Just before their summer residency at Maltby St. Market, things are getting hectic in Hungry Donkey's kitchen.

However, Tziovi the Chef, shared with us his simple but essential recipe for the best dish of the season: Greek 'village' salad.

This is a version of the dish we've been serving ever since opening and exactly how my mom still cooks it in Istanbul.

Unlike the common mücver this one has lots of fresh garlic for a more pungent flavour and therefore shares similarities with öcce fritters of Antep (a province in Southeastern Turkey).

Gemista is the quintessential summer Greek dish! A staple of the Greek family table, Gemista day was a special day for us kids. Beautifully stacked in the roasting tray, there was a silent honour code on how to serve them, and how many roast potatoes go with each serving.

A great combination of all things Greek, the marrying of simple fresh herbs, vegetables, rice, and olive oil creates such a healthy and flavourful dish, that can be eaten warm, lukewarm and even cold. We firmly believe that Greek cuisine is the world’s best secret for Vegans, and Gemista are the best example of why that is so!

Enjoy the subtleties of cooking Greek food with this recipe that makes it much more than a simple trip to the supermarket. 

It’s all about the series of small rituals from the choice of olive oil you use, to the asparagus you get from the farmers market that bring out the flavours in the food.

Don't forget the wine pairing...

It's much more than a trip to the supermarket when it comes to Greek food.  There are a number of small rituals involved, including the olive oil from your uncle's grove, the fresh cheese your mother brought last week while removing the one she brought a week ago, which she would then turn into little fritters and bring around on her next visit while castigating your wastefulness.  It’s harvesting wild asparagus for such a brief period of time that it barely lasts a full lunar cycle. There will always be someone coming after you who shouldn't go empty handed, so you should never take everything you find.

It's your clumsy attempt at making your own marinated anchovies in a jar topped with olive oil, long forgotten. Self sufficiency will have to wait, your wife said after trying them, as you felt your ears turn red as if they were crimson sails prepared for battle.  And finally a trip to the supermarket for some potatoes and eggs, or a beloved weekly trip to the “laiki”, the farmers market, which to my unorthodox Albanian mind, has come to replace the Sunday mass in both affection and devotion for many modern Greeks.  Or if you live in London, you could go to Spa Terminus market and let the Maltby&Greek team enact the various parts like true pros.

With a honey & red wine vinegar dipping sauce laced with copious amounts of Greek Oregano and Black Pepper!

Continuing our series of recipes from The Delicious Legacy Podcast host Thomas Ntinas

I know it sounds a little bit Asian this dish! Garlic, ginger, pork and prawn, fish sauce...! Surely it's Vietnamese right?

Well, I've always found the far Eastern cuisine very interesting, fragrant, complex yet delicate. The ancient Mediterranean cuisine from what has survived in texts, seems to have very similar tones woven into it.

A recipe inspired partly from Apicius (the oldest surviving Greco-Roman cookbook written sometime in the 4th century CE but based on recipes from at least the 1st century BCE), partly from Archestratus (the Greek Sicilian gourmand who according to a legend “circumnavigated the world to satisfy his hunger”), partly a need to create something when I needed 'finger food' for an event. Of course, this dish, with the use of vine leaves, is firmly established in the modern Greek kitchen and also all over eastern mediterranean. Vine leaves are edible, succulent, delicious and used for stuffing since Classical times (or even before that!)