Another favourite vegetable of mine are artichokes. Ancient, Mediterranean, healthy and delicious. Although they can be a pain to clean (remove leaves), it’s more of a tedious task rather than a difficult one. Regardless, I found a few parcels of artichokes at the market and used them to make a soup for this past Tuesday’s [...]
Last Sunday I cooked a more traditional dinner for over 30 guests (more to be written soon) and one of the Greek classics that was enjoyed was Chicken Avgolemono Soup. This soup is our panacea for the common cold. It’s Greek comfort food and anytime I’m feeling a cold coming on, I have Avgolemono soup. [...]
I have little to complain about upon reflecting on the six weeks I’ve spent vacationing in Greece. Despite the cloudy and rainy past couple of days the weather has been sunny, hot and the beaches were clean, not as crowded and the food, ever-inspiring. If if weren’t for yesterday’s cool & rainy day I may [...]
Margheritsa is a traditional soup made by Greeks for Orthodox Easter. It contains cleaned intestines, organs of the lamb or goat and may contain sweetbreads and even the boiled head of the animal. The meat is boiled until softened and a stock is created. Spring onions, herbs are added and the soup is finished off/thickened [...]
The basis for any good soup is a good stock and that’s especially important for getting the most flavour. When I make a stock, I buy the carcasses (three) from a chicken (you can use one whole chicken) or the leftover carcass of a roasted turkey and place them in a pot with a carrot, [...]
This recipe combines some of my favourite flavours: earthy mushrooms and nutty, smoky wild rice which really isn’t a rice! Wild rice is the seed of an aquatic rice that’s been consumed by Native Indians. Here in Canada, wild rice is grown in shallow lakes in rivers in the provinces of Saskatchewan, Manitoba and north-western [...]
Although we’ve had a pretty mild winter by Canadian standards, we do still get the abrupt reminder that we (Canadians) live in the Great White North (Canada) and that yes, winters here are a long and cold. Last week we had temperatures that only warmed up to -8 Celcius in the day time and dipped [...]
Recipe update from October 2007: I love this soup kitchen classic and I make it at least once a year during soup season. It’s winter and we have soup season! I don’t tinker much with this Rocco DiSpirito recipe other than to use what leafy greens are available in the market. It could be escarole, [...]
This soup can be a base for many other cold weather or winter soups. I used this base to make a cream of asparagus soup and it can be adapted to many other “creamy” soups. Of note is that I’ve greatly reduced the use of cream to make the soup…well, creamy. I like using grated [...]
One of the most wonderful dishes one can have in the Greek repertoire of recipes is a fish or seafood soup. There’s Kakavia which is usually tomato based and contains whatever fish and seafood is in season or caught on that day. The best Kakavias contain the Scorpion fish. The other soups are called Psarosoupes [...]
