Sofi's Aegean Kitchen: A Light Approach to Traditional Greek Home Cooking

Gathers Greek-style recipes for appetizers, soups, seafood, poultry, meat, game, vegetables, and desserts

Owner of Sofi, the Los Angeles restaurant, Konstantinides is a Greek-born former chemist for whom "food--choosing it, cooking it, and most of all savoring it--seems inextricably wound up in my life." Her book introduces a healthier version of the sometimes all-too-seductive fare of Greek habit. After explaining what ingredients should be kept on hand for the cooking (e.g., pre-made fyllo and puff pastry dough), Konstantinides extends a welcoming hand to the novice and the veteran in successive chapters surveying appetizers (taramosalata, dolmathes), soup, seafood, meats, vegetables and desserts. An additional chapter is devoted to pies using fyllo, from those including artichoke hearts and cheeses or shrimp to the traditional galatopita, or milk pie, which is sweetish. Recipes try to keep oil and butter down without butting out what is most Greek. Mostly, they succeed. A small complaint: italic type, hard to read, visits the pages in the author's reminiscences and recipe introductions.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

With little culinary background other than a love of cooking, Konstantinides, a native of Greece, opened a small restaurant in Los Angeles that was almost immediately successful. Now in larger quarters, Sofi continues to be popular for its simple, homey, regional Greek food. Some of Sofi's dishes are simplified versions of classics, others have been lightened; all are relatively easy to prepare. The Complete Book of Greek Cooking ( LJ 4/15/90) by the Recipe Club of St. Paul's Greek Orthodox Cathedral offers a greater number of recipes in the same vein, but this is an approachable introduction to the cuisine. Dosti, a Los Angeles food writer and cookbook author, offers a sampling of dishes from all over the Middle East and the Mediterranean, from North Africa to the Arab countries to Greece. There are few cookbooks that deal with this large, interrelated area as a whole, but many of the dishes included here are readily available in narrower regional cookbooks. Although Israel is part of Dosti's focus, few recipes from that country are represented. Furthermore, while Dosti emphasizes the importance of appetizers, or meze dishes, in all of these cuisines, it's surprising to find only a handful of recipes in that chapter. Not a necessary purchase.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

If smells could permeate the pages of a cookbook, this one would carry all the scents of ingredients so necessary to Greek cuisine--olives and their oil, garlic, fyllo (or phillo dough), and fresh produce and seafood--in lighter, healthier dishes. Los Angeles restaurateur Konstantinides deliberately selects more than 140 Mediterranean recipes both flavorful and low in fat, cholesterol, and sodium. Some are familiar (mousaka, dolmathes, pastitsio); others might become kitchen favorites--such as baby lima bean salad, stewed leeks, red snapper baked in foil, and chicken with okra. Except for time needed to wrap the wafer-thin dough known as fyllo around edible fillings, most of her birthplace foodstuffs require little kitchen preparation or time--a harried cook's delight. Barbara Jacobs