• Blog
  • About
  • Recipes
  • Tips & Tools
  • International LOVE
  • Love Notes
  • Shop
  • Powered by MSI Media Group

Engaging stories of love, joy, comfort and friendship with proven scrumptious, healthy recipes, we celebrate LOVE as the secret ingredient for wonderful food!

Going to Greece

September 23, 2012 by Mary Frances 12 Comments

Greek sweatshirt artWith autumn officially here, even though I love the season, here’s a way to hang on to summer for just a little bit longer.

I think it’s fun to plan a dinner around a specific theme. Not like the crazy tablescape lady on Food Network. I just learned that she is our Governor’s live-in partner! Yikes! She’s probably a nice woman but really, she’s a bit much.

We had some new friends over for dinner last Saturday. Well not really new. Anne and I did business with one another some 20 years ago! She had a creative placement agency. In those days, my company did a lot of package design for a fragrance company called Tsumara. We often needed textile designers to design the background patterns on these packages. Anne supplied me great ones on a freelance basis.

I ran into her recently at a New York Times /AMEX Business Summit. I gave her a LOVE card and she checked out the blog and recognized Ethel and Ethel’s garlic from an earlier post! We discovered our weekend houses are very close to one another. Isn’t that great?

So for our dinner together, I wanted to take them to Greece. We made a grilled Greek chicken recipe that my husband and I used to make all the time after our visits to Santorini. You take a whole chicken and stuff under the skin: slices of tomatoes, covered with dried oregano, sliced onions and thin slices of feta cheese. Grill it with a lemon-based sauce and voila, you’re in Greece. They do this all over Santorini on the street outside of small restaurants and everything is so fresh and good. Serve it with a simple Greek tomato and cucumber salad and you are set. Try it – it’s delicious!!

And grab a little bit of summer one last time.

SANTORINI GRILLED CHICKEN
– serves 4

1 whole chicken – about 3.75 lbs
1 large tomato – sliced 1/8” thick
Dried oregano
Feta cheese, sliced 1/8” thick
1 small onion – sliced 1/8” thick
salt
pepper
1/2 lemon
Lemon/garlic basting sauce

Wash and thoroughly dry the chicken. Trim off any excess fat. Refresh it with a half of a lemon, squeezing the juice out all over, inside and out. Pat the chicken dry again. Cut the tomato in 4 or 5 slices. Sprinkle each slice liberally with dried Greek oregano. Carefully, use your fingers to separate the skin from the meat on both sides of the breastbone and on both sides of the backbone. Into each quarter slide one tomato slice, oregano side down, one onion slice and one good slice of feta. If you need to cut a tomato slice or onion slice in half, to fit it all in, do so. If you accidentally tear the skin, use a small skewer to sew up the tear. Salt and pepper the chicken all over to your liking.

Grill the chicken at about 350 degrees, basting with the sauce 3-4 times throughout the cooking time. It should take about 45 minutes.

You could also do this in your oven. Preheat the oven to 550 degrees. Place the chicken in for 10 minutes, then lower the heat to 350 and roast for 45 – 50 minutes, basting three times with the lemon garlic sauce during this time, every 15 minutes. Check to see if it’s done with an instant read thermometer. It should register at 155 degrees.

LEMON/GARLIC BASTING SAUCE
1.5 tbs. unsalted butter
2 tbs olive oil
4 cloves of garlic, minced
2 tbs. finely minced onion
6 tbs. fresh lemon juice
1 tbs. Dijon mustard
1 tsp salt
1 tsp. light brown sugar
1 tbs. Worcestershire sauce
20 grinds of black pepper
¾ tsp. Sriracha sauce
3 tbs. water

In a small saucepan, melt the butter in olive oil over low heat. Add garlic and onion, cover and sweat for 15 – 20 minutes. Check often, stir and do not let it brown, but you want it to be meltingly soft. Add the rest of the ingredients, except for the water, stirring well. Raise heat to medium-high and whisk in water. Stir until mixture boils and then remove from heat. This can be made a couple of hours before you’re going to use it. Keep it at room temperature.
Greek salad overhead

GREEK SALAD
– serves 4

2 – 3 large tomatoes, preferably heirloom, cut in large chunks
½ of a large red onion, cut in ½” chunks
1.5 hothouse cucumbers, peeled, halved lengthwise & cut in 1/2” chunks
1/2 cup Kalamata black olives, pitted, cut in half
Greek feta cheese, crumbled in large pieces
Extra virgin olive oil
Red wine vinegar
Salt
Fresh ground pepper
Chopped fresh oregano leaves

Place tomatoes, red onion, cucumbers, olives and feta cheese in a large bowl. Drizzle with the best olive oil you have and a few splashes of red wine vinegar. Sprinkle with a little salt (the feta will be salty so not too much), fresh pepper and 2/3 of your chopped oregano leaves. Toss lightly to combine. Garnish the top with more oregano leaves.
Greek dinner plate with Santorini grilled chicken, Greek salad, corn, and red wine.Greek dinner plate with Santorini grilled chicken, Greek salad, and corn.

Filed Under: Dinner, Poultry, Salads, Travel Tagged With: cucumbers, feta cheese, Greek roasted chicken, Greek salad, grilled chicken, kalamata olives, lemon basting sauce, oregano, red onion, Santorini, tomatoes

A September Sunday morning

September 9, 2012 by Mary Frances 4 Comments

After the huge storm last night, including tornadoes in Long Island and parts of Connecticut, we awoke in the country to a most spectacular day today! Blue sky, billowy clouds, and a downed, huge, heavy tree branch that just missed one of our cars were the first things we saw this morning. Yikes!Toasted bagels with smoked salmon, Ben’s homemade cream cheese, tomatoes from the garden, thinly sliced red onion, and capers.
This was our breakfast, an absolute favorite of mine. Smoked salmon, Ben’s homemade cream cheese, tomatoes from the garden, thinly sliced red onion, capers and toasted bagels. We finished it off with a fruit salad of black mission figs, mango, red grapes and banana. Can’t beat that!
Fruit salad with black mission figs, mango, red grapes and banana.
Although there is nothing here that I made, except for putting together the fruit salad, I just had to share it with you because it was all so pretty in the dazzling sunlight this morning.

See the view from our dining room window below. Hope you had a great weekend!
View from dining room window.

Filed Under: Breakfast Tagged With: bagels, bananas, black mission figs, breakfast, capers, cream cheese, figs, fruit salad, mango, red grapes, red onion, smoked salmon, Sunday breakfast, tomatoes

Join 32k+ followers!


Never miss out on a recipe!

Subscribe to receive new posts via email:

Mary Frances

Mary Frances

Spread love through cooking.

Summer Favorites

Easy Cheesy Sautéed Squash The Best Potato Salad Super Quick Chicken and Summer Vegetables Stir-fry Chimichurri-ed Wilted Endives with Walnuts Chilled Curried Zucchini Soup with Apple Garnish Best Strawberry and Rhubarb Crisp to make now!

Categories

  • Appetizers
  • Breakfast
  • Brunch
  • Cocktails
  • Contest
  • Cookies
  • Cookware and tools
  • Desserts
  • Dinner
  • Events
  • First Course
  • Fish
  • Food Responsibility
  • Guest Post
  • Lunch
  • Meat
  • Pasta
  • Poultry
  • Products for sale
  • Salads
  • Sauces
  • Sides
  • Soups
  • Tea time
  • Travel
  • Vegetables

Pages

Blog
About
Recipes
Tips and Tools
International Love
Love Notes
Shop
Mary's secret ingredients

Blogs We Love

  • 1840 Farm
  • A Pug in the Kitchen
  • Cottage Grove House
  • Food, Photography & France
  • Food52
  • From the Bartolini Kitchens
  • Go Bake Yourself
  • Hotly Spiced
  • Jovina Cooks Italian
  • Lavender and Lime
  • Orgasmic Chef
  • Smitten Kitchen
  • Sophie's Foodie Files
  • Steven’s Wine and Food Pairings
  • That Skinny Chick Can Bake
  • The Pioneer Woman
  • The Squishy Monster
  • Tips on Food and Drinks
  • Yummy Chunklet
  • LOVE - the secret ingredient


  • GET IN TOUCH
  • E mary@lovethesecretingredient.com

· All Rights Reserved ·© 2016 Love- the secret ingredient. All rights reserved. Disclaimer | Privacy Policy Disclosure Policy Terms & Conditions