Cravings for Greek food
Now I don't know how many Greek restaurants are to be found in your area and if you ever had the luxury of having not one but several really good Greek restaurants near your home, but I know when I grew up, I did. And I loved eating from the Greek restaurant since my childhood.
I've always loved gyros the way we were served it in Holland, later when moving to Spain, and after that to Budapest, I have learned that they sell something called Gyros which is totally different from how we know it in Holland. Because of the not so great and often greasy meat they sold as gyros over the years, I stopped eating it at some point.
That doesn't mean that we often said to each other, I wish we'd bump into a Greek restaurant which is truly from a Greek family and serves authentic food and is proud of the food they serve. So far, we only found one Greek restaurant about half a year ago, we had high hopes.. until we walked in. We weren't even greeted, a man and (I assume) his son were too busy doing nothing as well as speaking to someone on the phone and it took 5 minutes before they came to the table while there was no one in the restaurant.
It was clear right away that they weren't enjoying their restaurant anymore and the floor was extremely sticky while a very bad smell was present, this made us decide to stand up and go because nobody came to serve us anyway. If the man had greeted us, we'd probably stuck around to try it so it was his loss. That was the end of our Greek journey so far.
Greek herbs
Drastic cravings ask for drastic measures. LIDL and their Greek weeks came to the rescue! I found their Gyros, Souvlaki and Tzatziki herbs on sale and decided to try them.
If I couldn't have real authentic Greek food anyway, I might as well try to make something myself and hope it brings us the Greeky vibe we were looking for. I bought chicken filet, had two whole buckets of Greek yogurt on discount which was perfect to make some Tzatziki sauce. Sadly I had a lot of back pain that day so I could not walk to the bakery for bread, but at least I had everything at home to make a Greek salad.
Grill
When using new herbs, it's always a bit tricky how it turns out. It can turn out to be a bit too little of the herbs on the chicken or worst case, too much. If it's too much my boyfriend will immediately respond to it by an upset stomach so I try to avoid that direction more than the "too little herbs" one.
On top of the herbs, I put some olive oil, hoping it would not taste too powdery, which worked out great.
For a bit, I thought I totally ruined my fairly new grill pan by adding the olive oil but rest assured, some water to let it soak and then a bit of normal cleaning did the trick. This grill pan is very easy to clean, which is very convenient.
Greek salad
While I was grilling the chicken, I cut the tomatoes, cucumber and onions to add to a big bowl. On top I added the feta in the glass cans which already have a nice mix of oil and herbs added.
These are more expensive but so much more tasty than these flat "slices" of feta in plastic. I love this mix in the glass jar so much that I initially forgot to top it with the extra virgin olive oil.
At first, I was unsure if this all would be enough but if you have the salad with the chicken and it's already a bit later, this is perfect not to over eat. Especially if you leave out the bread which I would have enjoyed but I'm limiting how much bread I eat anyway.
Tzatziki sauce
Then, the final touch. Again with these herbs, I was not sure how much to add or if I should go for some authentic version with garlic, cucumber and I believe there's mint in it as well. Although I'm not sure if that's authentic or a twist in the recipe.
Either way, I chose to go for comfort because of the pain I had and the next time I added a little more of the herbs, but it was still very Greek-y. But again, I rather be careful and add a little less than more in these cases. I still have to check the contents of the herb mix to see if it would really add to the flavour if I add garlic etc or keep this one just for the times that I want to have a quick and easy tzatziki ready in less then a minute.
Simply delicious
So here we have it a plate with the grilled chicken gyros and the simple tzatziki sauce.
And a delicious but simple salad which is ready in a heartbeat:
We felt like eating Greek for a bit, even though this was a really simple version of the Gyros only. It sure beat every sandwich we had that was supposed to be Gyros in the past 7 years at least. Mission accomplished with not too much effort. Everyone loved it, we have a winner.
I yet have to try the Souvlaki herbs though, maybe next week.
Have a great weekend!
All pictures above are mine...