SMBC #3: Greek Week

Welcome back to the third edition of SMBC. This belated post (we had this for lunch Saturday before last) documents our exciting venture into Greek cuisine. We were helped by our Greek friend, Chef K, who came armed with several recipes in her native tongue. And while they were all Greek to us, under her instruction, our kitchen was transformed into the very definition of efficiency (or a close approximation of).

A quick google search of Greek Cuisine revealed the following interesting fact: The Greeks did not only give us Pythagoras, Archimedes, Euclid, Socrates, and Plato, but also Archestratos - the author of the very first cookbook! So we will now follow in Archestratos' footsteps and write down what we did.

We made a quartet of Mezes (Greek for appetiser/starter) and finished it off with a traditional Greek dessert of yoghurt, honey, and walnuts. The four mezes that we made were:

• Meze for drunk people*
• Kolokythokeftedes**
• Halloumi wrapped in red pepper with lemon & chilli
• Greek salad

*I assure you that none of us were drunk whilst making this.
** We had great fun trying to pronounce this word!

These were the ingredients that we started with:

Mezze for Drunk People:	Kolokythokeftedes:	Halloumi in red pepper:
450g diced pork half a mug of red wine 1 mug of creamed tomatoes 1 teaspoon of mustard ginger garlic oregano allspice	500g of courgettes 1 onion 150g feta cheese 200g melba toast 2 cloves of garlic mint salt pepper flour olive oil for frying	Red pepper 100g block halloumi cheese 1 red chilli olives oregano half a lemon

Greek Salad:

Dessert:

cucumber tomatoes capers feta cheese

Greek yoghurt, honey, and walnuts!

Meze for Drunk People

• Put the 450g of diced pork into a large bowl. Mix in a teaspoon of mustard and add some sliced ginger and crushed garlic (to taste).
• Fry the pork, adding the red wine a little at a time and allowing it to evaporate.
• Finally add the mug of creamed tomatoes and flavour with oregano and allspice.
  

Kolokythokeftedes
This roughly translates into Courgettes/Zucchini "Meatballs". Here's what we did:

• Grate 500g of courgettes and then drain the juice from them.
• Add one chopped onion and two cloves of garlic (crushed) to the courgettes.
• Crumble in 150g of feta cheese.
• Crush 200g of melba toast into a (relatively) fine powder and add it to the mixture. (With our limited kitchen facilities, we crushed the melba toast using a glass and several plastic bags)
• Crumble in some dried mint. Add salt and pepper to taste as well as 4-5 teaspoons of olive oil.
• Use the mixture to make many small balls. Cover them with flour then fry in olive oil.

Halloumi in red pepper

• First, roast the red peppers until they are fairly soft. (We used our microwave to do this - apparently it has an oven setting!) Make a long cut down the side of each pepper and open them out. Trim around the tops and bottoms so that you get one flat piece.
• Slice the halloumi into several thick pieces.
• Juice half a lemon, chop some chilli and olives.

• Place a slice of halloumi in the centre of each piece of red pepper. Sprinkle the lemon juice, the chilli and the olives over the cheese. Add oregano to taste.
• Roll the red pepper around the cheese and secure it in place with a cocktail stick.
• Finally, grill the peppers for about 5 minutes on both sides until the cheese starts to soften. (Apparently our microwave has a grill setting too!)

Greek Salad

• Basically just throw chopped cucumber, tomatoes, and olives into a bowl, add cubes of feta cheese, capers and you're done! (Add salt and pepper and dress with olive oil too if you like)
  

And here we have our four mezes all together!

Dessert

• Greek yoghurt + walnuts +honey =

-----

Hope you enjoyed The Shok's debut on Hungry the Ate. Have a good recipe idea for SMBC? Let us know!