Snack

Greek cuisine is famed for its appetizer dips — no meze party would be complete without at least one.

Though they're the kind of thing you tell yourself you're making for kids, the way these sweet and slightly salty cookies go a little chewy when they absorb the ice cream will definitely inspire mature palates as well. This recipe is also delightfully devoid of fuss; you simply make one big sandwich and then cut it into small pieces.

Cha gio are considered culinary treasures, delighting everyone who's tried them. Light and crispy, spring rolls are traditionally wrapped with rice paper. At Lemon Grass, however, we use a more durable type of spring roll wrapper made from wheat flour. Also used for Filipino-style lumpias, they are marketed under the Menlo brand and stocked in the frozen food department of Asian grocery stores. These 8 X 8-inch wrappers seal the filling so well that no oil can seep through during frying; this is not the case with rice paper.

Who can resist rich chocolate with roasted pecans and butter-rum caramel? Melting the chocolate in stages insures that it will set. If you wish, the alcohol can be omitted.

These crunchy chips are great with chili, soup, dip, or by themselves.

Editor's note: The recipe below is excerpted from Entertaining with the Sopranos. To read more about the cookbook, click here.

There's no need to set up a deep fryer to make great potato chips—the oven is just fine.

This popular breakfast food is also a late-night favorite after a good "lime." "Lime" is the Trini term for "hanging out." On Friday and Saturday nights, smart doubles vendors take to their stations to serve hungry revelers seeking a midnight snack.

Recipe from the kitchen of Felicia Gray, age 12 Many crab dip recipes call for imitation crabmeat, but there's no place for "krab" here. Only real lump crabmeat makes it taste best. Serve it while it's hot with crackers, bite-size pieces of bread, or veggie sticks. It can also be presented in a bread bowl and served with a tray of fresh broccoli, carrots, zucchini, or crackers.

Editor's note: The recipe below is excerpted from Katie Brown's Weekends. To read more about Katie Brown and to get her tips on throwing a headache-free cocktail party, click here. You won't want to bite into these because they are so beautiful. But you will soooo be missing out because they are sooooo tasty!

Don't let the hairy arms and legs alarm, you. Tarantula cookies might look frisky, but they don't bite.

Editor's note: The recipe below is excerpted from Katie Brown's Weekends. To read more about Katie Brown and to get her tips on throwing a headache-free cocktail party, click here. I love an all-in-one dish!

Editor's note: The recipe and introductory text below are excerpted from Joan Nathan's book The Foods of Israel Today. Nathan also shared some helpful cooking tips exclusively with Epicurious, which we've added at the bottom of the page. To read more about Nathan and Israeli cuisine, click here. I remember with pleasure the Turkish Spinach burekas we ate every Friday morning when I worked in the Jerusalem municipality. The ritual was as follows: Simontov, the guard at the front door downstairs, would appear carrying a bronze tray with Turkish coffee and the heavenly, flaky pastries filled with spinach or cheese, called filikas in Ladino. It is rare today to have such delicious burekas, in Jerusalem or anywhere else in Israel. Most of the dough is commercially produced puff pastry, much thicker and less flaky than the homemade phyllo used to be. A few places, like Burekas Penzo in Tel Aviv (near Levinsky Street), which has been making the pastries by hand in the Turkish style for more than thirty years, produce a close second to those I remember from my days in Jerusalem. Various Ladino names like bulemas and boyos differentiate fillings and distinguish a Jewish bureka from a Turkish one. If you can find the thick phyllo dough, that works well. Otherwise, try this. My fifteen-year-old makes and sells them for fifty cents a piece. They are great!

Editor's note: The recipe and introductory text below are excerpted from Paula Wolfert's book The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen. Wolfert also shared some helpful cooking tips exclusively with Epicurious, which we've added at the bottom of the page. Here's a fast bread for slow foods. Small as a pancake, these easy-to-make, grainy-textured griddle breads are similar to those sold on the streets of Casablanca and Tunis. No yeast is required. A combination of coarse semolina and fine pasta flour provides a butter-colored interior and blotchy black exterior. Serve these breads as a hot hors d'oeuvre with North African herb or tomato jams or for breakfast brushed with butter or argan oil and honey.

Utensils needed: Heavy-bottomed saucepan; four 8-ounce containers with lids, sterilized
Cooking time: Approximately 20 minutes
Storage: Refrigerate in an airtight container up to 3 weeks.
Serving suggestions: Use as a condiment for meat, poultry, or fish; as a dip for crudités; or as a topping for croutons, baguette slices, or sliced cooked potatoes.

KITRINA KOULOURIA ASTYPALITIKA Editor's note: This recipe is excerpted from Aglaia Kremezi's book The Foods of Greece. To read more about Kremezi and Greek Easter, click here. I first saw these biscuits on Holy Thursday in Astypalaia (an island of the Dodecanese). In a bakery there I saw pan after pan full of yellow biscuits about to be baked for the second time. I thought they were the baker's specialty and asked if I could buy some. To my astonishment I learned that they belonged to the women of the village, who had brought them there to be baked. I was offered one to taste, and tried to figure out what was giving them their strange flavor. I had never seen or tasted anything like those biscuits anywhere in Greece. The week before Easter it is customary throughout Greece to bake Easter biscuits, but the ones I was familiar with were sweet and contained many eggs. These were savory — I could taste pepper in them — but I could not figure out the rest of the flavors. When I asked, I was told their main flavoring was saffron. In the fall, after the first rains, the women of the island climb the rocky hills of Astypalaia in search of the crocus flowers from which they collect about 1/3 ounce of saffron threads — enough to color and flavor the dough made from 28 pounds of flour that they usually bake. Astypalaian women don't like commercial saffron, believing that the saffron gathered from their own hills is best. And, of course, they are right. As I learned later, these saffron biscuits are found only on this tiny island. In Athenaeus, bread with saffron is described as one of the foods served during ancient symposia, but in modern Greece — although we now cultivate and export a lot of the precious spice — we use hardly any saffron in our cooking. I believe that this recipe must be a very old one, and that is the reason it contains no sugar. The women of the island keep the tradition and bake a lot of these yellow biscuits every Easter. They send some to their relatives in Athens and keep the rest in large tin boxes to eat with fresh farmer's cheese or with their coffee for the rest of the year. Adjusting the recipe given to me by Virginia Manolaki for 8 cups of flour was quite an ordeal. Commercial saffron seems to be weaker than the Astypalaian variety, so I had to use more. Finally, I came up with the version that follows, which is very near the real thing. Serve the biscuits with fresh cheese or with coffee.

Every Israeli has an opinion about falafel, the ultimate Israeli street food, which is most often served stuffed into pita bread.

Utensils needed: Mixing bowl; whisk; wooden spoon; large bowl; three 6-inch loaf pans, lightly buttered and dusted with Wondra flour; wire rack
Baking time: Approximately 25 minutes
Storage: Wrap tightly. Keep at room temperature up to 1 day; refrigerated, up to 1 week; frozen, up to 3 months.

Editor's note:
This recipe is adapted from chef Joseph Poon. He also shared some helpful cooking tips exclusively with Epicurious, which we've added at the bottom of the page. To read more about Poon and Cantonese cuisine, click here. In Hong Kong, the Cantonese have developed what are called Hong Kong-style coffeeshops, which serve Western foods with a Cantonese interpretation. In this easy fusion recipe, chef Poon offers a classic example of what might be found in one of these shops — a Western dish with the surprising flavors of cilantro and ginger.