I remember this peasant dish as skordomakarona (garlic macaroni) or makaronia bloom (flooded macaroni) because it was somewhat soupy. My mother made it occasionally for dinner –our secondary meal. For lunch she often made the more elaborate Greek makaronada: a platter of macaroni –usually overcooked– topped with rich, cinnamon-scented tomato sauce, sprinkled with copious amounts of grated kefalotyri cheese and then drizzled with sizzling sheep’s milk butter that partly melted the cheese, creating the desirable cords… My father loved this makaronada and usually ate more than he should, then blamed my mother for his stomach ache; she should have removed the platter from the table after serving, so he couldn’t have helped himself again and again, he shouted. I don’t think we witnessed this recurring argument for any other family dish, and I remembered it yesterday, as I kept adding to my plate more and more One-Pot-Pasta. (more…)

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Sardeles Marinates is part of my daily summer lunch, accompanying any vegetables, beans, rice or pasta I cook. Sometimes it is even the centerpiece. I enjoy the sardines with slices of my bread – toasted if it is more than a day old – and of course with a large tomato, onion, and caper salad.

I never get tired of them, and one of the beauties of home-marinated sardines is that they keep for a week or more in the refrigerator, so I don’t have to make them often. (more…)

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The July 5 lunch that concludes the 2015 Symposium meals is a mostly Vegetarian Greek / Mediterranean Feast conceived to communicate the richness of the region’s meat-less tradition.

Savor simple dishes bursting with flavor created with the best traditional ingredients combined with seasonal produce. Taste exquisite olives, cheeses, savory biscuits, along with surprising, hearty vegetable and bean salads that are flavored with my own spicy-fragrant condiments. A selection of seven award-winning Greek wines will accompany the meal which will conclude with three ‘spoon sweets’ –the best artisanal fruit preserves– along with special Cypriot wedding cookies and an aromatic herbal tea brewed with wild plants gathered from the Greek mountains. (more…)

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The frail-looking trees have adapted perfectly to the dry climate of the islands.

At last people started to package and sell the local, small but delicious almonds! Keans say that almond trees, much like the olive trees, blossom bountifully every second year, and last summer we did have something of a bumper crop.

But until recently very few bothered even for their own use to harvest the fruits of the trees that grow all over the island.

The very labor-intensive work of harvesting, peeling the semi-dried outer green peel, and then cracking the hard shell to get the kernels was not worth the effort; imported California almonds were so cheap… (more…)

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Warm porridge mixed with yogurt in the morning, a staple in my breakfast routine, goes back more than 25 years. (Before that I used to start my days with toasted bread and cheese, as I never liked sweets for breakfast.) To flavor my porridge, I used a good pinch of Aleppo pepper flakes – a sweet-smoky, sun-dried and mildly hot Mediterranean pepper. I discovered this deeply-flavored condiment around the time I made the switch to oats, and I couldn’t get enough of it.

To make the porridge, I used rolled oats since it was the only kind available here. Tins of Quaker Oats became quite popular in Greece in the 1960s, and mothers all over the country prepared kouaker (pronounced koo-Ah-kehr), the word that came to mean ‘porridge’ in Greek. It was usually served sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar or drizzled with honey.

This piece was written and posted at Team Yogurt.

Later, imported cornflakes and other crunchy breakfast cereals cornered the market. I was quite happy with my tart and spicy yogurt-porridge, which I complemented with two pieces of seasonal fruit: orange and apple, pear and strawberries, loquats and cherries, nectarines and figs or plums. I never ate bananas; we didn’t grow them in Greece. Now that I think of it, I never bought imported fruit at all. The local fruit from my weekly farmer’s market, at the foot of the Acropolis, was so fresh and irresistible that it made no sense to seek fruit grown outside the country.
It took me years to overcome the harrowing experience of my childhood breakfast: two slices of bread spread with a thick coat of margarine, washed down with a large cup of warm evaporated milk. (more…)

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