Summer Cooking

It's SEPTEMBER. When did that happen?!? I seem to have cooked every day, taken a slew of photos, and posted nothing other than a quick and DELICIOUS, save-my-morning coffee recipe... where does the time go?!

So, I'm just going to get on with it. I'll work to post the recipes later, but for now, here are the glamour shots from a Yemista I made three times this summer. It's work to prep it (like so many Greek dishes, it's "simple" but rather involved!), but cooked correctly it's worth every silly moment of parsley plucking.

Fridge-Brew Espresso

It's summer!! We're back in Kea, and the island is yet again home to the 18 hour bikini and shirtless motorbiking of August.

Even though we're shirking the morning commute, opting instead for the occasional 10am wake-up and intermittent glance through email, coffee is still essential.

Greece loves coffee like it loves talking about how it invented democracy. Their drink of choice is a Cappuchino Freddo: a shot or two of espresso blended with ice and sugar, poured over ice, and topped with milk that has been whipped to the consistency of thick icing. I've come to enjoy it, though I am still puzzled by how to efficiently drink its stratified parts, always poking my straw around hoping to blend the milk and coffee, instead ending up with watery ice-melt and cream at the end. Not nice.

It's in these moments that I wish I could just have an American-style iced coffee. In an attempt to get one, I recently asked for a "filter coffee with ice," thinking this might actually work. Instead I got a piping hot cup of coffee and a small bucket of ice cubes. Close. Very close. But not close enough to avoid me making a coffee-marinade for my friend's souvlaki.

So, I'm very happy to report that I have found a home solution to my coffee woes: the fridge!!?! For all my searching for iced coffee, I've done one better: overnight cold-brew coffee concentrate aka Fridge-Brew Espresso. No more sweating at the stove as I boil up my espresso to immediately dilute it over ice, I just mix the coffee grinds and water and leave it in the fridge to let time do its magic. By morning you have coffee so strong and so smooth (cold brew avoids the bitterness that can come with heat!?!) and so easy it's stupid. Strain it into a pitcher or a glass water bottle and it's coffee simply waiting in the fridge for you to pour it over ice. Yes please all the time every day all year long!

Fridge-Brew Espresso

adapted from chow.com

ingredients:

 2 cups coarse-ground coffee beans
4 cups water

to serve:
Ice
Milk/Cream
Simple Syrup (if desired)

make it happen:

Stir coffee grinds and water together in a pitcher/bowl/whatever.
Cover and leave in fridge overnight/12 hours.

Stir then strain through mesh sieve into a bowl. Discard grinds.
Strain through coffee filter paper (or paper towel in a pinch) into jar/pitcher. This will take a while. Try to be zen and let it take its drip-drip time. Once you reach the sludgey solids, don't bother sending them through, just discard.

Fridge-brew espresso is highly concentrated.
Dilute to suit your taste with ~equal parts coffee and water/milk/cream.
To sweeten, add simple syrup.

Serve over ice (of course!).

Roast that Whole Head of Cauliflower

It’s possible that every season when I come to Kea is newly marked as my favorite. Currently it's WINTER. It might be partly due to the fact that I get outrageously cold at the hint of a summer breeze, and winter here is never so beastly as NYC. Kea in January has all the fun parts of winter without the ankle-length parka and the concern that your hands might never warm up enough to effectively unzip your jacket.

We had two days of crisp spring air and sunshine followed by two days of proper wintery grey skies… and SNOW! Four days on the island had us wondering how many weeks had gone by; something magical happens to the passage of time when spring turns to winter and long walks down empty roads and green slopes speckled with sheep become afternoons by the open fire actually roasting chestnuts (that'll be my next post).

are you kidding me with how bucolic this is??

all to ourselves.
snapped this shot as the sun went down just around 4pm.

a bit like a walking cauliflower, really.

I can understand the appeal of Greek summer, but if there’s any way you can avail yourself of the cheap flights and time off over the winter holidays to get yourself to a Greek island, DO IT!!

Though summer produce and spring shoots are months away, Kea still manages to have some fresh veg on offer at the start of the New Year. Broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower and lettuce populate our garden, and Maria and Margherita’s farm stand is dominated by massive squash.

I'm not yet convinced its economically reasonable to have a vegetable garden, but GOSH it's satisfying to harvest those huge cabbages.

So, with huge heads of cabbage and cauliflower filling our fridge, I paused to consider making more pickles and saurkraut. But luckily I remembered having seen a few recipes bounding around the internet for roasting cauliflower whole-head intact. How superb!

this was our garden beauty. note to self, find a recipe for cauliflower LEAVES.

There’s nothing quite so pleasurable to me as making something simple, beautiful and delicious with the limited ingredients that I already have in the kitchen, partic-u-lar-ly if this happens on an icy grey day in Kea.

We made this for lunch, Day 3 and chomped away at the substantial stalks and lemony florets rather chuffed that we’d found an exceedingly easy and enormously satisfying way to let the flavor of fresh and local cauliflower do the work.

All sorts of food writers have written forests of pages about the nuttiness of cauliflower, but I’d never tasted it so clearly as I did with this recipe. The capers and lemon give just the right zing to unite the caramelized sweetness and the earthy nuttiness of the cauliflower.

TIP: Use a pretty baking dish and keep cooking it until it’s past the lightly browned stage. The extra caramelization will make a sublime difference in taste.

Roasted Cauliflower Globe with Olive Oil and Capers

adapted from Gourmet 2006

Ingredients:
1 medium-large head of cauliflower
Good quality extra-virgin olive oil
Salt
Juice of 1/2 lemon
Capers in brine
Black pepper
Parsley, optional

make it happen:
Put oven rack in middle position and preheat oven to 450°F/235°C.

Lightly oil a pretty baking dish just a bit bigger than the cauliflower head.

Strip the leaves and core the cauliflower, leaving the head intact by cutting a rough pyramid from the base of the stalk. Roll cauliflower head around a small bowl with sufficient olive oil (~1/4 cup) to lightly coat florets. Keep the bowl and whatever oil remains to the side as it will be perfectly suited for whisking up the dressing.

Put cauliflower base down/florets up into baking dish. Sprinkle with ~1/2 teaspoon salt. Bake mid-oven until tender, 1 to 1.25 hours.

Using bowl from before, top off olive oil to equal ~1/4 cup, add juice of 1/2 a lemon, 2 TB capers, 1/4 tsp pepper, and 1/2 teaspoon salt, and whisk.

When cauliflower is cooked and nicely browned, remove from oven and drizzle with the dressing. Once split and on our plates, we served it with an extra little drizzle of olive oil and nothing else. For us, it was perfection.

You might enjoy sprinkling around a bit of parsley, should you have it, as that will add a nice jolt of green that the brined capers simply can’t.

However you dress it up, it’s an instant winter classic.

Apple Cinnamon Cookies

Well, would you look at this draft that's been waiting a week for me to process the photos! Seriously, though, would you look at it? I'm a bit hesitant to post about being in Athens when I'm no longer there and its no longer raining, but the cookies were good, so... here's the post: 

 It's a rainy day in Athens and I'm tethered to my computer working on all those projects that still need completing before summer is officially officially over. And somehow it's already 5pm. EEEK! 

Still, I've got one manifesto down, 38 emails sent, and 3 international calls rung out, and I'm chomping at the bit to do something that feels productive. Despite all input to the contrary, my mind has a hard time really believing that digital work is as productive in an absolute sense as lifting a crockpot full of applesauce.

But it's not quite applesauce season yet (is it ever in Greece? this is a genuine question), but maybe an apple cookie would be an appropriate metaphor for the warm-rain, purple-cloud day we're having???

And I can further rationalise that as we are travelling back to London in just a few days, these will be perfect plane food. Once upon a time Mihalis had a favorite spot in the Heathrow airport where he got crispy, thin, very light little apple cinnamon cookies. He would take handfuls of them and bundle them in a napkin or (my personal favorite) tuck them inside a dry, lidded coffee cup and bring to me by the stack. This was back in the blissful days before we were married, when I still lived in NYC with a view of the park... annnnnd my neighbor's bathroom. So not all so blissful, but perfectly New York.

Sadly, the last five times he checked (what the what?!? that's possible??) they only had the rather typical white chocolate macadamia bland boring every shop has them cookies. BLAH. 

So here's my stab at making some of my own. Time will tell if they reach the same legendary coffeecup-stacked status as those before them, but I'm half-way through baking and we're about 12/25ths through eating them, so I will pencil this one down as a success :)

ENJOY!!

APPLE CINNAMON COOKIES

ingredients

3/4 cup (170g) butter

1 c (200g) sugar

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla extract

2 apples

2 1/2 c (312g) AP flour

2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 c walnuts
or more, if you really like your nuts

CINNAMON SUGAR FOR SPRINKLING:

2 Tb sugar

2 tsp cinnamon 

make it happen

Cream together butter and sugar w an electric mixer. Add the egg and vanilla.

Microplane one apple--it should resemble applesauce. Come to think of it, you could replace this with 1/2 c applesauce. Box-grate (wide holes) the other apple. Add to the wet mixture above.

Mix flour, baking powder, cinnamon, and salt together in a bowl. Add by scoops to the wet mixture. Fold in the walnuts.

*Optional: Refrigerate for ~30 minutes. Spoon batter by the Tb onto parchment lined baking sheet.

Bake @ 350F/180C for ~14minutes. Tops of cookies should be golden brown and middles should look done.

Immediately sprinkle with cinnamon sugar. Allow to set for a ~1minute on sheet. Then transfer to a cooling rack.

ENJOY!!

FULL MOON and Dinner at Kastriani

The sky this week has been ridiculous. Rain clouds, actual MOON RIVERS (cue Andy Williams) and the kind of full moon that looks like the sun and makes you understand why people worship that celestial body. Holy wow.

We took the occasion to go visit our dear friends, the priest and the papadia (his wife). Of course.
But really! We're friends with them!! Mihalis has known them for years, so I giggle at my luck every time we go because I'm so darn fortunate to have jumped off the tourist train and right over to the local boat. 

Mihalis does most of the catching up, I just try to catch as many Greek words as possible and play with the cats. And occasionally say something witty with broken grammar and lots of hand gestures.

I grew up in a dry county. Lots of churches in my hometown use grape juice instead of wine at communion. I don't think I'll ever get over how cool it is to hop in the car and catch up with Papa Lefteris and Maria over a drink. It's always tsipouro... which Papa L translates it to me as  "hot water."  YESSSS!

And then of course we stay talking so long that at some point they get hungry and invite us to dinner. Join them and some other locals who've wandered in?? Oh most definitely. 

Life is magic. 

Forgiving Fruit Torte UPDATE!

I knew the recipe was from my mother's collection... but omgoodness I didn't know it came from this classy cookbook!  And I only now heard the full story, which I LOVELOVELOVE, so I'm sharing it with you

I. cannot. get. over. this. illustration.

Lois Levine lived across the street from my mother in Hamden, Connecticut. She gave this self-published cookbook to her when my grandmother was ill and my mother was taking over the bulk of kitchen responsibilities.

Lois had co-written it with a Marian Burros, a Wellesley College classmate of hers, and--according to another neighbor, Mary Smith (the highest authority on these things)--produced the first editions in her basement.  All the technical hassles of food blogging seem quite breezy when compared to the previous option for people who loved sharing recipes and cared about formatting: typing, binding, and publishing books from their basements. Oy! 

The browning wisps of paper coming out of the top are carefully gathered clippings from Lois's food columns from The New Haven Register. The book later went on to be published commercially, and the co-author, Marian Burros went on to be a food editor at the NY Times.

How cool is that??