TAKE one FIG

Lemons and olive oil, bitter wild greens and sweet figs – Greece’s vegetable-forward cooking tradition is finding a new audience in Australia,

- NADIA BAILEY

When Fofi Gourlas was a teenager, her parents gave her a nickname: hortofaga, or “weed-eater”. It was a gently jibing, affectionate term. In Greek, the word refers to the idea of a certain bovine-slowness at the dinner table, as well as a love of eating greens.

Growing up in suburban Sydney in the 1970s, Gourlas has happy memories of weekend expeditions to the Blue Mountains to forage for wild dandelions with her mother. Less pleasant are the memories of her classmates’ horrified reactions when they clocked what was in her lunchbox – which was invariably fragrant with the typical Greek flavours of garlic, oregano and parsley.

“As soon as I unwrapped it, it just reeked,” she says. “I always felt really embarrassed.” She soon convinced her mother to pack her a more socially acceptable lunch: Vegemite sandwiches, made with white bread.

But within the Greek community, things were different. When her parents arrived in Australia in the late 1950s, they brought their food traditions with them – a diet rich in vegetables, in legumes, in the dark leafy greens that Gourlas loved so much. Fish was eaten once or twice a week, red meat more rarely. Every Saturday, she would go with her father to the markets and come home with vegetables by the box: artichokes, green beans, tomatoes. Her mother would make prasorizo – a risotto-like dish sweet with caramelised leeks and aromatic with dill and parsley – hulking pastitsio and pies filled with salty feta and foraged greens. When Gourlas went vegetarian at 16, her mother’s cooking barely had to change.