Wordless Wednesday 107

Wordless Wednesday 105

A study of Greek salads

A little while ago, I did a post about the perfect (most authentic) Greek salad. During my recent sojourn in Greece, I took photos of all the Greek salads I had, so that I could show you the real thing. Keep in mind that these aren't homemade salads, but they're what you'll be served at a taverna or restaurant.

Salad served at a (non-touristy) restaurant - look how it's swimming in olive oil:


Tourist-trap salad - we know this because the cucumber isn't peeled:


Salad served at a neighbourhood taverna:


Salad served at a fancy taverna - notice the funky salad bowl, plus use of capers:


Salad at a traditional fish taverna - this is the one that looks the most like a homemade one, although they've skimped on the olive oil and herbs:


Finally, here's a variation: it's what I call a party salad, because you only get the feta cubed like that when the salad is served as part of a buffet. This one was served at a Greek restaurant in London - hence the cucumber isn't peeled and there's chopped parsley all over.


Next time I hope to show you some homemade varieties.

Authentic Greek salad

I remember a while back having a discussion with Karen about how to prepare a Greek salad. It's something that people often ask me about, especially after they've tried to recreate this very simple dish at home, only to find it tastes nothing like what they had on holiday.

I've been wanting to do a post about Greek salads for sometime. Luckily, we've had some nice, warm weather recently and I've been inspired to cook Greek, so I took a picture of one of my (hastily prepared) Greek salads to show you what the real thing looks like. You can improve on the looks by chopping and arranging the ingredients more carefully, but this is the basic idea.


First, some things you might not know about Greek salads.

Greek salad or village/rustic salad (horiatiki in Greek) is a summer dish. In Greece, you'd never serve a Greek salad in winter time, the reason being that its ingredients are only in season in the summer, and Greek cuisine is very much seasonal. It has to be, because it relies very heavily on the natural taste of the primary ingredients, since herbs, sauces and spices are rarely and sparingly used.

Greek salad isn't made with lettuce. Ever. Lettuce is in season during winter, so by definition (if you're cooking with seasonal ingredients) you can't have fresh lettuce and fresh tomato in the same dish. Either your tomatoes are grown in a greenhouse and fertilized to within an inch of their lives, or your lettuce has been imported from South Africa. If you see lettuce in your Greek salad, it's because lettuce is cheaper than tomatoes.

Greek salad isn't an appetiser or a main course. It's meant to be eaten as a side dish, shared amongst a group of people.

You need the following ingredients to make an authentic Greek salad for 3-4 people:

2-3 Beef tomatoes - organic, cut in wedges
half a cucumber - peeled and sliced
1 green pepper - sliced
half a white onion - sliced
a handful of black olives
a slice of feta cheese - the best quality you can afford, made with sheep's and goat's milk, not cow's milk
a generous sprinkling of dried oregano
some extra virgin olive oil - best quality

Optional ingredients: capers, lemon juice or vinegar, a tiny amount of fresh parsley.

The most important ingredients are the tomatoes, the feta and the olive oil. If these don't taste like they should, your salad will never taste right.

Prepare the ingredients as outlined above and place them in a big bowl in order: first the tomatoes, then the cucumber, then the pepper and onion, the olives, finally the slab of feta cheese. Sprinkle oregano all over and season with salt, if using. Finally, drizzle with olive oil and serve.

Once the salad is at the table, you can break the feta up with a fork. Bon appetit!

Fasting food

During Holy Week, most Greeks (even those who haven't fasted during Lent - ahem) cut out meat from their diets and eat food that is plainer and less rich than usual. When at home this involves various types of soup (fish, lentil, chickpea, beans, you name it) and things like vegetable stews, boiled potatoes and pasta. Not terribly inspiring, but I guess that's the idea. This is what we eat when we go out for a meal at a taverna:


Every good meal starts with a generous bread basket. This one also includes some mini-sandwiches. Not sure what the filling was, but it was suitable for those fasting from dairy, so it definitely wasn't cheese, and it was also very spicy.


Then comes the salad. Vegetables in Greece are for the most part seasonal, and it's too early for tomatoes, so we had lettuce instead.


Meat is substituted by seafood. Grilled octopus is a delicacy worth fasting for!


Fried squid is another popular dish.


This is prawn pilaf, a dish made with rice, tomato sauce, herbs and prawns.


As you would expect, there are also several vegetable dishes. Fried courgettes are served with garlic dip.


So is boiled beetroot. Beetroot is usually served with a yoghurt sauce, but for fasting purposes this is replaced by a generous helping of garlic dip, made with mashed potatoes and crushed garlic. Smelly but nice.


These are patties made with fish roe, the same stuff that's used in taramosalata. Very salty and (according to hubby) very much an aquired taste.

Red kidney bean soup

Kidney beans don't exactly set my heart on fire, but I usually have a can in the cupboard for use in chili con carne. Sometimes I only use half a can, and then I have to find something to do with the other half. I have a great recipe for a chicken, avocado and red kidney bean salad, but that needs prior planning due to the fanciful ingredients required. So the other day, with half a can of kidney beans and no avocado or chicken in the house, I decided to make soup instead. I searched the Internet for a kidney bean soup recipe and found lots on offer, all fairly similar. In the end I chose three recipes that I liked the sound of, and combined them to make my own version. The result was truly yummilicious, so I thought I'd share the recipe with you.

Ingredients
(quantities are approximate)

1-2 tbs olive oil
1 onion
2 garlic cloves
1 carrot
1 red chili (dried)
1 stick celery
1-2 large red peppers
A few fresh tomatoes
Tomato paste or passata
Red kidney beans
1-2 pints vegetable stock
1-2 bay leaves
Thyme
Parsley
Oregano or "Italian herb" seasoning
Salt & pepper

Instructions

Heat oil in a large pan. Stir in chopped onions, garlic and carrots.
Cover & sweat over low heat for a few minutes. Add finely chopped peppers and celery. Cook for a couple of minutes more.

Stir in the chopped tomatoes, tomato paste & kidney beans. Add chilies and herbs, mix well, cook for 3 to 5 minutes over low heat, stirring occasionally.

Pour in the stock, season with salt & pepper & bring to boil. Let it boil hard for 5 minutes, then reduce the heat & simmer for half an hour or so.

Once cooked, you can cool the soup and then blend it with a food processor. You could also serve it with a dollop of lime yoghurt (made by combining plain yoghurt, lime juice and finely chopped coriander). I prefer chunky soups and had no lime or coriander handy, so I had mine as it came out of the pan.

To say I was surprised by the result would be an understatement. Who would have thought that combining red pepper, red kidney beans, tomatoes and a few herbs you could get such a mouth-watering combination?

The recipes I used to create my version of red kidney soup are:

Chef2Chef Red Kidney Bean Soup
Allotment Growing Red pepper and kidney been soup
WHFoods Red Kidney Bean Soup with Lime Yoghurt

Time for stew!

Last week, my goddaughter and I cooked a beef stew together. We used this recipe for a basic beef stew with carrots and mushrooms. Karen introduced me to it and it's become one of my staples.


The goddaughter showed impressive culinary skills for a 9-year-old. She peeled the carrots, browned the meat, prepared the stock and even offered to chop the potatoes, but I thought she was too young to play with knives.


Over the last year or so, I've made this recipe on several occasions, each time improvising a little on the ingredients and measurements. The resulting stews have varied slightly in consistency and looks, but have always tasted yummy. This one was no exception.


As they say, the proof of the pudding (or in our case, the stew) is in the eating. Here is the goddaughter's younger sister, a notoriously fussy eater, proudly posing next to her empty dish. I don't think there can be a better endorsement than this!

The food diaries: part 8 - Christmas party

Last week we went to our first Christmas party, organised by hubby's employers. Instead of a simple affair at one of the local hotels, this year we were invited to a fancy ball which included a sit-down 3-course dinner followed by live entertainment and a casino.

The food was OK, not exceptional, but certainly an improvement on last year (local hotel = mediocre food). Here's what we had:


Starter was a carpaccio of raw beef. I wished I'd pretended to be vegetarian and had the filo-pastry-with-something-or-other instead (not photographed, as we had no veggies at our table).


Main course was traditional turkey with veg and a generous helping of cranberry sauce. It took us a while to work out that the veg wasn't coming separately, but was hidding under a patty made of stuffing and two slabs of turkey. D'oh!


Dessert was a choice between a mini bread and butter pudding with Baileys (which sounds lovely, only you couldn't really taste the Baileys)...


...or a colourful fruit salad.

I had the pudding, but in retrospect the fruit salad would have been a better choice. Never mind. I'm sure I burned the extra calories on the dance floor.

Le Beaujolais Nouveau and other stories

Today we were invited to a charity event to celebrate Beaujolais Day and raise money for the local branch of the MS Society. The event was hosted by our friend Greg, who drove to France to pick up the wine himself.

Beaujolais Nouveau is a lightweight red wine made from Gamay grapes in the Beaujolais region of France. It is the most popular vin de primeur, fermented for just a few weeks then officially released for sale on the third Thursday of November, known as Beaujolais Day. It is intended for immediate drinking, and should be consumed by the following May after its release.

Our event took place at The Taste of India restaurant in Greenwich, with an Indian buffet and plenty of Beaujolais wine for tasting. Well, they said tasting, but I had two glasses and I don't even like wine that much. So I'm guessing others tasted rather more of it.


It was a great event, but as soon as I got home all I could think of was sleep. I slept for 1.5 hours and woke up feeling very disoriented. What's worse, we have a birthday party to go to tonight which promises to be another major drinking session. So I've made a cup of tea and checked that we have every remedy known to drunken men for tomorrow morning: tea bags, milk, coffee and coffee filters, toast, bacon and Alka-Seltzer. Let's hope they're enough.

I'm off now to get ready for the party. Cheers my lovies! Hope you all have a great Friday evening xx

The food diaries: part 7 - Sunday lunch

This weekend's culinary highlight was Sunday lunch at one of my favourite haunts, Inside Restaurant in Greenwich. This time I went prepared, camera in pocket, so I was able to take photos of everything we had.


We had a three-course meal, starter, main and dessert. I started with haddock fishcakes and mustard sauce.


Hubby had the warm artichoke salad.


For our mains we chose chicken leg and beef fillet respectively.



Both beautifully presented and very tasty!


We washed them down with Diet Coke and a local lager, the appropriately named Meantime Pilsner. The Greenwich Brewery, where this beer is brewed, is located 0° 2' 12" east of the Greenwich Meridian.


For dessert, we had white chocolate brownie and New York-style cheesecake.


Both were very good, but the brownie was something else! I think I showed great restraint in only having one.

How many calories?

During a recent trip to Belgium, we had lunch at Quick, the Belgian/French equivalent of McDonalds. I don't often eat in fast food restaurants, so I'm not sure if this is common practice in other countries, but all the food and drinks we ordered came with "nutritional information" labels, showing calories, protein, fat, sugar and salt content.

Quite sobering reading, considering a Supreme Cheese burger has a whopping 678 calories and 3.1 grams of salt.


Add some fries and you've got an extra 335 calories!


Luckily I had a King Fish sandwich ("only" 422 calories), no fries and just a diet coke to drink. A normal Coke would have added another 147 calories.


Interestingly enough, all information was given in % of the guideline daily amount for men, women (and in some cases) older and younger children, so you could see exactly how much damage you were doing by biting into your sandwich. A woman eating a Supreme Cheese burger and a portion of fries, will have consumed more than half the recommended 2000 calories per day needed to maintain a healthy weight. That's before she's even touched her fizzy drink.


Thank God for the latest research by the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition, which claims that the recommended daily intake of calories could be increased by up to 16% (or an extra 400 calories - bag of fries or average size cheeseburger - a day). This good news, however, only applies to people who "exercise more". Heh. Knew there had to be a catch.

Back to the usual low-cal diet for us mere mortals then.

What on earth are they?

I've been a busy bee just lately, which is why I've not blogged much. In fact, I've just come back from Paris, where I took this photo at a local market. I've never seen either of these two vegetables before, the orange onion-shaped one or the weird cabbagey one. Anyone have a clue what they are?


I'll post more about Paris (and Italy) later in the week, once I've unpacked my cases and got my act together.

The food diaries: part 6 - Chinese

The other day we went out for a meal at a Chinese restaurant in Athens. This is some of what we had: Peking duck, sweet and sour pork and beef in oyster sauce.


We also had wontons, spring rolls and stuffed dragon wings (I swear that's what they were called on the menu) but my friends were too hungry to let me take photos of our starters.

All in all, the food wasn't that different from what hubby and I had last time we had Chinese in London.

Spring rolls, sesame prawn toast and fried squid for starters.


Beef in black bean sauce and sweet and sour prawns for our mains.


Perhaps it's not such a good idea to relaunch the food diaries. Looking at all these photos is making me hungry.

Cooking blues

I was inspired to do this post by Betty C. who photographed seven blue objects in her kitchen and did a little show and tell.

I must admit I'm not a huge fan of blue in the kitchen, as I find it doesn't compliment the reasons why you'd go into the kitchen, i.e. to cook or eat. Have you thought how few edible blue fruits and plants there are in nature? Personally I can think of some red grapes, blueberries and not much else!

Blue being hubby's favourite colour, we have some blue items in our kitchen in London, but as I'm currently in Athens, my collection of blue objects numbers just two cups, one of which is more purple than blue.


This floral cup is my favourite. I used to have two of them, but one broke, so now I have just the one cup and two saucers. It's quite a small cup but it's the perfect size for my coffee, as I can never drink the amount in a regular sized mug without half the liquid going cold.


Luckily I had dinner with my brother and his wife the other day, and got to photograph the remaining five blue items for this post in their kitchen. Look at the kitchen table set for us: blue crockery, cutlery with blue handles and even blue paper napkins. It's a blue photographer's paradise!


On the kitchen counter, I snapped my sister-in-law's cup of coffee.


Then they turned their kettle and toaster on for me, and guess what, both of them light blue! Project complete.


In case you're wondering what we had for dinner, we ordered chef's salad, spagetti and a massive pizza from the local takeaway.


And no, we didn't manage to finish it all. At least half the pizza ended up in the freezer for another day.