WORLD CUISINE - WEEK 5

World Cuisine Week 5

The Cuisine of Greece. This is a welcome departure from the cuisines of the middle east, although it is similar. Again, I think these are good bases for the American chef to start from to create a truly good and unique dish. On to the menu.

Aginares Me Avgolemongo:

These are artichokes with an egg and lemon sauce. Honestly, the artichokes we had at school we pretty sub-par. they were small, not very meaty, and not very fresh. However, we were able to learn the process of artichokes. The sauce here is similar to a hollandaise sauce with more lemon. I did not think it went very well with the artichokes. Cooking and prepping artichokes is quite a bit of work.

Garithes Saganaki:

Baked Shrimp: This is a good dish, but it can be difficult to cook the shrimp correctly. Oven baking shrimp is a good way to over cook them. The flavors are excellent and served with fresh warm pita makes a great combination. I really like the cheese, normally I would not choose shrimp and cheese to go together, but they did quite well here. 

Spankopita and Fasoulatha

This is a spankopita filled with spinach and bean soup. These are not served together, just photographed together. The spankopita uses a phyllo dough that is very good. It is hard to work with because it is paper thin, maybe thinner and quite flaky. What we did was to spread butter on each sheet of dough and then stack them to form one larger piece. Once it is baked, it becomes flaky, buttery, and full of good lovin. Apparently many American chefs are not very good with phyllo, but I think it can be learned with experience. It is well worth the trouble.

I like bean soup so as with most bean soups, I am satisfied. This one was no different, but there isn't much to say.

Fresh Fruit

In Greece trays of fresh fruit are very common, so here we have a tray consisting of pineapples, oranges, mangoes and apples. all very good on their own.

Greek Salad:

Surprisingly this recipe did not call for feta cheese. I think the salad was crying because of it. However, greek salads are excellent and this one was the same the fresh cucumber and kalamata olives were great.

Another photo of the spankopita