Fresh Pitas and Svoulaki

After eating fresh pita bread in Washington D.C., Dave and I decided to try to make it on our own. Not to toot our own horns, but it turned out great and was relatively easy. We were so excited!!

I found the recipe at: http://www.thefreshloaf.com/recipes/pitabread

So after letting the dough sit, we created the pita balls and started baking them. Here are four of them waiting to be cooked.

We wanted thin pitas, like at Zatinya, so we rolled them out very thin.
We were amazed at how they puffed up in the oven.

Here was the first attempt of pita bread. It was light, airy and tasted very good. It went great with chickpea puree and chicken for dinner that night.

This is a whole wheat/all-purpose flour version of the pita. You can see it has better color and it had better tasted. It tasted more hearty, yet remained the fluffiness and lightness from our first batch.

Setting the scene: We had an awesome dinner at our friends house and they made us souvlaki and showed us the truly Greek (they grew up there) way to eat it with mustard, tatziki, a red sauce, onions, peppers, parsley. It was delicious!! Given our interest in culinary adventure, we tried to recreate the souvlaki and tatziki at home. The whole wheat pita above was made for the souvlaki.

Princess Kaitlyn took a break from playing at her castle and helped her mommy make tatziki - a cucumber, yogurt and dill sauce.


And we used pork tenderloin for the skewers and marinated them overnight using a the following souvlaki recipe: http://www.food.com/recipe/greek-souvlaki-110939. We marinated the meat overnight and they tasted great!!

As you can see, we have our pita, skewers, tomato, parsley and onion, mustard and tatziki.

For our first attempt at souvlaki, it tasted great. However, I do need to get the red sauce recipe from my friend (possibly a combination of tomatoes and sweet red peppers) and rework the tatziki recipe as it didn't have enough flavor despite sitting for 2+ hours and draining the water from the cucumbers and Greek yogurt. Regardless, this was a fun series of culinary adventures that we'll be sure to try again!