Intimate Lunches and Enticing Cakes
Intimate Lunches and Enticing Cakes
After the large spring, summer, and fall lunches with our guests under the mulberry tree, our winter dining room table is usually quite intimate...
At the table a winter green salad from my Foods of the Greek Islands with red cabbage coleslaw in the center. For meze artichokes in olive oil and my festive liver pâté with thyme, orange, and pistachios served with home-baked bread, of course.
On a different occasion, after enjoying with our friends a few exquisite thinly sliced Avgotaraho accompanied with Tear of the Pine, the unusual, slightly resinated aromatic assyrtiko we love, we sat at the table and started with
Roasted Butternut Squash with Garlic-lemon-mint Tahini Sauce
A recipe inspired from the dish my friend Şemsa Denizsel used to serve at Kantin, her Istanbul restaurant.
Peel and halve the squash, discard the seeds, and cut into bite-size pieces. In a bowl toss with olive oil, salt, pepper, cumin, ground coriander, and allspice, then spread in one layer on a baking tray lined with parchment paper.
Bake in the center of the oven for about 20 minutes, or until easily pierced with a knife.
To make the sauce, mince 1-2 cloves of garlic and toss with 1 teaspoon sea salt and 1/4 cup lemon. Let marinate for at least 1 hour, better overnight in the refrigerator. When you are about to serve, whisk 1/2 cup tahini with the lemon-garlic mixture; taste and adjust the flavor and texture with more lemon juice, and water or white wine if it is too thick.
Serve the roasted squash sprinkled with plenty of fresh, torn mint leaves, and the tahini sauce on the side (photo below right).
With the main course I served various winter vegetables: carrots, squash, as well as quince chunks, along with some mushrooms which I roasted under the chicken. A satisfying baked polenta –from David Tanis’ brilliant recipe— accompanied the birds (more here) which I had asked my butcher to spatchcock, and liberally seasoned with my aromatic Aegean Herb & Spice Mix. During the last minutes of roasting, as he birds sizzled, I topped them with orange slices.
I am not an avid cake baker; I prefer to make bread, and sometimes paximadia, the traditional savory, barley biscotti. But occasionally I do make cakes, especially cakes that include seasonal fruit, like this wonderful skillet version of orange cake, quite different from the old one I learned from my mother.
I adore chocolate, especially bitter and dense, like the Valrhona I use, so it is only natural that I would include a couple of chocolate cakes in my repertory.
This one is a variation from the basic Chocolate-olive-oil-almond-and-ginger Cake to which I have added a middle layer of cream and store-bought or homemade sour cherry preserves. It is my simple take on the black forest cakes that I used to love as a child.
I am totally immersed into Fuchia Dunlop’s Invitation to a Banquet, her superb book on the amazing history of Chinese Food. I totally enjoy listening to it in Audiobooks, as Fuchia reads it so beautifully! If you want to learn more about this incredible work, read her interview in Atlas Obscura.
Evaporated milk was a total childhood nightmare for me, as I was forced to drink it every morning. I grew up in the outskirts of Athens, where in those days fresh milk was not delivered. This piece in the Washington Post about the uses of evaporated milk in the modern kitchen made me rethink my total ban of the cans…
