Full of fun, easy, zesty and healthy recipes, my new and very summery book is out at last! You can click here to order it. I am sure you will love this sample recipe. It is a hearty salad that can also be a main dish. It became our standard picnic fare. We always make it the night before our lunch on the beach with friends. Grilled sadines or lamb chops on our portable BBQ is the main dish, but everybody –friend and participants at Kea Artisanal rave about the bulgur salad.

_{Photo by ANASTASIOS MENTIS.}

The recipe is based on Bazargan, a Syrian-Jewish salad that Claudia Roden included in A Book of Middle Eastern Food. I first tasted it many years ago, during a food conference, and I was immediately fascinated by this earthy, fragrant, and crunchy sweet-and-sour mixture. Claudia whipped it up during a cooking demo, and as she gave us tastings she pointed out that the salad was not ready because it had to sit for a few hours so that the grains could soak up the flavors from the sauce and the spices. Reading the recipe in Claudia’s old book, I wasn’t tempted to try it—one of my very few such misses. I am so glad I had the chance to taste it, so now I am passing the torch.

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In the last newsletter describing our ‘summer highlights’ we had to leave out two very important visitors whom we are now privileged to consider our dear friends: Journalist and Saveur kitchen director Hunter Lewis, and photographer Penny de los Santos.

They joined us here on Kea in-between our two May programs. Together we cooked and grilled, enjoyed lunches and dinners, while tireless Penny recorded everything in her inspiring photographs. Costas hiked to the ancient temples with Hunter, and we had the most wonderful time with two incredibly warm and talented people! We wouldn’t exaggerate if we said that some of us shed tears the night we parted, as Hunter and Penny boarded the ferry to Lavrion. (more…)

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In the dead of winter, when seaside taverns are closed and the cold wind beats mercilessly against the deserted beaches, islanders slaughter their pigs. Pig-slaughtering is still an important annual festival for the locals on Kea, as on all the Cycladic islands.

In the necessarily frugal old-days, it was an essential undertaking; today it is more of an occasion to gather, eat, and drink homemade wine and raki, the local moonshine… MORE

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Despite their colonial history, some islands were never occupied by the Ottomans, as the rest of Greece. By the late 15th century Kea was dominated by pirates, almost deserted by its inhabitants.

It was later repopulated by people who fled from other islands – my maternal grandfather’s family probably came from Patmos, as my mother’s maiden name, Patiniotis, indicates… MORE

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