Spaghetti With Roasted Cherry Tomatoes & Dry Mizithra Cheese
Last weekend brought the end to the meat-eating phase of Apokries (Greek Carnival) and now Greeks are in the homestretch – the last week of Apokries. It’s Tyrini or Cheesefare Week with many Greeks forgoing meat and only eating dishes with cheese…lots of cheese! Pasta’s popularity goes beyond the happy bellies of Italian diners and […]
Monkfish With Kritharaki, Fennel & Orange
One of my favourite fish is monkfish or angler fish. In Greece they call this fish peskandritsa and it usally is big, it’s fugly but it’s versatile and delicious. If you’re the type that doesn’t want to fuss with pin bones, no worries. Monkifish is large, triangular with the the body tapering as you near […]
Piroski
There are about 11 million Greeks in today’s Greece and about another 11 million throughout the rest of the world. Greeks have long traveled beyond familiar land and have made their new beginnings in far off lands. Eons ago, Greeks had settlements in Egypt, as far west as southern France and as far east as […]
Creamy Coleslaw
This recipe is as much about texture as it about taste. What I love about this recipe is that I’m using Greek yogurt to put the creamy in this coleslaw and there’s a minimal amount of mayonnaise and…no cream! Flavour-wise, I am relying on the flavours of cabbage and carrot, both finely grated – the […]
Cream of Chickpea Soup With Shrimp & Oxymeli
This recipe features alot of ancient Greek ingredients: chick peas…this was the starch of the day before potatoes and rice. Then we have shrimp – fish and seafood were prominent in the ancient Greek diet and they still are a big part of the diet in today’s Greece. Oxymeli, a Greek compound word meaning “acid-honey” […]
Slow-Roasted Leg of Lamb (The Greek Way)
Greeks know their way around lamb and we unabashedly cook it well and I mean well done. Do not confuse well done with dry, hard to chew meat. You are not going to experience this here. I treat a leg of lamb much like a lamb shank, brown the meat then place in a roasting […]
Roasted Beets With Almond-Potato Skordalia
This dish is a play on a Greek favourite – roasted beet salad with lots of garlic. This is a side dish enjoyed my many and more creative types have even come up with doing a mash-up (pun intended) of a beet skordalia. Inspired by a dish from the Kokkari cookbook and restaurant in San […]
Bulghur Salad With Nuts, Honey, Cheese, Pomegranate
I made this salad this past Sunday for guests who attended my Ancient Greek Food & Wine dinner. The main ingredient here is bulghur wheat, an ancient ingredient made of cracked durum wheat, parboiled and then dried. It gets sifted and then separated according to the size of the kernels. It’s a whole grain, super-healthy […]
Sauerkraut With Sausages, Pork & Caraway
Last Sunday I completed my journey into the world of ancient Greek cuisine by present the flavours and some of the ingredients that were enjoyed at that time. Some ingredients like olives, olive oil, grapes, wine, honey, grains are still present, other ingredients like eggplant, peppers, tomatoes and potatoes are more recent additions to the […]
Spaghetti With Shrimp, Lemon & Saffron
You know what’s in season in Greece right now? Big, fat juicy lemons! Last year when I traveled to Nafplio (Peloponnese) I recall seeing groves and groves of lemon trees lining the roads. It was August so they all looked like limes but I was imagining myself stopping at the side of the road and […]