Hi! Welcome to Mediterranean Taste, your source for the best in Mediterranean recipes and lifestyle.
Stay a while, explore, get inspired, master how to cook Mediterranean favorites, from local gastronomic specialties to iconic dishes, many very easy, and enjoy with me eating and drinking well. It’s easy to recreate the tastes of the Mediterranean in your own kitchen, wherever you are.
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I’m Rebecca, and the recipes you’ll find here are inspired by decades of living between America and Italy, traveling the Mediterranean, enjoying lots of great food (and the paradox!) and collecting thousands of Mediterranean recipes along the way.
Mouthwatering favorites from all over the Mediterranean.
Mediterranean cuisine is vast and varied, and I love it all — from Italy, France, Spain and throughout Northern Africa in the West, to all the glorious flavors of the Levant, Turkey and Greece in the East. Through recipes and culinary experiences, I share what eating Mediterranean means to me, and recipes from our life — the way we eat at home.
Our main area of specialty in our kitchen comes from the European Mediterranean. From the Mediterranean coasts to the Mediterranean Alps. Naturally this includes many of the classic dishes of Italy, our Mediterranean home base.
Why we love eating Mediterranean at our house:
Wherever we are in the world, we mostly cook Mediterranean. You can call it our diet in the sense of it’s root meaning: daily, as a habit — our main style of eating. However, we are not actually ever on a diet, per se. Mediterranean-style eating is a way of life for us.
Eating Mediterranean means enjoying eating well. Vibrant exciting flavors, beautiful fresh ingredients that celebrate the seasons, aromatic herbs, simple methods. These are recipes for everyday cooking, elegantly casual, innately nourishing eating — balanced with little indulgences of daily delights and special occasion treats.
- Easy to prepare, elegantly simple meals that usually can be thrown together quickly or made ahead.
- Ingredient-centered dishes:
- Celebrating individual foods in the Mediterranean has been going on for ages and continues today, celebrating anything (often with festivals to inaugurate peak season) from onions, artichokes, and chestnuts, to the olive harvest’s freshly pressed olive oil, the grape harvest’s promising vintages, and the enthusiastically awaited truffle season.
- Ingeniously simple ingredient combinations
- Great ingredients help us out a lot in the kitchen! When they’re great, we don’t actually have to do much to have a great meal. Quality ingredients chosen for their beautiful colors, freshness, or outrageously delicious peak-season flavors — that just happen to be nourishing by default — is a win, win in my book!
- An indulgent attitude for delicious dishes that are innately nourishing, without putting too much thought into nourishment or weight watching. It’s the opposite of restrictive eating (I’m still overjoyed at this delicious paradox!) Historically, Mediterranean style eating tends to keep us nourished and our weight in check by default.
- The paradox – Despite eating royally, generally with more multi course meals, more fat, more carbs, more treats, and more satisfaction, without attitude of restriction, I have always lost weight when in Italy — both for the short-term and long-term.
- A reverence for treats! (and historically, with a rhythm to it. I’ll talk more about this later because I really like how it naturally keeps me in line!)
- Timeless – The cuisines of the Mediterranean have both shaped and been shaped by the world. With a long history of influencing and being influenced. From the East and West, constantly evolving with exchanges and introductions of new ingredients, ideas and methods of cooking, enthusiastically, or eventually, embraced. Mediterranean cuisine continues to evolve, with plenty of license for individuality and creativity. And yet, many of the Mediterranean’s cuisines’ ancient ingredients, timeless pairings of harmonious flavors, and dishes, are still enjoyed today.
- It’s easy to eat Mediterranean from anywhere in the world, wherever you are.
Good Food & Cooking
The collection of Mediterranean recipes here is shaped by my philosophies on food and cooking. That is,
- Good food enriches daily life. There is no reason not to enjoy! (There is every reason to enjoy!)
- You can make extraordinary food in an ordinary kitchen, with everyday ingredients, no matter your available time or budget.
- Delicious, real, slow food can be fast and easy!
- For those timid in the kitchen,
- Anyone can cook. And even if you don’t cook much, you can cook in a skilled way what you do cook — without taking it too seriously.
- It doesn’t have to be perfect to be delicious. So why not relax any inhibitions.
- With cooking, your masterpieces and mistakes alike are all eaten!
- There is great beauty in timeless recipes. Trends come and go. Great ingredients, tastes and recipes endure.
- Eating with the Seasons – If you need inspiration look no further! Fresh, local foods in peak season are more amazing, with superior flavor, texture, color, nourishment… (I’m always dreaming of the coming August’s homegrown tomatoes.) That said, it’s a lot easier to keep up with what’s in season in the countryside than in the city! And the countryside has its challenges too! Having experienced both the complete luxury, as well as challenges, of eating seasonally in the countryside (What do you do when you are generously given over 1000 sanguine oranges during peak orange season?), I highly appreciate a blend of both! The countryside girl in me appreciates immensely and, when possible, takes full advantage of the seasons bounty. But as a born and raised city girl, I also appreciate choice, and the convenience of finding certain ingredients in stock for more than, say, a month a year! (Craving the Comfort of pasta with peas out of pea season? Frozen peas will be perfect!)
- Special Treats can’t be mediocre. I pass them by if they’re not worth the splurge or calories.
Mediterranean Recipes
The Mediterranean recipes you’ll find here are what we love to eat! Many have naturally evolved to reflect our individual tastes, and often made easier or quicker to prepare.
What you’ll find here:
- Easy tasty recipes, traditional and modern, from around the Mediterranean — from the coasts and islands to the fertile valleys and mountains.
- Recipes that are fast and easy as they are delicious.
- Quick and satisfying, no-fuss meals, from impromptu off-the-cuff cooking, to no-cook meal ideas.
- Make ahead recipes to have ready to use or enjoy when you’re pressed for time (or just tired!)
- When time-consuming, worth the effort!
- Mediterranean gems – Favorites made simple, iconic Mediterranean classics that have stood the test of time, regional Mediterranean specialties.
- Flavors and aromas that evoke the Mediterranean: aromatic herbs, lemons, basil, garlic, mint, fennel.
- Olive oil dominates the landscapes and the kitchens of the Mediterranean, and is often used raw as a flavor, and finishing garnish, as well as for cooking.
- Pasta! Pasta fits in beautifully to a modern lifestyle. It helps to keep us grounded. By it’s very structure, making pasta keeps meals fairly simple to prepare and nourishing with not much to have to think about. Having spent so many years in Italy, I have cooked quite a lot of pasta!
- Plenty of naturally vegetarian and vegan recipes
- Comfort food that satisfies.
- Recipes that are as innately nourishing and wholesome as they are delicious (So typical of the Mediterranean, and with the spirit is indulgence! This is my kind of cuisine!)
- Special Treats (But of course!) worth the calories!
- Substitutions and tips to make your life in the kitchen easier!
- Tried and true and tested recipes. All the recipes have been tested and approved in our real life kitchen and table, from our daily life, many by family and friends and neighbors over decades.
More about me
I spent the first part of my life in Texas, and have since lived between America and Italy, where my husband grew up, in the biggest of cities to the tiniest of villages of the countryside. And you better believe I have enjoyed the full range of gastronomic offerings. I am currently a coastal country girl in Italy, getting back in touch with the seasons; enjoying the beautiful emerald and azure coast of the Mediterranean while taking my daily walk (okay, at least 3-4 times a week) through coastal pine forests; and grilling lots of local fish with the fresh aroma and taste of the salty Mediterranean sea.
My 3rd-person mini bio
- Chef de cuisine — or chief — of her own kitchen, at home (actually co-chef — husband is chief too, off-the-cuff).
- Specializes in everyday cooking, bourgeois peasant cooking (yes, an oxymoron), weeknight easy eating, casually elegant weekend meals, and special occasion treats.
- Likes to enjoy meals as if spent the day in the kitchen — without actually having done so. Believes in less pots and pans and more enjoyment.
- Continues to eat in courses. “Who eats courses anymore?” some ask incredulously. “We do!” (salad and fruit follows the main course, etc…) In fact, we are highly suspicious it has something to do with keeping our weight in check! I plan to write more about this. It’s pretty relaxed most of the time. It’s just a nice way to avoid eating anarchy.
- Loves everything from eating from a tree, to fancy restaurants, salads just-picked from the earth, rustic fair with elegant cutlery, casually elegant meals without pretension.
- Loves seasonal food for gourmand reasons, and let’s the benefits take care of themselves. Especially, the unbelievably flavorful peaches of June; the gorgeous deep red colors, outrageous flavor and perfect texture of homegrown tomatoes of deep summer; fall’s porcini — on pasta; late fall’s seductive aroma of truffles pervading the air anywhere plates of pasta and scrambled eggs are adorned.
- Goes through profuse amounts of olive oil, especially when near the source.
- Loves to run her hands through all fresh herbs, in the wild, in the garden, and in the kitchen, to inhale their intoxicating aromas.
- Omnivore who can often be found eating accidentally like a vegan.
- Loves fruit desserts, but can be talked into chocolate cake with unsurprisingly little arm twisting.
- Reads the full cookbook.
- Has Mediterranean taste.
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