'Mini' Greek Salad (Humour Me!)

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This salad is perfect for the heat wave (mid-30 C / high 90-F!) that we are currently simultaneously loving and complaining about at the same time.  It's fresh, refreshing, healthy, and cool.

It's also obviously not brain science or rocket surgery!  I'm not re-inventing the wheel here...essentially this salad is the exact same concept as a regular sized Greek Salad except with baby, pint-sized, itsy-bitsy, minikin vegetables (I know - tomatoes aren't vegetables, and Pluto isn't a planet, but I'm still going to pretend that they are!).  Also, it's hot and hard for me to care about cooking or picking up my camera to take a picture while cooking or using my insanely hot laptop (seriously, why is it so hot!?) to talk about my cooking.  I made a really, really, really delicious pasta the other night and The Hubby kept asking why I wasn't taking pictures.  Answer - I was too hot and too lazy, and all I cared about was watching Big Brother, and am now way full of regret because I don't remember all of the steps for that pasta to be able to recreate it!  Sigh, sigh, sigh!

Back to the salad.  In this version, I have traded in full-sized cucumbers, bell peppers, and tomatoes for their ridiculously cute baby versions.  The other ingredients aren't tiny...I was considering using shallot or pearl onions in place of the red onion, but chose not to because who knows what that might have been like.  The olives I had no teeny substitute for other than capers, and that seemed weird.  The feta is also not mini...in fact, the the less mini you get with cheese in any recipe the better/tastier/merrier, amiright?

Greek Yogurt Tzatziki

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Yeeeeeesssssssssahhhh I love tzatziki.

I have made tzatziki a few times in the past, and my attempts have been so-so, but I think that I have now finally discovered the best tzatziki recipe known to man.  It's sooooo good, and really easy too!  I found this recipe on Food.com, and made it as an accompaniment to my spanakopitas for a recent Greek-themed Supper Club night.

It's seriously a must-try recipe!  Do it!

Spanakopitas

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Spanakopitas...mmmmmm...I want you.

But!

Phyllo pastry is a total jerk.  The phyllo dough comes in paper-thin sheets, tears easily, dries out easily, gets too wet easily when you are trying, like, your hardest, not to dry it out, and just in general doesn't want to do the things you want it to do, especially when it's almost midnight on a Thursday night because you didn't start making spanakopitas until after Real Housewives of Orange County, and you have Greek Supper Club tomorrow night so you have to finish them, and you have to be up at 6am.

But...

Because your taste buds will be soooo happy, you should probably make these spanakopitas anyways, if you have the time to fuss.  They freeze beautifully, so I've been known to make a triple batch and keep them on hand in my freezer for something quick to pop into the oven and serve as an appy when friends and family come over.

I had Supper Club #2 last Friday at my friend Cleary's house, this time with a Greek theme.  Oh, supper club, and the amount of wine that flows.  Here's an excerpt from the evening:  At one point in the night, I accidentally tipped the glass coffee table over in Cleary's living room, causing it to fall to the floor.  The coffee table was fine, but what was on the coffee table, do you ask?  Oh, nothing...except two full bottles of red wine, three full glasses of red wine, and the game of Taboo (ironic).  I remember looking at the tipped over bottles of wine and slow-motion-watching the red fluid just chug-chug-chugging out them onto the floor.  The 'floor' was white carpet, that was now covered in broken shards of glass, copious amounts of red wine, and a soaked Taboo score-pad.  The next thing you know, all four girls are washing and spraying and vacuuming and wiping, in between all of the laughter.  If that happened at my house, there would have been no laughter, only faces with a look of sheer fear on them when they see my reaction to the disaster.  Kudos to my friend Cleary who actually commented afterwards that her living room looked cleaner than before we arrived.  That's what friends are for!  It's also good to know that I still hold the title for the spilliest girl in the world.  For this reason, my best friend Sheena doesn't approve of me buying white clothing when we are shopping together.  Well Sheena, I was wearing a white t-shirt at Cleary's house that night, so I guess one point for you.

8-Layered Greek Dip

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This dip is so nice that I made it twice...

within 24 hours of each other...

and ate more than my fair share of it both times...

resulting in a major garlic hangover on both occasions.

And it was soooo worth it.

I am a big fan, big fan, of the 7-layer Tex-Mex dip that everyone knows and loves.  I would guesstimate that I have eaten that dip roughly one million times in my life.  So when I saw the recipe for a 7-layer Greek dip on Pinterest recently, I had to try it.  I traced the recipe on Pinterest back to its original source, Better Homes and Gardens, changed a couple of things around, and added one extra layer for good measure (you're welcome orange and/or yellow bell peppers), for a total of 8 delicious layers of dip.  If you are one of my two regular readers (Hi mom and dad!), you may have noticed that I have been on a bit of a Greek kick lately.

The first night that I made this was as an appetizer for a get-together at our super awesome neighbours' house.  I have to credit my brother for the superb vegetable cutting skills that you see here:

Pretty nice eh?

I doubled the recipe this first night, and the whole thing disappeared (at least half of it in my stomach), with many requests for the recipe.  The next night I brought it as an appetizer to my parents' house for dinner, and again it was a hit.  Both nights I served with pita chips, which I think was the right choice as a scoop.

Let me break this thing down for you:

Classic Creamy Hummus

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Hummus!

Homemade hummus is one of those things that just tastes so much better to me than the store-bought version.  I think it's because the manufacturers of store-bought hummus just don't understand the minimum acceptable garlic requirement.  I want to notice the garlic in my hummus.  I want to feel awkward about my garlic breath after I have eaten my hummus.  I want to know the next day that I ate garlic the day before due to a full-on garlic hangover.  I love garlic.

This hummus recipe is a culmination of about eight different hummus recipes that I have used over the years.  And, I know that I should use dried beans and reconstitute rather than using canned beans, but canned have always tasted great to me (and they are way easier and less time-consuming to use).

I have toiled over how to get creamy and smooth hummus, and have determined that the secret is to puree half of the chickpeas before adding the rest of the ingredients with the second half of the chickpeas.

You can whip this batch of hummus together in less than five minutes, and be dunking carrot sticks and pita bread into it in no time.