I'm Greek...We Eyeball Recipes

by Cathy

When I got married, my mom gave me a beautiful, hardcover Greek recipe book, complete with instructions on how to set the proper table and what tools a good housewife needs to have in her kitchen to cook for her family. At that time, I worked full-time as did my husband, so whipping up a gourmet Greek meal to be the "perfect little housewife" was out of the question because the "perfect little housewife" was not the road I was going down. Dinners consisted mostly of takeout or frozen pizza and chips. Not healthy, I know, but there simply wasn't any time to be creative in the kitchen and work a 50+ hour-a-week job. But as I watched us slowly start to bust out of our jeans, I knew I had to bust out that cookbook and trash the junk food dinners.

As I slowly honed my cooking skills with the easy, less time-consuming recipes first, I started recalling the dishes my mom would make when I lived at home. There were fancified versions of these in my shiny cookbook but I just wanted the simple recipes - the way my mom made them.  From memory. So I would call her up and she would give me these recipes over the phone or during an afternoon coffee session and I would write them down in my hand-written recipe book - the one I plan to hand down to my girls. The only problem was, her verbal recipes were not as concise as what was in that recipe book.  There were no clear measurements or cooking times of any kind. She would say, "a little of this, a little of that, a pinch of this, a half Greek coffee cup of this, when it browns it's done, when the sauce thickens, it's done" and the go-to classic - "just eyeball it."

Fifteen years later, that is how I know to prepare these recipes. I "eyeball" them. So this obviously brings me to quite a predicament when I get asked to share my recipes. I don't mind doing that; what makes it difficult is narrowing down in true measurements what I already know by "eyeballing."

Once, my Martha Stewarty neighbor asked me for my Yuvarelakia (Greek meatball) recipe, after the aroma coming from my kitchen wafted out and into her kitchen via our back deck doors. I gave her a small tasting first to verify that indeed, she did want the recipe - and indeed she did. So I sat down one night to translate it for her, starting with the name, which literally means, Little Barrels. Now again, this neighbor of mine is very "by the book". When she gives me recipes, there are special kitchen tools and various Pyrex measuring cups and measuring spoons of all sizes involved, ramekins for pre-sorting, and there IS a difference between pureeing and mincing. She keeps her spices in clear test-tube cylinders topped with corks, labels clearly typed, and the pages of her homemade recipe book (a three-ring binder) have each page set neatly into sheet protectors to prevent against spills from cooking. Before I stole the latter idea from her, my recipes were on post-its, napkins, torn out of magazines from various waiting rooms, printed from online, etc.

So knowing this, I clearly couldn't go to her with my Greek ghetto version of a recipe for Little Barrels. After struggling with measurement equivalents, cooking time, sauce consistency, etc. I handed my recipe over to my neighbor, but not without full disclosure.

"Here's that recipe, but just so you know, I can't guarantee that it will turn out the same for you as it does for me."

"What do you mean?" she replied, almost insulted.

"What I mean is, I don't make this recipe using exact measurements. I eyeball everything."

"Eyeball?" It's as if I spoke to her in Mandarin Chinese.

"Yes. We're Greek! That's how we do it." I replied firmly while pointing out that I had even written that in some portions of the recipe. ( It literally said, "Pour some Greek olive oil into the mixture until sufficient. Just eyeball it.")

My neighbor tried to hide her dismayed confusion and politely thanked me for the recipe as she went into her kitchen - obviously either to sheet protect the Greek ghetto recipe or to calculate the success rate of my measurements.

Regardless, a few weeks later, she called me over to taste her Little Barrels. And you know what? Considering she had to work with my Greek ghetto recipe, they were pretty darn good! But not as good as the "eyeballed" version.