Author: Despina Yeargin

Inspired by the wild greens foraging all over Greece, this is a typical seasonal dish. You go for a hike with a small knife and a large bag and collect whatever’s growing in the wild. When you get home, you look at what’s growing in your garden and what you’ve accumulated in your pantry, and…

  This is Robert. He’s a good sport! How to Win Friends & Influence People. Well, in our neighborhood, you feed them! Our neighbor and friend Robert Greer is a great guy. He loves fishing, he loves his life partner and wife, Denise, and he loves this lamb shank recipe that I developed one day…

Time for another installment in my YOU CAN COOK series. This time I show you how easy it is to INVENT A SALAD. Yes, you can cook, and you can create (invent) a salad out of a bit of this and a bit of that and your favorite foods for inspiration. Today’s example. In the…

Greeks are famous for their pastries. While other Middle Eastern countries have similar pastries, it seems that the Greek versions are better know. We have baklava, the favorite of the Western world, and bougatsa, the custardy treat that international travelers discover in Athens as a warm breakfast walking and eating treat. We also have the…

The Perfect Summer Salad. Oh, my goodness! What a wonderful expression of summer anywhere in the Mediterranean! Salade Nicoise, the simple salad from Nice, is nothing fancy, however, it is amazing in its simplicity of assembly and perfectly sunshiny in that so many fresh vegetable flavors represent summertime on your palate. You can find my…

Briam is a Greek roasted vegetable dish like ratatouille, which makes it seem a natural transition to a baguette, which is French, like ratatouille, which is similar to briam, which is Greek. Am I going in circles? Yes. What am I trying to say here? Read on, but if you’d rather go straight to the…

The Mediterranean Diet done the Greek Way is easy.  Mostly, you’ll cook one vegetable dish and call it dinner. I have curated a huge sampling of recipes from my blog–Greek recipes and a few others. They’re all meatless, and many are vegan. This is the type of one-pot meal that Greeks enjoy throughout the week…

The Mediterranean Diet is prescribed by many doctors and dieticians as one of the healthiest. Just this year, it was selected for the fifth year in a row as the healthiest diet in the world by a panel of experts assembled by U.S. News and World Reports. But is it? This diet that I was born…

In the United States, barbeque means smoking meats using all-wood coals. For most of us, it also means preparing the meat with a rub and finishing it up with a glaze of our own barbeque sauce or our favorite prepared sauce. In England and Australia, barbeque is the result of what we identify here as grilling…

There are a few Greek words familiar to the Western eye, but which are also confounding when they have to be pronounced. Retsina, tzatziki and gyro. A few Greek recipes are confounding also. In this post, I’ll show you how to pronounce and prepare a Greek festival- or restaurant-worthy gyro sandwich and the garlicky sauce…