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Za’atar is the blend I reach for when a dish needs to taste finished. Herbal first, then tangy from sumac, then nutty from toasted sesame, it turns a piece of bread and a dish of olive oil into something worth sitting down for. UC Cooperative Extension Master Food Preservers describe za’atar as a dried herb…
Open a jar of supermarket oregano and you’ll probably smell something faint, dusty and vaguely herbal. Crush a pinch of good Greek oregano between your fingers and it’s a different herb entirely: sharp, warm, almost peppery, with a bite that lingers on your tongue. That difference is why Greek salads, roasted potatoes and grilled fish…
The recipe calls for a tablespoon of fresh thyme. You have a jar of dried. Do you use a tablespoon of that instead? (Please don’t.) Or skip it altogether? Swapping fresh and dried herbs is one of the most common kitchen questions, and the answer isn’t just a number. Yes, there’s a simple conversion ratio,…
The moment it clicked for me was a pinch of dried oregano at a market stall, crushed between a vendor’s fingers and held under my nose. It smelled sharp, warm and almost peppery, nothing like the gray-green dust in the jar back home. That jar, I realized, wasn’t seasoning anything. It was decoration. I wasn’t…
Gigantes plaki is the Greek dish that proves a pot of beans can be the main event. Big, creamy beans bake slowly in a thick tomato sauce with onion, carrot, celery, dill and plenty of olive oil, until the top catches and the oil pools at the edges. My first batch had firm beans and…
Caponata is the dish that taught me eggplant can taste luxurious. Sicily’s sweet-and-sour eggplant stew, an agrodolce of tomato, celery, olives, capers, raisins and vinegar, is salty, tangy and sweet all at once, and it gets better as it sits. My first batch, though, was heavy and swimming in oil. The fix came down to…
“Don’t fry with extra virgin olive oil, the smoke point is too low.” If you’ve spent any time in American cooking forums, you’ve heard it. Meanwhile, cooks in Spain, Greece and southern Italy have been frying eggplant, potatoes, fish and fritters in olive oil for generations. So who’s right? The short answer: yes, you can…
Fig & Brine started at a farmers market stall, with a paper bag of figs and a tub of glossy olives. That’s still how I think about Mediterranean shopping: a few simple, whole ingredients doing most of the work. The hard part isn’t knowing what to eat. It’s walking into a big American grocery store…
Most meal plans fall apart by Wednesday. They ask for a brand-new recipe every night, three fresh herbs you’ll use once, and a grocery bill that makes takeout look tempting. So when I built this Mediterranean week, I set one rule: cook once, eat several times. This 7-day Mediterranean diet meal plan is built around…