Hallmarks of healthy eating
For a couple of hours last Wednesday, a strange, smoky scent took over the Winthrop Junior Common Room. But it wasn’t a fire in the making — just a case of plump eggplants being slow-grilled one by one, an old standby of Greek home cooks. “We like strong, pungent flavors, and we like that charcoal smokiness in food,” said Diane Kochilas, an authority on Greek cuisine and author of more than 20 cookbooks, as she flipped an eggplant on a gas burner. Kochilas advised her audience on how to check for doneness: When the densest part of the eggplant, near the stem, is soft, the entire thing will be cooked through. After letting the eggplant cool, she cut it down the middle, then scraped out its flesh. “I’m a Greek mother,” she explained later, “which means I want to feed everyone the Mediterranean diet.” Thanks to recent medical findings, she’s hardly alone in that...