When Life Gives You Lemons, Make Greek!

I don’t know about your holidays this year but ours were a little different. 

Due to family travels, we celebrated early on one side of the family and will celebrate in a few weeks with the other. What to do with Christmas on our own?  I must say this question produced some anxiety for me.  It seems the holidays are times for families to come together and it seemed odd that we weren’t on the particular day. What to do with ourselves?

We have been missing the one good Greek restaurant in our city that closed over a year ago. We loved the food and the atmosphere. It was always a good time. We especially loved their lemon-egg (avgolemeno) soup and, my personal favorite, spinach-feta pie (spanakopita). Classic Greek fare. So for Christmas dinner, I thought why not try my hand at it. I was about to subject my husband and three friends to a Hellenic experiment.

You might think: I don’t know anything about cooking Greek food. I really didn’t either. You might also think: that sounds hard to make. That’s what I thought at first, but was pleasantly surprised.  I’ve had this cookbook, The Foods of the Greek Islands, by Aglaia Kremezi for a number of years and had previously tried a version of the lemon egg soup plus some cheese & herb-filled breads. What I found was the relative simplicity of all the recipes. So I decided on a menu: Romaine salad with Greek vinaigrette, then the avgolemeno soup with the cheese & dill-filled biscuits, spanakopita with a chickpea & fennel side dish, and baklava to finish. 

Yes, it was a multi-course menu, but most of the dishes were straight-forward in their assembly and could be made ahead of time. I’m not one to leave all the cooking to the day of; I like to enjoy the time with others. That also means I started three days earlier.

First off, I started with the soup. It called for basically making your own stock. We’ve had a skinny capon in the freezer for a number of months not really knowing what to do with it. I’m not much of a meat eater and it was just the thinnest looking thing anyway. We didn’t think we’d get much of a meal out of it on its own. But it made for perfect stock, which consisted of the bird, an onion, some carrots, bay leaves, salt and peppercorns. That’s it. Let it simmer in water for two hours. Then take out & separate the meat, strain the liquid, and refrigerate until the day of the meal. Simple.  

Simple?  Nothing is that simple.  A couple of challenges arose when it came time to finish it: 1). Quantities. Recipes can be vague about amounts.  I think the recipe from the cookbook started with more liquid to make the stock then for making the actual soup.  So watch your quantities and don’t be afraid to add more/less of something to compensate. It’s all improv!  2). Adding the lemon & egg mixture is another time where it gets tricky.  You have to temper the eggs so they don’t curdle.  Who wants chunky egg soup?  Not I.  So you add hot liquid to the lemon-egg mixture first constantly whisking before you add it back to the big pot. This is a two-handed job and I realized I need to work on my left-handed whisking. 

Next came my first experimenting with phyllo. Everything I read about it was that it was delicate and dries out quickly so you have to move quickly.  I should also back up to say that the hunt for phyllo dough in my small city was an adventure in itself but, after a version of phone-a-friend, I was finally able to track it down in the freezer section of the third grocery store I visited.  Not knowing how much I really needed, I piled several boxes into the cart. 

For the spanokopita, we had a spinach in the fridge (score!), plus we also had kale that I froze from our garden.  I thought that would be a healthy addition and have more of a personal we-grew-this-ourselves significance.  But let’s be real; kale is tough. I could see our guests struggling to cut their portion. And I know I chewed a little extra hard myself.  So note to self: stick with just the spinach.

Since I bought enough phyllo to cover Athens, I decided to also make baklava. That too turned out easier then I thought it would. Putting it together was very similar to the spanokopita, plus, besides the phyllo, I had everything else in the pantry: almonds, cinnamon, honey. What could be simpler or more delicious? Not to mention you can make it up a day ahead of time! 

As for the soup, I finished putting it together the day of but was challenged keeping it warm enough.  I didn’t want it to get too hot as to not curdle the egg but hot enough to serve.  Who wants cold soup?  Again, not I.  When I went to serve it, it was colder then I would have liked. I would definitely keep a closer eye on this next time.

I haven’t even mentioned the cheese & herb-filled bread. They were perhaps the most fun to make, more involved then anything else, but worth it.  I baked them a day ahead which I must say added to them being a little dry. So if I try them again, I would most likely make them up ahead of time then bake them the day of.  At least they soaked up the yummy soup nicely.

As I was going along this Aegean journey, I realized the pervasive use of lemon. The tart, yellow fruit was used in every dish: in the dressing for both salads, the soup (obviously), the spanokopita and even dessert! A thought occurred to me: When the gods gave us lemons, the Greeks made food!  That’s when it hit me: whatever circumstances we find ourselves in, make the most of it. So family wasn’t getting together on that day, we were or will be together for our own special time.  It was also a chance to connect with friends, something we had talked about for years but never had the opportunity.  I quit being “sour” about our situation and enjoyed it like a yummy piece of baklava. Opa!