Italian Cooking & Language Blog

Fare La Scarpetta means to wipe your plate clean with a piece of bread.

What else could you ask for?

Thursday, July 15, 2010

Food in Greece and Italy

I’m scratching my head as I try to figure out how to summarize the amazing dishes we ate in Greece and Italy during our honeymoon. Should I start with the creamy lemon sauce on stuffed grape leaves we tried in Athens? Or the crawfish cooked in a garlic and ouzo sauce on Santorini? What about the osso bucco in Milan?

I can only think of broad, sweeping adjectives to describe the dishes. Delicious! Great! Amazing! And what do they offer you? Nothing, really. As I organize my notes and photographs, I will share them with you along with addresses and helpful travel information.

For now, I will start with the bilingual cookbook that I picked up in Mykonos. The book, “Mykonos – Tastes and Traditions” published by Eikon offers wonderful explanations of the traditions followed by recipes paired with photographs. We haven’t been home long enough for me to cook many dishes, but I did try the Zucchini Pie and it was delicious: grated zucchini baked with bread crumbs, feta cheese, eggs, mint and other herbs.

In Greece we ate stuffed grape leaves, moussaka and other traditional Greek-American restaurant favorites, but we also tried many new dishes, too. From this island cookbook, I look forward to trying the sausages cooked in cognac, wild chicory salad and coconut rolls.

More in the upcoming weeks…

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