Cherry and Sour Cherry Preserves: Kerasi or Vyssino Glyko

Wednesday July 19th, 2023Wednesday July 19th, 2023 aglaia Leave a comment

This is one of the easiest spoon sweets to make. Traditionally in Greece every July all cooks used to make Vissino (sour cherry) preserves to serve with ice cream or yogurt throughout the year.

Adapted from my book The Foods of the Greek Islands.

The cornerstone of Greek sweets are the preserves made with the fruits of every season.

Each home has several different jars of fruit in the pantry, and guests are offered a teaspoon with a glass of water as a welcome to the house.

I know that fresh sour cherries are not the easiest fruit for most people to get, and their season is so short, so I suggest you make the preserves with perokerasa (Rainier cherries) instead.

Unfortunately, the true color of the Rainier cherries preserves is a quite unattractive murky yellow, so you are better off adding a few drops of red food coloring. Instead, I prefer to boil a red beet with the cherries, a trick I learned from Tunisian cooks.

Makes 3 cups (more…)

Strawberry and Apple Skillet Cornbread/Cake

Tuesday February 28th, 2023Wednesday March 1st, 2023 aglaia Leave a comment

I was inspired by a Food and Wine recipe for Strawberry-Rhubarb Cornmeal Skillet Cake, by baker and food writer Jocelyn Delk Adams. Strawbwrries, from the mainland greenhouses, are lovely this time of year. But as I have probably said before we have no rhubarb in Greece, so I decided to add apples instead.

I didn’t make the very intriguing rosemary whipped cream Adam suggests, which I will probably try another time, but opted for ice cream instead.

Since both Costas and I love the caramel base of the Apple and Quince Crumble I make often, I decided to repeat something similar here.

Needless to say, that I substituted again light olive oil for the butter in the original recipe, as I do all the time, and the result was absolutely great! Note that this cornbread/cake, unlike most other cakes, is best slightly warm, the day it is baked.

Serves 8: a 10-inch (26cm) skillet.

THE APPLE BASE:

2/3 cup sugar

2 tablespoons water

1/3 cup light olive oil, canola or sunflower oil

2 Apples halved, cored, and thinly sliced; I used Fuji.

FOR THE CORNBREAD/CAKE

1 cup All-Purpose flour

1/2 cup yellow cornmeal

½ teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon baking powder

3 large eggs

1 cup sugar, plus 2-3 tablespoons Turbinado or any light brown sugar for sprinkling

2/3 cup light olive oil, canola or sunflower oil

2/3 cup full-fat yogurt

1 teaspoon vanilla essence

1 ½ cup coarsely chopped fresh strawberries

Vanilla Ice Cream for serving (optional)

Place the skillet over medium-high heat and add the sugar and water. Swirl the skillet as it bubbles and gradually starts to color. When it is light amber add the olive oil, swirl the pan and spread the apple slices carefully, as they may splatter. Press with a wooden spoon and lower the heat. Simmer and don’t mind if some hard sugary pieces form; they will dissolve later as the cake bakes in the oven. When the apple slices have soften, after about 4-5 minutes, remove the skillet from the heat.

Preheat the oven to 350 F (180 C).

Make the cornbread/cake: Whisk together flour, cornmeal, salt and baking powder in a small bowl until combined and set aside.

In the bowl of a standing mixer, add the sugar and the eggs and work in slow to start with and increase the speed after 2 minutes; keep beating until light and creamy, about 5 minutes. Alternatively, you can use a hand-held mixer.

In a small bowl whisk the oil with the yogurt and add it to the egg mixture working on medium. Add the vanilla and gradually add the flours, continuing to beat in low, until completely incorporated. You will probably need to stop and scrape the sides of the bowl with a flexible spatula to make sure all flour is mixed in.

Pour the batter over the apples and carefully spread it with the spatula. Scatter the strawberries on the batter and sprinkle with the light brown sugar.

Bake for about 40 minutes or more, until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Let cool for 20 minutes before cutting to serve, accompanying with ice cream, if you like.

This cornbread/cake, unlike most other cakes, is best slightly warm, the day it is baked, but you can wrap the leftover in kitchen film and enjoy it the next day as well.

Apple and Quince Crumble with Caramel

Monday January 16th, 2023Monday January 16th, 2023 aglaia Leave a comment

I used apples, or apples together with quince instead of the pears Samantha Seneviratne suggests in NYT Cooking to make this quite wonderful crumble that has a caramel base enriched with cottage cheese, instead of cream. I omitted half of the flour, added breadcrumbs, olive oil and orange juice and the results were delicious, both with just apples, or adding some quince for texture.

Served with or without ice cream, this is a seriously addictive dessert.

SERVES 8 – 10 (more…)

Yogurt and Olive Oil Cake with Citrus Fruits and Syrup

Wednesday December 21st, 2022Wednesday December 28th, 2022 aglaia 1 Comment

Light and aromatic, it is the perfect dessert that my mother used to make.

For the New Year I decided to dress it up, sprinkling with diced, caramelized citrus peels and pistachios; I also cut the year’s numbers on tangerine peels that I simmered in syrup before placing on the cake.

See more New Year’s Cake recipes HERE and HERE.

Bake the cake at least a day before you plan to serve it so the flavors have time to develop. Cakes are best the day after!

In our family it was simply called Tou Yiaourtiou (the one with yogurt), to distinguish with another, more elaborate festive dessert my mother and aunts prepared with store-bought lady-finger cookies and a heavy margarine-based cream –butter and heavy cream were not a common ingredient in Greece in my childhood years.

Only recently I realized that this, ubiquitous urban Greek dessert is the Gateau aux Yaourt the simplest French cake, the first one kids bake as the portions are measured in the yogurt pot. Obviously my family, as most other bakers in Athens, got the recipe from Tselementes’ book. He obviously copied the French cake, but substituted margerine (!) for the olive oil, calling it Yiaourtopita (yogurt pie) a name that many bakers use today.

Whenever I have, I use lemons from my garden, or our local tangerines and oranges that are wonderfully aromatic. I suggest you seek organic fruits for this and my other recipes.

See also my Orange, Lemon or Tangerine Olive Oil Cake which I make pulsing the whole citrus fruit, not just zesting it.

For a 9-inch (23 cm) round or square pan

(more…)

Galaxidi Kourambiedes: a New, Very Old Festive Treat

Tuesday December 13th, 2022Thursday December 15th, 2022 aglaia 2 Comments

A more than 200-year old recipe I got from Frosso Patiniotis, my very lively 96-year old aunt. She bakes every year these quite unusual, fragrant kourambiedes –shortbread-almond cookies– a few weeks before Christmas. I may have eaten them before, but I don’t seem to have noticed how very different they were from the ones I get from Tsourtis’ bakery, on Kea’s main town.

See also my previous recipe.

Frosso gave me the recipe she had gotten from Mrs Dandoura, mother of her class-mate and best friend Chrysouli who recently passed. Mrs Dandoura had learned to make kourambiedes from her mother and grandmother. They came from a wealthy, shipping Galaxidi family, a town 15 klm southwest of Delphi that had flourished in the 18th and through the 19th century as a result of maritime trade and commercial exchanges with the West due to its exquisite natural port.

Calculating the generations that baked these festive cookies, we concluded that the recipe must be at least 200 years old. Thus kourambiedes were not, as the Greek version of Wikipedia cites “brought by prosfyges (refugees),” the Anatolian Greek population who fled after the defeat in the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922) from Smyrna (Izmir) and other parts of Turkey. Prosfyges did, indeed, introduce quite a few special foods to Palaioelladites —the local Greeks– but certainly kourambiedes were already part of the local festive table in many parts of the country.

Probably the word kourabies (plural kourabiedes) derives from Qurabiya a Persian and/or Arabic word with many variations, used for similar short-bread cookies throughout the Eastern Mediterranean and north Africa. Often sprinkled or with the addition of rose or citrus-flower water, I have not seen any version of these cookies that contained so many spices, and I just imagine that the cosmopolitan Galaxidi merchants were maybe inspired by the festive European/Grerman cookies. But this is my assumption, as I am also baking Pfeffernüsse and Lebkuchen these days…

Paula Wolfert in her wonderful 1988 book ‘Paula Wolfert’s World of Food‘ has a version of kourabiedes she calls ‘Greek Butter-Almond Cookies’ and over the years she kept telling me how amazing they were. As she wrote in the headnote she served them in her wedding, as many Greek families do.

Makes about 30 large or 40 small cookies. (more…)