Tsiknopempti – Smoky Thursday in Greece!
Smoky Thursday is the meat-eating feast before Lent. Read about this delicious tradition and enjoy a few succulent meat dishes that will please everyone’s inner carnivore.
Mediterranean Diet Mindset
Adapt a Mediterranean diet lifestyle and mindset easily, wherever you are, by following a few basic tenets.
4 Tips for Sexy Greens!
Sexy greens is not an oxymoron! In the Mediterranean diet, greens are a basic ingredient. Their sheer variety offers countless solutions to everything from soup and salad to main courses and they’re packed with nutrients.
Mediterranean Diet & Chocolate: 5 Ways to Use Chocolate in the Greek Kitchen
In the Mediterranean diet and Greek kitchen, chocolate finds its way into delicious desserts with olive oil, superfood Mastiha, Greek wines, tahini, nuts and more. Just in time for Valentine’s Day, here are five ways to use chocolate in traditional and modern Greek baking…all in the spirit of the healthy Mediterranean diet!
5 Uses for Greek Honey
Greek honey is one of the most therapeutic and delicious foods on earth, and a mainstay of the Mediterranean diet! On Ikaria, local honey, always raw and pure, is one of the secrets to longevity! Here are five tips for how to use it and enjoy it in savory and sweet dishes alike.
Ikaria’s Famous Drinking Herbs: 6 Teas and Natural Remedies from the Blue-Zone Ikarian Pantry
If you’re looking for one of the secrets to Ikarian longevity – and, indeed, a key component to the Mediterranean diet as a whole – you need to take a look at the island’s bounty of herbal teas. Yes, you probably know all about the way fresh and dried herbs spice up many a Mediterranean […]
Mediterranean Diet: 5 Greek Soups that are Essential
Mediterranean Diet: 5 Essential Greek Soups The Mediterranean diet is renowned for its variety and healthy choices, not least of which is the array of delicious, easy soups that found all over the region and are based on a long list of Mediterranean ingredients you can find almost anywhere. Where do Greece and Greek cooking […]
3 Basic Ingredients for Mediterranean Diet, Plant-Based Slow Cooking the Greek and Ikaria Way!
January is Slow-Cooking Month, a time to retrench after likely holiday excesses and to retreat into winter mode more fully. At least it is for me, especially from my perch in Greece and on Ikaria, where the Mediterranean diet reigns supreme.
Black Eyed Peas for Health & Luck
Good luck foods are one of the most fascinating chapters in global food history. For Greeks on New Year’s, the food of luck is either a bread, cake or pie called vasilopita. There are dozens of different regional renditions, some sweet, some savory. For the Italians, it’s lentils, which symbolize money. In the American South it’s black-eyed peas. I am devoting this blog to my favorite black-eyed pea recipes, equally delicious for good luck and good health! They’re the perfect Mediterranean diet ingredient: humble, versatile and easy to cook.
25 GREEK CHRISTMAS RECIPES
I want to wish everyone a safe, happy and healthy holiday season and New Year. We celebrate with season’s “eatings,” always with a Greek twist, a drizzle of olive oil and spoonful of honey and the scent of warm spices permeating so many holiday dishes. Holiday traditions culminate at New Year’s for Greeks, the day most people actually exchange gifts.
Samythos Tahini: Meet the Producer
Do you love tahini as much as I do? It is one of the most nutritious ingredients in the Mediterranean Diet, an excellent source of copper and selenium, important for immunity boosting and more. It’s also delicious, of course, and Samythos, which you can find online, is special: Passionate artisan Thanassis Polyzoidis produces dark, nutty cold-pressed tahini from organic unhulled sesame seeds, which he grows in what was traditionally the sesame basket of Northern Greece. Guest writer Diana Farr Louis talked to Polyzoidis about why tahini is his life’s work.
35 Vegan Thanksgiving Recipes with Greek Flavors
Friends, fans and followers, welcome to this little collection of 35 Vegan Thanksgiving Recipes Inspired by Greek Flavors! So much of Greek cooking is naturally vegan that we often just take our great plant-based dishes for granted.
Enjoy this selection of traditional and contemporary Greek-Inspired Vegan Thanksgiving Recipes…from my Greek table to yours!