Sun Basket’s Favorite Greek Inspired Recipes
Gigantes Plaki, tirokafteri and this week’s Globetrotter recipe, Chicken Soup with Orzo, Grape Leaves, and Lemon aren’t the only tastes of Greece offered by Sun Basket. Here are some of our favorite Greek-inspired recipes from our archives.
Spiced Chickpeas and Quinoa Salad with Spiced Pita Croutons
Infrequent meat eating means more vegetarian meals, which leads to lots of beans, creatively cooked. The chickpeas in this protein-packed salad get a quick, seasoned fry to crisp them up before being tossed with a healthy amount of leafy arugula and topped with, you guessed it, Greek yogurt.
Baked Shrimp with Tomatoes, Feta, Orzo, and Mint
With a diet composed heavily of vegetables and grains and light on meats, Greeks get a fair share of their protein from the surrounding Mediterranean waters. Tomatoes boast a laundry list of nutrients, their acid balanced out here by salty, tangy feta.
Roast Chicken Breasts with Romano Beans and Tomatoes
High in iron and calcium, fresh beans are a great way to boost nutrients as well as protein in this light, satisfying supper. The use of fresh herbs is a hallmark of Greek cooking, particularly oregano. Recent studies have shown that the oil in this little herb is a powerful antimicrobial and can help fight off infections. Plus, it tastes delicious with olives.
Fitter, happier, more productive—eating the Hellenic way
Extensive studies have shown that Greeks on a traditional diet have dramatically lower incidences of heart disease and cancer compared to the U.S., and, on the island of Crete at least, the highest adult life expectancy in the world. And they get more than one-third of their calories from olive oil. Using traditional Greek foodways as a model, in the 1990s, several organizations, spearheaded by two Greek nutrition scientists, devised what we now call the Mediterranean Diet.
Just like the Ancient Greeks did, the Mediterranean Diet emphasizes fruits and vegetables, seafood, lean meat, and above all, plenty of olive oil (and other good-for-you unsaturated fats)—plus wine, though in less than Dionysian quantities. Now, scientists can’t seem to stop coming out with fresh studies about all that the Diet can do.
If you’re a regular Sun Basket customer, you’re already following the Mediterranean Diet to some extent. It’s the inspiration for many of our meals. Because it’s one of the most inclusive of diets, embracing meat, dairy, and wheat products, it has broad appeal and is easy to follow. Sun Basket’s staff nutritionist Kaley Todd is a fan. “It’s the best of both worlds,” she says. “The flavors are amazing, and the health benefits are measurable. It’s one of the best examples of how nutritious food can also be delicious.” Here she shares five favorite recent studies that underline just how right the Ancient Greeks were.
Five Surprising Benefits of the Mediterranean Diet
1. Aging
A landmark study of American female nurses found that those on the Mediterranean Diet in middle age were about 40% more likely to live past 70, free of any of 11 chronic illnesses diseases, including type 2 diabetes, Parkinson’s Disease, and many cancers.
2. Brain Health
Australian researchers recently found that the Mediterranean Diet is associated with lower rates of cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s disease. The diet even improves ordinary cognitive functioning: those on the diet also showed better memory and executive functioning, such as reasoning and planning.
3. Breast Cancer
In one of the largest studies, scientists analyzed the eating patterns of more than 4,200 women in Spain, and found that those consuming a Mediterranean diet were 62% less likely to get breast cancer than those following a standard low-fat diet.
4. Heart Disease
One European study followed more than 2,500 Greek adults for over a decade, tracking their medical records, lifestyle habits, and eating patterns. Those who most closely followed the Mediterranean Diet were a whopping 47% less likely to get heart disease, regardless of their smoking habits, age, family history, or other lifestyle factors.
5. Weight Management
It’s a common misconception that high-fat diets lead to weight gain. Results from one major study show that those following a Mediterranean diet lost significantly more weight than those who ate a low-fat diet.
Tirokafteri – Spicy Feta Dip
We like to think of this as Greek-style pimiento cheese, with feta standing in for cheddar (tirokafteri literally means “spicy cheese”). We like to turn up the flavor with a roasted a poblano chile and add a pinch of cayenne pepper. If you prefer a milder (and faster) version, swap out the poblano for a jarred sweet roasted red pepper. Serve it as a meze or appetizer with seeded lavash at your next gathering.
Tirokafteri – Spicy Feta Dip Recipe
Makes about 1 cup
Ingredients:
For the cheese spread:
5 ounces feta cheese, preferably Greek
3 tablespoons Greek yogurt
2 tablespoons olive oil (extra virgin, if you’ve got it)
1 small poblano chile (approximately 2 ounces)
Kosher salt
1/8 tsp cayenne pepper, optional
For serving:
1 red bell pepper
1 to 2 pieces lavash flatbread
Olive oil, for drizzling, optional
Instructions:
1 Prep the feta; roast the poblano pepper
Light a gas burner or preheat the broiler to high.
- Let the feta come to room temperature.
On the stovetop over the flame, or under the broiler, roast the poblano chile, turning frequently, until charred on all sides. Transfer to a bowl and cover with a plate or plastic wrap; let steam and cool, 10 to 15 minutes. (If using jarred roasted red pepper, move on to prepping the red bell pepper after bringing the feta to room temperature.)
While the poblano cools, prepare the red bell pepper and lavash.
2 Prep the red bell pepper; toast the lavash
Heat the oven to 350°F.
Remove the stem, ribs, and seeds from the red bell pepper; cut the pepper into ¼-inch-thick strips.
- Cut the lavash into 2-inch squares.
On a sheet pan, spread the lavash squares in an even layer and lightly brush or drizzle them with oil, if desired. Toast in the oven until crisped and golden brown, 10 to 12 minutes. Transfer to a plate. While the lavash toasts, finish the dip.
3 Finish the feta dip
Using a small, sharp knife or your hands, remove the stem, charred skin, and seeds from the poblano. Finely chop the poblano.
In a medium bowl, combine the poblano with the feta, Greek yogurt, and olive oil; stir until blended. Season to taste with salt and as much cayenne as you like.
4 Serve
Transfer the feta mixture to a bowl and serve with the lavash chips and red bell pepper strips alongside. The dip can also be covered and refrigerated for up to 4 days.
Chef’s Tip: If you are pressed for time and own a food processor, in step 3, instead of chopping the poblano by hand, process it to a coarse paste, then add the feta, Greek yogurt, and olive oil, and pulse a few times until blended.
Nutrition per serving (about 2 Tablespoon of dip): Calories: 70, Protein: 4 g, Total Fat: 6 g, Monounsaturated Fat: 3 g, Polyunsaturated Fat: .5 g, Saturated Fat: 2.5 g, Cholesterol: 5 mg, Carbohydrates: 1 g, Fiber: 0 g, Added Sugar: 0 g, Sodium: 280 mg
Diets: Gluten Free, Vegetarian, Soy Free
Allergens: milk, wheat
Get it to go: uniquely portable cuisine of Mongolia’s nomads
Milk
Mongolian nomads count on their herds to provide them with nourishment; dairy products make up a large portion of their diet, whether made from yak, goat, sheep, or even mare’s milk. Fresh milk is turned into urum (butter), as well as khailmag (a sweetened caramelized dessert cheese), and aaruul (a hard cheese). Fresh milk is fermented into kefir, a yogurt-like drink. Kefir can then be turned into byaslag (a soft cheese), or eesgii (roasted, dehydrated cheese curds). Mongolians even make a milk vodka, called airag, which they prefer to drink warm.
Dumplings
Ideal for families on the go who don’t want to carry a lot of utensils, dumplings are at the center of most Mongolian meals. Whether steamed (buuz), boiled (bansh), or deep-fried (khuushuur), having something warm to hold and eat makes a lot of sense when it’s -40° outside.
One-pot dishes
When you carry your kitchen on your back, you don’t want too many pots and pans. Meats are cooked over an open fire in a single pot filled with a rich bone broth, a technique often described as the ‘Mongolian Hot Pot’. Tsuivans are noodle stews, made by a technique Italians also favor, of cooking the noodles in the sauce. Guriltai shul, a brothy soup, is thickened with borts, dehydrated, pulverized meat powder.
Behind the Lens: Sun Basket’s Tyler MacNiven in Mongolia
In the summer of 2009, Sun Basket co-founder and filmmaker Tyler MacNiven actually traveled there to make a feature about a struggling internet personality trying to make it big. We took advantage of that coincidence and sat down with him to find out about traveling nomad-style.
Q: Why did you choose to make a movie in Mongolia?
A: We wanted to highlight this remarkable culture with a funny and heartwarming buddy movie. I’d been fascinated by Mongolia for a while. I’d heard about their hospitality, how it’s not just a way of being polite, but a necessity because of the landscape.
Q: You spent two months there. What did you eat?
A: The weather can get intense, so there’s a lot of fire building. They use dried dung to light their fires. I’d never seen that before. The families we stayed with ate a lot of tsuivans, what they call stews, as well as dumplings—steamed, fried, you name it. That, plus tea. They make a lot of different kinds of tea with milk and butter and stuff like millet.
Q: You stayed with families? How did that work?
A: Hotels aren’t a common sight in the Mongolian desert, and there aren’t too many Airbnbs. So mostly we stayed in gers, which is what they call the portable yurt-like structures they live in. They’re incredibly complicated and simple at the same time.
Q: Sounds like there’s not a lot by way of roads out there. How did you find your way around?
A: That’s right, outside the few cities there are no paved roads. We rented this old Russian van and moved from ger to ger completely off-road. We’d roll up at someone’s lone ger, introduce ourselves and sit down for tea and a chat. They’d point into the distance towards the place that was the most passable after the winter storms, and we’d get back in the van and take off for the next valley. There we’d spot another ger in the distance, drive over, sit down for more tea, and repeat the whole process. This went on for miles and miles and miles. Being a nomad really is an incredible way to travel.
Tyler (in the gold) visits with new friends outside a ger in central Mongolia.
From Mongolia to Portlandia
Long before the bearded, flannel-shirt-clad crowd embraced a nose-to-tail ethos and made fermentation crocks standard kitchen equipment, the nomads of Mongolia found a way to use every last kitchen scrap. Take, for instance, bodog. First you get a sheep. The animal is slaughtered and dressed, the organs are made into soup, and the skin is sewn into a sack-like cooking vessel. (Pots and pans can be such a drag when you’re constantly on the move.)
When it’s time to cook, first, rocks are heated in a fire fueled with sheep dung (trees are sparse in this extreme climate). The hot stones are placed inside the sheep skin, layered with fresh sheep meat, then the neck hole is sealed shut with a wire. The stones provide an even heat while the hide traps the steam. Think of it as extreme braising.
This kind of resourcefulness defines the Mongolian kitchen. Vegetables are scarce here, where it’s not unusual for temperatures to slip to -40°F during the course of the long, dry winters. These always-on-the-go types rarely stay in one place long enough to tend a crop from seed to harvest anyway. Mongolians subsist almost entirely on the meat and dairy products from the animals they herd. But constraints fuel creative solutions, and the nomads are masters of fermentation. While the rest of us live and die by the sell-by dates on our milk cartons, Mongolians turn leftover milk into yogurt, cheese, even vodka. Any remaining bits of yak and goat meat are dried to make jerky.
If their diet sounds eclectic, it follows one key rule: This is a cuisine of portable foods with enough fat and calories to sustain a body on a journey across the Mongolian steppe. Call it the ultimate in sustainable cuisine.
Mongolian Roasted Garlic Paste
In their book Beyond the Great Wall, culinary anthropologists Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid write about their travels through Central Asia. They discovered this savory seasoning in northeastern Inner Mongolia where it often accompanies grilled meats. We like to stir it into noodle dishes and soups, smear it on toast, and use it as a condiment for sandwiches.
Mongolian Roasted Garlic Paste Recipe
Ingredients
1 cup peeled garlic cloves
2 shallots
1 serrano chile pepper
½ teaspoon kosher salt
¼ teaspoon toasted sesame oil
Pinch of cayenne pepper
Instructions
Heat the oven to 400°F.
1 Char the shallots and serrano; dry-roast the vegetables
- Peel the shallots.
On the stovetop over a flame, or under the broiler, cook the whole, peeled shallots and the serrano chile, turning several times, until well charred.
Transfer the charred shallots and serrano to a sheet pan with the garlic cloves. Season generously with salt. Dry-roast them in the oven, rotating the pan and stirring the vegetables halfway through, until the vegetables are soft and the garlic is golden brown, 18 to 20 minutes. Remove from the oven and let cool to warm. Discard the stem from the serrano.
2 Make the paste
Transfer the shallots, serrano, and garlic to a food processor or a large mortar and pestle. Pulse or mash to a smooth paste. Add the sesame oil and cayenne and pulse or stir until incorporated. Season to taste with salt.
3 Serve
Transfer to a bowl and serve right away, or cover and refrigerate for up to 1 week.
Total time: 25 to 35 minutes
Makes about 1 cup
Nutrition per serving (about 1 Tablespoon): Calories: 15, Protein: 1 g, Total Fat: 0 g, Monounsaturated Fat: 0 g, Polyunsaturated Fat: 0 g, Saturated Fat: 0 g, Cholesterol: 0 mg, Carbohydrates: 4 g, Fiber: 0 g, Added Sugar: 0 g, Sodium: 60 mg
Sun Basket’s Favorite Sicilian-Inspired Recipes
Tuna Salad, Almond Cookies, and this week’s Globetrotter recipe, Quinoa Pasta with Caponata, aren’t the only tastes of Sicily offered by Sun Basket. Here are some of our favorite Sicilian-inspired recipes from our archives.
Grilled fish with artichoke tapenade and fennel-orange salad
Seafood is far and away Sicily’s preferred protein; fish are often served simply, whether grilled or pan-seared. Cardoons, the artichoke’s ancient cousin, grow wild all over the island. We capture its slightly bitter flavor in a delicious salad that expresses the essence of agrodolce.
Baked rigatoni with eggplant, tomatoes, and ricotta
At every cafe and restaurant in the eastern city of Cataña you’ll find pasta alla Norma. Named for a famous opera star, it consists of pasta with eggplant, tomatoes, basil, and a shower of crumbled ricotta salata. In Sun Basket’s take, Chef Justine blends these classic Sicilian flavors in a baked dish perfect for cool nights.
Chicken with green olives, capers, and lemon
Many Sicilian dishes take little time to cook, because the ingredients are of such high quality, they need hardly any fussing. In one of Sun Basket’s fastest recipes, three of Sicily’s most iconic ingredients combine in an easy, potent pan sauce for chicken.
Behind the recipe: Caponata—Sicily’s ultimate fusion food
Perhaps more than any other dish from the island, caponata reflects the exceptional diversity of Sicilian cooking.
The ingredient list doubles as a history lesson about the island. Arabs brought eggplants from North Africa after they took over in the 700s, their delicious cooking traditions later preserved by the Normans, who employed Arab cooks in their castles in the 1000s. Tomatoes were introduced by Spanish aristocrats in the 1500’s; according to food historian Clifford Wright, the name itself may come from the Catalan word, caponada, a similar dish that would have been served aboard ships, the vinegar acting as a preservative on the long voyages across the sea.
But others think the name comes from the capperi, or capers, which grow in abundance on the island. Pine nuts are also native to Sicily and honey bees thrive on wildflowers that grow all over the island. Currants and vinegar come from grapes first planted there by Ancient Greeks.
When these ingredients are cooked together, the resulting relish showcases the classic Sicilian flavor profile, agrodolce, marrying sweet with sour. The combo is thought to have origins in both Spain and North Africa (and maybe also Ancient Greece and Rome). It’s all Sicilian to us.
From Sicily to Little Italy
Plates piled high with spaghetti and meatballs, veal Parmesan buried under a blanket of cheese, long-simmered tomato sauces—these classic Italian-American dishes are Sicilian innovations, even though few Sicilians ever ate them before coming to the U.S. Between 1876 and 1924, almost one-third of Italy’s population immigrated to America. Most came from poverty-stricken regions of the rural south and Sicily. As Nancy Verde Barr describes in her fascinating cookbook We Called it Macaroni, theirs was a classic cucina povera, peasant food that made a bounty out of humble ingredients. When they came to the U.S., however, that began to change.
At home in Italy, Sicilians coated eggplant or zucchini with stale breadcrumbs to make vegetarian Parmesan. Chicken and veal we’re luxury ingredients. Thanks to the island’s mild climate and rich volcanic soil, tomatoes grew year round and the sauces made with them were fresh and quickly cooked. Pasta was served in small portions before the main course, lightly dressed with simple ingredients like raisins, fennel, and fresh sardines. Fish and eggs were the featured proteins, meat reserved for celebrations. But as they acclimated to life in a new country, Sicilians changed not only what they ate, but how the world thought about Italian food.
Most of these immigrants settled in cities like New York, Boston, and Providence, Rhode Island (places, not incidentally, near the coasts, where they could still fish). Though they left behind an agrarian life, they continued to grow vegetables wherever they could—in backyards, on rooftops, and windowsills. They opened food markets that catered to other Sicilians, from traditional bakeries to fish carts. For a while, at least, they continued to eat as they always had.
As they became more affluent, Sicilians started eating more meat and upping the portion of cheese in their macaroni. Their new neighbors, not all of them Italian, didn’t always appreciate the pungent flavors of prized ingredients like wild mint, peperoncino, and salt cod. Sicilian cooks learned to tame their tastes and their food became richer, the portions bigger, and the flavors less bold. Eventually, these immigrants gave birth to a new cuisine, an Italian-American hybrid celebrated in red-tablecloth restaurants where candles stuffed into chianti bottles illuminate meals that would be unrecognizable in their native Sicily.
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