Greek Recipes

          Searching the Internet for some info on edible flowers, I saw some beautiful pictures of cakes and other fancy desserts decorated with, among other exotica, small blue and yellow pansies and chrysanthemum flowers. Did we always eat pansies on our cakes and in colorful salads or is it one more innovation from Noma (with its inventive kitchen) that has been immediately adopted by all of us?        Well, in fact, dried flowers have been used for thousands of years as spices in cooking or in herbal teas for medicinal purposes. Their use in modern cooking today as decorative edible ingredients is really a rebirth of this very old tradition.  Roses and zucchini- squash flowers have never stopped being used in cooking.       In Greece we make rose petal jam and we use zucchini flowers in different savory recipes.  When I was a child, whenever my mother made stuffed tomatoes, there would always be some sp...

One of the things I love most about Greek cooking is the way in which vegetables are taken so seriously. They are a main ingredient in their own right and not relegated to side dishes for meat or fish. When it comes to the actual vegetables themselves in Greek cooking, nothing is more exciting than the artichoke. The season for artichokes is brief and if you grow your own they are at their best to harvest when small and tender, the flower bud closed tightly and very glossy. My favourite artichoke dishes include my mother in law's recipe for stuffed artichokes ( you can find the recipe here) and also the classic 'city style' braised in olive oil along with the onions, garlic, carrot, potato, a few fronds of dill and plenty of lemon juice ( you can find the recipe here ). My father in law was reminiscing the other day about an artichoke dish that his mother would often cook, when he was a boy. It was similar to the 'city style', the artichokes being braised in oliv...

Sfougato (σφουγγάτο) is a term used to describe a basic egg dish, which can actually look like anything from an open faced omelette to a frittata, to a zucchini slice or a soufflé! Commonly, a sfougato will often combine eggs with a variety of greens or green vegetables, depending on what is in season – and as per the name "sfougato", the finished dish will have a sponge like texture. In the first spring after we were married, I made Mr K as special meal one weekend of a green garlic soufflé - green garlic being one his great culinary loves. Ever since then, he often thinks fondly of that soufflé and will ask for it to be made when every green garlic appears at the market, or if we are planning a special dinner for family and friends – he suggests it should be on the menu. My version of sfougato was born from the memory of that green garlic soufflé – but this is a version that can be made in five minutes on a weeknight! The nettles take a little bit of special handling and c...

When looking at the Mediterranean diet pyramid, there is quite a large amount of cheese featured. In fact, if you follow a mediterranean diet it is recommended that you eat dairy each day, in moderation of course. Greeks rarely consume cow's milk products, with the exception of some yoghurts and there is certainly no low fat, over salted processed yellow plastic cheeses! The mediterranean Greek diet is all about fermented milk products such as yoghurt and feta cheese made predominantly from sheep and goats milk based products. Feta cheese is probably the most iconic and well known of all Greek cheeses. It is rich in probiotic bacteria and made from a mixture of sheep and goat milk. It is not to be confused with cow's milk 'feta' from some other countries, the taste and texture of which is dramatically different too Greek Feta. Indeed, Greek feta cheese now has a Controlled Denomination of Origin (DOC) (hooray!), which specifies that it must be made from pure sheep milk...

Each week my local market has a stall filled with beautiful berries and I always have to stop and buy a small box or two, sometimes raspberries or most often, plump blueberries. As I reached for some absolutely giant jubilee blueberries, the stall holder also presented me with a huge container of the most beautiful fresh strawberries. They were not the giant, overgrown variety often sold in supermarkets, but little ruby red, absolutely gorgeous gems. Even though they were rather tiny and a little uneven in size, they had the most divine pure strawberry aroma. When I saw the container of strawberries at the market I knew instantly that they had to be used for an ice cream. The colour was so beautiful and they were just calling out to be mixed with cream. To make the strawberry flavour even more intense, I roasted the strawberries with a touch of raspberry vinegar and a little Greek basil. I really wanted to add the beautiful berries themselves to the ice cream for some texture, so roast...

Given that I have just posted my " Field Guide to Greek Wild Greens ", I thought it perhaps fitting to share a new recipe with you, which uses a variety of different wild greens and comes from my mother in law’s recipe collection. Quite commonly in tavernas all over Greece, a big bowl of horta is served alongside a plate of char-grilled octopus. At home, the weekly meal is a little more simple and the octopus and horta are combined into the one dish. Sometimes you can just have the braised greens alone and the style of cooking them is called ‘tsigariasta’ (τσιαγαριαστά) which means sautéed in Greek. It is a very popular style of cooking in the Ionian islands. Depending on the season, the greens can be braised with a little fresh tomato, or in winter when citrus is at its best, you can use a generous squeeze of lemon. To give the greens a little more flavour – different types of seafood can also be added, depending on the season and what is available. This dish was a common ...

I would love to be able to spend hours foraging for wild greens – but it is a time-consuming activity and you MUST have someone with you (preferably an older Greek person) who can properly identify what is what, so you don’t end up serving something potentially poisonous in your spanakopita! To alleviate my foraging anxieties (and to learn more), I have started to grow many ‘wild’ greens from seed in my garden – the seeds being the (well identified and home cultivated) gifts of my Greek parents-in law, their family, cousins and friends and my lovely Italian neighbours - or the sellers noted below.  Another good starting point has also been frequenting local grower’s markets to learn more about the wild greens being sold. In Australia, wild greens are growing in popularity at farmer’s markets and you can now easily buy a range of seasonal greens from dandelions to mallow leaves. In Greece, at the laiki (local street market) you will always find an abundance of wild greens on display...

There is one book common to all the kitchens of Greek women who migrated to Australia in the 1950s and 1960s. That is a book known just as, "Tselementes".  Nicholas Tselementes was well known chef, who trained and worked in some of the finest kitchens in Europe. In 1910, he wrote the first ever Greek Cookbook, which became every Greek housewife's cooking bible. The reason why so many Greek migrant women sought out a highly prized copy of Tselementes has been speculated upon by many food writers, some consider it was symbolic of the growing sophistication of Greek migrant women. On her wonderful blog, " Organically Greek " Maria writes of her own mother's experience in New Zealand,  "...Cookbooks were unknown to her until she migrated...Suddenly it seemed that a cookbook was indispensable. It was as necessary as, as, as sandblasted ballerinas on concertina glass-panelled doors separating the lounge from the dining room, china figurines on the mantelpiece...