Kick-Off Dinner: Main Dish - Greek Chops

It’s been a busy week. We never intended to take 7 days to get our first posts about our grand blog kick off dinner, but that’s life. Our dinner was a great success. We had some of our best friends over and asked everyone to participate. As is quite customary with our group, we cooked way too much food. Over the next week or so we’ll highlight some of the dishes we prepared, detail the recipes, and share why we chose to make these dishes.

I drew the long straw, so my post is going first. The first dish I want to share is my Greek Chops. The inspiration for this recipe goes back a long ways. As you may recall from previous posts my favorite restaurant is a Greek bistro in Stockton, CA by the name of Papapavlo’s. My parents and I have been faithful customers for years. In fact, we became such frequent customers that we became pretty good friends with several members of the staff, including the head bus boy. One particularly chatty evening he shared with us the recipe to the restaurant’s famous Greek Lamb Chops. This has become one of my favorite things to cook over the past years. I should clarify, generally I do in fact make a Lamb Chop, but this time I switched it up and made a veal chop. I fully intended to do lamb, but when I got to the meat section the veal looked so much better than the lamb did. I’m a very easy going cook, if plan ‘A’ isn’t going the way you intended, I’m generally more than willing to go to plan ‘B’ or, in this case, veal. Let’s jump straight into the recipe.

The principle player in this dish is the marinade. It’s a very simple marinade. I don’t have an exact measurement, that’s not the kind of cook I am. I tend to follow my instinct and taste buds. Whatever sounds good is what I put in. In this case, here are the ingredients I generally include:

- A cheap bottle of red wine (we used Two Buck Chuck from Trader Joes)
- Chopped Basil
- Chopped Cilantro
- Chives
- Olive Oil
- Balsamic Vinegar
- Ground Pepper

This is by no means the only ingredients that I have tried. These are just the marinade all-stars if you will. When I don’t have the pressure of guests eating my meal I generally dig through my herb cabinet to see what looks (and smells) like something that might make the meat better.

However, when the pressure’s on I go with what I know will serve me well, and that’s fresh basil, cilantro and chives. In all my cooking I used fresh herbs whenever I can, or as was this case last weekend, what I have growing in my herb garden. The flavor is just so much more robust, and I love full flavored food. My only suggestion to you is that you make enough of this marinade to reach at least half way up the meat in whatever dish you have chosen. You may not want to make enough to fully submerge the meat, but ½ submerged will allow you to fully marinate by flipping the meat periodically. I suggest letting the meat rest for at least 6 hours in the marinade. I have gone as far as 24 hours. The flavor will intensify the longer you let it rest.

I have always chosen to barbeque my chops. I grill them over medium high heat for about 6 minutes on each side. We made sure each piece of meat reached an interior temperature of 165 degrees, and removed the meat from the grill. I like my meat just a touch more than medium and these chops were perfect. Let the meat rest for a few minutes before serving, then enjoy. The marinade creates a wonderful, full and fresh flavor. There is no need for anything to dress this chop up. A fork and knife are more than enough.

That cover’s the main dish, well at least for the meat eaters. However, at our dinner party, the carnivores represented only 50% of the population, the guys. The ladies are all vegetarians. This put me into a strange new world. I have never been, nor do I ever plan on becoming, a vegetarian. Substances like tofu are foreign to me, but what kind of a food blogger would I be if I didn’t accept a new challenge and attempt to expand my abilities? Luckily, this isn’t the first barbeque I’ve been to with vegetarians. I’ve seen many a tofu kebob prepared over the last few years, so i began looking for a good tofu recipe online. I found a recipe for cilantro lime tofu, which I have to say, sounded almost appetizing. The preparation for the tofu was very similar to the veal. Prepare your marinade, pour over the tofu, let it rest. The recipe can be found here. As I stated above, my final product was something close to the recipe, but I never once pulled out a measuring spoon.

I let the tofu sit for about 6 hours in the marinade before we put it on the grill. If I do this recipe again, I will most definitely let the marinade work longer, probably a minimum of 12 hours to give the tofu more opportunity to soak up the flavors. I would also keep the tofu pieces on the thinner side. I sliced my tofu into slices about an inch think. I would suggest no more than ¾ of an inch. This will help to keep the balance of flavor between the marinade and the tofu.

One of the nice things about this marinade is it keeps the tofu from sticking to the grill. The tofu actually came out very nice. The marinade was dynamite! It was fresh and crisp, but the cayenne added a little bit of a bite. The tofu firmed up nicely on the grill, and had very nice grill markings. I was pleasantly surprised with how it turned out, but honestly I don’t know good tofu from shoe soles, so my opinion is, as Joey Tribiani once said, “a moo point… it’s like a cow’s opinion. It doesn’t matter.”

This post drafted while listening to Vince Guaraldi - Greatest Hits (See all Cool Jazz Music CDs).