ja, I meant the cutlery… 
- thank salmon-colour glazed-dish screams IKEA through its 4 corners…
Gosh, love rhubarb, something I learnt in the UK.
Wife (Serbian) decided to make Greek cheese pie the other day. Made all sorts of culinarily illiterate, derogatory comments like “Greeks, man, they stick a kilo of feta between pastry leaves and call it a pie!”. I retorted by “Well it’s a CHEESE PIE, not a pastry pie!”. Me and the kids agreed it was the best cheese pie she ever made!
Point of note, Serbian and other Balkan pies put the emphasis on the pastry, and the best ones are kneaded with and baked on copious amounts of lard, with barely any filling. An issue is that the commies destroyed centuries-old cheese culture in the Balkans and Asia, collecting all milk and nationalising production to ultra bland “white” and “yellow” cheeses. It’s been well-documented and confirmed by my anecdotal research talking to Albanian, Bulgarian, Serbian friends, and always finding local Balkan cheeses to be…bland. They’re recovering but it takes a long time…
So today I decided to make another cheese pie, but this time make half of it like a favourite cheese dip, incorporating sun-dried tomato, chilli flakes and spring onion. Let’s see how it tastes.
Edit: turned out good but some flaws: too salty, even with no added salt (but 400g of feta and a good 100-150g of Swiss surchoix gruyere), sundried tomato is heard, but not much. Spring onion didn’t add, just made it heavy. No burn from the chilli flakes, will be putting more next time. A bit on the soft side despite adding 2 spoons of flour.
4 Likes
I want a slice of that right now.
2 Likes
This “smashed” style reminds me of a way my Turkish ex used to prepare onion salad. I normally can’t eat raw onion (burp it for 2 days, even a tiny bit) but could when done this way:
Finely slice 2-3 big onions (it really is an onion salad, not a salad with onions), add a load of salt, roughly massage - borderline crush - the onions, rinse away the salt with plenty of water, add olive oil, lemon, parsley, salt and pepper and anything else you like.
Another nice Turkish pie she made was a parsley pie, parsley is the main ingredient, not a condiment.
Layer phylo pastry with finely chopped parsley, mixed with a paste of yoghurt, egg, olive oil, salt and pepper, make 3-4 layers, bake. Doesn’t sound good but it is, especially if you like parsley (I love it). It’s very refreshing but also filling.
Armenians do similar things but they use coriander, and to me coriander tastes like stinkbugs smell (found out about 15 years ago that I’m not just weird, as I was always told by lovers of this devil weed, it’s genetic).
On topic of pies, Northern Greece has a huge tradition, most meals start with a pie or three, these peeps take everything that can be put between pastry and do it. The easy stuff like meat, cheese, spinach/herbs is vanilla, they make pies out of…potatoes, rice, pasta, peppers, mushrooms, onions, leaks, cabbage (forgot it, including pickled - tastes great!), leftovers (why not).
Bit like Serbs making spirits out of everything, including banana (which I thought was confined to Africa).
2 Likes
When we lived in the most rustic part of the UAE, the tabbouleh served in restaurants (Lebanese) was made with mostly parsley; it was delicious. The massaging of onion (and many other things) with salt is also practiced in Hawaii–lomilomi (“massage” or “rub.”) It takes out all the bite. I can happily put almost anything in phyllo. And I absolutely love coriander (and thank goodness, so does OH).
2 Likes
In a hurry, and if using red onions in an Indian or Middle-Eastern salad, if you soak the chopped or sliced onions in cold water for five minutes and then drain, you still get most of the taste but without the onion coming back to haunt you.
That’s what I do, anyway.
2 Likes
Sunday is a cheap-energy day, so I plan most of my cooking then. Overnight I’ll make chicken broth in the slow cooker, after an oven-roasted chicken for tonight’s dinner. But today I’m preparing marinara for a dinner later this week. Garlic and juicy diced yellow onion are cooked to translucent in olive oil. I then add 600ml Cirio passata, a couple of spoons of Oro di Parma tomato paste, a good glug of red wine, plenty of black pepper, a grinding of red pepper flakes, Maldon salt, a pinch of sugar, and 6-8 tops of basil leaves and stems taken from the plants I just put into pots. It simmers ever-so-gently for 40 minutes. Three 300-ml Weck jars are the delicious result. Simple, fresh, and ready to make other interesting dishes.
2 Likes
About 10 years ago, verrines were everywhere in French social media and restaurants. Anything you can layer goes. This little verrine works as a dip and consists of a bottom layer of chèvre mousse (made with skyr), then a layer of chopped smoked salmon, a layer of seasoned mashed avocado, and a pile of trout roe. With a spoon, you lift out a vertical section and pop it onto a very thin toast.
4 Likes
so 80’s! reminds me of my first trip to Vegas I do the same (yet, with marinated salmon or tuna (mirin / soya / fish sauce ) and add some date tomatoes instead of the skyr, served over some sushi rice – as a stacked ring tartar. Which of course, gets destroyed as soon as you fork in…
1 Like
Kids bullied me to make creme caramel over the weekend. I ate one in Greece a couple of weeks back where they took a Spanish approach and had (most probably) boiled some orange peel with the cream, so replicated it here. Decadent, delicious, and very easy to make.
Of course they didn’t wait for it to cool down properly, and turned upside down to get the caramel dripping all over it, they dug in like barbarians like they always do…
4 Likes
osea, flan in the OV
Those are still very much a thing at apéros and finger buffets around here.
O sea? O well!
Osea (OV) = That is.
I would recommend, if you want to make it really unforgettable…and a nightmare for any dietist, to use cream instead of milk, or condensed sweetened milk, or, if you can find it…“dulce de leche”
To die for.
I had to plug your comment in chatGPT to understand what you meant, then played with vocalising “osea”. ChatGPT is not sure if OV means “Original Version” or “Oven Version” 
My recipe is half and half milk+cream, 500ml total, 2 yolks, 3 eggs, 75g sugar (+vanilla and other condiments), and further 100g of sugar in 50ml water for the caramel. I can’t stand dulce the leche or condensed sweetened milk though, plus would completely change the taste to something really heavy and sickly sweet (for my tastes!).
That’s the way I’ve been making it for 50 years, and no, dulce de leche and condensed milk belong in ice cream but not crème caramel. Way too sweet.
well, the point is to remove part - or all- of the of the 75g sugar – and part of the caramel…the dulce de leche has a deeper taste like caramel-- that’s why it does not need anything more…
It’d radically change the taste, though, I like how 50% cream retains some lightness, 100% cream is too rich for me. Also like that the body of the cream is not too sweet, and you can regulate yourself how sauce it.
In the end it’s all about personal tastes isn’t it, there’s no wrong answer.
3 Likes
with fresh raspberries!!