Hot Fig Salad

Hot. Cold. Salty. Earthy. Creamy. Crunchy. Stinky. Sweet. Bitter. Hammy. Gooey.
Makes 4 servings.

For the figs

8 ripe figs (Mission figs here, with the near-black purple skin)
4 oz blue cheese (the stinkier the better, Wikipedia can tell you all 'bout blue cheese)
1/4 lb thin sliced parma prociutto (in SF, I shop at Lucca's Ravioli Co. for Italian products)

For the rest

8 cups loosely packed baby arugula (or baby spinach, if ye be brave)
2 cups toasted walnut halves
1 T dijon mustard
2 T extra virgin olive oil
4 T balsamic vinegar
salt & freshly ground black pepper

Ready: Pre-heat the broiler in your full-sized oven or in your toaster oven. Rinse and dry your arugula; it's a delicate green, a salad spinner does the job best.

For the figs

Prep: Cut stems off figs and slice each in half the long way. Push a finger tip gently into the middle of each fig half; this indentation will hug the cheese. Cut or crumble the blue cheese into 16 equal pieces. Cut each slice o'prociutto the long way so you wind up with 16 strips a 1/2 inch wide.
Assemble: Cram a piece of cheese into a fig half. Wrap a strip of prociutto around the cheese-stuffed-fig like a salty hammy belt. Put the fig half cheese-side up on a small tray and reapeat with the rest of the figs. If your guests arrive early, this is something they can help you with if you trust them to not nibble. Keep an eye on 'em anyway. It's hard to trust people around figs.

...Get'em hot. Put the tray of figs under the broiler for just a minute or two. You want to crisp the prociutto and melt the cheese.

...While you're broiling. Whisk together the oil, vinegar, dijon mustard and salt and pepper to taste to make a simple vinagrette. Don't use some crud from a bottle. Grab an arugula leaf and dip it in the vinagrete to taste your dressing. Adjust the ingredients as you like to suit your tongue and your arugula.

Set: Don't forget to take the figs outta the oven. Put the well-dried arugula in a large serving bowl. Right before serving, drizzle half your vinagrette - don't dump all of it at once though, overdressed salad is the most depressing thing - on the arugula and gently toss to coat; your hands are the best, gentle tools for this. If you need more dressing, put more on, a few teaspoons at a time. Wash your salady hands.
Present: Divide the arugula into four bowls. Give each bowl a fourth of the nuts. Stack the hot figs on top of the salad like boats tossed onto a beach after a storm. Crack pepper over the salad. Serve it up immediately, while the figs are still HOT.

When baked ziti meets pizza, life knows no bounds

Blessed New York pizza. The left is topped with eggplant Parmesan, which - for the uninitiated - is breaded and fried thin slices of eggplant, layered in a deep dish with tomato sauce, mozzarella and blobs of ricotta baked to bubbling.

The right is buried under baked ziti, typically a casserole-like dish where ziti pasta tubes are tossed with tomato sauce, mixed with ricotta, topped with mozzarella and baked until the edges of the ziti develops a salivatingly crunchy edge that works with and against the melted cheeses.

Here, an enterprising pizza man dumped the dishes on top of pizza. The ziti pizza in particular is a masterful experiment in Italian-Italian Fusion cuisine.


Other choices included (top shelf) sausage rolls, calzones, and pizzas including: (three closest, from left) fresh tomato and basil, chicken, and tomato sauce-less white pizza.

A key difference in New York pizza preparation is that the pizza is made then left to rest and cool on the counter for hours. You pick your slice and it is reheated in in one minute a blazing hot oven. Something about allowing the pizza to rest combined with re-baking makes the 'za sublime.

After enduring months of pale, feeble San Francisco pizza, it was a tough choice.


Spinach and pepperoni pizza rolls, eaten as a pre-pizza appetizer by true devotees of 'za.

Greek food

While travelling around three Greek Islands in May with Todd, I documented nearly every
mezes and meal we shared. I hope to also add stories about our Greece travels, so check back.

The Mezes Matrix

	Breakfast	Lunch	Dinner
Day 1				Read Day 1 food
Day 2				Read Day 2 food
Day 3	skipped the most important meal of the day			Read Day 3 food
Day 4				Read Day 4 food
Day 5				Read Day 5 food
Day 6				Read Day 6 food
Day 7		was too hungry, forgot to take the pic		Read Day 7 food
Day 8				Read Day 8 food
Day 9				Read Day 9 food

These images and more are from my Flickr photos.

Greece ~ Day 9: food

Focused on the food. All descriptions read left-most picture, from back to front, L to R, then to the next photo.



Breakfast:"Continental breakfast" was included at our hotel, which was bread, butter, jelly and American-style coffee or tea. They don't get butter and jelly in jail so it wasn't a complete disaster.

Lunch: Since this was our last full day on a Greek island, we were committed to spending it on the beach. The sand is actually pummeled volcanic rock, so the heat of a hot and sunny day is magnified. We started with chocolate ice cream shakes and later had our first and only gyros. They were the perfect greasy food for lounging on the beach.

Todd made the gyro-getting trek. "Gyros" is pronounced yeer-OH, not the New Yorker ji-ro way. Todd said the conversation between him and the gyro guy went like this:

TODD: "I'd like two yeer-OHs please."
GYROGUY: "That'll be three ee-ros."
TODD: "No, TWO yeer-OHs."
GYROGUY: "Costs three ee-ros for two yeer-OHs."
TODD: "Oh." (hands over 3 Euros)

Dinner: We really tried to find another restaurant that looked as good as Lava - in San Francisco, since we we don't eat out a lot, Todd and I have had an off-and-on rule that we can't go back to the same restauarant twice unless we are introducing friends to a favorite place or we can only order dishes we haven't tried before. Nothing looked as tempting as going to Lava again for our last Greek Island dinner.

Sticking to part two of the rule, we ordered white wine, baked eggplants with tomato, mussels with rice in a tomato sauce, and pastisio, a casserole of macaroni and tomato-meat sauce topped with cheesy bechamel. It was all outstanding.

Greece ~ Day 8: postcard

"After many days and thousands of miles and multiple modes of transportation - trains to planes to tubes to feet to planes to buses to boats to cars to ATVs to more boats and more boats, we're a mite tired. We are not lazy travelers. We must see. Eat. Experience. Explore. Wear ourselves out essentially. So we force ourselves to schlep to the town of Perissa on the island of Thira on the island cluster of Santorini in the Cyclades Islands in Greece, etc. Perissa is one of the beaches of black lavalicious, toe-searing, off-putting sand. We split our time between being sprawled, sweating under beach umbrellas or swimming in our hotel pool. Then, we are relaxed and ready - if reluctant - to begin our long journey home via a 10 hour slowboat ride to Athens, where we have another 10 hours to while away (from 8pm to 6am unfortunately), via a flight layover in Milan via two days in Ft. Lauderdale for a friend's wedding. Voyage!!

XOXO - Lauren & Todd"

Greece ~ Day 8: food

Focused on the food. All descriptions read left-most picture, from back to front, L to R, then to the next photo.



Breakfast: Another day on the move as we bused from Karterados, the town where we stayed our first two nights on Santorini, to Perissa on the southeast coast, with black lava beaches. I'm eating a chocolate-filled croissant, a Greek favorite (Todd read that somewhere, I have no idea if it's true).

Lunch: Got off the bus in Perissa starved and with our heavy backpacks in tow. It's a beach town so we knew the odds were against us finding a decent restaurant in the main stretch, but with our bags, we couldn't go far. Oh, and it was a sunny 95 degrees. We had dolmades, grape leaves stuffed with herbed rice; "mushroom risotto"; and feta baked with tomato and green pepper. Todd really wanted the mushroom dish, he's a mountain man who had been without his favorite fungi for a while now. It was possibly one of the most worthless dishes we've ever eaten, essentially canned mushrooms boiled with some straight cream. At least the portion was generous - we were so hungry we actually ate it. As to the rest: the dolmas were ok, the feta was good, but impossible to screw up really.

Dinner: We asked the advice of the overly-tanned white Irish guy who we had to pay to use beach chairs, who recommended we schlep to Lava restaurant, on the beach, but away from the campground and bus stop. We arrived after an easy kilometer of walking along the beachside road. Lava's approach is apparently how most restaurants in Greece used to be setup, you sit at a table, order your drinks then are ushered into the kitchen. There are no menus, instead the night's dishes are displayed in hot trays, and you select what looks good. If you have any questions, the chef is there to answer your questions. Faced with about 3 dozen options, some vegetarian, some meat-heavy, some fishy, we chose dishes we hadn't even seen on other restaurant menus.

A local decent red wine. Red peppers stuffed with cracked wheat, herbs and some sort of nut; pasta with tender, meaty, grilled chopped octopus and a simple tomato sauce which was unbelievable; and halved fennel bulbs topped with asparagus spears and topped with cheese. We were estatic to finally see fennel bulbs, with all the fennel-seed flavored ouzo, you'd think the fennel bulb would be on every menu, but no dice. After the meal, we just managed to eat the complimentary fresh, perfectly sweet cherries.

Greece ~ Day 7: postcard

"Today we enjoyed a sweat-making and hunger inducing day at "Boot Camp Santorini," a tourist package sold as a lovely day exploring the beauty of this Greek Island. The brochure touts a refreshing walk on the active volcano mini-island off the main island coast, an invigorating swim in a hot spring in the sea, a lunch time meander through a little town and a stunning sunset from another little town, Oia, back on the main Santorini Island. The reality: a hot, parched hike on the dusty black dirt of the volcano with a few breaths of sulfur steam for good measure (with an informative, enthusiastic guide), a shocking plunge into frigid sea water followed by a straining swim to rust-riddled warmish muddy springs, too exhausted to hike up a cliff to the little town because its either a grueling hike accompanied by the odor and avoidance of donkey poo, or a ride on a diarrhea-prone donkey. It was a worthwhile day, both the pleasure tour promised and the painful punishment in one.

XOXO - Lauren & Todd"

Greece ~ Day 7: food

Focused on the food. All descriptions read left-most picture, from back to front, L to R, then to the next photo.



Breakfast: Before heading off on our tour of Santorini, we shared a savory, delicious tyropita, or cheese pie standing at the bus stop.

Lunch: No photo yet. We ate simple lunches at a port cafeteria. Chicken souvlaki for Todd, fish souvlaki for me.

Dinner: Instead of dinner, since we had lunch at 3 p.m. again, we snacked just before sunset. We were at the end of our tour, in the beautiful town of Oia, back on the main Santorini island. In a cafe on the edge of the caldera, I had a 7-year aged Mexaxa (Greek brandy), which went straight to my head, Todd had a juice, and we shared a galaktoboureko, a traditional dessert with a filo crust around custard, drizzled with a sweet syrup. At least, I think this is galaktoboureko - it doesn't look much like the recipes I've looked up since. But, isn't it all just so dang pretty?

Greece ~ Day 6: postcard

"'OH!! Wait!' I cry in my booming NY-best voice at the men folding up the stairs to the boat - our boat, our only boat for days and days. To go from Amorgos to our next island, Santorini. They pull the steps back down and we are on our way...just a couple of hours later the caldera - the cliffs making a stand on the inside curve of Santorini's main island's crescent moon - rises above our boat, topped with a white icing of precarious white buildings. We dock and take a ride from our hotel owner up a reckless switchback road cut into a piece of the cliff. Later, we wander through the tight twisted streets of Fira, the main tourist trap and insane asylum of kitschy shops built on the edge of a volcano-formed and still lava-inclined precipice. We escape the frenzy of cruise-ship crowds and spring-break party girls and nosh at a roof deck restaurant looking towards the calmer opposite coast of rational beaches and simple shorelines. Just over halfway through our trip, we piddle away the remainder of the day shopping and snacking on pastries sticky with honey and sipping local wine.

XOXO - Lauren & Todd"

Greece ~ Day 6: food

Focused on the food. All descriptions read left-most picture, from back to front, L to R, then to the next photo.



Breakfast: More yogurt with fruit, walnuts and honey and Greek coffee for me. Todd has a mixed fruit juice of kiwis, bananas, oranges and who knows what else. Not pictured is Todd's crepe which was forgotten by the nice restaurant owner and waiter. Waiting for the crepe almost made us miss our boat to Santorini, which was the only boat leaving for days.

Lunch: After fighting the tourist hordes in the main town of Fira on the main island of Santorini, Todd and I escaped for lunch. Since it was 3 pm our eyes were bigger than our stomachs. Moussaka, an eggplant, tomato and lamb casserole topped with cheesy bechamel; tomato balls, overly bready and tomato-y only in color fried blobs; local white wine; the scary pink schmear is taramosalata, carp roe (eggs) blended with soaked bread, onion, garlic and olive oil - it's way better than it sounds and looks; and a Santorini panzanella, or bread salad, toasted bread cubes tossed with large capers, tomatoes, onions, lettuce and a hard local cheese.

Dinner: Lunch was enough for us, and we were exhausted so we stopped at a bakery for local honey pastries and picked up some white wine.