It started snowing this morning, not enough to pave it, but it brought back the cold. Even though it is March already and usually in Greece this states the start of Spring, instead the first day of this month was more like winter.
Today I was quite busy and didn't have a lot of time to cook, so with all this cold weather, I thought it was a good day for soup.
And not just any soup. Trahanas soup.
I know that I may soumd gibberish and some people might say "What is trahana?" but I will answer all your questions.
Trahanas is a very popoular food ingerdient in Southeast Europe and Middle East. In my country, Greece, it looks like cous-cous or small pieces of pasta and it is made with wheat (flour) and milk. After the kneading, we pass it through a sieve to form small grains and let it dry for a long time, a day or more. It can either be sweet (made with just flour and milk) or sour (made with milk boiled with salt and other ingredients giving a sour taste -in Crete it is called xinohontros)
Trahanas is an excellent ingredient for soups, pies or additive to certain dishes. My dad used to cook potatoes with sour trahanas.
Also, apart for the classic trahanas, we can have with cooked and dried vegetables, spicy trahanas.
This is the trahanas left after two months since I bought it. This jar was full to the brim.
It was from Thrace, a northern part of Greece and was quite spicy. Except the wheat and the milk during its preperation, they add three different kinds of peppers (green, red and spicy green), pumpkin and boukovo.
The ingredients and the preperation is quite easy.
You just need three cups of water, one small cup (an espresso cup) of trahana and feta cheese.
Measure out three cups of water (one cup is about 300 ml.) and put the water in the pot to boil.
Once it starts to boil, add the trahanas. (Close up to see the grainy look of it)
It would be good to have a wooden spoon to stir from time to time.
This is the difficult part:
After four to five minutes boiling, you add the feta cheese. The more, the better. Feta gives an excellent taste to trahanas and also replaces the salt. (as you will have seen we didn't add any salt, because feta is salty on its own).
And what is the difficult in it? Not eat the feta cheese before you add in the mixture
And leave it on the stove for one minute, just for the feta to homogenize with the other ingredients.
Trahanas soup should be thick, something like this
It is served in the spot, preferably with wholemeal bread with seeds. (and if we've warmed it up a bit, even better)
And I like to add in my soup some strained Greek yoghurt. It gives a slightly sour taste to the dish.
Trahanas is rich in carbohydrates. The milk that is used in the recipe to prepare it increases the protein and calcium content.Also, it s rich in magnesium, that's why it is suitable for children. Some also include trahanas in their diet, because it regulates blood pressure, as they say.
It is very easy to be made and it doesn't need olive oil of other oils in its preparation. Due to feta cheese, you don't need to add salt.
But the best part was that after the nutritional trahanas soup, we had cake, since my partner had his birthday today.
The cake was not made by me. It was ready bought, a black forest cholocate cake.
Yummy, yummy.
Hope you liked my recipe. Trahanas soup is very easy to be made, needs very few ingredients, but is very tasty and delicious. Best thing for the winter cold and the snowy days like today.
Thank you for reading!
All the photos were taken by me, unless differently stated.