I wish I was Greek: Cooking from The Olive and the Caper

Long ago, I read a dumb article that categorized people in terms of the gifts that they buy for others. One type of person - “The Projector” - gives the presents that they actually wish they could receive. Last Christmas, I became a Projector and bought my mother Susanna Hoffman’s new cookbook, The Olive and the Caper.

Sure, my mom loves all things Greek, and she does enjoy kitchen-related paraphernalia even though she doesn’t cook much, but I knew it was a stretch. I felt guilty and selfish, but not as bad as the time I bought her a DustBuster in order to facilitate cleaning up the near-constant mess generated by my parrot.

I wish I could tell you that I decided to cook a giant Greek dinner in order to make up for buying my mom a book that I wanted, but I didn’t. I decided to make a giant Greek dinner because My Big Fat Greek Wedding was on TV, and it penetrated my subconscious and forced me to dream about traveling in Greece, and when I awoke I knew it was time to cook something from The Olive and the Caper. Pretty mystical, huh?

So I got to work and cooked for about three hours and came up with Chicken Kapama, Giant Beans Plaki Style, Skordalia, and New Potatoes with Mint and Spring Onions, all from the book. We have a wonderful Greek market in the vicinity, so I was lucky to start with actual giant beans (called gigantes), as well as divinely thick honey and peppery olive oil.

I would recommend The Olive and the Caper to anyone interested in Greek cooking, or for that matter anyone interested in reading tales that essentially amount to Greek travel porn - being presented with shrimp right off the boat at a taverna by a country fisherman, receiving fresh eggs in return for a favor in a small village, etc. It’s positively stuffed with cute anecdotes and history lessons. Although normally I object to really cluttered cookbook pages, when the clutter is about Greece I’m willing to make an exception. And the recipes seem to be pretty dependable and trustworthy rather than hare-brained and bizarre, which is a bigger asset than you might think.

The Chicken Kapama has a long list of ingredients, including brandy, coffee, red wine, cinnamon and cloves, and requires two hours of simmering. You can hardly go wrong with that kind of dish; the chicken took on a lovely reddish color and became incredibly tender and infused with all the spices.


I reserve a special place in my heart for gigantes; I remember eating a plate of them on Paros and falling in love with their creamy texture and their simple tomato broth. However, they need a lot of time to lose their crunch, so I would actually suggest cooking them for three hours rather than the recommended 1 – 2 in the recipe, and giving them more liquid to simmer in.


The potatoes were fine, but not the most thrilling of dishes, and I added carrots to the mix. Here's the whole mess together, with some of my mom's leftover tzatziki added as well:


The skordalia veered wildly out of control. I didn’t plan to make it, but a dollop was required in the gigantes, and honestly, I wouldn’t want to meet the person who doesn’t want a nice bowl of skordalia lying around at any given time. My version used bread and pine nuts; Hoffman calls for a whopping 15 garlic cloves in the recipe. I used 7 large cloves and it still pretty much blew our heads off, growing even stronger overnight. My mom apparently tempers the sting of the raw garlic by mashing it with salt and letting it sit for half an hour before mixing it into tzatziki or whatever else, so perhaps next time I will try that. All I know is that my mouth was burning with garlic fumes all night long, which gave me really bizarre dreams. But at least they weren't about My Big Fat Greek Wedding.