Category Archives: Food & Friends

Extracting cooking and recipe  secrets from my grandmother Fotini sometimes feels like investigating a CIA spy. You really need to break it down to details in order to get the correct information.

Taking notes while Fotini give us instructions to make the lemonade.

She tends to hold the little details so she still makes the best whatever-she-is-cooking-thing. The idea of measurements is also missing, so when I explain her that we need to give clear instructions for the recipe so other people can make it too, she will come back to me with funny descriptions that work only as na inside-family code.

For example when I asked her what temperature the sugar syrup should have before adding the lemon juice, she naturally answered : “The same as when you add the yeast to make yogurt”.

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Today we all want to wish Happy Birthday to our friend Niko… May the Giafka be with you xoxoxo

It’s been more than a year since I last updated this website and it’s a shame. It’s a shame as a lot of friends all over the world have actually asked me to update it and I haven’t responded.

Nevertheless in the meantime I was pretty lucky to enjoy cooking with/for friends a lot and it was nothing but a pleasure to me. So the important part was done and documented, waiting in my hard drives patiently to be published.

So here am I, back to Greece again to our beloved “Giafka”. I returned from a trip to Goma, DRC just a couple of days ago while Georgia who is now working at Evros supporting  a medical project for immigrants, came back  to Athens for R&R. So we decided to celebrate this with a proper dinner of course.

So the funny part of the story today!

I had prepared almost everything for the soup and I was a step away from blending it when I realized that i was missing the european socket adaptor. Our blender was purchased in Uganda and carries a British outlet. We only had one adaptor at the house and it was Mimi’s (my other roommate). Mimi is actually in Vietnam or Cambodia or somewhere in the area with the “triorofo” gang on holidays. Georgia texted her to ask whether she has the adaptor or she knows where is it. Don’t forget it is a bit late evening, Saturday night and the possibilities of finding a place to buy an adaptor and enjoy our soup were of course minimum. Anyway we got no answer for a while. However we have this mini market shop in the neighborhood, just a across our house, owned by an old sweet guy, Mr Giorgos who just happen to have everything. I actually would like to call his shop “Mr Giorgos wonder store” cause he has managed to fit everything in pretty limited space, one might say. Long story short, Georgia found a universal adaptor at his shop and we managed to blend the soup.

While we were eating our soup  Mimi replied to the text:
” If you want to know about the adaptor so you can use the blender, I am not going to tell you cause tomorrow that I am coming back you will be all wasted and hang over-ed” (referring to a possibility of using the blender to mix cocktails).