friederike's Reviews
11 recipe(s) reviewed. Showing 1 to 11Sort by: Title 
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The Olive and the Caper: Adventures in Greek Cooking
By Susanna Hoffman
Workman Publishing Company - 2004
Almost Classic Pork and Celery Stew : page 397
A bit bland; tastes like chicken (or rather pork) soup without the soup. Even though completely un-Greek, it was better served with couscous than with rice, probably because couscous has a bit more of a flavour of it's own. The meat was wonderfully tender, though.
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Beet Tzatziki : page 467
Brilliant recipe! It tastes very nice and makes a cheerful dish. It works really well with chicken, we served it with baked chicken, sweet potatoes and Sweet Potato Skordalia
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Bread Skordalia : page 462
Bread Skordalia actually convinced me that I needed a Greek cookbook, and I needed it fast. In May, we spent a week on Kos, a fairly touristical island just off the Turkish coast. We were lucky that at that time there were very few tourists other than us, and that we found two very nice restaurants that didn't specifically cater to tourists (you know, not the ones with posters outside featuring photos of hamburgers, hot dogs and the like, advertised in at least three different languages). One of the two nice places we found was a fish restaurant just outside the harbour, and it was so good (and cheap) that we went there every other day. We'd usually just ask what fish was fresh, and what else they'd recommend to go with that. On our very last day, they served us skordalia, and we were enraptured.
This version of skordalia is very good, and very similar to the one we had in Kos. It was a tad thick, but that might have been my fault as I used ground almonds and therefore didn't know how much I needed to add exactly. Also I found that for some reason, our small kitchen machine wasn't able to chop the garlic, therefore I would suggest chopping it by hand.
Skordalia has a very strong garlic flavour; see it as a Greek version of garlic mayonnaise. I would recommend making only half a recipe, that should be enough for whatever you are eating. We served it with Patates Lemonata (oven-fried potatoes), plain fried fish and Greek Village Salad, a very nice combination.
Edited 20 May 2017:
1/2 cup almonds is about 75 g in weight. I have no idea how many ground almonds we used last time, but my guess is that we used more than that. Having used whole almonds this time, I would actually recommend using ground almonds, as at least in our case the kitchen machine didn't grind the almonds very fine (or DH stopped the machine too soon, which I doubt).
15 cloves garlic might be a little too much, depending on the size of your cloves; start out with a little less. Also consider that garlic tends to become stronger in flavour if you let it sit for a while, e.g. if you prepare the skordalia in advance. We are considering using roasted garlic in addition to raw to mitigate the sharpness of the garlic.
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Coffee Syrup : page 517
Made a nice syrup. It was slightly bitter, but that's to be expected with coffee, and wasn't noticeable at all in the Walnut Cake with Coffee Syrup (nor would it be if you used it in other desserts, e.g. over vanilla ice cream - at least that's what I guess). I actually used slightly diluted espresso instead of strong coffee.
QS, how I read the recipe was that it shouldn't yet be syrupy when you turn off the heat; that will happen automatically once it cools down. I turned off the heat after 15 min, and while it didn't much look like a syrup at that point, it did once it had cooled down.
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Greek Village Salad : page 192
Very nice salad, contains all the ingredients you'd expect from a Greek salad. Served with Patates Lemonata, plain fried fish and Bread Skordalia, a very nice combination.
Edited 14 June 2014:
We served this as a complete meal for dinner, for just the two of us, and it was very nice. There was a little too much olive oil for my taste, next time I'll probably start with 1/4 cup, but otherwise it was very nice.
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These were really nice! Unfortunately, though, they stuck to the baking dish and were already a bit dark by the time the 45 min were over. I'm not really sure why that happened but I guess we'll start checking earlier next time (i.e. tomorrow). We might also try using a ceramic baking dish; DH thinks that'll help.
Served with Greek Village Salad, Bread Skordalia and plain fried fish, a very nice combination.
Edited the next day:
We gave it another try, this time in a white ceramic baking dish. It went well during the first ten minutes (which was the first time I checked) - the oil didn't spatter as the day before, the fries didn't colour at an alarming rate, and they didn't stick to the pan. I checked again another 20 minutes later, by which time they had begun to stick, and that only got worse. BUT at least they hadn't got burnt and I was able to leave them in the oven the whole 60 min in total.
I'm wondering now whether it was the colour and material of the baking dish (dark grey metal vs. white ceramic) that retained a different amount of heat. Also, next time I'd check every ten minutes to prevent them from sticking to the pan. Has anybody else had similar problems?
Edited 20 June 2014:
This has become my go-to-recipe for fries. Using a sheet of parchment paper did the trick, even if it means taking care that the oil and water mostly stay above the parchment paper. They're normally done withing 45 min.
For the FIFA 2014 challenge I slightly changed this recipe to make Fish 'n Chips with mashed peas for England - I omitted the thyme and lemon juice, and added a good slug of vinegar right at the end (though it probably would have been better to do so 10 min before the fries were done).
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Sweet Potato Skordalia : page 463
It's a nice, slightly unconventional version of the classic potato or bread skordalia, but a very successful one! It tasted really nice, I thought the garlic was strong but nicely balanced by the sweet potato, almonds, vinegar and cayenne. There was just one problem: olive oil.
I'll admit upfront that perhaps the main problem was that we used the wrong one - I only had extra vergine at hand, and that produced a very strong olive-y flavour, not very nice. But I also think the quantity was off - the skordalia ended up being too liquid, and the flavours initially were completely overpowered by the olive oil - surely that cannot all be due to the extra vergine olive oil? Next time I would start with less oil, maybe only 1/3 cup, and would be prepared to substitute part of the olive oil with a more neutral tasting oil.
Oh yes, and quantity: it's really a lot, and unfortunately I forgot. Half a portion should be enough for 6-8 servings. You can probably freeze it if you have leftovers, though it's probably better to add everything except for the oil, then set aside a portion you want to freeze as oil doesn't freeze that well.
Yesterday we served the skordalia with baked chicken, Beet Tzatziki, sweet potato chips (like in this recipe, but minus the harissa), a very nice and cheerful looking combination. Today we had White Bean Soup with Skordalia, and the skordalia really saved the soup!
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Vegetable Moussaka with Potatoes : page 316
Hmm. A lot of effort, little result.
Obviously, one of the problems you will always have with aubergine is that it will absorb a lot of fat, but frying the potatoes slice for slice didn't necessarily make that better. You could circumvent this problem by baking the aubergines in the oven, and by cooking the potatoes until halfway done instead of frying them; this also cuts back the amount of work you'll have.
I also felt that the dish as a whole missed some kind of a sauce; I probably would have added a tomato sauce.
Other than that, it was nice enough, but not necessarily something I'd go back to.
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Walnut Cake with Coffee Syrup : page 516
A very nice cake, goes well with coffee (haha :) ). I used zwieback and normal (not toasted) walnuts; you can probably tweak this recipe to make it suitable for people on a gluten-free diet as my guess is that it's easier to substitute the zwieback than it would be to substitute flour. I forgot to measure the quantity of the syrup and just poured everything over it, but luckily that wasn't a problem. I really liked the structure of the cake.
Because of the spices, it reminded me very much of Christmas and I'm considering making the cake again in December, though I would then probably use another syrup, i.e. vanilla, cinnamon or cardamom syrup, and perhaps even coat it in a layer of chocolate.
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White Bean Soup with Skordalia : page 160
Without the sweet potato skordalia it was pretty boring. With the skordalia, it was quite nice - but then again I'm afraid I'll find a lot of things nice with skordalia (except for dessert!).
That might have been partly my fault for not adding the full amount of olive oil. I realized that the reason the olive oil was in there in the first place was probably to add deepen the flavour, but 1/2 a cup seemed like a bit much. In the end, I added half the required amount. I also accidentally added too much celery, but that wasn't tragic.
Compared to the very similar White Bean Soup with Bacon, the other recipe definitely was the more interesting one. I think the reason is that the other recipe uses stock instead of water, roasts the mirepoix (carrots, celery and onions) before cooking it, and it uses bacon, which is always a good flavour boost (however, the sweet potato skordalia is a good substitute!).
What I liked about this recipe is that apart from boiling the beans before they are soaked (which seemed a bit unnecessary, but perhaps there is a reason for that?), this recipe seemed much simpler. But perhaps it's just the roasting of the mirepoix and the pureeing which added the extra steps to the other recipe. A version in between both recipes would probably be ideal.
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Winter Vegetable Soup : page 167
Gah, this was horrible! White wine I can imagine, red wine just was a recipe for disaster. Even worse, apart from the red wine, it lacked flavour and was pretty watery even though I hadn't even added all the water - I had to add a lot more tomato concentrate, a quarter cube of stock and more savory to make something of it. Plus points for incorporating cabbage, but that's the only positive I can find, unfortunately. We used savoy cabbage, and white beans from a glass which I only added at the very last moment to heat through.
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