Changing tactics from my liberal ranting of the past 48 hours (I’ve lost two friends on Facebook … can’t figure out which ones, though. It’s entirely possible that it’s the notoriously unreliable friend counter, but I prefer to think I’ve annoyed people), I’ve decided to go the food porn route.
I had a dinner party on Sunday.* At the request of my guests, it was the long-promised Greek dinner party (that is, a dinner party where Greek food is served, not … well, whatever your mind came up with).
And so, let’s do some food porn!
Here was the menu:
Mezze course:
feta cheese
Greek and California olives
Greek pepperoncini
pita crisps
bissara (Egyptian fava bean dip)
hummus
grape leaves
tzatziki
Main course:
Pastitsio
Spanakopita
Dessert:
Baklava
As usual for me, I tend to wayyy over plan dinner parties, so I decided to cut out the soup course (it would have been lentil soup) because, well, there was too much food as it was.
So. Food porn.
Thursday night I rolled the grape leaves. The recipe that I used is from this book: Little Foods of the Mediterranean: 500 Fabulous Recipes for Antipasti, Tapas, Hors d’Oeuvres, Meze, and More
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Friday night, I soaked the fava beans and garbanzo beans for the various dips, and made the baklava. (If you need to see how that worked, just check out my last 12 of 12).
Saturday morning it was time to make the bissara and hummus.
Bissara is an Egyptian fava bean dip. Egyptians use fava beans — fuul in the local parlance — in the same way that the people of “Greater Syria” use the chick pea (also: garbanzo bean, in Arabic both the legume and the dip that’s made from it are called hummus). You find hummus, and its eggplant-based cousin (known more popularly as baba gannouj, although in Greek it’s melitzanosalata) in Greek food. Oddly, although fava beans are all over Greek food, bissara is not found on the Greek table. It is, however, one of the few parts of Egyptian food that I like (I love Egypt, but Egyptian food is never … ever … going to be the next great thing on the world foodie scene). The recipe came out of the above book.
I chose to make it anyway (food porn above). It’s fava beans cooked onions, garlic, cilantro, dill, mint, parsley, pureed, and then cooked again with coriander, cumin, and cayenne. It was a decent hit.
I also made the hummus on Saturday. I’d never made it with dried beans before (instead of cans). I kind of liked the way it turned out. The recipe came from Anne-Marie Weiss Armush’s classic The Arabian Delights Cookbook: Mediterranean Cuisines from Mecca to Marrakesh. It has attracted praise from actual Middle Eastern people, so I hold it in high esteem.
Spanakopita. Classic Greek mezze: spinach and various salty cheeses (feta, kefalotyri, and myzitra) in phyllo. I made it Saturday evening. This is my yia yia’s recipe, and it’s extremely variable — she wasn’t particularly the kind of cook who measured as she went.
And now, for the piece de resistance: Pastitsio. It’s a sort of Greek lasagne. Yia yia enjoyed the pastitsio, but she never made it, so I had to find another recipe to use (other than the one in the 1960s era cookbook I inherited, the one written before health care professionals started recommending against using lard and butter in copious amounts).
I used (and adapted) this recipe right here. The taste is spot-on, however the white sauce that the recipe links to never actually set during the cooking process. My guests didn’t notice, but I did.
Pastitsio (Greek Lasagne)
Here’s what you need:
- 1 1/2 pounds of tubular pasta (in this case, I used Pastitsio #2, acquired from the local Mediterranean market. You can also use ziti or straight macaroni. Do not use elbow macaroni. I will come find you and beat you with a wooden spoon.)
- 1 cup of olive oil
- 2 cloves of garlic, finely minced
- 1 1/4 cup of chopped onion
- 1 pound lean ground beef
- 1 pound ground lamb
- 2 cans diced tomatoes, drained
- 1 1/2 teaspoons of ground cinnamon
- 6 whole cloves
- salt
- pepper
- 1 1/2 cups of grated kefalotyri cheese
- béchamel sauce with cheese or basic béchamel
Sauté the onions until translucent in 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a large heavy-bottomed frying pan.
Add meat. Cook until lightly brown, stirring to break it up.
Add the tomatoes, cinnamon, cloves, garlic, salt, and pepper and stir well to combine. Reduce heat and simmer until liquid has been absorbed, about 30-35 minutes. This is very important–the meat mixture should be as dry as possible without sticking to the bottom of the pan. Set meat mixture aside, uncovered, and allow to cool.
Preheat oven to 350F. Lightly grease a baking or roasting pan approximately 11 X 14 X 3 inches high. The height of the pan is actually very important–the sauce has to go on thickly. It turned out that I didn’t have a pan high enough and so … well, I had to throw half of the white sauce out (although it wasn’t a major loss).
Boil the pasta, drain, toss with olive oil to keep from sticking together.
Now, your Greek mother who has nothing else to do … or your gay Greek dude throwing a fabulous dinner party to impress his friends with his cooking ability (which, given his inability to dance, dress particularly well, fix up his single straight friends with his other single straight friends, and his complete intolerance for shopping excursions longer than 30 minutes in length is pretty much ALL HE HAS LEFT) … will line up half of the pasta in nice, neat rows, and sprinkle it with 1/2 cup of kefalotyri.
Layer on the meat sauce. Sprinkle with another 1/2 cup of the kefalotyri. Line up the remaining pasta.
Make the white sauce … just not the one attached to the about.com recipe. Find a recipe for bechamel and make it.
Pour the bechamel on top — this is why you need the pan to be 3 inches tall. You’ll wind up with 1/2 inch or so of sauce that will puff up as it cooks.
Bake for 30 minutes. Then rotate the pan 180 degrees, sprinkle on the remaining 1/2 cup of cheese, and bake for 15-30 minutes more until the top is golden brown.
Pastitsio is served warm, not hot — you don’t want to serve it right out of the oven.
The final food porn: the set table:
My Turkish mezze platter:
Grape leaves and tzatziki. I love garlic, but … well, I may have finally met my match on garlic. 10 cloves of garlic is a bit much for 17.5 ounces of Greek yogurt (also: 2 tablespoons of minced fresh dill and one cucumber, seeded, peeled, grated, and drained).
And yes … there are leftovers. And man … it was yummy 
* OK, let’s get this out of the way: given my current record of promising and then delivering dinner parties, you need to have known me for at least eight years before you can expect to actually be invited to one. So, no, you weren’t invited, and it’s not because I don’t like you. It’s just because I haven’t known you for eight years yet.
