Hello my friends! I would like to wish to all of you a very Happy and Prosperous New Year full of happy moments and lots of love. How were your holidays? Did you have fun? Did you meet with family or friends or both? We went on a trip to the northern part of Greece...
Pasticcio in Italian means “mess” and indeed Pastitsio is a dish that combines pasta, ground meat and bechamel. The name was established during 17th century in Italy. There are several variations of pastitsio that include dough, pasta and meat ragù. Pasticcio alla Ferrarese is a type of calzone which is stuffed with pasta, meat, mushrooms...
One of the most popular stories (likely false) is that a man named Juan Mendez from Chihuahua, Mexico used a donkey to carry around his supplies for his food cart. To keep the food warm, he would wrap it up in a big homemade flour tortilla. First appearing in the early 1900s, right around the...
Dill is very well known from ancient years. In ancient Greece dill plant was a sign of wealth and burnt dill oil to aromatize their homes. Soldiers placed burnt dill seeds on their wounds to heal. For ancient Egyptians dill was a medical plant that was used as an ingredient in the production of pain...
A fermented fish sauce called garum was a staple of Greco-Roman cuisine and of the Mediterranean economy of the Roman Empire, as the first-century encyclopedist Pliny the Elder writes in his Historia Naturalis and the fourth/fifth-century Roman culinary text Apicius includes garum in its recipes. The use of similar fermented anchovy sauces in Europe can...
The story of thyme goes back to Sumerians some 5,500 years ago. As far as we know, they were the first to use it as a condiment and medicine. In ancient Egypt it was among the ingredients they used to mummify the dead. In ancient Greece, since Homer years thyme apart from condiment it was...
Barbeque in Greece has a history. Cooking on coal was the most usual way to make things back in the old days. There are several areas in Greece where coal cooking is in the center of the attention. In Athens and everywhere else there are places called tavernas where most of the menu is cooked...
Although paprika is mostly known as Hungarian, truth is that its homeland is south America. In several vessels that were found in Incas tombs dated thousand years ago there were pictured capsicum plants. Incas also buried their dead as mummies with capsicum plants with them. Some historians believe that a doctor traveling with Christopher Columbus...
Athens along with its suburbs counts for about 4 million people which is almost half of Greece’s population. During the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s because of the lack of works in the province, people moved from villages to the big city to find a job. Initially and up to the 80’s downtown Athens was the...
As I have mentioned before, Greek kitchen has borrowed many of its dishes from that of the Middle Eastern and Asia Minor. One of the dishes Greeks brought with them when they came as refugees from Turkey was Giouvarlakia. The name derives from the Turkish word yuvarlak or yuvarlak kofte and it can be found...
