Ah yes saffron infused honey. We got more than our very little money's worth from the 4-wheeler. You could seriously get from one end of the island to the other in 30 minutes, and that included going over a mountain. It gave us a lot of freedom to stop by every beach, church, and vista, and to pull in for a souvlaki or 7 in Megalochori. I mainly wanted to stop there because it sounds like a dinosaur, but seriously the food was so good and so cheap.
After one of the beaches in Akrotiri (the red one from Jessica's post), we pulled our hog over to to the side of the road to meet Karmen who vends her wares from a table on her front porch. She was working in her incredible seaside garden, where she grows everything she sells. Everything except the saffron, which is grown on a special mountain top somewhere on Santorini, and the olive oil, which was pressed down the road. She was eager for us to try everything.
After one of the beaches in Akrotiri (the red one from Jessica's post), we pulled our hog over to to the side of the road to meet Karmen who vends her wares from a table on her front porch. She was working in her incredible seaside garden, where she grows everything she sells. Everything except the saffron, which is grown on a special mountain top somewhere on Santorini, and the olive oil, which was pressed down the road. She was eager for us to try everything.
She handed us a tiny plate with two tiny tomatoes and said try one. They looked like gigantic juicy beautifully deformed tomatoes shrunk to the size of a grape. I expected a cherry tomato, slightly tart, plenty juicy, with a little bit of a fresh viney taste. What we got was a mouthful of sunshine. Pure unadulterated sunshine. That sunshine that you see piercing through the clouds when the rains cease and every thing on earth is greener. The sunshine that leaves your body feeling warm, not burnt, on the first day of short sleeves. We didn't even think to take a picture because we've eaten 2,000 cherry tomatoes in our life, but the Santorini cherry tomato deserves an altar, probably even a big church in the center of town. It was so perfectly sweet and fresh and full and soulful. Now we just have to hope that the seeds we mailed home make it through customs.
It was all so cheap, and ended up leaving with a little heart-shaped jar of honey and a doll-sized jug of grape syrup. If we lived here, we probably would've bought the whole place out. Everything looked glorious.
For some reason this little pitstop was probably our favorite thing from our whole trip to Santorini, and that's saying a lot.
No comments:
Post a Comment