Ever since I read this article in the New York Times 10 years ago, I have been interested in the Greek island of Ikaria. The lifestyle and food habits seemed perfectly suited to my own values, so I am always looking for recipes from Ikaria to incorporate into my life.

If you don’t have a subscription to the Times, here is a PDF version of the article:

Last week I made some homemade spinach tagliatelle, and I needed a vegetable side dish. I found a perfect choice in the cookbook, The Blue Zones Kitchen, written by Dan Buettner — the author of the NYT article. The dish was Springtime Soufico, an unassuming but perfectly delicious little vegetable stew. Naturally, I had to eliminate the green pepper for my wife’s benefit, but the rest was as designed.

I had made the tagliatelle two days earlier, using a batch of fresh spinach that needed to be cooked just then. I left the noodles to dry out in the refrigerator, and then decided to pair them with roasted garlic and little cubes of pancetta, as the pasta dish for the night.

A bottle of 2017 Agiorgitiko provided a lovely medium-bodied red wine from Greece to pull together all the flavors very nicely.