Ingredients

2 lb grapes (if you want seedless candied grapes, use seedless grapes!)
1 lb sugar
1/2 cup orange juice
1/2 cup water
1/8 tsp salt
1 TB lemon juice
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
a few cloves (optional)

Execution

Remove the stems from the grapes and rinse them. Put them in a pot with the sugar, salt, water and orange juice.

Boil for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Let them sit overnight, and the next day boil them (gently) until the syrup thickens, roughly 45 minutes to an hour. Then add the lemon juice, stir it in, and turn the heat off.

When the grapes have cooled to room temperature add the vanilla. Pack into jars. (Optional: put a few cloves into each jar). I’m sure these were traditionally stored at room temperature, but I keep them in the refrigerator to be safe.

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In a nutshell, the trick is to baste the eggs with the hot oil so that the whites cook through without you having to perform the tricky task of flipping the eggs. Of course, if you don’t mind the yolks breaking, turning the eggs is no problem. But if you want unbroken, yet runny, yolks, the words “flip” and “turn” belong in a horror movie.

Okay, so here’s what you do. First heat oil in a frying pan until it’s really hot. Don’t skimp on the oil! Then crack the eggs into the oil. If you’re a total klutz like me, you can first crack the eggs into small bowls and then slide them gently into the hot oil. If you bother to do this, you’ve officially become a member of “The Church of the Unbroken Yolk.” By the way, if you’ve gotten the oil really hot, the eggs should sizzle and bubble immediately.

Now just stand there and spoon hot oil over the eggs while they cook.

And here is my egg!

Now, I like the whites to be set, but my number one concern is that the yolks be runny. Whereas with Mama and Zoe, while they want the yolks runny, their number one concern is that the whites be firm and set. This is accomplished by basting the eggs for a few seconds longer, as I’ll show you.

Yup, just keep basting.

And here are their eggs! The white is completely set, including the white on top, yet the yolk is runny. Serve with bread!

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After rolling the meatballs in the flour, you can’t save it for other uses, because it will have bits of meat in it. What a waste of flour, not to mention the tasty little meat crumbs. So here’s what Mama does: sprinkle the flour with salt, then add water to make a paste. If it was Summer Meatballs that you just made, use the flavorful liquid that drained out of the meat mix instead of water.

Now make patties out of the flour paste. It should be wet enough that it’s a pain to work with, because if the paste is dry, the pitakia will turn out dry and tough. So add enough liquid that the resulting paste is pretty sticky. Forming patties will be easier if you coat your hands with oil. Don’t try to make them pretty; it won’t work. Just make rough patties and slide them into the hot oil that you cooked the meatballs in. (The heat should still be on under the pan.)

When the underside is golden, turn them and fry until the other side is golden. Eat hot with the meatballs.

By the way, when I mentioned in my Fry Bread post that I’d had fried flour-and-water paste that was delicious, it was precisely these pitakia I was thinking of.

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“How much parsley, Mama?”
“Eh, you know, enough!”

I guess Mama trusts my judgment now! Well, sort of. When I told her I was working with one kilo of meat, she asked with a note of suspicion in her voice, “You mean you have two pounds?”

The recipe below can easily be halved.

Ingredients

2 pounds lean ground beef
6 slices of bread, soaked in milk and then squeezed out
2 thick slices of feta cheese, crumbled
6 tomatoes, chopped
1 round eggplant or 4 japanese eggplants, peeled and finely chopped
2 banana or anaheim peppers, finely chopped
2 small zucchini, finely chopped (optional)
6 onions, finely chopped
6 cloves of garlic, minced or pressed
2 bunches of parsley, minced
40 fresh oregano leaves, minced or 1 TB crumbled dry oregano (not powdered)
2 eggs
1/2 cup ouzo (or red wine or beer)
4 tsp salt
1 tsp black pepper
a few cups of flour to form the meatballs
several cups of oil to fry the meatballs

Cook It!

Put the meat in a bowl. Tear the soaked and wrung-out bread into pieces and throw it in. Crumble the feta slices into the bowl.

Add the other ingredients. Halfway through adding them decide your mixing bowl is too small.

Ah, that’s better!

Use your hands to mix the ingredients very well. Mama emphasized this particularly, and didn’t hang up before reminding me several times that I must be very thorough in the mixing. Put the well-mixed meat (Remember to mix it very well! Yes, Mama, I will.) in a colander set in a bowl, and refrigerate it for at least one hour or better yet, overnight. (In my next post I’ll tell you about a thrifty and tasty use for the liquid that drains out.)

Put a small blob of meat mixture, about a tablespoon, into a pan of flour.

Dump a handful of flour over the meat blob. Pick up the meat blob along with a handful of flour and roll it into a ball. This meat mixture is quite wet, so don’t be afraid to squeeze it into coherence.

Flatten the ball into a thick disk and set aside.

Heat a couple of inches of oil in a pan until hot, and add several meatballs. If the oil is hot enough they will sizzle immediately. Don’t put too many meatballs in at once; they need room “to swim.” Remove when the outside is well browned.

Notice that the oil in the photo above is very brown. If you are making a half-recipe, with one pound of meat, this is how the oil will look at the end. If you are making the full recipe with two pounds of meat, this is how it will look halfway through. At this point you need to dump out the oil, wipe out the pan with a paper towel, and start afresh with new oil. You see, the flour from the meatballs is turning the oil brown, and if you keep using the same oil the flour will overcook and cause bitter flavors. Additionally, with the oil so brown, the meatballs will look brown and done long before they are, so it’s awfully easy to remove them before they’re cooked through.

These are best straight from the hot oil, but they are also great left over and heated up, and they freeze well too. I always make a big batch to have leftovers and to freeze.

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You will need a bowl, a colander, some cheesecloth, and of course, yogurt.

Place the colander in the bowl, and line the colander with cheesecloth. I generally cut off a length that will cover the colander with some hang-over, then I open it up completely and fold it in quarters: in half crosswise and then in half lengthwise.

Dump the yogurt into the cheesecloth-lined colander. (Not to be totally obsessive or anything, but because a little tiny bit of the yogurt is going to be absorbed into the cheesecloth, and because Brown Cow is a cream-on-top style of yogurt, I usually remove the cream layer, then dump in the yogurt, and finally put the cream layer on top where it won’t sink into the cheesecloth.)

Flip the loose ends of the cheesecloth up to cover the yogurt and then place the whole set-up in the refrigerator, for a few hours or overnight. If it’s winter and you don’t heat your house much, you can leave it on the countertop. (I bet that sentence sounds really strange to people in northern climes.)

You’ll find that as the whey drains out, the volume of yogurt will shrink by about one-half.

I did mention that as long as you start with good quality yogurt you’ll get excellent results, right? Okay then, let’s talk money. I can buy a large container of Brown Cow for less than I pay for a small container of Fage. After I drain the Brown Cow, I’m left with roughly the same quantity of yogurt as in a small container of Fage. But I paid less for it and I also get the bonus of one-and-a-half or so cups of whey, which I can use in bread baking.

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Anyway, here are his rules for the game:

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
4) Optional extra: Post a comment here at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.

Note: If you want to do this on your blog, I suggest you copy the list from the source code. That way you’ll get all the links Andrew has thoughtfully included to make it easy to look up any unfamiliar items.

The bolded items are the ones I’ve had. The crossed-out ones I probably wouldn’t try.

1. Venison(It was in third grade and I don’t remember what it tasted like.)
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros(An old favorite I was just reminded about at I’m running to eat.)
4. Steak tartare(Yum! Although I prefer carpaccio if I’m going to eat raw beef.)
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding(I’ve read about this, and really want to try it!)
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht(Blech! I hate beets!)
10. Baba ghanoush(Very good, although I prefer Melitzanosalata.)
11. Calamari(My recipes: Fried Calamari and Calamari cooked in wine.)
12. Pho(Soon! Soon!)
13. PB&J sandwich(Even as a kid I preferred peanut butter and butter, no jam.)
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle (Heavenly!)
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes(Critters got more of them than I did, though.)
22. Fresh wild berries(Berry picking! I miss it!)
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper(But I wouldn’t try a whole one, just a little piece!)
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas(Not interested in this combo, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t try it.)
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O (Wow! What a thought!)
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu(I’m not a risk taker.)
47. Chicken tikka masala(I’ve got a recipe I’ve been meaning to try.)
48. Eel(So far only on sushi.)
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin(On sushi, and I didn’t care for it. Haven’t tried it Greek-style.)
51. Prickly pear(Does he mean the green paddles or the fruit? I haven’t had the fruit.)
52. Umeboshi(Just last week!)
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini(A favorite of mine, but too strong to indulge in very often.)
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips(Chips?)
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian(Of course he just had to include this!)
66. Frogs’ legs(I’m not sure, but I don’t think so.)
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis(This one’s been on my to-try list for a long time.)
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho(For some reason I just don’t like it. I want to try “White Gazpacho” sometime though.)
72. Caviar and blini(Sadly, caviar is rather wasted on me. Too fishy tasting for me.)
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie(As a child.)
78. Snail(Find out how to harvest your own!)
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict(An old favorite and the reason I learned to make hollandaise sauce as a teenager.)
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab(Best I ever had was fried and served with watermelon pickle.)
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano(Yum!)
96. Bagel and lox(Not without cream cheese though.)
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee(Seemed overpriced and overrated to me.)
100. Snake

Conclusions:

1. I have lots of new tastes ahead of me.
2. I’ll try practically any food. My only strikethroughs were the cigar in #36, the liquor absinthe in #73, and the sometimes-fatally-poisonous fish in #46.

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I bought a ridiculously large chuck roast last time I made Beef with Green Beans, but Zoe suggested I just go ahead and cook it all, and then freeze the extra meat to serve with french fries. So I did!

I forget how I reheated this meat. You can put it over low heat on the stove, especially if there’s some leftover sauce with it. I probably reheated it in the oven in this case though. You could also warm it up in the microwave. You can see I also stirred in some frozen peas, because I have a hard time sitting down to a plate of meat and potatoes with nothing green. Zoe was dubious about this addition at first, but then she said, “Well, we do also make beef with peas, so it’s a reasonable addition.” At least I didn’t suggest putting in basil!

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The name of this dish betrays its Italian origins. It comes from parts of Greece closest to Italy - the western Peloponnesos and the Ionian. This is a family recipe of Zoe’s father, and he made it often. As with so many Greek dishes, it is surprisingly simple given the flavor punch it delivers. Speaking of flavor, it is also surprisingly sweet. I don’t know why.

Ingredients

1 1/4 lb tomatoes, grated or pureed in a food processor.
5 eggs
6 TB olive oil, good quality if you’ve got it, because it flavors this simple dish
salt and pepper

Cook It!

Heat the olive oil in a frying pan over fairly high heat and add the tomatoes.

Add salt and pepper to taste. For this amount of tomato I put in approximately 1/2 tsp salt and 1/4 tsp pepper. Stir the tomatoes so they’re well mixed into the oil. Cook the tomatoes, stirring frequently, until their liquid has evaporated, approximately 10-15 minutes.

Meanwhile, crack the eggs into a bowl (you can use the bowl the tomatoes were in). Sprinkle the eggs with salt and pepper, then beat them with a fork. When the tomato liquid has evaporated, pour in the eggs.

Turn the heat down to medium low and stir the eggs into the tomatoes. Cook and stir frequently, until the eggs have set and “drunk the liquid,” about 20 minutes.

Before we proceed to further steps and photos, we’d better get one issue out of the way. This is not a visually attractive dish. In Zoe’s words, it looks like “orange throw-up.” Just thought I should warn you. Mama won’t even eat it because of the visual effect. Too bad, because it’s delicious!

Okay, back to stirring.

After each stirring, spread the egg mixture out in an even layer that covers the whole pan, this way it will cook evenly.

Eventually, the eggs will be firmly set and will have absorbed all the liquid.

Serve with bread and feta.

Note: I’ve given ingredient amounts that will make a hearty meal for two, but you can make any quantity that you want. The basic proportion is two eggs per one large tomato. Salt and pepper to taste. And don’t skimp on the olive oil!

UPDATE: One of the commenters below has steered me to another recipe for strapatsada, at Kalofagas, which you might like to check out. Related to that, the question has arisen as to whether strapatsada is of Italian origin or Sephardic origin. Well, heck, I don’t know! I probably shouldn’t have spent time googling it, but I did, and I found this:

The Greek cookery writer Rena Salaman mentions that the word for this dish used in Corfu - strapatsatha - comes from the Italian verb strapazzare, meaning to beat.

You can read the rest, an informative article about Greek food, that includes yet another strapatsada recipe in The Guardian, Life and Style.

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I made just one meal because I was busy with work up until the night before we left, and didn’t have time to shop and plan for any more than the one meal. I wanted to make something new and delicious for the adults, but I also want to be a popular auntie, so I wanted to make something kid-friendly. I’d considered making Greek Beef Patties (Biftekia), but we were planning to have American-style hamburgers one night, so I settled on Beef with Green Beans (Moschari me Fasolakia).

My four-year-old niece helped me snap the beans. I usually get lazy and just do the stem end, but my niece kept getting confused about which end was which, so I decided we should do both ends. She stuck with it patiently until all four pounds of beans had their tips and tails snapped off.

Both nieces loved the beef and green beans. They ate a lot! And when we had leftovers for lunch a couple of days later, they both bemoaned the end of the “snappers.”

It was actually fun not being responsible for more meals, because it freed me up to fool around with sides as the mood struck me. One night my dad was grilling steaks, so I caramelized a skillet full of onions, then made a sauce by tossing in some minced garlic, chicken broth, and wine, and letting it cook down for a few minutes. Another night I roasted carrots and onions to go with my mom’s meatloaf. I also made bread a few times, but that was about it.

So here I am, relaxed, refreshed and ready to make…hmm, what should I make?

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Ingredients

• 1 lb lean ground beef
• 1 egg
• 1 tsp salt
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 medium onion, chopped finely
• black pepper
• a pinch or two of crumbled dry oregano
• 2 or 3 slices bread, soaked in milk and then squeezed

Preparation

Put the bread slices in a shallow container and pour milk over them.

Put all the other ingredients in a bowl.

Squeeze the soaked bread to remove excess milk.

Tear the soaked-and-squeezed bread into pieces and add them to the bowl. Then mix everything together with your hands.

Now make whatever size beef patties you like out of the mixture. We typically make them rather thin so that they’ll cook through fairly quickly. Each patty should be coated with oil; I find it easiest to do this as I form them.

Wrap any patties that you want to freeze in plastic wrap or foil, and put the others in a baking pan. You might want to oil the pan a bit, it depends on how thickly you’ve coated the patties with oil.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and put in the pan of biftekia. Bake for about 10 minutes, then flip and bake for another 10 minutes. Turn the broiler on and broil on each side for a few minutes. Watch them closely once you’ve turned the broiler on! As soon as they’ve taken on the amount of browning that you like, turn them or take them out.

Typically served topped with a pat of butter and a generous squeeze of lemon.

I’ll be making this as one of the meals during a family vacation on the coast. It seems like it would be a kid friendly dish, so I think my nieces would like it. Or maybe I should make the beef and green beans. Hmmm.. What do you think? I’ll let you know how it went when I get back in ten days. I probably won’t have internet access until then, so please don’t think I’m ignoring comments and emails.

Kalo Kalokairi!

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