The scene was as incongruous as it was endearing: One fine spring day just as we were walking along the outskirts of the old city of Rhodes, a Chinese bride and groom Chinese– dressed in full nuptial regalia and with an entourage of friends and family, were having their pictures taken. In the distance along […]
This article first appeared in the L.A. Times in March, 2003. Seduced by Souvlaki Diane Kochilas Αthens. The pang for souvlaki comes about once a month. I am usually in the center of town when that indescribable waft—the scent of grilled meat (either pork or lamb), garlic, and oregano, coupled with the smell of warm […]
It’s the shape that sets these lovely pies apart: filled with cheese and coiled, Cretan cooks nicknamed them sarikopita after sariki, the word for turban in Turkish. Petimezi is essentially reduced, clarified grape must. You can find it in Greek and Middle Eastern food shops all over the world. It is, in fact, one of […]
The Cretan Diet has become synonymous with the Mediterranean Diet, which has gained so much attention as one of the world’s most healthful. Crete was one of the original places observed in the now famous, and still ongoing, Seven-Countries Study begun by Dr. Ancel Keys in the late 1950s to document the rate of heart […]
Greece is fortunate to have one of the best climates in the world, one in which ample sunshine helps produce some of the tastiest fruits and vegetables. Because raw ingredients—from garden to grove to field to sea—are delicious in their own right in Greece, Greek cooking has evolved in such a way so that there […]
It was a driving trek of heroic proportions up the dirt road from Rethymnon, the historic seaside fort city on the northern coast, to the tiny village of Potamous, on one of those dusty Greek-island dirt roads that are less daunting than they seem but nonetheless make every passenger but the driver look like they […]
If there were a king of the garden, an everything to everybody sort of fruit, that would be the apple. From time immemorial, it has been a symbol of good and evil, of magic, of love, more important in religion, superstition, folklore, history and medicine than any other fruit. To the Pythagoreans and to many others after them, the […]
No other ingredient in the Greek larder affords the breadth of possibilities that fava does. Fava, to a Greek, is a bean puree. Its name refers to the end result—the mashed beans—and has nothing to do with what Americans and Italians know as fava, the broad bean. In Greece, most fava is prepared with yellow […]
In this nation of bread eaters, the subject of regional pasta is, ironically, vast. There are, indeed, dozens, if not more, different traditional Greek pastas, and certainly dozens of ways to cook them. Some are truly unusual. A Little History Pasta has always been part and parcel of the Greek larder. Common belief has it […]
Grape must is the vine’s utilitarian child. Obviously as old as the vine itself, the unfermented juice of the grape has found a place in the annals of gastronomy from earliest times, in ways which have changed surprisingly little over the centuries. The tart juice of unripe grapes, for example, was used by the ancient […]