For two months the kitchen was a pile of stones, concrete, and dismantled doors and windows. Dusty and noisy, emptied of everything that could be moved, the space looked destitute, as if it could never be a welcoming kitchen again.

  Slide Show: New Kitchen for the New Year!

At times I questioned my strong impulse to knock down the staircase, expand and completely renew the room. Patience is not one of my qualities, and I wanted the work to finish as soon as possible. Wanting to speed up the entire process I went a bit far, taking the measurements and ordering the granite surfaces before installing the kitchen cabinets; the suspense was killing me for weeks – would the fit be correct? — until the shiny dark brown slabs arrived, and were a perfect fit! (more…)

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Even using the leftover decorative pumpkins, following my recipe for kolokytha rossoli, the easiest of the spoon sweets, you can prepare jars of home-made edible presents to offer to your friends…

  Slide Show: The Greek way with Pumpkins

Recipes mentioned in this post
Pumpkin Preserves (kolokytha rossoli)
Pumpkin, Leek, Walnut and Cheese Tart
Pumpkin Pie from Lesbos
Pumpkin ‘Hummus’ (or tahini babaganoush)

READ MORE (in The Atlantic)

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“Thank you for an exceptional week and for welcoming us into your home and community. I was so immersed that I forgot about our life at home—-a true sign of a successful vacation.” Comments like this, coming from our guests across continents, are our greatest reward at the end of yet another successful Kea Artisanal year. In 2009, once more we had the chance to meet several wonderful people who became our new friends:

Starting in early May, we welcomed our visitors to a green island, filled with spring flowers. By late May we received a group of charming ladies, our first visitors from South Africa. The group was put together by Debbie Evans, who runs a cooking school in Johannesburg and organizes cooking trips to various parts of the world. (more…)

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A new and exciting workshop will take place in Kea next June (21 to 26): our ceramist friend Vicki Snyderfrom Santa Fe, who set up Terra Kea, her Greek studio on the island, together with the famous San Francisco ceramist Christa Assad will give pottery classes in a joint seminar with Kea Artisanal.

We will provide food and some extra stimulation, we hope. The workshop is already sold out, but let us know if you are interested, because a second one may follow later in the season.

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I know that for most of you fall, if not winter (was that a snowstorm in Boston last weekend??), is advancing rapidly, and your local, fresh vine-ripened tomatoes flower and plump in the memory alone. In our corner of the world, though, we still enjoy warm days and only somewhat chilly nights, so our tomato plants continue to produce fruit. We had a good harvest this summer — lots of dark red, pink, and orange fleshy heirloom tomatoes, as well as plenty of red cherry and tiny pear-shaped sweet yellow fruits, quite rare in Greece, that our guests admired enormously.

But while the last fruits of summer are still on our palates, the time has come to plant the winter and spring vegetables –lettuce, spinach, chicory, radishes, carrots, kardamo —the spicy Greek cress with feather-like leaves— and of course the fava seeds that will give us its tender green pods in the spring, right before Easter. That means uprooting the last tomato plants, and Costas, my husband, completed the task with fervor, ignoring my usual, nostalgic protests. Each year we go through the same argument, and although I know that he is right, and surely our poor garden soil needs a bit of rest, fed with compost and manure before we start planting again, I feel sad to remove tomato plants, that seem to jingle their fruit in protest, as we uproot them from the soil. (more…)

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