Tag: Diane Kochilas

November 20, 2024 – Maybe I Was Wrong?

November 20, 2024 /

I am a big boy. When I did my review of my Greek Table, I admitted that I had only read half of it. It was the salads, sauces, breads and appetizers section of the book. I was not really inspired and didn’t want to invest more. But, with our meeting coming up tomorrow, I had to make an effort to try something.

This last weekend, it was nasty. My wife had been gone all weekend and I wanted to do have a nice dinner prepared for Sunday night. I picked out a few recipes to prepare a Greek dinner. While it was raining buckets, it seemed like a stew night to me. The picture below is the beginnings of Greek Beef Stew.

What you see is fennel and red onion being sauteed together. Beside the beef it had red wine, cinnamon, thyme, rosemary, carrots, allspice, molasses, honey, tomato paste and prunes. What else have you got? I have to say that it wasn’t my favorite but it was definitely hearty and unique.

I made the stew to go with what I really wanted to make. That was a squash pie in-between some phyllo. We have had several packages of that hanging out since the failed phyllo pizza experiment. This recipe had a phyllo sandwiched with walnuts. The filling was made with butternut squash, raisins, ricotta cheese, cinnamon, clove and onion. There was phyllo placed on top and baked. It kind of came out as like a mild pumpkin pie.

Finally, I made a spinach salad for the second time. It has feta, Olives, spinach, red onion, oranges dressed with Olive oil and lemon juice. Clearly I liked it if I have made it twice now. We had to toast with some Ouzo I bought for some future recipes and a Pinot Noir that paired beautifully.

All of the recipes call for things like Greek olive Oil, Greek Wine and Greek molasses. Where I am at, I would be lucky to have a few choices but Greek is certainly not likely. So, I made do with what I could find. It is hard for me to imagine a better pairing of Oregon Pinot with these exotic recipes.

This meal was some work. Besides having to go to the store for ingredients that I don’t normally keep around like fennel I started at one and most of the cooking was done by four. I wasn’t completely done until six which included doing most of the dishes and setting the table. So, it wasn’t a meal for a weeknight.

So, I probably judged the book and a cuisine prematurely. I really didn’t get into the heart of Greek food even with my experimentation. The seafood and the small plates. I sure went through a lot of olive oil on this dinner, about a quart. My next attempt will probably include spanakopita and some sort of fish. I have got to find something to put Ouzo in.

End Your Programming Routine: I guess the lesson here is that you can’t judge a book by the cover. I didn’t think that I was going to like it, but because I was forced by necessity to try, I found the silver lining. That is an experience that can span a lot of different genres and activities. Ultimately, I don’t think that I am ever going to crave Greek food, but I can probably find something intriguing to try.

November 6, 2024 – My Greek Table: Authentic Flavors and Modern Home Cooking From My Kitchen To Yours

November 6, 2024 /

Welcome to the November selection for the Left Coast Culinary Book Club. This is once again a cookbook with the focus on Greek food. Of course I have heard of Greek food, but I never realized that there was a show on PBS focused on it.

When a cookbook is a monthly selection, I usually read the text but not all of the instructions. I read the recipe header and scan through the ingredients list. This one is no different. I try to pick a few recipes that I might want to try as well as keep an eye on what I might want to make to share at the monthly meeting.

Truthfully, I haven’t quite finished reading all of it, I will but I have read enough to get the gist of what is going on. This cookbook is self described as not specifically authentic but ‘in the spirit of’ Greek food. It is meant as more of a framework to get started. This isn’t an exhaustive list but I have determined that the common thread is tomato, artichoke, cucumber, olive oil, oregano as the primary flavors. It does appear that most recipes have one or more of these ingredients.

I suppose I can blame my heritage and upbringing that is northern European. As a result, I definitely don’t groove on Mediterranean food. I don’t find my tastes to be universally one deminsional however. Mexican, Indian and Korean are cuisines that I find myself drawn to. I suspect that Mediterranean is close enough but not quite what I expect or want.

That being said, I can always find a few things to try. I haven’t totally decided but I think that I am going to make either meatballs or a Greek sloppy joe. Reading the book, I learned that there is a concept called Meze which is like sharing small plates. This is like the more familiar Spanish tapas with a group. It is small bites with a lot of variety. Sounds perfect for a group setting.

We have some frozen pastry that I would desperately like to get rid of but I haven’t found the right recipe yet. Maybe by the time I get to the end of the book, I will find something. By the way, this technique ends up driving a lot of my cooking decisions. ‘What do we have that I would like to get rid of before it goes bad or I am tired of it in my way.’

What do I think of the book? Given that it is not my first choice of cuisine, I have to say that it is not my favorite. There are a lot of recipes that are all variations of the same kind of ingredients. I guess to me, it doesn’t seem given so many recipes (400+ pages), the variation is not very different or novel.

It’s nice to have choices. It sure beats not having any. Like most cultural cookbooks, there is an emphasis on good ingredients. Using tomatoes in mid winter kind of degrades the overall quality of the recipe. In my climate, there is probably only a couple of months where ‘good’ tomatoes are possible. That kind of narrows down the window to make a lot of these recipes as they are intended and likely best.

I’m sorry, the book just wasn’t for me. The truth is, a helpful review would have something to compare and contrast. If I didn’t like this one then what would I recommend? This is my problem with a lot of Amazon style reviews. The evaluation is only made on limited experience with one product. Powder puff reviews just talk about what you would find in the book and real vague language. I will let you do that.

End Your Programming Routine: This review is only my opinion, so don’t get hurt. If you like Greek food or if you are a fan of Diane Kochilas then by all means check this book out. We make gyros from time to time (I have no idea if these are officially Greek) and I like them. I have said this before, I usually find two or three recipes out of a particular cookbook. That shouldn’t be offensive, but a fact. I have stacks of cookbooks now. Some of them, I barely open.