A traditional Greek dinner…with a twist!

I love greek food. I really do. I love most anything you’d find at a little hole in the wall Greek restaurant here in the States. Despite my love for all food Greek, I’ve never tried making it myself, until this week. Today the menu at my house consisted of Gyros with homemade gyro meat, homemade pitas, homemade tzatziki sauce, and homemade baklava for dessert. It was superb, so I thought I’d share the process with y’all.

The baklava I didn’t take pics of till it was done, so here it is:

And here’s the finished gyros, sorry ’bout the poor quality pic:

Now, I said it was a traditional Greek dinner with a twist, b/c there are a few things that I knew my wonderfuly hubby wouldn’t eat, so I adjusted. He hates onions. I used dehydrated onions in the meat, and left the onions off the finished gyros. We both hate tomatoes. I left those off the gyros as well. Since I got rid of the veggies essentially, I added back shredded lettuce to give that watery vegetable quality that it would’ve been lacking. That’s my twist. Oh, and I added feta cheese to the tzatziki sauce for something different.

The pita recipe I used can be found here.
The rolled out pita bread:

The baked pita bread:

The cut pita bread:

The recipe for the gyro meat can be found here.

The gyro meat fresh out of the oven and sliced:

The meat after I grilled it on the stove (I like it better grilled after it’s sliced):

And one more picture of the finished product:

The recipe for the tzatziki sauce is here. I used half plain yogurt, half sour cream and I added a Tablespoon of sugar.

The sauce:

Oh, and the baklava recipe can be found here.

Now, doesn’t that just make you want to try to make your own Greek dinner at home? It really wasn’t that hard, and I look forward to doing it again. The pita bread was SOOOOOOOO much better than anything you can buy at the store, and was as easy as making homemade dinner rolls. The gyro meat was only slightly more involved than making a meatloaf, and the tzatziki is harder to spell than it is to whip up. The baklava, well-that IS a pain, but it’s easy, just a lot of repetitive busy work. You really should try to make your own traditional Greek meal if you haven’t before, it’s totally worth it!