‘This is better than baklava!” exclaimed Athanasia, my late mother in law, the first time she tasted this pie. It is quite an unusual, deep flavored pumpkin pie from Lesbos, the large island of the northeastern Aegean, so much in the news these days for quite different reasons…

Athanasia, a very eclectic cook, was usually quite stingy with her praises and she really loved baklava. So her unsolicited approval meant a lot to me, and I will never forget it. She also baked her variation of the central Greek pumpkin/squash pie which starts by blanching the squash, then draining, mashing and mixing it with plenty of sugar and walnuts or other nuts. (more…)

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I remember this peasant dish as skordomakarona (garlic macaroni) or makaronia bloom (flooded macaroni) because it was somewhat soupy. My mother made it occasionally for dinner –our secondary meal. For lunch she often made the more elaborate Greek makaronada: a platter of macaroni –usually overcooked– topped with rich, cinnamon-scented tomato sauce, sprinkled with copious amounts of grated kefalotyri cheese and then drizzled with sizzling sheep’s milk butter that partly melted the cheese, creating the desirable cords… My father loved this makaronada and usually ate more than he should, then blamed my mother for his stomach ache; she should have removed the platter from the table after serving, so he couldn’t have helped himself again and again, he shouted. I don’t think we witnessed this recurring argument for any other family dish, and I remembered it yesterday, as I kept adding to my plate more and more One-Pot-Pasta. (more…)

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Sardeles Marinates is part of my daily summer lunch, accompanying any vegetables, beans, rice or pasta I cook. Sometimes it is even the centerpiece. I enjoy the sardines with slices of my bread – toasted if it is more than a day old – and of course with a large tomato, onion, and caper salad.

I never get tired of them, and one of the beauties of home-marinated sardines is that they keep for a week or more in the refrigerator, so I don’t have to make them often. (more…)

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The July 5 lunch that concludes the 2015 Symposium meals is a mostly Vegetarian Greek / Mediterranean Feast conceived to communicate the richness of the region’s meat-less tradition.

Savor simple dishes bursting with flavor created with the best traditional ingredients combined with seasonal produce. Taste exquisite olives, cheeses, savory biscuits, along with surprising, hearty vegetable and bean salads that are flavored with my own spicy-fragrant condiments. A selection of seven award-winning Greek wines will accompany the meal which will conclude with three ‘spoon sweets’ –the best artisanal fruit preserves– along with special Cypriot wedding cookies and an aromatic herbal tea brewed with wild plants gathered from the Greek mountains. (more…)

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The frail-looking trees have adapted perfectly to the dry climate of the islands.

At last people started to package and sell the local, small but delicious almonds! Keans say that almond trees, much like the olive trees, blossom bountifully every second year, and last summer we did have something of a bumper crop.

But until recently very few bothered even for their own use to harvest the fruits of the trees that grow all over the island.

The very labor-intensive work of harvesting, peeling the semi-dried outer green peel, and then cracking the hard shell to get the kernels was not worth the effort; imported California almonds were so cheap… (more…)

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