Editor's note: The recipe and introductory text below are excerpted from Diane Kochilas's book Meze: Small Plates to Savor and Share from the Mediterranean Table. Kochilas also shared some helpful cooking tips exclusively with Epicurious, which we've added at the bottom of the page.
There is this great bustling taverna in one of the northern Athenian suburbs near where we live, and this is the house special, so much so that the chef refused to give me a recipe for it. So, I deconstructed it myself only to re-create it pretty much intact. The tomatoes, cream, and ouzo make a great sauce. You could easily make a quantity and serve it over pasta. It would look and taste good with squid-ink linguine.
• To make the tomatoes easier to peel, first blanch them: Cut a shallow X in the bottom of each tomato and drop into boiling water for 10 to 30 seconds, until the skin around the X starts to peel back. Immediately remove to ice water, then peel. • Kochilas says it's fine to substitute canned tomatoes in this recipe, as long as they're high-quality. You can also finely chop the tomatoes instead of pulverizing them in a food processor.
