{"id":1202,"date":"2021-10-02T16:17:25","date_gmt":"2021-10-02T23:17:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fnerk.com\/?p=1202"},"modified":"2021-10-10T17:08:05","modified_gmt":"2021-10-11T00:08:05","slug":"international-meals-greece","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/?p=1202","title":{"rendered":"International Meals – Greece"},"content":{"rendered":"

Greece is the first country on this list since France that we’ve both actually visited.\u00a0 In fact, writing up our trip to Greece was the reason we started this blog in the first place.\u00a0 You can read all about our adventures there starting from this post.<\/a> It’s a fun ride – we go lots of interesting places and eat lots of stuff.<\/p>\n

But speaking of eating stuff, what’s on tap for THIS meal?\u00a0 When you look up “National Dish of Greece,” you get a number of possibilities, but one which scores surprisingly high is\u00a0Fasolatha<\/em>, which is a white bean stew.\u00a0 (Another one is\u00a0Moussaka,\u00a0<\/em>but neither of us are huge fans of eggplant, and there were plenty of other options.)\u00a0 We decided to make that, grill some souvlaki, and make a dish of braised green beans, Fasolakia,<\/em> as another vegetable.<\/p>\n

Our original plan was to follow this with custard filled pastries for dessert, but those turned out to be too much to squeeze in after we returned from a grueling hike in the morning, so we made a pie called\u00a0melopita<\/em> instead, which we will talk about in due course.<\/p>\n

This meal did require a bit of forward planning, as both the beans and chicken for the souvlaki had to soak overnight.\u00a0 The beans just in plain water, but the chicken was in a yogurt based marinade that also included olive oil, oregano, lemon, garlic, and paprika.\u00a0 Welcome to Greece!<\/p>\n

\"Marinade<\/a>\"Souvlaki<\/p>\n

The day of, we had two different bean dishes to cook, both of which had rather long cooking times, but fortunately, the schedules overlapped such that we could get one cooking before we started the second.\u00a0 So for our first trick, the white bean stew.<\/p>\n

After soaking the beans overnight, they get a 30 minute or so boil in water to soften ’em up a bit.\u00a0 Wouldn’t want those beans getting too complacent.\u00a0 Um.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

That accomplished, the stew starts with onion, carrot, and celery, your classic mirepoix, although probably not diced finely enough to really warrant that term, cooked in a whole lot of olive oil.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Mirepoix\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Next up, beans, tomato sauce, salt, and pepper.\u00a0 We found GREEK tomato sauce, so we were proud of ourselves!<\/p>\n

\"Tomato<\/a><\/p>\n

Yeah, about that.\u00a0 A) that’s not sauce, as it turns out – it’s paste. B) It’s also Turkish, not Greek.\u00a0 Oh well – into the pot it went, with a bit more water to balance the fact that it’s paste and not sauce.\u00a0 And this then just cooks for a long time while we move on to the green beans.<\/p>\n

Sadly, we didn’t get a bunch of pictures of this one cooking, but that’s because it was so little WORK there was almost nothing to photograph. Cook more onions in more olive oil (seriously, we used like half a bottle of olive oil for this meal) Add garlic, green beans, a large can of crushed tomatoes, and some red pepper flakes and dill.\u00a0 Cook until tender.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

With those both going, and timed to be ready at roughly the same time, it was time to fire up the grill for the souvlaki.\u00a0 Sadly, it was pretty gloomy outside, so we didn’t take any pictures.\u00a0 In fact, we have no more “in process” pictures at all.<\/p>\n

But we put meet on sticks and grilled it.\u00a0 It smelled like grilling meat on sticks, i.e. AMAZING. Finally, we fried up some grilling cheese (apparently setting it on fire is more of a Greek-American<\/em> thing), and put everything on plates, topping the souvlaki with a lemon juice \/ olive oil dressing.\u00a0 They looked like this:<\/p>\n

\"Greek<\/a><\/p>\n

Doesn’t that look delicious?\u00a0 It really, really was.\u00a0 The real star of the show, to my surprise was the green bean dish: fasolakia<\/em>.\u00a0 Everything was good, but that to me was the dish that stood out the most – the dill and the garlic just did something magic to the tomato sauce.\u00a0 The souvlaki was tasty grilled meat, and the soup was hearty and filling. We would make any of these again in a heartbeat.<\/p>\n

For dessert, since we decided the pastries would take too long to sort, we made a honey pie, which may be the easiest desert we have ever made.\u00a0 Here’s the method:<\/p>\n

Mix five ingredients in a bowl.\u00a0 Put the batter in a pan.\u00a0 Bake it.<\/p>\n

That’s it.\u00a0 The ingredients are nothing more than ricotta cheese (this would be a different, but similar cheese in Greece itself), honey, sugar, eggs, and vanilla. Mix, pour, bake, done.<\/p>\n

\"Melopita\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The edges are a little rough because we ran out of cornstarch, so the sides stuck to the pan.\u00a0 But it was heavenly, and it set up nicely.<\/p>\n

We have not yet shared the very best part of this meal yet, however.\u00a0 The very best part of this meal was that we SHARED IT WITH OTHER PEOPLE!\u00a0 For the first time since BULGARIA, we actually cooked for more than just the two of us, and it was\u00a0fantastic<\/em> to finally have friends over for a meal and a board game. They brought cocktails, too!<\/p>\n

\"FRANDS!\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Pandemics are stupid, and you should get vaccinated if you aren’t already.<\/p>\n

As a postscript, we DID make those pastries a few nights later when we had time.\u00a0Bougatsa<\/em> are custard filled phyllo pastries, giving us the chance to remind ourselves once again that phyllo is a harsh mistress.<\/p>\n

They start with a custard made from butter, sugar, eggs, vanilla, and semolina flour, which you are supposed to add a LOT earlier in the process than we remembered to.<\/p>\n

\"Custard<\/a><\/p>\n

If you add the semolina too fast or too late (we did both) it gets lumpy.\u00a0 On the other hand, if you just leave it out, it never thickens at all.\u00a0 So we had a slightly lumpy custard to spread on our phyllo sheets.<\/p>\n

\"Custard<\/a><\/p>\n

These get wrapped up into perfectly, 100% regular packets, covered with a completely uniform brushing of butter.\u00a0 No differences or irregularities whatsoever.<\/p>\n

\"Unbaked<\/a><\/p>\n

Nailed it.<\/p>\n

Still, as long as you considered them individually, and don’t think about the second one from the bottom on the left, they turned out fine – crispy and sweet, and what’s not to like about a custard pastry?<\/p>\n

\"Baked<\/a><\/p>\n

And that’s Greece!\u00a0 It was tasty, took us back to our blogging roots, and let us HAVE DINNER WITH ACTUAL OTHER PEOPLE! YAY!<\/p>\n

Next up, we take a culinary adventure to Grenada, hopefully unaccompanied by Marines.<\/p>\n

Recipes:
\nSouvlaki<\/a>
\nFasolatha<\/a>
\nFasolakia<\/a>
\nMelopita<\/a>
\nBougatsa<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Greece is the first country on this list since France that we’ve both actually visited.\u00a0 In fact, writing up our trip to Greece was the reason we started this blog in the first place.\u00a0 You can read all about our … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1209,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-greece","category-international-meals"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1202"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1202\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1216,"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1202\/revisions\/1216"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fnerk.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}