Cows heads and kebabs

Hell, I knew there was something that I forgot when it came to describing Greek kebabs. It was the meat markets that I wandered through by accident one day in Athens.

Ok, let's imagine that you are wandering through your typical weekend market at say Fremantle or Bondi or St Kilda or Glebe where hippies are selling handmade lavender and rosemary soap, necklaces, second hand watches, second hand books, hemp shirt, paintings, knick nacks, tofu burgers, CD's, furniture, photo frames and all the rest of it and you came upon the meat stand.

Instead of the meat being lovingly cut and cryopacked into dripless plastic bags, and those bags sitting in lovely temperature controlled fridges etc, you found that the butcher has a large wooden block, and on that block sat a half skinned cows head. Buzzing with flies. And hanging from hooks around it where all sorts of unidentifiable bits of cow. Also buzzing with flies. I've seen a bit of bush butchering being done, but at least the half inept bush butchers that I know can knock up an animal into some partly recognisable cuts. These Greek guys just went at the cow with an axe and knocked off bits any old how. It was the butchering equivalent of a mad womans breakfast.

The whole lot was enlivened with flies and slowly congealing pools of blood here, there and everywhere. Clearly, being a health inspector or meat inspector is not a recognised occupation in Greece. If you know where the term "bloody shambles" comes from, you might be able to picture the scene.

In fact the first thing that comes to mind these days is the scene in "Three Kings" where the guys meet a cow in the desert, and the cow walks towards them and steps on a land mine or a cluster bomb and explodes and covers them in blood and bits of cow. That to me is a good way to start the kebab making process. If they had scraped the bits of cow off their MOPP suits, stuck it on sticks and grilled it over hot coals, they would be most of the way towards having a kebab the proper way.

Anyway, I had a kebab in this meat market. There was one bloke with a wooden block and a cleaver and he was hacking up bits of meat and threading them onto skewers, and another bloke was cooking them. I'm sure they swapped roles from time to time (without washing their hands), but what the hell, if you haven't had a case of the runs when back packing, then you haven't been trying enough of the local produce.

They cooked a pretty mean kebab. I stood there and ate it whilst looking at the half skinned cows head. I am pretty damned sure I had half an ear, or even a bit of cheek, but with a kebab, it doesn't really matter what bit of the animal you are eating. I'm pretty sure you are safe as long as it bleeds and it is chewy.

Which was the nice thing about the meat market kebab - essentially they fed you badly chopped up lumps of steak, and a nice lump of steak is often rare in the middle, and that is the tasty, juicy part. A great big lump of industrially processed meat on a six foot long skewer does not produce tasty, juicy bits of beef for your kebab. It produces the kebab equivalent of a Big Mac. A bland piece of shit. A fucked fast food farce.

And what is it with the bloody yoghurt sauce that we get in this country? Who the fuck thinks that you are going to have a good yoghurt sauce if it is runny enough to be squeezed out of the nozzle of a squeezy bottle? You should have to ladle the damned stuff onto the kebab with a big spoon. The weak, watery bloody yoghurt that we get dished up is as bad as say Heinz tomato sauce. The stuff is red, it says "tomato sauce" on the bottle, but it is a long way from the sort of tomato sauce that you can mix up on your stove top. Bloody running yucky pathetic cows piss yoghurt sauce is as far from real yoghurt as "ketchup" is from real sauce.

So our local kebab makers can take their big skewers and their watery yoghurt sauce and their watery hummous and fuck off. However, they might have to take a few council food inspectors with them. I don't think the locals of Balmain would appreciate the sight of a cow being chopped into itty little bits for kebabs on the petrol station forecourt in front of the kebab caravan.

It's like the recent decision by the NSW government to ban some kind of fishing in Sydney harbour because (I think) of dioxin levels. Weak bastards. After going through Greece, I crossed the border into Turkey and spent a week in Istanbul. One memorable lunch was had on the banks of the Bosphorus (is the Bosphorus? My geography is getting hazy) and I had the local version of a Fillet of Fish straight off a fishermans boat.

The local fishermen puttered out into the straits in little dinghys - maybe 12 footers - and came back and cooked the catch in the boat over something like half a 44 gallon drum BBQ. They just chucked the whole fish onto the hotplate, grilled it and then handed it over to you in a bun. They might have gutted it, but they certainly didn't take the head off. The locals just scoffed them down heads and all. I started at the tail but had to give up at the gills. Munching fish heads is a bit too multicultural for my liking.

Anyway, there I am, standing on a stone sea wall above a little fishing boat, watching a parade of filthy oil tankers going back and forth through the straits in front of me. Half of them seemed to be leaking oil into the water. The water right in front of where I was standing for instance had that lovely multicoloured spectrum scattering effect that you get when there is a nice scummy oil slick on the surface. Most of the Turks seemed to have only one head and 10 fingers, so the Fillet of Fish couldn't have been too bad for them. However, I am sure those hard working fishermen have been chased into retirement by now by some bloody nosy do-gooding EU inspectors of some sort. If the Turks had any sense, they'd fling the inspectors into the sea and then toss in a match. That would sort them out. And it would be a quick way to cook some fish.