A Greek cookbook helps you eat for longevity

The term "plant-based" is everywhere these days but there are places in the world where this way of eating is such a part of the culture, it isn't labeled as such. One of those places is Greece, where Diane Kochilas' people are from. She's a daughter of Ikaria, an island that's famous for the longevity of its inhabitants. She hosts the television series My Greek Table and has written many cookbooks focusing on the country's cuisine. In her newest work, The Ikaria Way: 100 Delicious Plant-Based Recipes Inspired by My Homeland, the Greek Island of Longevity, she shares the food of her island home with those who want to cook healthy without ditching flavor.

Evan Kleiman: You've written close to 20 books on different aspects of Greek cuisine, and this book is a bit of a departure. In a way, it's as if you wanted to reframe the food that you've been making for years. Can you speak to that and the slight shift in focus that's at the heart of this book?

Diane Kochilas: The book had two seeds. The first seed was in my kitchen during one of my cooking classes a few years ago. I had a couple from Montana who maybe a day or two into the classes, after several meals together, sheepishly mentioned that this food was a real revelation to them because they never anticipated that eating a diet of plant-based foods could be so satisfying. At that point, we had maybe had three or four meals together. Back home, they were eating meat three times a day. So there was a little alarm bell that sounded in my head. I thought, wow, that's really interesting because that's so very different from the way I eat. 

The second seed was actually a friend of mine in Athens who's one of these brilliant thinkers. He and his wife had been vegans for a long time. We started talking about the nature of Greek cuisine and how there's so much incredible plant-based food. I actually had a few different titles for the book but Ikaria was always the subtext.

For me, the book is an extension of what I try to do in my classes on the island, which is to give people the types of recipes that they can cook wherever they are. You don't have to be on the island to cook this food. You don't need to live in the Mediterranean. We are very fortunate, we have incredible produce. You probably can relate to that on the West Coast. But the food is really meant to be accessible to cooks at every skill level. That's been my life's aim. Those conversations about whether you can repeat an ethnic recipe from one country to the next. Can a Greek salad taste the same in the United States? It can't. It won't ever taste the same. But that doesn't mean you can't make it and it won't be good.

Diane Kochilas hosts "My Greek Table" and has written 20 cookbooks on the cuisine of her homeland. Photo by Christopher Bierlein.

You've also talked about how perplexed you have been by people's attitudes towards food and how you wanted to share, as you put it, "how to be good to your body without being mean to your mind," which I think is such a profound sentence. 

That sentence came from that friend of mine who was brilliant. He unfortunately died very suddenly and unexpectedly. He was Greek American and had spent many years in the United States. He was living in Athens at the time, and we were talking about the food insanity in the United States. My two children were raised in Athens and studied in the United States, and the very first thing that they struggled with was the quality of the food supply and the confusion that people seem to have, even when they're 18 and 19 years old, "I can't eat this. I don't eat that. I stay away from gluten. I eat low fat." It seems like there was a laundry list of don'ts. We don't eat that way in the Mediterranean. It's all about eating everything in good measure.

Yeah, balance. 

That's the most important lesson in all of this, balance.

I agree. You make these probiotic, rich pickles from different things in your garden. Can you describe the variety of what you make?

That also started by accident. A couple of years ago, I had more cucumbers than I knew what to do with, and I couldn't give them away. People were so sick of my gifts of cucumbers that I spent a good part of the summer making cucumber jam, dried cucumbers, cucumber chips, and a lot of pickles. I just started to play around with all sorts of things. I was pickling some unripe tomatoes. I was pickling peppers. I was pickling something called purslane just as an experiment, because that grows all over the garden. It grows wild. It's really good for you, too.

I want to ask you about purslane but first I'm going to ask you, these pickles that you're talking about, they're salt brine, right? 

Yes. I think when you're doing the probiotic stuff, you're not supposed to use vinegar because that kills whatever probiotic activity is happening in there.

Here, we can get purslane at the grocery store, usually Latin grocery stores have them. They're called verdolagas in Spanish. I love purslane but I think a lot of people need to be convinced. They don't really understand what to do with it. Tell us how you use it.

I love purslane. I use it a lot in salads. The leaves are so tasty. There's a little bit of a tartness to them but they have that succulent texture. It's such a great weed. I use it a lot in summer salads. In almost every salad, I'll throw in some purslane. 

I use it with yogurt in two different ways. I'll cook it a little bit, just saute it in a little bit of olive oil and add it to yogurt so you make almost a tzatziki but with cooked purslane. I also do the same thing with raw purslane. We also sometimes stew it with a little bit of tomato and onion and garlic, and eat it that way.

You also have a salad in the book called Lizana's Purslane Cucumber Salad with Oregano, Feta and Olives, which sounds like a nice twist on the ubiquitous Greek salad.

It's a really nice salad, and it's very simple. If you've got good cucumbers that are super crisp and some nice sea salt, it's a really nice combination on a hot summer day.

Greek cuisine is famous for pies, pies of every description, every size, filled with many different things. You've created a rice dish that looks so spectacular, you call it Longevity Greens Rice, that was inspired from pitarakia, which are small hand pies. Could you describe the rice dish and how many greens are in it? I watched you make it in one of your videos. It was just packed with greens.

The whole idea behind all of that kind of food, whether it's inside filo pastry or whether it's cooked into rice, is to use what's in season. When I make that dish, it changes from winter to spring. We have fewer greens in the summer but more herbs. So sometimes there are 20 different greens and herbs and maybe some vegetables that go into that mix. You really feel like you're being good to your body when you eat that.

This rice dish was inspired by pitarakia, a traditional Greek pie.  Photo credit is Vasilis Stenos.  

Are you eating it as a main course, for the most part?

For the most part, those sorts of dishes would traditionally be served as a main course in the Greek kitchen. We have a lot of main course rice dishes. That particular recipe, which happens to be one of my favorite recipes in the book, has two roots. One of them is the spanakorizo, which is a spinach rice dish, which maybe you've encountered in Greek restaurants as a side dish, or sometimes they serve it with fish. That's also one of the great vegetarian dishes of Greece, and we serve that as a main course. If you want to enrich that a little bit, you might serve it with a sunny side up egg or a little feta cheese on the side.

I took that idea and I enhanced the spinach with the filling for the Ikarian pie. That filling, again, changes from season to season. You can have things like spinach, Swiss chard, sorrel, sweet dandelion greens, leeks, onions, scallions, maybe some carrot, wild fennel, which you can get easily in California, all sorts of fresh herbs, mint, things in the mint family, spearmint, double mint, pennyroyal, marjoram, oregano, basil. It's a very complex flavor but it's also very light and herbal, so it's wonderful.

I have to ask you about the moussaka that you have in this book. You've made it vegan. What replaces the meat? And what do you use to make the sauce instead of bechamel?

This recipe is also one of my favorites. As my 30-year-old daughter mentioned, when I gave her the first piece of this, she said, "Mom, this is epic." I make a couple of different versions of it but the version in the book has black beans and chickpeas. I chose black beans because they look a little like ground meat. They're dark and they kind of fool the eye, at first. You can also do lentils in the sauce, but lentils have a more distinct flavor. 

I use a combination of black beans and chickpeas, and it's the same sauce that we use for our typical meat sauce in moussaka, which has the cinnamon and the allspice, a little bit of underlying sweetness sometimes. It's exactly the same sauce except I use beans instead of ground meat. 

For the bechamel, you can use any non-dairy milk that you like. I happen to prefer coconut and almond milk, so that's what's in this particular recipe. If you want to make the bechamel, since it doesn't have eggs, if you want to fluff it up a little bit, if you're using canned chickpeas (you can find some really great quality canned beans now), you take the soaking liquid from the chickpeas, and you whisk that, and it becomes almost like a meringue. That helps lift the bechamel. It gives it a sort of height and fluffiness.

"The Ikaria Way" promotes longevity through plant-based eating. Photo courtesy of St. Martin's Publishing Group.