Nowadays, potatoes are an essential part of Greek cuisine and are just as popular an appetizer as they are a main dish, whether fried, baked or boiled. However, when this “newfangled” food was first introduced, it caused such controversy that Ioannes Antonios Capodistrias (1776-1831), the first government chef to the young Greek state, alledgedly had to resort to a cunning ploy to get his extremely suspicious countrymen to accept this unknown food. Thus instead of handing out potatoes freely, as he had intended, he ordered his soldiers to appear to be guarding them. This immediately aroused the curiosity of the farmers, who promptly stole them! Of course, the soldiers had been instructed to turn a blind eye to this and the potato was successfully introduced to Greece.

-From Culinaria Greece

 

Another great recipe from this outstanding series of books. The pictures in the book are beautiful and the potatoes looked delicious, so I'm giving it a try.

 

Here's the ingredients. Pretty simple and basic, and that means it's going to be good. The plastic tub has chopped basil and oregano from the herb garden

 

 

Washed the potatoes, then cut them into "fingers" about 6 per spud (these weren't very big)-

 

 

Arranged them in a casserole dish, sprinkled kosher salt (about 3 TBSP) on them and the chopped herbs-

 

 

Then added about a 1/3 to 1/2 cup olive oil drizzled over it (the recipe didn't specify how much) then all the juice of 2 lemons over the whole thing-

 

 

Put enough water to "just cover" the potatoes, and into a 400F preheated oven until all the water is boiled off-

 

 

It's been one hour since they went in and there is still some water in there. The recipe did not give a time for this, so I am on my own at this point. I'll post finished pics as soon as it is done!