Based on the iconic Albanian dish of baked lamb with rice, I came up with a meatless version for my book Mediterranean Vegetarian Feasts. The recipe didn’t make the final cut, and my friend Cheryl Sherman Rulecooked, fine-tuned and photographed it for Team Yogurt.

_{Photo by Cheryl Sherman Rule}

Having eaten the delicious, creamy Albanian Elbasan or Tave Kosi my neighbor Ela prepared for us, I was determined to come up with a vegetarian version. Ela cooked lamb shanks on the stove with a little water and a quartered onion, then boned the meat and cut it into bite size pieces, discarding all fat. She left the broth to cool completely and skimmed it, getting about 1 cup broth which she mixed with her homemade yogurt that has the consistency of thick cream. She sautéed onions and cooked the flour in a mixture of olive oil and butter before adding the yogurt and eggs. She sprinkled the rice directly to the pan, with the meat, then poured in the broth-yogurt liquid. She was very careful not to over-bake and dry the food, letting the pan set at room temperature; this made her Tave Kosi so special. Mushrooms, both dried and fresh, together with peppers create a very different, but also flavorful base for the creamy yogurt-baked rice.
Instead of peppers, you could make it with diced zucchini, eggplants or any other seasonal vegetables.

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By February gardeners on the island pick the remaining cabbages from the garden, as they start to prepare the soil for the spring and summer vegetables.

Local cabbages are huge this time of the year but not particularly heavy; the heads are no longer tight and compact because the cabbage leaves start to loosen as the central stem grows. For us now is the ideal time to make lahano-dolmades, or yaprakia (stuffed cabbage leaves). It is much easier to separate the outer leaves of these late-season cabbages to blanch and stuff them. Our neighbor Stathis gave me two large cabbages the other day, as he was digging out his winter garden. He got six cabbages, more than Ela could use. (more…)

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Between the rich feasts of Christmas and the New Year, this humble yet delicious mung bean soup is what I would love to cook and eat!

Last year a friend of mine, a Greek-American retired archeologist who lives permanently in Kea and travels often with her husband all over Greece, brought me a bag of mung beans from the north, thinking that she had discovered a new kind of indigenous bean. She hadn’t seen them in the market before as they seem to be half-forgotten now after they created a sensation in the ‘80ies. My friend, like many others, didn’t know that this ancient Asian bean called rovitsa (pron. rov-EE-tsah) in Greek was “recently moved from the genusPhaseolus to Vigna,” according to Wikipedia, and was first domesticated in Mongolia where it occurs wild. In Punjab and other parts of India archaeologists have found evidence of cultivated mung beans dating back 4,500 years! (more…)

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To make flavorful and attractively colored breads and biscotti I often add carob,greens or squash and tangerines to my basic dough along with olive oil. The addition of beets makes delicious baguettes and buns but does not, unfortunately, create red or even pink bread…

Beets stain all the surrounding vegetables that complement them in salads; they make a dark red borsht and an equally impressive beet risotto, but when reduced to a pulp and added to flours and water the resulting vivid pink dough loses completely its color when the bread is baked. Occasionally a faint pinkish crust remains but the inside of the bread is quite ordinary, and you have to eat it to taste the sweet earthiness of the beets. (more…)

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You do not necessarily need to roll your own phyllo if you want to make an authentic Greek or Eastern Mediterranean pie. You can opt for the crustless version, adapting this basic recipe using any seasonal vegetable: a combination of sautéed leeks and carrots in the winter, or eggplant and peppers in the summer, for example.

The traditional ‘naked pies,’ the ones that are not wrapped in phyllo as most vegetable pies are, often include cheese –crumbled feta in most cases– but there are traditional vegan variations like the hortopsomo(literally ‘green bread’) of Epirus and southern Albania. In it the greens and herbs are bound together by cornmeal. My favorite ‘naked pie’ is the one we make in the summer with zucchini, of which we often have an overwhelming abundance in June, fresh from our garden.

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