A Trio of Sauces for Vegetables

It's summer and vegetables everywhere are popping up. Fresh tomatoes, zucchini, beets, green beans, eggplant, peppers. You name it , and they're available. In local grocery stores, farmer's markets, neighborhood produce stands, and CSA farms. The heat is also creeping up, and sometimes I just don't feel very creative. With that in mind, to celebrate fresh summer vegetables and my own laziness, I decided to revisit a cooking project from many years ago.

Greek Cooking Show

If you click on the link below, you will be taken to an episode of the Greek cooking show, Simply Delicious, that my husband produced for Access Sacramento television several years ago. Of course, I'm the Greek cook! This episode features three sauces that Greeks traditionally use for vegetables. As a warning, these episodes & recipes were developed before Congestive Heart Failure. Nowadays, I eliminate the salt. Since all three recipes call for lemon juice, I find it easy to add a bit more lemon to brighten up the flavor. I usually just add a teaspoon at a time, tasting as I go.

Olive Oil, Lemon, Garlic, and Oregano: Fundamental Greek flavors!

The first recipe is for the simplest of sauces, ladolemeno. Just olive oil & lemon juice. This is a staple of Greek households. It's used over any freshly cooked vegetable, especially greens. You can gussy it up with freshly chopped herbs or a bit of garlic, if you like. The second sauce is avgolemeno. This sauce recipe is different from the one used in the famous soup of the same name. It uses a roux to create a sauce that can be easily kept warm for a while and can also be reheated. This sauce is great over stuffed cabbage or grape leaves, salmon/tuna patties, and any of the cruciferous vegetables. This is one of my favorite sauces, and I make it acceptable now by using low sodium/NSA chicken broth and extra lemon. The third sauce is skordhalia, a potent fresh garlic sauce. It's traditionally eaten with beets, fried eggplant or squash, and fried fish. I love the stuff, but I really have to be in the mood for an overpowering garlic experience.

Links to printable recipes for the sauces are listed below:
   Ladolemeno - olive oil & lemon
   Avgolemeno - egg & lemon
   Skordhalia - fresh garlic

This link will take you to the PDF versions of all the TV recipes. You'll find the sauce recipes listed under "Sauces."  All the TV shows can be accessed by visiting the Simply Delicious YouTube Channel. Each episode is about twenty minutes long, so you may want to fast forward or skip over some sections. This link will take you to the three sauces episode.

My Mother & Grandmother:
Two GREAT Cooks!

The Yaprakia show features three generations of Greek cooks -- my mother, me, and my daughter. This video project was a wonderful way of preserving my family's culinary heritage. My grandmother, my mom, and I all were the typical "pinch of this & a couple of spoonfuls of that" type cooks. Doing the TV shows forced me to codify & quantify the family recipes. Now I've got something concrete that my children & grandchildren can refer to. I hope you enjoy the video and the recipes.