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Spanish Lavender (Lavandula stoechas)

Posted on March 19, 2018September 26, 2019 by Mostly Greek: "Living a Village-ish Life in Suburban California"

The scent of lavender is incomparable. Good thing that lavenders tend to be profuse bloomers!

Continue reading Spanish Lavender (Lavandula stoechas)

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Posted in Drought Tolerant, Flowering Plants, Gardening, Herbs, The Plants We Grow, UncategorizedTagged Drought Tolerant, Gardening, gardening information, Herbs, lavender2 Comments

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Welcome to Mostly-Greek! I’m Dorie, a Greek mom and yiayia (grandma) living the suburban life with my family in the heart of California like it’s a Greek village!

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I hate the heat of summer, but I love what it makes possible. I guess I'll just have to put up with it all by stuffing my face with all sorts of yummy treats. Oh darn. Tucked inside this sweet crumb topped coffee cake is a layer of brightly flavored, fresh nectarines. Their sweet flavor is complimented by the slight tang from the cake itself, because it's made with sourdough starter! I know we don't typically think of sweets and sourdough together, but it's time we did! This is a perfect way to enjoy the flavors of the season, and equally perfect for breakfast, a midday treat, or good ole dessert. So come on over for the recipe, and remember summer won't last forever!

The plums keep coming and I'm not even upset about it. A little tired, maybe, from processing them all, but grateful for the bounty. Each year I will put up the plums we get in various ways (see yesterday's post for one), but I will inevitably make this Greek plum cake at least once each summer. It's an easy and delicious treat and we happily enjoy it in the morning with our coffee or in the afternoon with our frappe (yes, more coffee!). It's a lightly sweet pastry that you can enjoy without feeling grossly weighed down like a lot of other cakes will, and since it has fruit it's healthy, right? I don't care, I'm going to eat it anyway! 😄 Come on over and enjoy a slice, too, and let's at least make the best out of summer's heat!

Our plums are so ripe that they are literally falling off the tree in clusters. We are harvesting them as fast as we can but it's still not fast enough. Most will get dried or frozen to be saved for later, but there will always be some saved for making jam. Especially the variety that is ripe now. The flesh is tasty but the skins are mouth puckeringly tart! This is actually the ideal plum for preserves and baking because that tart skin adds just the right flavor to offset the sweetness of the sugar used. The other great thing about that skin is that it is high in pectin which means that turning these purple skinned beauties into jam is even easier because you don't need to fuss with commercial pectin (which is notoriously fussy!). This is the perfect way to save summer in a jar and be able to enjoy it all year long! This recipe is so easy, so come on over for a visit, and if you're tall, I hope you don't mind me asking you to reach the fruits at the top of the tree! 😁

Happy first day of summer!! We are crashing headfirst into the season with a high of 103 F for today, being followed by several days of 103 - 105 F temperatures. These are the days when cooking inside doesn't happen, and even grilling outside is unbearable. Seriously, who wants to stand in front of a hot box filled with fire when it feels like the surface of the sun already? This is salad season, and I'm quite happy that it's here. You see, I actually like salad because it gives me an excuse to eat large quantities of my favorite blue cheese dressing without people giving me the side-eye. Blue cheese pairs so well with all sorts of leafy greens, including ones with a little bite to it like arugula or mizuna. It also compliments both salty and sweet salad toppings like bacon crumbles and fresh or dried fruit. The problem is finding a good blue cheese dressing, but if you make your own then problem solved! It. Is. So. Easy!! Like 5 minutes kind of easy. (And just in case you were worried about it, no, there's no mayonnaise involved.) All you have to do is come on over for a visit to get the recipe!

I think our kitty crop is coming along nicely.

There are a few food related memories that I have from my childhood involving my grandparents. They liked to experiment with new recipes together in their retirement years and I can honestly say that I never had a bad meal by their hands. But being a kid at the time when I visited them the most, it's the more simple things I remember best. One was the jar of sun tea that would be brewing by the door of the back porch that led to their garden. There would be multiple bags of the ubiquitous Lipton tea held in place by a screw top lid while the liquid turned that dark golden brown color. I recently revived that traditional way of making iced tea, but I like to spice things up a bit with a mixture of herbal tea flavors along with the quintessential black tea. The result is a richly flavored beverage just perfect for cooling off with on a hot summer day that the whole family can enjoy. We also stir in some traditional Greek spoon sweet instead of plain sugar for an added boost of flavor. I have all the info you need on how to properly make this old fashioned favorite, so come on over for a visit!

Did you know that today is International Feta Day? Well now you do!! This fun "holiday" was started as way to have something positive and positively delicious to focus on when things around the world were looking pretty bad a couple of years ago (pretty sure we all know why😔). What better way to celebrate than to make the most quintessential Greek treat using feta, tyropitakia (Greek feta filled phyllo pastry). The filling I make uses only feta for the cheese, so every bite is filled with that wonderful tangy flavor. The wrapping with the phyllo isn't difficult, and I have a whole post on tips for success in case you haven't used it before. So come on over for the recipe and let's enjoy Feta Day together!

One of the frustrating things about gardening is that so much of what you plant DIES in just a few short months. And then, get this, you know it's going to happen so you replant the same thing the following season, fully expecting it to die AGAIN. This is what happens with most garden vegetables, so if you want to harvest anything, you have to do this crazy cycle on repeat, year after year. However, there are a few garden crops that are a little more generous and will provide an extended season, or maybe even several seasons, of bountiful harvests. Broccoli is one of them. Many varieties will produce multiple side shoots after the main head is cut, and they are also somewhat cold tolerant, so you can gather throughout the year. These heads of Romanesco Broccoli are from seeds planted last year and this is the third or fourth harvest from them. I have more information about growing Broccoli on my blog (plus some tasty recipes using them), so come on over for a visit!

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