bad luck for you.

As for dialup, it connects once every 5-6 retries, it somehow misses the mark to get an IP and DNS from the server. And don’t let me start about the troubles we had with Linux trying to copy from an SD card 4 GBs of data to a usb fat32 external drive. Apparently it never “sync” after the copy, and so files were never really copied. Or something.

Every few months I am getting this “chill” to leave OSX and XP behind and go with Linux. But every time, Linux will somehow let me down with a very specific kind of bugs. It’s the kind of bugs that are only getting fixed when the developers have project managers and closed down teams, rather than random developers at random countries working on their own.

There is a good chance we will be having a flashback of the story of the “Black Rock” on “Lost” this coming season. The producers are currently trying to find two old ships for shooting. Personally, I can’t wait for the new season!

[I am reposting this as it somehow has disappeared form the DB]

My internet connection is very flaky here in Greece. I used to have access to a shared wifi hotspot a few days ago that suddenly stopped working, so I am now with a prepaid 5 Euro internet connection called “net” (20 hours of connectivity per month). Apparently, to make that working with our Ubuntu Linux laptop (IBM T23) and the “martian” winmodem driver, I needed to install GnomePPP (gnome-networking doesn’t stay connected), enable its “stupid mode” option (whatever the hell that is), and add the forthnet gateway and two DNS IP addresses. Only then it connects correctly and stays connected. Hopefully this will help some users.

We can buy organic, free range chickens everywhere in the world. But even these organic free range chickens look just like any other industrialized chicken. Here’s the real organic, free range, and occasionally fresh-vegetable & corn-fed chicken. From my grand-mother’s hens. Red (!) meat that resembles duck, not chicken. More real than the real thing.

Uncooked:

Cooked:

Apparently, some employees want to sue Apple for not offering pays for overtime. I think that this lawsuit was long overdue. Living in the Silicon Valley, we have a number of friends who work at Apple (mostly in the iPod, iPhone and OSX kernel divisions), and who were worked to death. I know people who would work every weekend and who would check out their cellphone every 10 minutes when they are out just in case there’s a work emergency. Sure, in the Valley, every company requires its engineers to work extra, and to over-care about the product, and to work even more extra around release dates, but the Apple situation was worse than in most Valley companies. I heard someone even saying once about Apple “burning out its engineers by working them to death for 2 years and then hiring new blood immediately after, doing the same thing to them too”.

Sorry, but Apple deserves the heat in this situation. That’s my personal opinion.

A lot of heat here in Greece. I never liked humidity and heat, it just doesn’t let me sleep much. Other than that, everything is good. So far. See you later.

Hello everyone from France! We have a great time here. Just so you know, my internet access is limited while on vacations.

A handful of people wrote lately online saying that they “expected more of me” in terms of video. They marked my latest video as “half-assed”, despite my explanation of the tiny timeframe we had to shoot it and the lack of locations.

Well, see, here’s the real problem. When you are a very public person, like I am, people expect from you more than they would expect from others. Even if I have never excelled, studied, or even offer suggestions in art. I offer suggestions regarding software problems and software tricks, which is where I excel. But I never wrote an article or forum thread to say “if you use this angle you will be able to achieve this”, or “if you use that shutter speed you can then get this look and then couple it with that scene” etc etc. My filmmaking advices are all software-related, and how to best use software to get an acceptable result, not how to put together an Oscar-worthy movie. Even my recent article on how I do travel videos, was just a description of how I do things, not necessarily how travel videos should be done.

But from the moment you get “known” in that small community and gaining some authority because of that side of knowledge, then the expectations go through the roof. They want to see you excel in places that you don’t really have much to do with (I am just an amateur filmmaker like most in that community, started shooting just a year ago), and they will crucify you if you release something imperfect. It comes with the territory I guess.

Make no mistake, I don’t mind critique of my work. But when they say that they “expected more of me”, me in particular, I find this to be unfair. It’s like telling me that “Joe Videographer can release an imperfect video, but you Eugenia, are not. We only expect the best from you”.