Spaghetti Tossed in Shrimp Butter
This is one of the tastiest pasta dishes you will ever have. Really. How can it not be good when the sauce contains onions, garlic, lots of shrimp, mushrooms, red peppers, Ouzo , butter, cream cheese and the surprise ingredient? Vanilla extract! This pasta dish is a riff on shrimp butter that I’ve used for […]
Spaghetti With Roasted Cherry Tomatoes & Dry Mizithra Cheese
Last weekend brought the end to the meat-eating phase of Apokries (Greek Carnival) and now Greeks are in the homestretch – the last week of Apokries. It’s Tyrini or Cheesefare Week with many Greeks forgoing meat and only eating dishes with cheese…lots of cheese! Pasta’s popularity goes beyond the happy bellies of Italian diners and […]
Ellasonitiko (Slow Roasted Pork Belly With Crackling)
Last summer was a hot one and avoid the cities and stay near the beaches where most of my friends and family are, anyways. Once the temperatures get cooler, the evenings longer – that’s when it’s time to head into the city and explore without sweating off half your body weight. September is a wonderful […]
Ginger Scallion Noodles With Shrimp
One of new additions to the landscape of Toronto’s food scene is the addition of Momofuku here in Toronto. Momofuku began in New York and it is headed by chef David Chang. Reviews of the Toronto location (which is 3 floors of varying Momofuku concepts) have been really good so far, from both foodies and […]
Creamy Coleslaw
This recipe is as much about texture as it about taste. What I love about this recipe is that I’m using Greek yogurt to put the creamy in this coleslaw and there’s a minimal amount of mayonnaise and…no cream! Flavour-wise, I am relying on the flavours of cabbage and carrot, both finely grated – the […]
Cream of Chickpea Soup With Shrimp & Oxymeli
This recipe features alot of ancient Greek ingredients: chick peas…this was the starch of the day before potatoes and rice. Then we have shrimp – fish and seafood were prominent in the ancient Greek diet and they still are a big part of the diet in today’s Greece. Oxymeli, a Greek compound word meaning “acid-honey” […]
Slow-Roasted Leg of Lamb (The Greek Way)
Greeks know their way around lamb and we unabashedly cook it well and I mean well done. Do not confuse well done with dry, hard to chew meat. You are not going to experience this here. I treat a leg of lamb much like a lamb shank, brown the meat then place in a roasting […]
Misko Pasta With Sausage & Red Pepper Sauce
Greeks have been preserving the Summer’s bounty for ages – anything from sun-drying tomatoes, pickling, curing olives to even meats. In Florina (where my parents come from), you can see red shepherds peppers air-drying outside of homes in the late summer warm and breezy air. These dried peppers can then be re-hydrated in hot water […]
Roasted Beets With Almond-Potato Skordalia
This dish is a play on a Greek favourite – roasted beet salad with lots of garlic. This is a side dish enjoyed my many and more creative types have even come up with doing a mash-up (pun intended) of a beet skordalia. Inspired by a dish from the Kokkari cookbook and restaurant in San […]
Spaghetti With Shrimp, Lemon & Saffron
You know what’s in season in Greece right now? Big, fat juicy lemons! Last year when I traveled to Nafplio (Peloponnese) I recall seeing groves and groves of lemon trees lining the roads. It was August so they all looked like limes but I was imagining myself stopping at the side of the road and […]
