Biographical note:

Award-winning author DIANE KOCHILAS divides her time between New York, Athens, and her family’s ancestral island, Ikaria, where she and her husband, Vasilis Stenos, run the Glorious Greek Kitchen cooking school. She has written 18 books on Greek cuisine. Her latest book, The Country Cooking of Greece, was hailed by the Virtual Gourmet as her masterpiece and the Best Cookbook of 2012. She lives in Athens and New York City.

Main description:

Ikaria is mythical, beautiful, enigmatic—and, as we learned after reading the New York Ttimes article about it, a place where residents live unaccountably long lives. Part cookbook, part travelogue, filled with gorgeous photography, stunning recipes, and interviews with locals, and packed with the often quirky secrets to a long life that Ikarians are spoon-fed at birth, Ikaria is award-winning author Diane Kochilas’s ethno-culinary paean to this magical island.

Here, Kochilas will marry lore to lesson and recipe to interview: we’ll meet a 101-year-old weaver—the best on the island—and taste the combinations of herbs that he cooks with and that he believes give him life. We’ll learn about the life-giving benefits of delicious salads both raw and cooked, the gorgeous breads and savory pies that are a part of every meal, the bean dishes that are passed down through generations, and the seafood that is at the root of the Ikarian culinary culture. filled with mouthwatering recipes and remarkable stories, this book will introduce many Americans to food as life, as only the Ikarians know it.