Preferred units

I’ve never made Greek breads. There are at least two, basically the same but with different names, vasilopita for New Year’s, and tsoureki for Easter. Vasilopita has a coin baked inside, lucky for the person who gets it. Tsoureki is garnished with a red Easter egg on top. But my family usually just called them pita. Which made for some confusion when gyros came around and the flatbread was also called pita. We’d never heard of the flatbread, before the gyro era.

We do both the coin and red egg bread, but use the exact same dough for both. Yes, can see where the pita name would be confusing when gyros hit the scene. Thanks @ernie_in_berkeley.

I used to do this whenever we were staying in an apartment or villa (usually in Cyprus or Spain). However, most trips these days we eat out every night (yes, it does get a bit wearing on the annual three week trip to Tenerife). But I still take them if we’re renting in Mallorca - there’s a fab street food market in the town near where we usually stay and it’d be a crime not to cook a couple of times a week. I’m hopeful that “the thing” will retreat enough to allow us to travel next year.

It’s funny how the old imperial measurements still hang about in some circumstances. For example, in the UK, the weight of new born babies is still recorded in pounds and ounces, even though we officially went (sort of) metric in 1965. And, in 2011, we were in South Africa - a country which converted to metric in 1970. We were chatting with a young SA man who mentioned that he was six feet tall. Another tourist in the group asked how come he didnt describe his height in metres. Apparently just not done - but his weight was in kilos, not stones. He said though that, if he had to measure six feet, say to cut a piece of wood, he’d need to convert it to metric to know what he was doing. Odd.

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Much prefer to weigh myself in kilos - makes me feel like a kid again! :grin:

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Because we usually had it only for Easter, I tend to call them both tsoureki…:wink:

:+1: I mean, c’mon, it’s not even Turkish, for heaven’s sake.:stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: (There is a Turkish flat-ish bread called pide, but it’s ciabatta-thickness, and while it’s a bit chewy because of the high crust-to-crumb ratio, it has a relatively normal leavened-bread texture.)

Being second-generation and not really raised especially “Greek”, this never actually drove me nuts, but the fact that pita (somehow) became ubiquitous at Greek restaurants (at least here in NYC) even before gyros per se became particularly popular - and so associated with “Greek” food by the hoi polloi :wink: - was a pet peeve of my late mother’s, who had never seen or even heard of it until she was an adult…

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I lived in France for several years, so my cookbook shelf is a hodgepodge of US and non-US cookbooks. My favorites all have margin notes converting to the other system, but mostly I own measuring tools in both metric and imperial, so I use the appropriate cups and spoons.

I find weight makes infinitely more sense.

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@Harters - if we are lucky enough to travel internationally again, it’s extremely doubtful we’ll be cooking. Unless, that is, if we rent a house and stay for a month or 2. We’ve talked about such with family and friends, and would most probably do that on Crete or another Greek Island. Not ruling out other places either.

I do hope you and your wife can resume taking your vacations again soon, when safe to do so.

Enjoyed your anecdotes about metric and imperial measurements and people using both. I can only imagine that would have happened here also. Imagine if it was being instituted currently in the US…

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We’ve already booked a couple of nights at a hotel that seems to have arranged things very well from a Covid aspect. That’s next month for my birthday. And we’ve also rented a house in southern England for a week in mid-September. It’s a small seaside village but shouldnt be busy then and I’ve plenty of time to research restaurants that have got their act together. By the by, it’s an area we know quite and we plan to revisit a couple of well known gardens that are open to the public, Both are now requiring visitors to pre-book and will turn away anyone arriving without a ticket. Bit of a nuisance as it could mean we will have picked a day when the weather is not garden visiting friendly.

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My son loves that bread. There seems to be a LOT of bread eating there.

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