Ἑλλάς

On Thursday we got to cook Greek food, yum! For those of you who don't know, two out of our three members traveled to Greece over spring break and got to enjoy the delicious food there. For this meal, we decided to make an onion pie, baked feta and walnut salad, and baklava. But that's getting ahead of ourselves.

We started by going to the Holy Land Delhi in Minneapolis where we purchased approximately four tons of pita (okay, maybe not quite four tons) and some plain yogurt. We had been looking for Greek yogurt but were unable to find it. However, to make Greek yogurt (or at least a substitute) put plain yogurt in a colander with some cheese cloth and let it drain overnight. You might be surprised by how much liquid drains out, so it makes the yogurt really thick.

Our Baked Feta and Walnut Salad recipe came from Mediterrasian.com. It was delicious. It worked really nicely with the onion pie, though it can definitely taste wonderful without the onion pie. It's also pretty easy to make and is specialer than just boring totally raw salad (did that make sense? I hope so...)


Our next dish was onion pie from The Glorious Foods of Greece by Diane Kochilas. My suggestion-don't make it. We had considered making Spanikopita (Spinach pie) which is the quintessential Greek dish. We decided against it just because it seemed like a boring choice, however, it would have been much better than onion pie. I suppose the pie wasn't that bad, just really really oniony. And there was a ton of it. Kitchen tip of the day: check out how many servings a recipes makes, if it says 10-12 people and you are only cooking for 6 people, modify the recipe. Especially if it is mostly made of onions. We made 2 and a half pies. One is still sitting in my fridge (we made it on Thursday). Anyways, it wasn't terrible, but I wouldn't recommend it, there are other, better Greek dishes out there to try.


Lastly we made baklava which was, of course, wonderful. Its pretty hard to screw up this delicious dish and our recipe came from the awesome Mediterranean cookbook that we have used for previous meals. So far, it has not failed us. Even my relatively picky younger brother (his idea of ethnic food is Chipotle) ate and apparently enjoyed this. Once again and not surprisingly, dessert was the favorite dish of the meal. I apologize for the poor picture quality, for whatever reason I just couldn't get a decent shot of it.


To sum it all up, the food was, for the most part, really delicious. Greece has a lot of yummy and interesting recipes that you should definitely try, and is a beautiful country if you ever get the chance to visit.

ευτυχισμένη μαγείρεμα (happy cooking!)