Easter Dinner at Eleni's

Sunday April 24

Eleni kindly invited us (and Junko and Daniel) to come over for a traditional Greek Easter dinner. She is an expert chef (even her apron says so), and served forth all the traditional foods.

We started with mageiritsa, the thick Easter soup that usually contains the innards of the lamb who is roasting on a spit outside. Luckily, this one was made of lambshanks and rice with lots of lovely dill.

Then, of course, the centerpiece - a succulent roast leg of lamb. Accompanying it were potatoes with lemon and rosemary, two kinds of tzaziki - one with sour cherries and walnuts, the other dill - and a giant, refreshing salad. And of course there were red eggs for tsougrisma, the battle of egg-tapping, which Eleni won.

Holt baked tsoureki, Greek Easter bread, which he braided like a giant challah; it sometimes has a red dyed egg embedded in the top, though not this time. It's flavored with exotic things like orange peel and mahlepi, an aromatic made from inner kernels of the pits of St Lucie Cherry; it smells like a combination of bitter almond and cherry. We got the spice suggestions from the blog of Sam Sotiropoulos.

though the recipe itself came from Holt's classic Best of Baking cookbook, by Wolter and Teubner. It was not as sweet and moist as the tsoureki of Eleni's memories, but more like a Christopsomo, which is also traditional. Maybe we'll try the other type next time.

Dessert was just chocolate eggs, which is all we could absorb, and at the end we staggered home and collapsed, which is an Easter tradition as well.