We’re Better Together – A Mediterranean Food Odyssey

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It’s Ann here today. Andy is over in OurLittleCorner looking for a free lunch.

If you’ve read how important it is during these weird and crazy times to maintain social contacts…to actually be with people on a casual basis…and you’ve read that dinner parties are great ways to be together, let me offer some help. We have a little dinner group that meets 5-6 times a year. We meet at our house and Andy and I usually provide the main dish. Everyone else brings a side or appetizer or dessert. And I help out by providing the recipes. Our last dinner party was “a Mediterranean Food Odyssey” (with a little Aegean connection thrown in for good measure).

Brittanica’s Interactive Map – link is below

For our Mediterranean Food Odyssey: 

We know that Odysseus actually started his journey home from Troy (located in what is now Turkey) on the Aegean Sea.  If you click here you’ll find the coolest interactive map from Britannica, showing you the wild places he supposedly stopped – and how many of his men got killed or lost or changed at each spot!  Be sure to scroll down a bit to get to the map which is called “Interactive Voyage,” and then click on “start journey.”

We began our dinner with Muhammara  – a red pepper and walnut dip from Turkey – which we served with pita chips. This is something we all “gobbled up.”  (Get it?)

Our main dish was Pasta e Fagioli, served with focaccia; both come from Italy.   That’s where Odysseus ran into the Laestrygonians and the Sirens and lost 11 of his 12 ships and 557 of his 600 men.   These Italian dishes are to die for.

Our salad was from Greece.  When Odysseus finally arrives in Ithaca, his home, located on the Ionian Islands of Western Greece, he kills all of his wife’s lovers. Mind you, he’s been gone 10 years and lived with Calypso for 7 years!  Why wouldn’t Penelope, his wife, have a few lovers?

“In the darkness of night, [Odysseus] would begrudgingly sleep with Calypso in her grotto-palace, but in the light of day, he would sit alone on the beach and sob for all he had lost.”
Begrudgingly? Right! 🙂 

Our dessert was Pistachio Harisa (not harissa), also called basbousa or namoura; it’s a cake popular throughout that whole region, including Tunisia, where the Lotus Eaters enticed Odysseus’ crew members with their psychedelic  lotus blossoms.  The cake is made with a flavored, sugary syrup, pistachios, and semolina.   Who needs lotus blossoms when you’ve got cake (and can eat it too!)?

For our next dinner party we may just follow the path of Grace O’Malley, Ireland’s “pirate queen.” FYI there’s a new novel just out about O’Malley, entitled The Pirate Queen. Here’s what the NYTimes has to say about the novel, which was written by Ariel Lawhon.

What food will we serve? Since historians believe O’Malley not only took her ships around the coastal areas of Ireland but also to Scotland and Spain, I’m thinking Warmed Potato Pancakes with Scottish Smoked Salmon or perhaps Cullen Skink, Irish Leek and Potato Soup, and for dessert a Tarta de Santiago, which comes from the Galicia region of Spain. But Colcannon Mash also sounds like a must! This will be fun and a challenge – and great food.

So keep your dinner party simple and casual: everyone contributes a dish, no more than 6-8 total guests and 4-5 dishes. Get together often so that everyone becomes very comfortable. Be brave and try new dishes – and don’t be embarrassed by a few missteps. For this dinner party, every dish was an adventure (not unlike The Odyssey) since none of the recipes had been tested by us before hand. I overcooked the pasta; my friend Sophie was afraid her cake was too dense, Jane thought there was too much dressing in her salad, and Lynne had trouble roasting and peeling the red peppers. But our adventure was so rewarding!

Photographs (provided by our guests) of our (vegetarian-friendly) dinner:

Muhammara and pita chips
Pasta e Fagioli
Focaccia
Horiatiki
Pistachio Harisa

  • Muhammara and pita chips – Turkish Red Pepper and Walnut Spread (simplify things by using roasted red bell peppers in a jar)
  • Pasta e Fagioli – Italian Pasta and Beans (revise the recipe slightly by cooking the pasta separately and adding it at the last minute)
  • Focaccia – Flat Italian Bread (better to serve at once – and not re-warm)
  • Horiatiki – Greek Tomato and Cucumber salad (don’t drown the salad with too much dressing)
  • Pistachio Harisa  – Tunisian Semolina Cake. The link is a video of Sami Tamimi making the cake; the ingredients in his Falastin cookbook are slightly different than the video; today’s recipe is based on the cookbook (don’t expect this to be fluffy and cake-like; it’s quite dense)

Pistachio Harisa - Semolina Cake

Adapted from Sami Tamimi’s Falastin cookbook

Syrup

  • 1 1/3 c water
  • 2 1/2 c sugar
  • 3 T lemon juice

Put the water and sugar into a small saucepan. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to medium and simmer for 10 minutes. Remove from heat and stir in the lemon juice.

Cake

  • 1 1/2 c shelled pistachios, divided into 1c and 1/2 c
  • 1/2 c + 2 T sugar
  • 7 T butter, at room temperature, plus extra for greasing
  • 1/2 c sunflower oil
  • 2/3 c Greek-style yogurt
  • 3 eggs
  • 3/4 tsp baking powder
  • 3/4 tsp Diamond kosher salt
  • 2 3/4 c fine semolina
  • 3/4 c unsweetened, shredded coconut
  • 1 T lemon zest

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Butter a 9″x13″ pan.

In a food processor blend 1 cup of pistachios until they are very finely ground. Set aside.

Place the remaining 1/2 c of pistachios into the processor and coarsely chop them. Set aside.

Put the sugar, butter, oil and yogurt into a bowl and with an electric mixer beat on high speed until smooth. Add the eggs one at a time, beating after each addition. Whisk the baking powder and salt into the semolina, then add that and the finely ground pistachios, coconut, and lemon zest to the batter. Mix with the beater on low speed until just combined. Don’t over mix.

Scrape the batter into the buttered pan and use a spatula to smooth it. Sprinkle the coarsely-chopped pistachios over the top and gently press them a bit into the batter. Let the cake rest for 10 minutes and then bake for 25-30 minutes or until the surface is golden brown and a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean. Cool on a rack for 10 minutes and then pour the cooled sugar syrup evenly over the cake. Let sit for another hour before serving.

Store any leftover cake in an airtight container for 2-3 days – or freeze.

Recipe brought to you by BigLittleMeals.com and Andy and Ann.






Goodby “Hello”— We’ll Miss You

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It’s Andy here today. Ann is over in OurLittleCorner cruising a popular grocer’s prepared food aisles.

Ann and I have decided to part ways with our landline phone. According to Numberbarn.com, that puts us among the 40.9 million folks who in the last five years have made the plunge to rely exclusively on cell phones.

The 1950’s phone of my childhood. We didn’t worry about spam calls in those days — and answered all calls with hello.

Even though we had been gradually weaning ourselves from our increasingly dormant landline, dropping the service wasn’t an easy decision. After all, we’d spent nearly eight decades using “real” phones that carry our voices over copper wires. For some reason the thought of chatting with someone through thin air seemed less “personal” (for want of a better term). But technology marches on (as does the increasing number of spam calls), so we reluctantly retired our faithful landline phone.

Our then 7th-grade daughter Sara on our phone in 1984. She most likely used the hello greeting when answering calls.

The massive and dramatic changes in phone technology have been accompanied by more subtle changes in how we conduct ourselves on the phone. One of those subtle changes is the topic of a recent NY Times piece by Alisha Haridasani Gupta entitled The Generation That’s Never Had to Say ‘Hello?’ . She suggests that for younger generations, answering a phone with a hello is becoming as obsolete as is the landline . This is rather disturbing considering that I grew up assuming that uttering hello when answering the phone not only was polite, it was imperative.

I had never really given much thought to why hello rather than some other greeting became the norm; it was just what everyone said. But of course the hello greeting had to come from somewhere. Evidently it didn’t come from Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the phone in 1876; according to Wikipedia he answered his new-fangled invention with a nautical “ahoy ahoy.” Rather, the now taken-for-granted hello came about due to the urging of Thomas Edison who in 1877 recommended to industry leaders that the standard phone greeting protocol should be”hullo” (which later morphed to “hello”).

[Editor’s Note: It’s interesting to contemplate what it would have been like if Edison not stepped in and Bell’s greeting had caught on. I can’t imagine hearing (or saying) “ahoy ahoy” with every phone call — although I can imagine it being grist for a Monty Python skit.}

Postcard c. 1905–1915.
The greeting “Hello” (not “Ahoy ahoy”) became associated with telephones in the late 19th century. (source: wikipedia)

So, if hello is waning, what’s taking its place? Gupta, who is writing mainly about the phone greetings of the Gen Zers who grew up with caller ID, provides examples along the lines of “Hi,” “Yo,” “What’s up?” “Where are you?” or even “Yeah?” And at the extreme, some say nothing and wait for the caller to speak first (which seems kind of creepy to me).

However, based on my own experience I would say that Gen Zers aren’t the only ones abandoning hello. Even those of us who cut our teeth on rotary phones are finding ourselves using the greeting less and less. We may not be as technologically savvy as Gen Zers, but most of us have retained enough grey matter to understand caller id. When we receive calls from folks we know, we know that they know that we know who’s calling, in which case a “Hi Sally” or “What’s up Charlie” may be more appropriate than an impersonal hello.

Furthermore, we elders are able to grasp the fact that calls from unknown numbers are more than likely to be spam and should either be cancelled or left to go to voice mail, thus relieving us of the obligation of uttering any personal greetings at all. Given the volume of potential spam calls I receive, the number of lost opportunities for a hello is not trivial.

Clearly Jeremy belongs to a generation that never had to say “hello.” (Zits 2011 comic strip. Source: comicskingdom.com)

At the end of the day I have to agree that, as with landline phones, there are valid and practical reasons hello is on the endangered species list . But that doesn’t stop me from fondly recalling those days when phones had wires going to the wall and it was of little concern that we didn’t know who was calling until after we offered the hello greeting.

So it’s time to say , “Goodby hello, it was a nice ride while it lasted — we’ll miss you.”

Savvy Shoppers or Fraudsters? The Murky World of Online Free Returns

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It’s Andy here today. Ann is over in OurLittleCorner trying to convince us that glass can be soft.

My previous blog was about free shipping so I feel morally obligated to follow up with the flip side of the e-commerce coin: free returns. While free shipping may nudge us to the digital shopping cart, it’s free returns that often seals the deal. At least that’s the case in our household. For example, a couple of evenings ago I told Ann that I was thinking about ordering some cycling shoes online and before I had finished the sentence she said, “Be sure they offer free returns.”

After more than 10 years my cycling shoes have seen their day and I’m ordering a new pair on line — maybe .

This got me thinking about a NewYorker article by David Owen I read a while back: “What Happens to All the Stuff We Return?.” Beyond shedding light on the booming industry based on the rising flood of returned stuff ( what’s called “the reverse supply chain”), Owen explains how free returns came to be considered something akin to an unalienable right.

The idea of free returns was the brainchild of James Cash, who in 1913 founded the J.C. Penney retail chain with the innovative policy of “allowing customers to return anything, no questions asked.” It’s noteworthy that Sam Walton, who worked at a Penney’s store prior to launching his Walmart chain, adopted a similar return policy which is still in effect.

J.C. Penney’s “Mother Store” (established 1902 in Kemmerer, Wyoming.) By 1913 J.C. Penney had expanded to 28 stores throughout the west and started the first “free returns” policy. (Photo from sah-archipedia.org)

It was nearly a century later when Amazon normalized free returns for online shoppers and Zappos kicked it up a few notches by offering free returns for up to a year and even encouraging customers to order items in multiple styles and sizes. [As an aside, Amazon started a similar shoes-and-accessories site, called Endless, but eventually gave up trying to compete and bought Zappos in 2009 for $1.2 billion].

Returned goods in a 250,000-square-foot warehouse in Fort Worth, Texas. (Photo source: NY Times, May 15, 2025)

However, it appears that the golden age of on-line free returns has peaked. A couple of years agoThe Atlantic published an article entitled “The Free Returns Party is Over.” The gist of the article is that while the free return policy had been been wildly successful in luring millions of consumers, it turned out to be a “giant boondoggle, logistically and financially” and on-line retailers have begun looking for an offramp.

From among the numerous web sites that offer explanations for the demise of the free return boom I found that a blog posted by Carriyo (a company that coordinates the shipping logistics for large online retail businesses) was particularly informative (and disturbing). It suggests that the “collapse” of free return policies is result of three interrelated factors.

Two of these factors are not surprising. First, the cost of the “reverse logistics”of returns has led to mind-boggling annual losses for retailers. And second, recent tariffs have increased financial strain .

It’s the third factor, return fraud, that I found the most disturbing. Fraudulent returns have accounted for about $100 billion in losses for retailers, which is a huge chunk of change. However, to me the issue of return fraud is much more than about economics. It raises questions about the moral integrity of those of us who have returned goods on line and makes me wonder at what point does a savvy shopper step over the line to become too savvy of a shopper?

This is not just idle thought; research findings show that:

Close to two-thirds of consumers admit to participating in at least one costly return behavior — from wardrobing (buying items with the intent to use and return them) to bracketing (ordering multiple sizes and returning the rest). Among consumers who wardrobed, 30% say they do it weekly. Among bracketers, 25% do it at least once a week.

This is from just one of many web sites discussing return fraud.

Although these estimates may sound exaggerated they’re consistent with what I found across sources. It’s hard not to be impressed with the variety and ingenuity of return fraudsters — sending back empty boxes, putting broken or fake items in boxes that weigh as much as the original product (one company reported receiving a bible in lieu of the original product), returning stolen merchandise, swapping products for cheaper versions.

According to the National Retail Federation the upshot of the “unsustainable costs” of free return policies has forced 72% of retailers to introduce charges for at least some returns (averaging about $9.00 per return).

“What was once unthinkable — asking customers to pay for the privilege of sending something back — has become standard operating procedure.”

Does Pogo’s famous quote apply to us online shoppers? (Created by Walt Kelly for Earthday in 1971).

In one sense it’s tempting to see losing the “privilege” of free returns from a Pogo-esque stance — We have met the “enemy” only to realize that rather than greedy retailers, it is us, the consumers— for being too savvy. On the other hand, to frame free returns as a perceived “privilege” is misleading. By dangling the free-returns carrot in front of us, retailers drew in millions of customers (and grossed over $1.17 trillion in 2024 alone) and then turned around and justified the need to impose return fees by accusing their customers of abusing the system. This sounds a whole lot like “blaming the victim.” I suppose that like many things the truth lies somewhere between.

Ann’s admonition to find a vendor with free returns is what got me started on this blog, so I’ll close by reporting that I did find an on-line site with the brand and size of cycling shoe I wanted. But a free return option was not part of the deal. They charge a $10 return-shipping fee.

They’re on the way...
with this return policy

I thought about asking if they would knock a dollar off the return fee to meet the $9 national average but decided it wasn’t worth the hassle. Anyway, the shoes were marked down 15 percent for a Labor Day sale, so I hit the “buy” button (for one pair) on the digital shopping cart. While not pleased that I would have to pay a fee should I decide to return the shoes, I did come away feeling somewhat self-righteous for overcoming the bracketing temptation (admittedly with a little help from that $10-a-pop return policy).

Let’s hope the shoes fit.

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