Greek Food Day

Since I've been learning Greek, my mom thought it would be a fun springtime end of the year project to have a day when we had Greek food.  I could choose what Greek food we had.  I tried searching for Greek food, but when I clicked on something that looked like it would be a good eggroll-ish dinner, it turned out to be fried dough balls that were a common dessert.  I wasn't finding any good ideas until I saw some article about Greek seafood.  

My three ideas for dinners ended up being Sea Bass, which I thought was a good idea, Brown Trout, which I didn't know about, since even though they looked really good, they live all through New Hampshire and Vermont, and we were looking for Greek foods.  My last idea for dinner was Octopus, which I'm pretty excited about, but I don't know if the store, or anywhere around here, has a whole Octopus, head and all, which is what the recipe calls for.  

For breakfast I had written down this custard called rizogalo, which looked pretty good.  (It said it could be a breakfast or a dessert, which sounded promising.)  I also had bougatsa, which was a sweet or savory filling wrapped in phyllo dough, which is a combination of flour, water, vinegar, and a little oil.  The last one was called staka me ayga, which looked like scrambled eggs, but it said you put in staka, which is some sort of buttery creamy and floury mixture, which sounded good.  

For dessert I had written down lokma, the fried dough balls I had clicked on first.  I had also written down karythopita, which was a spiced cake with walnuts on top that sounded pretty good.  That was as far as I had gotten on dessert, because the recipes for dessert were all a few paragraphs long, not like the nice quick overviews on how to make the different breakfasts and dinners.  I tried writing down the ingredients, but that was also a really long list.  The others I would have written down were filo and butter pull-apart, which was this circular dessert with multiple thin layers, and the whole thing looked like it was encrusted in honey.  There was also lemon bougatsa, which looked super good, and was a thick lemony paste that looked kind of like a lemon pie.  Also there was honey and rosewater baklava, which was a nut-filled filo pastry with cinnamon syrup.  There was white chocolate baklava cigars, that, sure enough, resembled cigars.  And kataifi, which looked like a clump of spaghetti does when you twirl it on the end of your fork, but apparently it was supposed to be an almond pastry covered in syrup.     

I've been writing back and forth with a kid from Greece lately, which has been fun.  I asked him if he had any suggestions for foods, and he sent me four different links to food he liked.  For seafood, he said octopus with chopped pasta, and he also sent me links to bean soup, which sounded good.  (He said it was the national Greek food, and it must be pretty good if it's the national food.)  The other two were called Greek village salad, and the stuffed.  The stuffed was peppers and tomatoes that you stuffed with rice.

For breakfast I decided to have staka me ayga, 1, because I had ruled out rizogalo since, even though it looked so good, it was just rice pudding, and it wasn't only in Greece that people had rice pudding.  2,  because staka me ayga sounded way more Greek, since it said staka was local cow milk, and we looked it up and found bottles of staka for sale, with all the labels in Greek.  3, because I was curious about staka me ayga, since it looked like normal scrambled eggs, but there were different ingredients.  

For lunch I decided to have Greek village salad, since I thought it looked okay, and because every other lunch didn't look that good, and I'm not really a vegetable casserole fan.  

For dinner I decided to have brown trout, because I didn't know if we could get good octopus, and that looked pretty complicated, so I decided to stick with something that lived right around here and didn't have to be shipped in from Timbuctoo.  I don't know what kind of sea bass the recipe wants, and it turns out there are a million different species of sea bass, so I ruled that one out too. 

Lastly for dessert I decided to have lemon bougatsa, which I decided by ruling out desserts like lokma (those dough balls) so that I had the most dessert looking ones, then I ruled out watermelon in cinnamon sauce and ones that I was a little unsure about, since I didn't think the cinnamon sauce would pair well with the watermelon.  Finally I was left with just these almond shortbread balls and lemon bougatsa.  The shortbread balls were so covered with confectioner-sugar-looking icing, that I didn't know if I would be able to taste the shortbread.  Thus is how I decided upon lemon bougatsa.  

I'm excited for everything, especially dinner, and we've ordered all the ingredients so that I can make it this weekend.      

Mother's Day

It was Mother's Day a few days ago, so in the morning we made a fun breakfast.  We left bread out the night before so that it would be stale in the morning, since we were going to dip the bread in a sauce, and that way it wouldn't get soggy.  The sauce was milk that simmered with lemon skin, a cinnamon stick, and two tablespoons of honey.  We dipped the bread in the milk, then in some eggs I whisked up, and then we put the pieces of bread in a frying pan with oil.  After we let them cool off for a minute, I dipped the pieces of bread in a big bowl of cinnamon sugar, and then piled them all up in a bowl to go over to the table.  

There was a bit too much cinnamon sugar on them, and I had to scrape some off so that it wouldn't be too sweet.  Margaret loved how sweet they were, and she added extra honey on top, which she actually got away with since the recipe said that adding honey was "optional".  She also wanted to have all the cinnamon sugar we had scraped off of ours, but I'm guessing that one of the reasons that didn't work out was because the recipe didn't say that it was traditional for all the six-year-olds present to get an extra half a cup of cinnamon sugar. 

                                                                       

Then we went on a walk at a place called Quincy Bog, which was fun.  We saw three or four snakes, about seventeen turtles, three or four Canada geese, one salamander, and seven or eight chipmunks.  I took advantage of the chipmunks, and took the shells off a bunch of acorns, then followed the chipmunks until they ran down into one of their tunnels, so that I could give them a few acorns by rolling the acorns down their tunnels.  

Me and Margaret were also measuring how deep the water was on the boardwalks by dipping a stick into the water, and seeing how far it was down by lifting the stick out of the water after it touched the bottom to see how much of the stick was wet.  (Sometimes our sticks were too short and wouldn't touch the bottom.)  One of my favorite places to measure, was a narrow canal that was two feet wide, but three and a half feet deep, and surrounded by solid (if a bit mushy) ground.  The guide to the bog, one of which we had brought along with us, that explained certain areas that were marked with a  yellow tag, and this canal was one of those areas.  The guide said that the beavers at Quincy Bog had dug the canal so that they could float logs down to their lodges and dams.  We had seen a beaver the first time we went to the bog, but we didn't see any this time.  We spent most of the afternoon at Quincy Bog; even though we could have done it in half an hour, we were having fun slowly check out every little corner.  

Dinner was good, it was sheet pan chicken, with a bunch of leeks and other onion-ish things.  For dessert we had this super good custard and whipped cream dessert, with a layer of raspberries encased in red Jell-O on the bottom.    

Margaret gave my mom a card.  I gave her a card too, along with a stop-motion.