Sunday again. oh dear! no bread......

.....no milk, no cornflakes, no greek yoghurt, no shops open. No problem.

The make-do paratha - better than bread anyway. Put about 3oz. water in a very small saucepan, add salt and pepper if you like. Add 5 dessert-spoons flour and mix quickly with a strong round-ended knife until you have dough.

Tip this into a frying pan and add olive oil as if you were frying an egg.

Flatten the dough with a spoon as it is cooking on a fairly high flame. reduce the flame if the oil begins to smoke.

Turn it over while it is still soft on the side you can see. Press it down with the spoon.

Keep turning until you think it's ready. Me, I fried two eggs (avga matia) slowly on both sides in the oil that was left. Lunch. avga matia - oh! get the stress right please, means 'eggs eyes'. The normal greek way of frying them is to burn them on one side while they are runny on the other. My properly cooked matia are always pale and filmed over (bit like my eyes really), but they dont stare at you accusingly like greek ones.

Wow! anthropology, language, cooking, all in one small post - where else do you get that then? You won't get this right the first time - the dough should be soft but not sticky; you need enough oil for the paratha to be crispy, or less oil for a more paratha-like texture. If it takes too long to cook it could be tough. Any old oil might be better actually, frying at a higher temperature.

Within two weeks of my arriving in Konitsa on the mainland, there was the biggest earthquake for over a century. Sadly I was staying in the next village towards Albania, and the effects were minimal. Konitsa had two hundred houses seriously damaged, many daubed with a red symbol which meant 'uninhabitable'. So of course most people moved back in and when 200 'containers' - portacabins were set up around the place, all with water and power laid on, a lot of them remained empty.

A friend gave me his, and use of a huge space to do what I liked in. And that is where I learned to cook parathas on a camp fire before fixing up facilities inside. Konitsa - now there's a place, pics one day.