This moist, fruity cake is based on a recipe for Rustic Tuscan Apple Cake that my friend Val posted in her brilliant site More than Burned Toast.
I tweaked the recipe, substituting olive oil for the butter, and also used my lemon liqueur instead of the amaretto the Tuscan recipe suggests.I made it in a rectangular pan, and as I took it out of the oven I glazed it with some marmalade diluted in more lemon liqueur…
For a 10X7 inch (25X18,5 cm) cake (more…)
Besides adding our garden’s delicious red peppers to sauces, fry, and stuff with rice, vegetables, meat, or fish, I love the combination of flavors created by olive-oil-sautéed peppers and use them as topping for my flat bread, pairing them with crumbled feta cheese.
The dough is the one I use for my everyday breads, sometimes adding yogurt if I have leftover that is going too sour or any kind of mashed vegetables or greens.
See also the Tomato and Cheese topped bread, the Smoked Cheese and Kumquat Bread which is basically the winter version of my topped breads. For a more spicy-aromatic topping spread Zaatar mixed with olive oil over the tomatoes.
Makes TWO large Laganes (flat breads), or FOUR smaller 10X7 inch (25X18,5 cm) breads, serving 8-12 people as appetizer
Pomegranates are just coming to season and they are delicious, although not easy to peel. Later in the season I will probably juice our garden’s pomegranates, but throughout the summer I use the pure, local, thick pomegranate juice we buy frozen on Kea. It has a somewhat tart and tannic taste and no added sugar or anything else. Taste the pomegranate juice you get and adjust the proportions of simple syrup accordingly.
We love the aroma of rose geranium, of which we have plenty in the garden. It is traditionally used it in the quince preserves, but also add it in our fig jam. The pomegranate juice has plenty of flavor but no fragrance so by adding rose geranium leaves you get a great aromatic granita. Some liqueur or vodka is essential, we think, making the frozen dessert much more complex and easier to serve.
Makes 10-16 servings (more…)
Figs and the milky, sticky sap from the tree were used since antiquity to curdle the milk and produce a fresh cheese. In Greece we call this soft cheese sykomyzithra and in Turkey teleme. From Paula Wolfert’s Mediterranean Clay Pot Cooking (Wiley, 2009) we get the ancient as well as the contemporary way of making this cheese, according to Musa Dagdeviren. In Musa’s beautiful video on Netflix we see the shepherds whip-up the fresh cheese in the mountains; and of course Dagdeviren has included the recipe for teleme in his recently published, encyclopedia-like Turkish Cookbook (Phaidon, 2019)
The recipe for this dessert that lingers between sweet and savory, is from Musa Dagdeviren’s book. Instead of dried figs I once used fresh over-ripe figs and the result was a lighter, exquisite cream. I like to sprinkled the bowls with walnuts toasted with brown sugar, salt, and rosemary.
Makes 6-8 servings (more…)
“We discover references to mastic in such diverse places as the logbooks of Christopher Columbus’ first voyage to the New World, and in the account and recipe books of the Sultans of Topkapi and the Seraglio. We read in the history books that the allure of mastic drew emperors, monarchs, and princes into battles for control of the mastic lands and villages of Chios,” wrote the late Dun Gifford in his introduction to the 1999 Oldways Symposium about the “Healthy Mediterranean Diets and Traditions of Chios and Lesbos islands.”
Last week, some twenty years later, mastic became the talk of the world!
“Over my 54 years, I’ve pinned my hopes on my parents, my teachers, my romantic partners, God.
I’m pinning them now on a shrub.
It’s called mastic, it grows in particular abundance on the Greek island of Chios and its resin — the goo exuded when its bark is gashed — has been reputed for millenniums to have powerful curative properties,” wrote Frank Bruni in the New York Times. (more…)
