For those of us who are hobby cooks, or even food-bloggers, there is a shiny alternative reality where, in one blinding moment, we have both won Masterchef and our freshly published cookbook lies on the kitchen table. For Irini Tzortzoglou that parallel universe has become the one she lives in, and there are few people…
Tag: Greek food
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…
Home Victories – A Wartime Recipe
May 9th, 2019 saw the Better Half and I arrive in St Petersburg. It had been a longed-for trip and a birthday treat for me. Having been weirdly obsessed since teenage years with ‘Dr. Zhivago’ and ‘War and Peace’, this was the trip of a lifetime. Unwittingly, the fates and BA flight prices had conspired…
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…
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…
City Lights – food and friendship in Istanbul.
Going to Istanbul with your Greek head on, you fast become aware that you are in a city of unknown knowns. Creeping up on you when you are least expecting it, you suddenly realise that, either by the look of something or its name, you know exactly what you are dealing with. From the name…
Zoned Out – Zonars – a legend lost
While learning Greek, about a million years ago, my rather innovative teacher, Dimitris, ditched the standard translation texts – they were dreadfully turgid – and instead he gave me chunks of fiction to render into my faltering Greek. Usually they were excerpts from Agatha Christie ‘whodunnits’ – I blame Dimitri for my ongoing obsession with…
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…