Category Archives: food and cooking

Greek cookies and California tomatoes

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At church we’re still busy on Monday nights baking cookies for the upcoming food festival. The fair features foods from the Balkans, Eritrea, Russia, and even Italy. Last Monday we made another Greek cookie and a Bulgarian pastry. I hear that biscotti are on the schedule for next week.

Kourabiedes are reminiscent of Russian Tea Cakes or Louisiana Pecan Balls, only softer. Our recipe uses ground almonds, and we stick a clove in the top of each rolled ball of dough before baking. I see variations in recipes online that use walnuts, roll the dough into different shapes, and leave out cloves altogether. I tasted a cookie and found that the clove does indeed become crumbly during the long baking and is easy to chew. It spices up the cookie very nicely.

The dough itself is not very sweet, so the heavy dusting of powdered sugar while the cookies are warm and again later before serving round out the flavor of the butter and nuts. I found the result to be softer than a Russian Tea Cake, and really yummy.

Pumpkin Banitsa were the second type of dessert made that night. According to Wikipedia this pastry is commonly filled with eggs and cheese, or savory vegetables, but we use a spicy dessert version.

They went into the freezer uncooked, and will be baked the morning of the event. A pumpkin filling gets rolled up in sheets of filo dough – I’ll give you the recipe for that pastry down below.

As is often the case with filo dough, butter is brushed on the thin sheets at intervals. I’m sure that vegan versions of these goodies have been invented, but we like to go with tradition – and lots of butter!
Pumpkin Banitsa
Pumpkin Filo Pastries – A Bulgarian specialty that is traditionally made at Christmas.


2-3 pounds pie pumpkin, peeled and cut into 1″ dice

1 cup brown sugar

1 tablespoon cinnamon

1 1/2 cups walnuts — chopped finely

1 pound filo dough

1 cup butter, melted or clarified (see baklava recipe) powdered sugar and cinnamon for dusting

Makes about 20 pieces

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Place pumpkin on a large baking tray and add 1/4″ of water. Bake until tender, about 30 minutes. Leave oven on to stay preheated for baking finished pastries.

2. Place pumpkin in a large saucepan with sugar and cinnamon. Mash pumpkin and stir to combine. Cook over low heat, stirring constantly, until sugar is dissolved and you have a smooth mixture. Turn off heat, add walnuts and set aside.

3. To make banitsa: Fold a sheet of filo in half. Brush with melted butter. Place 1/4 cup of pumpkin mixture at the bottom center and fold in sides. Roll up, and place on buttered baking sheet, seam side down. Repeat until all filo is used up, placing rolls about 1″ apart. Brush tops with remaining melted butter.

4. Bake for 30 minutes, or until golden brown. Remove from oven and dust with powdered sugar and cinnamon.

I was back at the church kitchen Tuesday morning on the most important and eternally valuable baking job: making the Bread of Offering that becomes the Eucharistic bread. What a blessing to be part of that team!

In the afternoon I picked tomatoes and basil in my garden. And there was so much of both, I needed to use the produce right away.

The tomatoes at right are Rainbows in back, red Early Girls, and little stripey Michael Pollans.

But it was cherry tomatoes I put in the oven to be transformed into Slow-Roasted Cherry Tomatoes. This recipe was my inspiration four years ago, and this is how I made them the first time.

While they were drying out for hours I made several masses of basil pesto in the food processor, totaling 40 oz. This time I used walnuts instead of pine nuts because even at Costco the pine nuts had increased too much in price for me to bear.

Now I can give the basil a deep watering and forget about it for a time. The flowers that had been forming are not there anymore with their warning of the demise of my whole basil patch.

When the tomatoes came out of the oven – they were mostly Juliets and SunGolds – I packed them into the freezer to use for appetizers or garnishes. All that work was yesterday; after crashing and sleeping I woke with enough energy to tell all about it.

In our area we can look forward to harvesting tomatoes and basil through September and up until a frost. Those of you who say your tomatoes are “done” — is that because they are determinate varieties? I wish I could give you some of my now bountiful harvest. I can now look forward to BLT’s and tomato-basil salad and salsa. Cookies we can do anytime, but Summer is for tomatoes.

Koulourakia and Colors

church, food and cooking, other gardens, , ,
first twist

At church again, this time for baking cookies for that upcoming festival. We made koulourakia, which most of us bakers can’t pronounce, so we call them “the twisty Greek cookies.”

The dough, made with seven pounds of butter, had been prepared last night and stored in the fridge. We scooped it out with melon-ballers and rolled the balls into ropes.

Japanese anemone

And outside I caught this graceful and lovely flower in bud and bloom. I haven’t looked it up yet to find out what it is….though I might have known in the past. Do you recognize it? (update: Jo tells me in the comments it is a Japanese anemone.)

GJ twisting

After being twisted, the cookies get an egg wash and then a sprinkling of sesame seeds. They are basically a butter cookie, and though some recipes include orange juice and/or zest, our current version is “plain.” But I came home with my hands smelling anything but plain.

In our back yard now we have three cherry-sort of tomatoes: Juliet (red); Sun Gold and Sunsugar (orange); and Michael Pollan (pointy green striped). So I can put them all in a salad to colorize it! Not to mention, this year I have three colors of nasturtiums, red, orange and yellow — so I put all those petals in my salad as well. That’s a visual feast as well as a feast for the palate, as last night’s guest said.

In case you can’t see all three tomatoes, here is a close-up:

Today the thermometer reached 75° – woohoo –
so we hope we are in a warming trend.

Not Lazy Summer Days

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To be precise, summer only began yesterday, so I shouldn’t be complaining about the lack of hours sitting on a patio with tea, or in the shade reading a book. I will likely yet have time before we get to the fall equinox for solitary early-morning weeding sessions in the garden while towhees splash in the birdbath nearby. But lately I’ve been doing so many fun and good things, I’ve been getting a bit depleted.

A week ago today, I was baking pies. It was a satisfyingly creative job, even if I did have a huge mess afterward.

Initially I wanted to bake an apple pie for the father of my children, for Father’s Day. And at church the ladies were bringing in pies for the agape meal, also in honor of the day. I made three for that contribution, using up some flaked coconut and other goodies in my pantry.

This one above left was named Million Dollar Pie where I found the recipe online, but as I improved it by cutting the sugar in half, I’ll make that Two Million Dollars. It must have tasted like a candy bar, what with the coconut, chocolate chips and walnuts it featured, but none was left over for me to try.

The recipe I found for Coconut Pineapple Pie made two pies from a 14-oz. bag of flaked coconut and a large can of crushed pineapple, with some eggs and butter, etc. in the mix. I did get a taste of that concoction, and I wonder if it might have had more zing if I’d used a name brand of pineapple. Even with its sugar cut in half it was a little too blandly sweet for me, but people liked it.

My newest favorite kitchen gadget got used that day: silicone pie crust shields. In the past I used aluminum foil to keep my crusts from getting too brown, but foil is not nearly as handy.

The day after Father’s Day grandson “Pat” flew to California all by his lonesome from D.C.’s Ronald Reagan Airport, mostly to spend a while with Pippin’s family, but we grandparents had the happy task of meeting him at the Oakland airport. Oakland is next door to Berkeley, where year by year I as a child visited my own grandparents, so we stopped in that old neighborhood of Indian Rock and Indian Rock Park in the Berkeley Hills.

Indian Rock

My sisters and I used to play here, just down the block from my grandma’s house, and even my father had his picture taken on the Rock when he was a small boy. It’s such a lovely thing that the houses were built all around this cluster of craggy boulders that seem more likely to be found in the Sierra Nevada. Pat climbed “cross country” on them, while we older people used the flights of steps long ago cut in the rock.

My father in 1927

From the top you can see far and wide, both the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge, and at the bottom, where the hill slopes into the town of Albany, it’s possible to walk down to Solano Avenue by way of stairs passing between houses. It takes only a few minutes to go this way, descending to shops and in my grandma’s time, her beauty parlor and the ice cream parlor that she let us visit by ourselves. Those were the days when children were safe.

After a couple of days having Pat all to ourselves, I drove him north to have adventures with the Professor and fun little cousins.; we listened to most of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader on the way up, with me interrupting frequently to say, “Would you look at all those sunflowers!” (There were a couple of thousand acres, I think, visible from I-5.) and “Those are tomatoes in that field, and this is alfalfa….” Sadly, we couldn’t get one of those faraway views of Mt. Shasta because of clouds.

I had a few sweet hours with Scout and Ivy before I wore myself out driving back the very next day. I needed to come home and get ready for multiple house guests, and for events such as the much anticipated Feast of Pentecost.

Friday morning when I was back watering the garden I discovered that more of my unusually colored California poppies had bloomed, like this one.

A brief look-around at my flowers didn’t seem to be enough R&R, though, so I asked Mr. Glad to take me to the coast where I could “just sit and stare at the ocean.” He was happy to comply.


The weather wasn’t as summery and calm as the predictors had led us to expect, but the fog hung around only thinly so that we mostly noticed the sunshine. I tied a bandana around my head so that the wind wouldn’t make a total tangle of my hair, and we sat in the lee of a sand dune where I could rake my fingers through the warm sand for an hour.

I don’t know how long I may have to wait to experience even a short string of rejuvenating days, but for now I think my half of a lazy afternoon will do nicely.