There are many ways to divide the world. I prefer the one between those who love white sauces and those who love red ones. Sofrito belongs, of course, to the first kind - the Sunday kind, the dish of celebration. But that’s for those who like categories. I could eat it any day of the week. In our house, it was always a small battlefield. My brother and I wanted it with fried potatoes, or with rice, peas, and carrots. My father insisted on pasta, buried under grated cheese. My

Seen from the sea - or from the air - Corfu appears draped in silver. The island’s hillsides glisten under the light of thousands of olive trees - tall, dense, and intertwined, like a single vast forest. For visitors, this landscape is pure poetry: a sea of leaves shimmering between green and gray. But behind that beauty lies a story of survival, pragmatism, and trade. In Corfu, olive trees look like nowhere else in Greece. They are tall, slender, and silver under the light -

If Bianco is the island’s quiet soul, Bourdeto is its fire. A dish with Venetian roots, reborn in Corfiot kitchens where olive oil, garlic, and hot red pepper come together in a bold, uncompromising sauce. In our house, Bourdeto was a winter ritual. We made it only with scorpionfish - skorpina  - which my father would buy early in the morning from the market in town. Sometimes, friends or neighbors brought fresh fish from the coast, and that decided the menu: when skorpina  

Corfu’s cuisine still bears the quiet mark of its Venetian past - centuries of coexistence that blended local frugality with Mediterranean finesse. Dishes like Bianco emerged from that encounter: born of poverty, elevated by technique. In Italian, bianco  means “white,” and the name itself reflects a Venetian approach to cooking fish without tomato - a preference for clarity, for sauces built on olive oil, lemon, and garlic rather than color and heaviness. At its heart, Bianc

There is, I believe, no greater compliment you can pay to a Corfiot woman than to tell her she makes a good Pastitsada. Because in Corfu, this dish is more than cooking - it’s a measure of care, patience, and love. Every home has its own version, passed down through mothers and grandmothers, whispered like a family secret and perfected over years of Sunday tables. Pastitsada became a symbol of Corfiot identity - a dish that speaks of family, of celebration, and of belonging.

In Corfu, nerantzosalata (orange salad) is more than a local dish — it’s part of the island’s quiet grammar of taste. In our house, it was never just a salad; it was a complete evening meal, a ritual of the cold winter months. My father would peel a bright, heavy orange, slice it into thick rounds, and lay them on a plate — nothing else yet, just the color and the scent. He would drizzle fresh olive oil, dust it with sweet paprika, and finish with coarse salt. Then came the c

I first learned to taste olive oil beside my father. We would wait together in the small mill of our village, watching the olives turn slowly into oil. The mill was alive - the hum of the machines, the rhythm of footsteps, the sound of voices calling names. The air smelled of olives - sharp, green, and heavy. People came and went, tired from the harvest, damp from the autumn air, hungry but patient. No one left before tasting the first stream of new oil. Those who cared enoug

In Corfu, we call them seskla - the tender, glossy winter greens known in the rest of Greece as seskoula, or Swiss chard. And at home, Tsigari - or Tsigareli, as it’s often called - was always made only with seskla. Just the pure sweetness of the greens, slowly simmered with onion, garlic, paprika, and plenty of olive oil. Because Tsigari is not a stew. It’s not a soup. It’s a dish of spicy, sautéed greens, cooked until the sauce clings to every leaf - a deep red from the pap

In the days of the drachma, back in the 1980s, in a small village far from Corfu town, finding dessert wasn’t simple. There were no pastry shops nearby - not even a bakery that made anything sweet. I still remember the grocer cutting a chocolate bar into four pieces, selling them separately, so everyone could afford a taste. But people always found a way to be sweet. Ours came from what we had: bread, olive oil, and sugar. Sometimes fresh, sometimes a few days old - fried, go