We recently stopped at the Greece Marketplace during the Epcot International Food & Wine Festival… we both have the Taste of Greece on our “must have” lists, when Nick saw that it was the featured pairing with Domaine Skouras Moscofilero (a wine that wasn’t on our must-have lists)… he ordered both for us to sample.
Taste of Greece paired with Domaine Skouras Moscofilero: grilled and marinated calamari, hitipiti, eggplant dip, olives & pita bread
The wine was good with the saltier components of this “dish” … it wasn’t very tasty on it’s own. Let me explain what is in the container…
creamy stuff in the foreground is htipiti dip (feta spread/dip), black olives and rosemary are pretty easy to understand, the little “sticks” are calamari (very strange looking calamari), the green stuff is eggplant dip, and the pita bread is also self explanatory
We liked two things about this offering… the olives (clearly brined and not canned) and the htipiti – the saltiness of both of these items paired well with the wine and had a bit of a flavor punch (whereas the other elements did not pack much if any flavor).
there was a lot of olive oil poured on top of everything, maybe that’s authentic, it simply looked greasy to us
At first, we thought that the calamari had been left off our dish… We’ve never seen calamari as uniform, sticks of protein. It was only after we tasted them that we realized that it MUST be the calamari (it wasn’t fishy or anything, it wasn’t overcooked, it just looked really strange and didn’t have much flavor). Before we began eating anything, I removed as much of the rosemary as I possibly could. The light rosemary flavor in the oil and the olives was okay, but we aren’t huge rosemary fans as a general rule.
3 sticks of calamari, lots of oil, and eggplant dip
The eggplant dip wasn’t so great, pretty much flavorless and squishy. And the pita bread was cold and hard as rocks… it seemed like it had been removed from its packaging and sliced HOURS before we came along.
loads of olive oil
There were some items that we liked – the htipiti, the olives, and the wine… I don’t think this is going to be a “do again” for us, I think we’d rather go to Kouzzina and get something there…
Hitipi is a dip that I make quite a lot at home thanks to the “Cooking with Mickey” cookbook, which has the old Spoodles recipe. I thought it was the best thing on the plate, and as such, probably wouldn’t order again. Hitipi is dead simple to make and flavor to personal taste, so it’s just not worth my time and limited belly capacity to order at the Food & Wine Festival. And I agree with you, those sticks of calamari were weird!
It took me a few minutes to realized that the white sticks were the calamari… I did like the wine (some)