Homemade Fresh Myzithra (ricotta-like cheese)

Monday June 10th, 2019Monday June 10th, 2019 aglaia Leave a comment

Here on Kea we make it with the milk our neighbors often give us. It is probably the first and simplest cheese ever made, and today the various commercial myzithra we get sometimes come from Crete –where is called anthotyro. Cheese makers make it now by adding fresh milk to the whey left from the first, usually the hard cheese they make, adding rennet to the milk.

If you can get leftover whey add fresh milk and do not add lemon or vinegar, just boil the whey with the milk and cream. Needless to say that if you make it with the usual cow’s pasteurized milk you get from the supermarket, combine it with goat’s milk, if you can, and add some cream –more or less, depending on how creamy and lush you want your myzithra.

Serve this delicious fresh cheese plain, as appetizer, sprinkling it with chopped herbs, shallots and garlic, or as dessert, drizzled with honey or jam. You can also use it to make savory myzithropita (cheese tart), or combine it with some feta cheese to make a Greek version of the cheese cake.

Makes about 1 pound soft cheese (you may double the quantities for more)

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Cheesecake with Feta and Myzithra (Ricotta)

Wednesday June 5th, 2019Wednesday June 5th, 2019 aglaia Leave a comment

This is my interpretation of the dessert made popular by Americans in recent years. But fresh cheese desserts abound since ancient times all around the Mediterranean. Ricotta-like cheese, mixed with honey, dried fruit, and nuts was used for some of the first sweets our ancestors enjoyed on special occasions. Apicious the Roman cook and author, describes such a sweet in his book written the 1st century AD.

Both in Greece, in southern Italy, and in Sicily, ricotta-based sweets are very popular, especially around Easter time. Unfortunately, the current American version that uses packaged ‘cream cheese’ and has been adopted by bakers all around the world, is far from the delicious, if less refined-looking traditional cheesecakes from which I was inspired to make this one.

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Oven-roasted Summer Vegetables, Briami

Monday June 3rd, 2019Thursday June 6th, 2019 aglaia Leave a comment

We often roast the vegetables in the wood-fired oven and they become even more delicious and smoky. But even in the conventional oven, with the addition of some pimenton –the Spanish smoked pepper– if you like, this is a glorious and extremely easy dish to make.

When we were kids, before we had an electric stove with an oven, my mother used to get to our neighborhood’s bakery a pan of mixed vegetables well-doused in olive oil and sprinkled with oregano and other herbs. It was roasted in the communal oven, after the breads were baked, and we collected it just before lunch. Especially practical on summer days when we went swimming, as the baker was left to cook our lunch!

Serve it either warm or at room temperature, preferably with the addition of feta cheese, and fresh, crusty bread! These days we may just roast eggplants and peppers, omitting the potatoes if we want to serve the vegetables with rice or bulgur (see the Variation).

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Avgolemono: the Elegant Egg and Lemon Sauce

Thursday May 23rd, 2019Thursday March 9th, 2023 aglaia Leave a comment

The most sophisticated of the Greek sauces, avgolemono, a sauce of eggs and lemon juice, seems to have its roots in the Sephardic agristada. It probably came with the Jews who settled in Greece in the 16th century, fleeing from Spain and the Inquisition.

Lamb-Avgolemono

Agristada and avgolemono both cleverly use eggs beaten with lemon juice to create an emulsion which thickens the cooking juices, much in the way the French use tangy crème fraîche.

Avgolemono is used with meat, fish, or just with vegetables. Fish soup avgolemono is usually cooked during the cold winter months, while lahano-dolmades (stuffed cabbage leaves) is one of the most iconic winter dishes. Besides the comforting chicken avgolemono soup, magiritsa, is the festive Easter soup prepared with the spring lamb’s innards, flavored with scallions, and dill, and finished with tangy avgolemono.

The traditional, elegant avgolemono is often abused in restaurants where flour is used to thicken and stabilize it so that it can be endlessly re-heated.

Meat with greens, artichokes and/or other vegetables is sometimes called ‘fricassée,’ from the French chicken dish whose white, flour-thickened sauce has neither eggs nor lemons.

Here on Kea I learned to make avgolemono with the winter wild greens that are cooked with pork, while in the spring it complements the local, thorny artichokes that we braise with fresh fava pods and finish with an extra lemony avgolemono prepared using the wonderful, deep-yellow yolks of my neighbor’s eggs.

Artichokes in Olive Oil (Carciofi Sott’Olio)

Tuesday May 21st, 2019Tuesday May 21st, 2019 aglaia Leave a comment

The recipe is inspired from the traditional Italian way of preserving in olive oil—and not just artichokes, but also pearl onions, green garlic, peppers, fresh fava, peperoncini, and more.

I always have jars of artichokes in the refrigerator, using my garden’s crop of small, thorny, purple Kea artichokes. In the spring, when you find the best artichokes at the farmers’ market, dedicate a day to peeling and preparing them, filling jars with delicious artichokes that can become the base for all kinds of dishes. Add them to salads, appetizers, grains, or pasta recipes. I stuff small breads with the leftovers from the bottom of the jar and use the olive oil in sauces and dressings, or keep it for next year’s artichoke preserves.

Makes a 1-quart (960-ml) jar

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