As ridiculous as it sounds, I can safely say that I didn’t meet a courgette until 1975. Growing up in the 1960s, I cannot think of an occasion when one appeared on the dinner table or was even mooted as a veg option. There were vegetable marrows, of course. They were usually the size of…
Tag: Greek cooking
Golden Balls – Loukoumades
Obviously, that last post was quite a bit more than ‘tongue in cheek’! As you can probably guess, I’m really looking forward to eating something someone else has cooked as soon as possible. As (despite requests) Kouzina Karantina won’t be offering a ‘take out’ service anytime soon, I reckoned I owed a recipe, and this…
Lockdown Lowdown – Where to eat?
Call me boring if you want, but somehow I seem to be homing in on one very local eatery recently. To be honest, further afield, there were only one or two standout meals right at the beginning of the year. There was a terrific pizza experience in Paris, in January. At Il Brigante, in the…
Recipe for theft – Kleftiko
I think it’s well-established by now that an incredible amount of words in the English language are actually Greek. There are all those school subjects like geography and history (yes.. history). Then there are the ones that we don’t know that we know …wine, for example, and surgery. And of course, there are all the…
Not Tickled Pink – Another Greek Food Myth – Taramosalata
It’s not often that Greek food gets mentioned on the telly, so naturally, my ears pricked up last week when I heard the word ‘taramasalata’ last week. In a cookery or food programme that is fairly possible, and with the current series of ‘The Trip’ being set in Greece, well maybe we’ll hear a few…
Inventions and Innovations – Kataifi Melitzanópita – Aubergine Kataifi
Forget splitting the atom or realising that the Earth wasn’t flat – who was the bright spark that invented bread? We all know about Einstein and Fleming and there are those who think that Steve Jobs and Tim Berners-Lee changed the development of Mankind – but who invented bread? I mean where would we be…
All Fired Up – Sheftaliés
For those who have never known a British summer, the experience can be a bit of a curiosity. The first thing to take on board is that the weather is totally, but TOTALLY unpredictable. So forget 4-6 months of more or less warm, balmy days, and recalibrate your expectations to temperatures that can, and I’m…
All Messed Up – Tourlou Tourlou
Some while back there was an advert on Greek TV for a brand of feta cheese. It showed a traditional village home with a man eyeing up a tray of freshly cooked stuffed vegetables – he calls out to his wife to see if he can have some. A rather old-fashioned, elderly lady comes into…
Not Woke – Just Fasting. Cheat’s Chickpeas – Revithátha Efkoli
Apologies, just in case anyone has noticed, for my almost Trappist silence over the last few months. It’s not because I have lost interest in blogging, simply I have spent the second half of 2018 ‘on the move’. Kouzina was, for most of that time, literally without a kouzina (it’s Greek for kitchen). It’s all…
Blog-Pod – Arakás me Patátes – Braised Peas With Potatoes
In Greece, a country where vegetable recipes rule supreme, you rarely hear food described as ‘vegetarian’. The naming of someone as a hortofágos (vegetarian) is a relatively modern phenomenon, despite the fact that traditionally Greeks, especially in villages and islands, ate very little meat. Regular meat-eating came with growing urbanisation and relative affluence. But explaining…