Greek Night At Almost Heaven South - Around The World Meal

The inspiration for a meal can be pretty well out there sometimes as evidenced by this one.  Bev had a cucumber that she had grown and wanted to use and decided she’d like to make it into Tzatziki sauce.  But what are you going to do with it was the next question to which she came up with a souvlaki recipe from Food & Wine.  Then I suggested that we just use this meal as our regular Thursday night offering for our friends and we make Greek potatoes as a side.  So this whole meal began with one over sized home-grown cucumber.

After a little research, it seems that souvlaki is meat grilled on a skewer, so this may not actually be souvlaki, but what ever it is, the original souvlaki recipe was for four servings but I wanted to make two batches with six servings each and the recipe for one six-serving batch is shown below.  Click on the link for the original recipe.

Pork Souvlaki – Adapted from Food & Wine

The Ingredients:

2 pounds trimmed pork shoulder, cut into 3-by- 1/2-inch strips

1½ large onion, cut through the root end into 1/2-inch wedges

½ cup plus 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

¼+ cup fresh lemon juice, plus lemon wedges for serving

3 tablespoons chopped fresh oregano

2 garlic cloves, mashed to a paste

¾ t. Kosher salt

¾ t. black pepper

Tzatziki sauce (see below) and Warm pita, for serving

The Process:   

In a medium bowl, toss the pork strips and onion wedges with the olive oil, lemon juice, chopped oregano and the garlic paste. Season with 1½ teaspoons of salt and ½ teaspoon of pepper and let stand for 20 minutes.

Heat a large cast-iron griddle or grill pan until very hot. Add the pork and onion wedges along with any marinade and cook over high heat, turning once or twice, until the pork and onion are tender. 

Transfer the pork and onion to plates and serve with the tzatziki, lemon wedges and pita.

Bev made the tzatziki sauce using the recipe from Cookie & Kate and I won’t reproduce it here.  We blended it up with the immersion blender and added a little milk to thin it.  I thought it was very good and would use the recipe again.

The recipe for Greek potatoes came from All Recipes and I doubled the liquid amounts and used five pounds of potatoes.

Greek Style Potatoes - Adapted from Allrecipes for this double recipe

The Ingredients:

2/3 cup olive oil

3 cups water

4 cloves garlic, finely chopped

½ cup fresh lemon juice

2 teaspoon dried thyme

2 teaspoon dried rosemary

1 heaping Tbsp chicken base

ground black pepper to taste

5 lb. medium russet potatoes, peeled and cut into wedges

The Process:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).

In a bowl, mix olive oil, water, garlic, lemon juice, thyme, rosemary, bouillon cubes and pepper.

Arrange potatoes evenly on two jelly roll pans. Pour the olive oil mixture over the potatoes. Cover with foil and bake 1 hour in the preheated oven, turning occasionally, until tender but firm.

The Verdict: 

I thought everything was delicious and I believe this was the first time I’d ever eaten souvlaki – but I would definitely eat it again.  Our friends, who had gotten one batch of souvlaki and 2½ pounds of the potatoes said it was great and the four of them ate everything but two potato wedges.

Photos can be enlarged by clicking on them and the blue words are links.

Have a great day and thanks for stopping by Almost Heaven South.

Larry

8/20/20 event date