Ελλάδα

I was quite excited with the idea of "visiting" Greece, as I have a deep love of Greek mythology.  Our cats (and a dog and a hamster) have all been named after the Greek pantheon of gods and goddesses - in fact, as I type this, Aphrodite is curled up just a few feet away, and Hestia and Hermes are upstairs.  Come on, anyone with cats named Hermes and Hestia has to know something about Greek mythology!!  What I found, though, is that many of their dishes include lamb, which is something I just don't eat.  Eating lamb would violate what my daughter calls my "too cute to eat" philosophy.  The way I look at is this:  calves - too cute to eat, so no veal, cows - not, chickens - fair game,  deer - too cute to eat (see Bambi), moose - well, you get the drift.  Plus, the kids were with me for the weekend, so I wanted something that would hopefully appeal to them.

In the end, we had quite an elaborate meal.  We started off with an appetizer of tsatziki dip and crackers - mmm mmm mmm!  Next up was a lemon chicken soup, simple and absolutely delicious, and the ubiquitous Greek salad, called the Country Salad in Greece - makes sense to me!  For our main course, we had Pastitsio, accompanied by a Santorinian vegetable mix.  Dessert was an old-style Greek treat of honey and sesame seeds called Pasteli.  The meal was accompanied (for me) by Mythos, a rather appropriately named Hellenic lager.  I did pause briefly at the Ouzo, but I just couldn`t bring myself to buy it, knowing it would be a long time before it was consumed (if that ever were to happen)!

Final results - the tsatiki appetizers, soup and salad were all fabulous!  I will definitely be making the soup again.  I am amazed, however, as it seems that every recipe called for copious quantities of butter and eggs - especially eggs!!  The pastitsio is a dish with layers of pasta and ground beef (in place of that too cute to eat ground lamb), topped with a bechamel sauce.  It was tasty enough, I guess, but a bit of a let-down after the soup and salad.  The Santorinian vegetable mix recipe seemed innocuous enough, but was, well, let`s just say it wasn't worth saving the leftovers!  I honestly don't think I have ever used so many eggs in cooking one meal!  The dessert was tasty indeed, even if it didn't solidify properly because I didn`t have quite enough sesame seeds - still tasty, though!

The more I do this, the more I have to acknowledge that it really doesn't do a country's varied cuisines justice by making just one meal, cobbling together a variety of recipes from different regions.  I wish I could be more true to the actual regional traditions, but it would make it impossible for me to keep to my goal of a new country every week!

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