Tag Archives: Greek food

Gift Guide: For the Hellenophile

20 Dec

Whether you’re giving a Greek American a taste of their homeland when they can’t make it back for the holidays or satiating a Hellenophile’s interest in Greek culture, there are countless foods, books, beauty products, and jewelry that will suit your needs.  Plus, select a gift made in Greece and you’ll also be supporting the struggling Greek economy.  Here’s just a small selection of Greek gift ideas, some made in the States, some in Greece, and others elsewhere, but all unique and lovely.

Gifts for the Greek food lover:::

 

Kokkari: Contemporary Greek Flavors by Janet Fletcher

 

 

 

 

 

 

How to Roast a Lamb: New Greek Classic Cooking by Michael Psilakis

 

 

 

 

A selection of delicious dressings and marinades from Sophia’s Gourmet Foods

A selection of three different flavors of honey from Odysea Shop

Traditional Greek preserves (rose petal and pergamot) by Monastiri

Kalamata olive oil

Ouzo candies

Pavlidis Dark Chocolate

Pastelli with honey

Bonus tip! – Gifts appear so much nicer when they come as a set.  You may want to give a cookbook with some Greek spices.  A duo or trio of a certain type of product (such as honey or olive oil) is a great way for the recipient to try out a few flavors.  Or, you may want to give a gift basket of assorted Greek candies.

 

Gifts for someone who loves Greek literature:::

 

The Greek Poets: Homer to Present by Peter Constantine

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Odyssey: A Pop-up Book by Sam Ita

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Greek classics

Subscription to Greek America Magazine

Bonus tip! – Trying pairing the book with a book light, a notebook and pen, a bookmark with a quote by a Greek philosopher, or a coffee mug (maybe even with a bag of Greek coffee).

 

Gifts to make someone feel like a beautiful and pampered Greek goddess:::

Beauty products from Korres

Olive oil body lotion by Olivia

Jewelry by Konstantino

Bonus tip! – Include a lovely handwritten letter.  A bottle of Greek wine or some fine Greek chocolates would also make someone feel loved and pampered.

 

As the Greek proverb says, “A gift, though small, is welcome.”

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Tasty Tuesday: Chew on These Greek Crisis Cooking Tips

13 Dec

 

My yiayia (grandma) never threw anything out.  She repurposed plastic bottles and sewed up the runs in cheap, drugstore pantyhose.

When she made chicken, the leftover bones got thrown into soups.

Raising her family in Greece during World War II, she had to stretch the drachma as far as it could go.  Now, with the economic crisis in Greece, Greeks are having to return to the thrifty ways of their yiayias.

The Associated Press takes a look at Eleni Nikolaidou’s book “Starvation Recipes,” a collection of recipes and “survival tips” based in Nazi-occupied Greece, and chef F. T. Bletsas’ budget-minded cooking tips in his Greek tv show “Mama’s Cooking” and English-language website www.cookingeconomy.com.

One tip from the article: You’ll feel like you’re eating more if you chew your food veeeeerrrrrrrryyyyyy sssssllllloooowwwwlllllyyyyy.

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Tasty Tuesday: Tzatziki in the Morning

22 Nov

One of my favorite bloggers, Joy of … wait for it … Oh Joy!, likes tzatziki sauce.  In a recent post, “My New Favorite Breakfast Sandwich…” she calls tzatziki sauce the “extra special ingredient” to the breakfast sandwich she’s been making and enjoying that includes egg and avocado slices on a toasted English muffin.

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Tasty Tuesday: Dinner at Souvlaki GR

6 Sep

My friend Laura, from college, came to Greece with me one summer, so when she and her husband visited me this summer in New York City, I knew just the spot to take them: Souvlaki GR.  My sister and I had passed it one day while wandering the Lower East Side, and I did a double take because it was as if I had seen a mirage of a taverna on a Greek island.  With a stone floor, white-washed walls with blue shutters, and beach umbrellas inside the restaurant, it perfectly captured the laid-back vibe of Greece.  It was perfect for reminiscing about our all-too-long-ago vacation in Crete.

As it turns out, Souvlaki GR started out as a food truck before opening its Lower East Side restaurant.  Those of you who follow me on Facebook know that no matter how trendy food trucks are, I just can’t get onboard with them.  My parents didn’t raise me to eat out of trucks.  That said, I can see why Souvlaki GR would be a popular food truck.  The food and its packaging are the perfect portable meal.  Their restaurant is so cute, though, that I wish they’d stepped it up with the food and offered larger portions more suitable for a sit-down restaurant.

What do you think: should a food truck-turned restaurant keep to its winning menu or should the restaurant offer something more than the truck?

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Tasty Tuesday: FAGE Greek Yogurt Topped with Fresh Raspberries and Blackberries

2 Aug

What I love about summer is fresh berries!  Raspberries are probably my favorite food.  (Well, along with brownies and coffee ice cream!  And pasta!)

Lately, I’ve been eating a lot of FAGE Greek yogurt with fresh, organic berries for breakfast and a cup of hazelnut coffee.  It tastes so good and makes me feel happy that I’m being healthy.

According to the nutrition benefits page of the FAGE yogurt website:

FAGE Total Strained Greek Yogurt is an extraordinary source of nutrition. Made from an authentic recipe that dates back to 1926 and using 100% natural ingredients, it contains no added sweeteners, thickeners or preservatives and no powdered milk, powdered cream or powdered protein.

Just whole milk, cream and cultures go through our unique straining process to create this blissful, low-calorie taste experience. In fact, approximately 4 pounds of raw milk are needed to make just one pound of FAGE Total Greek Yogurt.

FAGE Greek yogurt is vegetarian and gluten-free.  The 0% and 2% are also diabetic-friendly.

Meanwhile, raspberries are full of all sorts of antioxidant goodness.  Check out what Wikipedia has to say about raspberry health benefits:

The aggregate fruit structure contributes to its nutritional value, as it increases the proportion of dietary fibre, placing it among plant foods with the highest fibre contents known, up to 20% fibre per total weight. Raspberries are a rich source of vitamin C, with 30 mg per serving of 1 cup (about 50% daily value), manganese (about 60% daily value) and dietary fibre (30% daily value). Contents of B vitamins 1-3, folic acid, magnesium, copper and iron are considerable in raspberries.

Raspberries rank near the top of all fruits for antioxidant strength, particularly due to their dense contents of ellagic acid (from ellagotannins, see for instance raspberry ellagitannin), quercetin, gallic acid, anthocyanins, cyanidins, pelargonidins, catechins, kaempferol and salicylic acid. Yellow raspberries and others with pale-coloured fruits are lower in anthocyanins.

Due to their rich contents of antioxidant vitamin C and the polyphenols mentioned above, raspberries have an ORAC value (oxygen radical absorbance capacity) of about 4900 per 100 grams, including them among the top-ranked ORAC fruits. Cranberries and wild blueberries have around 9000 ORAC units and apples average 2800.

As for blackberries, Wikipedia simply says:

Blackberries are notable for their high nutritional contents of dietary fiber, vitamin C, vitamin K, folic acid – a B vitamin, and the essential mineral, manganese.

Do you prefer raspberries or blackberries?

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Tasty Tuesday: Mango Salad with Sophia’s Pomegranate Dressing

26 Jul

I’m not a salad person.  Like a good Greek, my dad ate a huuuuuuge bowl of salad every night at dinner.  Salad seemed like a whole lot of chewing for not a lot of flavor payoff to me, though.  I’ve taste-tasted plenty of dressings at all-you-can-eat buffets, and while blue cheese or Italian might make lettuce a little more palatable it usually ends up making my salad taste rather generic.  “Hi, I’m American, and I like ranch dressing!”  That’s why I was surprised when I found myself tempted by the salad dressings at the grocery store.

Shelved between plastic bottles of gooey dressings was Sophia’s Gourmet Foods Greek Island Dressing.  The tall glass bottle looked sophisticated and down-to-earth at the same time, as if Sophia’s is the shabby chic of salad dressings.  The labels are white with beautiful line illustrations that call to mind late afternoons on the Greek islands.  The contents of the bottles looked thick, textured, and vibrant.  The dressing looked natural and homemade.

I picked up a bottle and read the label.  I’m really into reading labels these days.  It’s crazy the amount of junk (read: preservatives, sugar, coloring) that goes into packaged foods.  Here’s what’s in the Tahini: “Lemon Juice, Tahini, Water, Garlic, Salt, Sesame Seeds, Citric Acid.”  That’s it.  All of the other flavors do contain xantham gum, which helps the dressing achieve the thickness I’d noticed.  Some have various types of sugars added, but a serving size (2 tablespoons) only has 2 grams of sugar.  I wish the natural ingredients themselves did all the thickening and sweetening, but still Sophia’s seems more natural than a lot of other brands on the market.

I selected the “with Pomegranate” dressing.  The ingredients are:

Water, Pomegranate Juice (from Concentrate) Extra Virgin Olive Oil, Lemon Juice, Soybean Oil, Honey, Vinegar, Garlic, Spices, Cultured Dextrose, Salt, Xanthan Gum, Natural Color, Natural Flavor.

Pomegranates, which originated in Iran, are central to the Greek myth of Persephone.  In Greek Orthodox Christianity it is the pomegranate, not the apple, that was the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden.  At very traditional Greek weddings, pomegranates are broken on the ground.

Pomegrantes are believed to reduce risk of heart disease.  They’re a good source of vitamin B5 and C.

Sophia’s Greek Island dressing just has pomegranate juice from concentrate so it’s not quite as beneficial as eating a fresh pomegranate on its own, but all the Sophia’s dressings are all natural, gluten free, cholesterol free, and low in sodium.  They also made from extra-virgin olive oil, which is also good for preventing heart disease, according to the research I’ve done previously.

Okay, so it’s pretty healthy but how does it taste??

I loved it!  It tastes fresh and tangy.  The texture isn’t syrupy, goopey, or runny.  It pours out nicely and has a bit of a pomegranate-seed texture which I liked.

I poured it over fresh romaine lettuce and fresh slices of mango.  The tang of the pomegranate and the sweetness of the mango paired really well together.  Delicious!

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2011 Gabby Awards: The After Party

14 Jun

Are you sick of hearing about the 2011 Gabby Awards yet?  I’m going to skip over the actual awards ceremony itself because as the main event it’s already gotten press coverage elsewhere.  What I want to talk about now is the after party!  I mean, let’s be honest here, most of the time when you’re at home on your couch watching the Academy Awards and the Grammy Awards you have to sit through an awful lot of boring acceptance speeches.  Don’t you really wish you could find out who’s dancing with whom at the after parties?  I have to hand it to the Gabby Awards, though: instead of a bunch of “I’d like to thank my publicist” speeches, the winners shared beautiful and tender stories of immigration and growing up Greek American.  I was thoroughly engaged and inspired.

After the 2011 Gabby Awards ceremony on Ellis Island, we boarded a ferry to Chelsea Piers.  You may recall I recently spent an afternoon exploring Chelsea Piers.  Not surprisingly, the awards ceremony had run waaaaaaay over schedule.  Hey, we were on Greek time, what do you expect?  We’re notorious for being late.  We were tired and hungry and probably felt a tinge of what our Greek ancestors felt when they were coming into Ellis Island all those years ago.  The pitch-black sky was perfect for witnessing the surprise Gabby Awards founder Gregory Pappas had arranged: the Empire State Building lit up in the colors of the Greek flag!

When we got to Chelsea Piers at 11:30 pm, Greek American Iron Chef Cat Cora had prepared a special buffet dinner for us.  Cat Cora was raised in Jackson, Mississippi, so her food is a unique pairing of Greek and Southern flavors.  Unfortunately for me (a vegetarian), both Greek and Southern cooking tend to focus on meat.  My tablemates told me the moussaka was delicious.  I particularly enjoyed Cat Cora’s melitzanosalata (a flavorful eggplant spread) and her more innovative asagio orzo.

If you go to Cat Cora’s website, she offers some free recipes.  My dad is obsessed with avocados (you’ll have to wait to read my memoir for the story behind this) so I want to tell him about her avocado tzatzkiki spread.

I have to admit, though, I have a bit of a sweet tooth, so even before I checked out the main course I was at the dessert table!  And it was to the dessert table I kept returning.  There were too-pretty-to-eat cookies by Eleni’s, a bakery I’ve languished in many times.  There were tiny squares of bliss by Chocolat Moderne.  I’m a sucker for gourmet chocolates.  What I loved about Chocolate Moderne, founded by Greek American chocolatier Joan Coukos, is that the gourmet chocolate company invokes classic Greek flavors in their chocolates.  Does Kalamata olives and chocolate sounds like a strange flavor combination?  It’s not.  It’s ammmmazing!  The dessert table also featured the best cupcake I have ever tasted, by the Greek American sisters Katherine Kallinis and Sophie LaMontagne behind Georgetown Cupcakes.  Seriously, Magnolia Bakery has nothing on Georgetown Cupcakes.  My sister’s a huge cupcake fan (not quite to the extent that my dad is obsessed with avocados but let’s just say she’s done a lot “research” into finding the best cupcakes in NYC) so I’m thinking we have to take a roadtrip to DC this summer to meet these Greek American cupcake sisters and eat their cupcakes!

As we ate all the delicious food and drank hearty glasses of pinot noir the band played Greek music.  Glykeria took to the stage to perform.  She is so cute and put on a great show.  It wasn’t long before many of us had pushed the tables and white couches away to start dancing.  Some people even got up on the tables and started dancing.  If you’ve ever been to a Greek restaurant or club, you know this is not at all uncommon.

But did I mention the dessert table??

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Penelope: NYC Restaurant Review and Mini Mythology Lesson

31 Jan

My sister treated me to lunch at Penelope on Friday, which was the perfect antidote to the snowy day.  The shabby chic look of the décor, in white and powder blue, reminded me of my Victorian dollhouse.  There were antique-looking light fixtures, salvaged wall art, and even a picket fence at the hostess desk.  Located in the Curry Hill area of New York, Penelope (159 Lexington Avenue, at 30th Street) is one of the cuter little restaurants in a neighborhood dominated by Indian buffets and grab-and-go bagel shops.

If you’re in the mood for a sophisticated take on comfort food, head over to Penelope.  The menu offered up so many vegetarian options, though there were also plenty of meat dishes.  There was Ellie’s Spinach Pie, which is described as “yia yia’s greek country recipe” [sic]; The John-Oliver, a goat cheese and olive tapenade sandwich on cranberry-pecan bread; and Grilled Three Cheese, which for a buck more you can add artichoke hearts to.

I ended up getting the Mac & Cheese.  It wasn’t quite as good as the one made at Chat’n’Chew, but I loved that they put tomato on it—just the way my mom serves it.

For dessert, my sister and I split a Peanut Butter Blondie, and I had a latte.  So good!

Next time, I’d like to come for brunch.  Their Nutella French Toast sounds amazing.

When Jennifer Potenza opened the restaurant in 2003, she named it after her pet turtle.

Fans of Greek literature, though, may remember that Penelope is also the name of Odysseus’ faithful wife in The Odyssey.  While much of the action in Homer’s epic poem revolves around the adventures of cunning Odysseus, who fends off the Cyclops and the sexy Sirens, it is also a story of profound love.  There’s no reason for Penelope to believe that her husband has survived when, days turn into years and still Odysseus has not returned from the Trojan War, and yet Penelope remains faithful to Odysseus by refusing to accept offers from any of the one hundred (108 to be exact) suitors that come into her life.

Twenty years later, Odysseus returns.  Penelope doesn’t believe it’s him at first, and it’s only after he tells the secret that only he and she knew about how part of their bed is made from an olive tree that she believes it is truly him.

One can pick out Penelope in artwork because artists depict her at a loom and with her legs crossed.

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Vasilopita Cutting at the FOS Kick Off

18 Jan

I recently wrote an essay that involved an experience I once had at a vasilopita cutting.  I look forward to sharing it with you sometime in the future.  In the meantime, I want to encourage you to come out to the vasilopita cutting at the FOS kick-off party Thursday night, January 20, 7-9 PM, at Kellari Parea.

In addition to the vasilopita cutting, there will be savory appetizers and a cash bar.  Admission is $25 in advance and $30 at the door.  $100 makes you an event sponsor.  Kellari Parea is located at 36 E. 20th Street in Manhattan.

The kick-off event will present Faithbook: The Orthodox Church as the Ultimate Spiritual Network as the next series topic for FOS, a Greek Orthodox fellowship led by Father Frank Marangos at Holy Trinity Cathedral.

You can listen to an interview about FOS at Radio NEO.

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