Light and Simple Veggies

Spring is officially here, and with the warmer weather arrives an abundance of fresh spring vegetables. Those garden vegetables and leafy greens are just begging to be steamed and doused in fresh extra virgin olive oil. No complexity here, just three basic ingredients: sea salt, fresh squeezed lemon, and extra virgin olive oil - if you have it, the grassiness of a fresh Koroneiki oil from Greece is positively delicious on veggies!

A simple way to prepare some basic veggies and offer a great side-dish to any meal, is to prepare them steamed or lightly boiled. It can be as basic as potatoes and zucchini, or you can add carrots, cauliflower, or broccoli - just about anything works. Simply steam or boil the veggies to your desired texture. If using potatoes, I usually boil them first for 10 minutes, then add the other veggies to cook for another 10-15 minutes. When ready, place the cooked veggies in a dish, sprinkle with salt, squeeze some fresh lemon, and pour on the olive oil! It may not sound all that exciting, but if you're using a fresh, flavorful olive oil, it will bring the vegetables to a whole new level.


Have some leafy greens you're not sure what to do with? Just lightly steam them, then pour-on those three simple ingredients! If you are lucky enough to live in Crete, you have a plethora of amazing wild greens to choose from this time of year. One of my favorites is stamnagathi (pictured), a nutritiously bitter local green, also known as spiny chicory. Not in Crete? No problem - any greens will do. Try spinach, dandelion, kale, collards, mustard, or chard. All fiber-packed veggies are rich in vitamins A, C, K and folate. Throw some omega-3, antioxidant-rich extra virgin olive oil on them and you're all set for your next clean bill of health!

Olive Pomace Oil - What it is and why to avoid it.

Olive Pomace Oil - you may have come across this product conspicuously placed next the the extra virgin olive oils in your local supermarket and wondered what exactly this stuff is. You see the word 'olive', it's next to the extra virgin, and the packaging sure looks nice - a romantic picture of a woman happily picking olives from a tree in the fields of Italy somewhere. Don't be fooled. Olive pomace oil is actually a bi-product of olive oil pressing and is heavily refined - placing it in the same category of oils as Canola, Corn, Vegetable or any other refined seed oil. Remember, whatever oils you're using, if you can't literally squeeze oil out of it (ever tried squeezing oil out of a corn kernal?), it's been heavily refined.

So what exactly does it mean when you hear the words 'refined oil' and why the negative connotation? In an excerpt from Tom Mueller's excellent book, Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil, the author visits a pomace plant in Italy where they receive and process "huge piles of pomace, the solid residue of olive skins, stems, pits, and leaves left over from olive oil extraction, which actually still contains about 8 percent of the oil made by the olives." He goes on to explain the process:

"Front-end loaders dump the pomace into a large hopper, from which it moves into a steel tube heated by the furnaces, that rotates slowly until most of the moisture in the pomace has evaporated. The dried pomace is transferred into tall silos and drenched with hexane, and industrial solvent. After the residual oil dissolves into the hexane, leaving the pomace, a blast of steam as loud as a cannon-shot drives the mixture of solvent and oil into a separate tank, where it's heated to evaporate off the hexane. What's left is a dense, black liquid known as crude pomace oil. Before this oil can be sold as food, it's piped into a refinery in an adjoining building for desolventization, deacidification, deodorization, degumming, and other chemical processes. The resulting clear, odorless, tasteless fat is blended with a small quantity of extra virgin olive oil to give it flavor, and is sold as "olive pomace oil."

Mmm, sounds delicious, no? Basically all of the healthful properties that make extra virgin olive oil such an amazing super food are all but lost in the refining process of pomace oil and what you are left with is no better than any other seed oil, which in my opinion should all be avoided as much as possible.

I feel this is an important topic to discuss after a recent conversation with some family members who were enjoying an evening dinner at an up-scale restaurant in their area. As is common today, their waitress started off their meal with a basket of bread and a dish of oil for dipping. When asked what kind of olive oil it was, the waitress returned from the kitchen, proudly stating that it was a pomace oil from Italy! Now I don't know about you, but I'd much rather be given butter, thank you! You wouldn't dip your bread in canola oil now, would you?

Therefore I offer a challenge: the next time you are at a restaurant being served oil in that little white dish, to ask what kind of oil it is. Of course taste is a dead giveaway, too. If the oil has very little flavor, any hint of rancidity (think of the taste of crayons), or is abnormally light in color, much like a vegetable oil, kindly suggest to your server, restaurant owner, or chef, that the oil they are serving has no business on their guests' tables and should be used strictly in the kitchen for cooking and frying. The more restaurants realize their customers' knowledge of olive oil is expanding, and that there is a demand for real extra virgin olive oil, the more they will listen and meet that demand.

Citrus Almond Olive Oil Cake

Agree to bring the dessert to your next holiday gathering? Break out the olive oil! Your guests won't believe you baked a dessert without butter or canola.

Olive oil lends a surprising moistness to cakes, and this one comes out beautifully, without being too rich or overly sweet. But be sure to use extra virgin - don't believe those myths that say it's better to cook with 'pure' olive oil, which is just another refined oil. Stick to the good stuff. Always.

What you'll need:

1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup almond flour (usually found in the natural foods section at your grocer)
1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon sea salt
3 eggs
3/4 cup granulated sugar (I like it a little less sweet and only use 1/2 cup)
1/2 cup of extra virgin olive oil
1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1/4 teaspoon pure almond extract
Grated zest of either 1 lemon, or half an orange - or mix 'em up!
1/2 cup fresh squeezed orange juice

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and grease a round 9-inch cake pan. In a medium bowl, whisk together the all-purpose flour, almond flour, baking powder and sea salt and set aside. In a larger bowl, lightly whisk the eggs, then add the sugar and whisk for about 30 seconds. Next, add the olive oil to the egg mixture and whisk until slightly thickened. Last, whisk in the vanilla and almond extracts along with the orange juice. Add the flour mixture to the wet ingredients until you have a smooth batter, then pour into the greased pan and bake for 30 - 45 minutes. Test the cake by inserting a toothpick into the middle to see that it comes out clean.

After you pull the cake out of the oven, let it cool in the pan for about ten minutes and prepare the glaze in the meantime.

For the glaze you will need:

2 tablespoons butter
1/2 - 1 cup confectioner's sugar (depending on how much glaze you like on your cake)
3 tablespoons milk (I usually just add it until my desired thickness)
fresh lemon juice to taste (I like mine lemony and use about a teaspoon)
1/4 cup sliced, blanched almonds, toasted

First, toast the almonds on a baking sheet under the broiler until slightly browned. Set aside to cool. Next, melt the butter over medium heat in a small saucepan, swirly occasionally, until the butter turns a slight brown color and begins to smell a little nutty. While the butter cools, sift the confectioners sugar into a medium bowl, then whisk in the milk, and then slowly add the butter, whisking until combined. Next, add a few drops of fresh lemon juice to your desired taste, then stir in the toasted almonds. Carefully spread the glaze over the top of the cake with a spatula until it begins to drip slightly down the sides. Let the cake sit until the glaze is dry and then it's ready to serve.

Being that this is a slightly more dense cake, it can be served in smaller slices to a larger, hungry crowd. I also find that it freezes very well, and only takes a few short minutes at room temperature before it's ready to eat.

Hosting Thanksgiving?

Here is a marvelous article posted by the folks over at The Olive Oil Times for some tasty ways to add olive oil to your upcoming Thanksgiving meal: http://www.oliveoiltimes.com/olive-oil-basics/olive-oil-thanksgiving/8905

Reviewing Olive Oil (and other rants and praises)

Too often I find myself dining out in a lovely new restaurant, impressed by the ambiance, service, and look of the menu, while after ordering, the server carries over a basket of bread and pours some olive oil into a little white dish to whet the pallet. "UGH!- what is this?!" I exclaim to myself with the unfortunate taste of the first oil-soaked piece of bread I put in my mouth, "Really? They call this olive oil? Is this the best this restaurant can do?"

While my reaction may seem extreme, I feel that all too often restaurants try so hard in their kitchen, getting their menu and presentation just right, but make the unfortunate mistake of overlooking the important introduction to one's whole dining experience - the bread and olive oil. For whatever reason, be it cost, lack of knowledge, or lack of awareness of the customer's knowledge, chefs seem to not think much of placing a bottle of adulterated, and often rancid, olive oil out on the table for the customer's bread-dipping pleasure. As an avid olive oil connoisseur I take many issues with this. Often the chef decides that whatever 'olive oil' he's using for sauce making, frying, etc. in the kitchen is just as acceptable for the customers to eat raw and pour all over their food. I feel this is a huge disservice to the customer, not only in that it is an offense to the pallet, but that it is not allowing the customer the pleasure of experiencing what a true, fresh and robust, extra virgin olive oil can really taste like.

Restaurants are notorious for watching their costs to every penny and that is why the food service industry is one of the toughest markets to sell quality products. The extra virgin olive oil they think they're buying at a great price (a too-good-to-be-true price), is often not extra virgin or even 100% olive oil. They're often adulterated with refined oils such as canola or soy, or are of terribly low quality, old and rancid - and this is the stuff that ends up out on your table in that pretty little glass bottle. My advice to the restaurants is, fine, buy the cheap oil, but keep it in the back kitchen where it belongs, and do us all a favor and spend a few more pennies and buy a quality 100% extra virgin olive oil to put out on the tables. If you can't do that, then don't even bother putting any oil out on the table at all and go back to butter.

After too many disspointing olive oil experiences, and a few surprisingly great ones, I've decided I need to start spreading the word and have opened a Twitter account. My posts can be found here on my blog and on my Twitter page. Here I will tweet to my little heart's desire any time I want to express my opinion about what I'm seeing, tasting, and experiencing in the realm of olive oil. Feel free to jump on board and join the conversation: Follow @LoveforLathi

Fasolakia (green beans with potatoes and zucchini)

I know, summer is almost over and I'm just now offering you an idea for what to do with the bounty of green beans and zucchini many of you are growing in your gardens right now - or finding at your local farmers market.

Either served as a light meal or as a side, fasolakia is a traditional Greek vegetarian dish consisting of green beans, potatoes, and that fertile garden vegetable that you always seemed to have planted too much of - zucchini.

This is all you will need for this simple summer recipe to serve the family (it makes great leftovers too!):

2 lbs. fresh green beans (I've used frozen in the winter as well)
2 - 3 large juicy ripe tomatoes, grated
1 onion, chopped
1 cup Extra Virgin Olive Oil
2 medium-sized potatoes, peeled and cut into large cubes
2 - 3 Zucchini - I know these things range greatly in size, but you want to cut them into halved 3 inch pieces
salt/pepper

First, prepare the beans and wash them well, taking off the ends. If you're patient - which I not always am - you can remove the strings down the center of the bean as well, depending on how fresh or tough they are. Next, in a deep pot, heat the olive oil on medium heat and add the chopped onion, sautéing until tender. Now add the beans, grated tomato, and good amount of salt and pepper to taste along with 1 cup of water. Simmer over medium heat. After about 20 minutes, add the potatoes and zucchini and simmer for another 25 minutes, or until potatoes are tender.

The trick is to get the water content just right - you want to add only enough water as needed to cook all the veggies. They do release more water as they are cooked, so usually there is no need to add more. And as always, serve this dish with some fresh baked bread to soak up all that tasty sauce left on your plate!

Hearty Lentil Soup

Who can't get enough homemade hot soup this winter? It has certainly become my staple for these long cold winter nights. Well, the days are getting longer now, right?

This lentil soup is a go-to favorite. With minimal ingredients and very little prep time, it's a great recipe to fall back on when the fridge and cupboards go bare. This soup is also very easy to add things to - as that's the beauty of soup. Have some veggies in the fridge that are on the verge of making their way to the garbage? Why not chop them up and throw them in the pot. But really, why change a good thing? You won't believe how good this soup is with nothing but the following ingredients:

2 cups of lentils (green or red, it's your choice)
1/2 cup Extra Virgin Olive Oil
2 large cloves of garlic, chopped
2 bay leaves
2 medium ripe tomatoes, grated
Salt, Pepper
(Crusty buttered bread optional)

If you know you're going to be having this soup for dinner, feel free to soak the lentils a couple hours ahead of time as it will speed-up the cooking process.

In a large pot, sauté the chopped garlic in the olive oil over medium heat for about one minute. Add the grated tomatoes and simmer for a couple more minutes. Add the lentils and about 4 cups of water. Stir in the bay leaves along with salt and pepper to taste. I like to add about 2 teaspoons of salt, as with all soups, salting is key. Simmer for about 30 minutes, perhaps a bit longer if you did not soak the lentils beforehand. Be sure to keep an eye on the soup, adding more water if necessary.

To top off the soup, I like to add some hard crusty bread at the end. When my favorite loaf of sourdough gets hard enough to break my teeth, I know it's good enough for my soup. Just lay it in your bowl with a little butter on top and let it soak up the broth.