Going Greek for Easter

Happy Easter everyone! I hope you enjoyed yourself and had lots of chocolate and especially, that you enjoyed the day. We had a lovely Easter, in spite or maybe because of the lockdown. I had made a point of really making it pleasant and different this year. And we introduced a small change in our celebration of the holiday which might become a new gastronomic tradition for Easter.

Usually, I make an omelette for Easter, but my wife never liked omelettes much, whatever the recipe. So we thought about finding another vegetarian meal that we know we would both enjoy. I got the idea to bake a spanakopita instead. It's mediterranean, so very fitting for an Easter lunch if the weather is nice (it was nice). I also associate Easter a lot with Greek culture, so it made sense to have a Greek meal. More importantly, my wife loves spanakopita, so she would never complain about eating some, at any time. And it is so simple to make, we don't even have to follow a recipe. So here is the spanakopita we had, with tomatoes and olives to accompany it. We'll almost surely make it next year.

Manger grec

Petite plogue gastronomique pour ce soir... Ce que vous voyez ici est un (une?) spanakopita, un classique de la gastronomie grecque, une tarte dont l'intérieur est un mélange de fromage feta et d'épinards. Lorsque l'été est en pleine force et qu'il fait donc chaud, c'est le repas idéal. Et puis c'est niaiseux à faire. Je vous recommande d'essayer ça un de ces quatre.

Exotic mood

It happens sometimes: I get into a particular "cultural" mood. Maybe I am just a shallow tourist deep down. Recently, my wife and we made spanakopita, one of our favourite "couple" meal. So I had again a Greek feeling. I wish the weather had been Greek too. But it was neither hot nor dry. I also try to speak Italian as much as I can with an Italian colleague of mine, hoping to improve it. And there was a company dinner last night in an authentic Mexican restaurant (as in: the fajitas did not taste like your Old El Paso mix). So I am in an exotic mood. Since I put enough of Italian songs here (or songs in ITalian), I thought I put that Greek song you can hear near the end of the second season of The Wire. I put it here because I am in this exotic mood, because I love the song and because the Greeks were maybe my favourite villains in the whole series.

An hedonistic life

I don't know why, maybe it is because we are having lovely days here, with hot and sunny weather, maybe because I can now be carefully optimistic on the employment front, which makes the upcoming end of my current employment less stressful, but I am having a really nice weekend. I almost feel like on holidays, for the first time in years. Forget about what I said yesterday,this Saturday proved that I can appreciate a sunny day without a swimming pool (although with one I would appreciate it better). Which makes me an inconsistent blogger, I guess, and just as much as a philistine, as I still quoted Melville on such a trivial topic.

But anyway, I take pleasure in life this weekend. We had a very Greek Saturday my wife and I, or at least a very Greek dinner, as we made spanakopita. We had it with white wine, which makes it taste even better. And during the day I had beer, not enough to be tipsy, but plenty enough to appreciate the day, which was not so unbearably hot as to make it awful. Today I woke up without hangover or headache. So I am following the principles of hedonism: taking pleasure and maintaining myself in a state of pleasure. Often, I enjoy life as an Italian, but today I am a Greek. Tonight we might eat in a French restaurant, so I might be a French hedonist, which is a rare thing for me.

A little disclaimer before the end of this post: I don't particularly agree with hedonism as a philosphy. There will be plenty of occasions to follow stoicism, I might as well be an hedonist when I can.