If you don’t know what it is, join the club. I only learned the word a couple of days ago. Until I looked up recipes for Greek Village Salad that day, I had no idea that it was called horiatiki. It is refreshing and delicious. The Central Market used to have it in big trays from which you could scoop it up into your plastic container. Alas, that was a couple of years ago.
A few days ago, I asked one of the folks behind the deli counter when they might carry it again. A pleasant and personable young man looked at me with a blank expression; “I’ve been here two years, and I’ve never heard of it,” he replied. “Well, shit!” I thought to myself.
Horiatiki is a simple salad in a spirit similar to the Italian Insalata Caprese. It has chopped tomatoes, green bell pepper slices, chopped cucumber, kalamata olives, and chucks of Feta cheese. Like its Italian cousin, it does not include leafy vegetables. I love mixed greens, arugula and romaine lettuce, but these Mediterranean salads are a nice break from lettuce-like vegetables.
It turns out that all that one needs to make horiatiki is available at the salad bar – all except red wine vinegar and EVOO which we have at home.
I went to the store today, and I bought duck legs, wine, red currant jelly, and the salad bar ingredients for horiatiki. Susan chopped the vegetables for the salad, and I added the vinegar and EVOO (Persian Lime Olive Oil from The Olive Tap in Colorado Springs that we bought several years ago. I always get the easy jobs.
The horiatiki looked like this:
I prepared the duck legs with a generous sprinkling of Chinese Five Spice, and a bed if garlic cloves and sprigs of rosemary from our backyard bush.
Roasted duck has unctuously crispy skin and is all dark meat. Need I say more? Yum! The plating looked like this just before we devoured it.
If you haven’t had Greek Village Salad, I heartily recommend it to you.