salt tagged posts

I left for last the sauce that is the one closest to my heart. The sauce of the sauces. Well at least for me it is. I love this sauce as nothing in the world. It is a sauce that has only one way of making it and can accommodate everything, from veggies to cardboard.

This is probably the more common, and recognizable sauce. Every culture around the Mediterranean sea and in general the countries that have the tomato as a farm product. It is probably the one sauce that can be made in 1000 different ways; with meat, with veggies, with cheese, with sea food…. And can top everything from pasta to meat. It is the only sauce that can be used as cooking media to give flavor to roasts. It is actually the only sauce that is eaten cold as well. Yeah… cold like ketchup.

The Tomato ...

So I have a friend... A very good friend that she prefers for her birthday a meat loaf shaped as a cake instead of a real birthday cake. Well she prefers both a meat loaf cake and a real cake, but in the case she had to pick one, she will pick the meatloaf. It is a neat idea that her mom started and carried on till this last weekend when her birthday arrived and her mom was not here to make it. Oh what a disaster. Who you gonna call? The rescue semiprofessional chef Webby (that would be me). So I made one and it looked just like the one in the picture above. Actually it is the one in the picture.

What do you think when I say rice? I know chinese food. Some more adventurous my think indian food. But in every case it will be thought as the companion to a very hearty, saucy meal. But Rice is way more than that. Rice can be yummy and delicious on its own. All it takes is some simple techniques, some basic know-how, and will to get creative... Yes with rice. But rice is a lot more than Chinese and Indian food. Don ‘t get me wrong, I love both of Chinese (and more generally speaking oriental) and Indian food.

Zucchini (Courgettes) is a small, thin skinned, summer squash. Its Scientific name is Cucurbita pepo (a species which also includes other squash). It can either be yellow or green or light green, and generally has a similar shape to a ridged cucumber, though a few cultivars are available that produce round or bottle-shaped fruit. Unlike the cucumber it is usually served cooked, often steamed, boiled, grilled, stuffed and baked, barbecued, fried, or incorporated in other recipes such as soufflés.

A spinach pie with a real twist I gave it. Just to make more fun the process of eating. And increase the mystery that surrounds the pie. The concept is actually not original. It is inspired by a pie called saricopita and it is very very common at the mountains of Crete. It resembles the way the sarici (a cretan traditional head-wear) is wrapped around the head. Spinach pie (spanakopita), in every form, is a great summer food. Light, tasty and goes great with Ouzo.

Summer is here... And all that comes with summer. Warm weather, heat waves, ice creams... and eggplants. Yeah I said eggplants. You know it is a vegetable that you can find year around, but the price, the quality and the taste are so much better during the hot summer weather. It is a vegetable, or to be precise a fruit, that is very popular around the Mediterranean, specially in Greece, Turkey, Italy and Egypt. Yes I said a fruit. Technically a fruit, in botany, is the ripened ovary—together with seeds—of a flowering plant. And that is exactly what eggplant is.

Yesterday I was invited to a desert party for Valentine’s day. It was desert so I assumed (wrongfully as it was proofed) that the main thing will be chocolate, since there is all this philosophy about chocolate and love and yada, yada. Instead of repeating the same pattern I decided to make something different. I made (as you can tell from the picture) cinnamon rolls. There are a couple of reasons for that: 1) I love cinnamon (I dedicated a whole blog entry on that) and 2) there is something about the aroma of yeast that makes homes really smell like homes, nice and cozy. Good cinnamon rolls, however, although simple to make, for sure require time and careful steps. They can go from puffed to flat in matter of minutes. None of the steps requires any super talent or any excellence or even any skill for that matter. All of them though, require religious attention to the execution.