The darling food of the Summer has to be lobster rolls. A specialty of New England and found in restaurants specializing in fish and seafood and popular at picnics, backyard parties and even food trucks! A traditional lobster roll contains cooked lobster meat, mayonnaise and often may contain celery and scallions. Lightly seasoned, a squirt [...]
The darling of my last Greek Supper Club had to be these canapes with shrimp butter, poached shrimp and caviar on top. To ensure that these didn’t get gobbled-up prematurely I had sent them out to our hungry guests one platter at a time. This works in theory unless your guests barge into the kitchen [...]
The first time I saw or heard of octopus meatballs were from Maria’s blog at Kali Orexi (BonAppeti. Maria is a Greek blogger resided in the NYC suburbs and she shares dishes she’s created or ones inspired by her ancestral homeland of the island of Kalymnos. For those not familiar with Greek geography, Kalymnos is [...]
When you’re hungry (especially during Lent) your belly can inspire you to create the simplest and most delicious dishes. One of the easiest dishes to prepare is fried calamari. One need only find fresh or thawed from frozen squid, mix a bowl of seasoned flour and have the confidence to fry in hot oil. Not [...]
How many ways are there to prepare octopus? There’s grilled, boiled, baked, I recently tried “sous vide” (and it was fantastic) and now there is fried. Regardless of how you’re going to eat octopus the key is to tenderize it. The old-school way in Greece was to bash it on rocks at the beach, some [...]
Green and red, earth and sea, shrimp and mushrooms, rice and herbs for you and me! Spring is here and the colour I associate the most with the barely new season is green. Here in Toronto we’ve had a mild winter and Spring has been unusually warm with temperature reaching 25 Celcius last weekend. One [...]
The crab, the symbol for my zodiac – Cancer or Karkinos in Greek. In Greek mythology Karkinos was a giant crab that assisted Hydra the nine-headed serpent in its battle with Iraklis (Heracles) at Lerna. The hero crushed it under his foot but as a reward it was placed amongst the stars as constellation Cancer [...]
As an ingredient, Greeks “own octopus”, as Greek-food Guru Diane Kochilas said earlier this week. No one owns any particular ingredient but we proudly cook it (with skill) and there are countless octopus dishes in Greek cuisine from salads to stews, grilled to giouvetsi. You’ll find octopus in practically every corner of regional Greek cooking [...]
One of my favourite Greek appetizers has to be fried calamari. It’s the freshness of the sea, the tender squid tubes and tentacles dredged in flour and fried until golden. You get a slight crunch from the coating then the tender squid in your mouth explodes with flavour. Calamari (squid) are found at your local [...]
As a general rule, cheese and fish & seafood shouldn’t be mixed but there are always exceptions and when it comes to Greek food, we have some wonderful cheese and seafood combos like Shrimp Saganaki and Mussels Saganaki. Today I’m taking this delicate but delicious combo of cheese and seafood to calamari aka squid. For [...]
