I'm first generation here. My grandparents brought their village with them when they came to the US, and it stayed fully intact. My grandmother cooked the same dishes here that she'd made back home, exactly the same, straight through Brooklyn and every year after. Summers, we'd go back and find ourselves at her table in that tiny kitchen, the one where the walls could tell a whole epic about Yiayia's story.
Back in Queens, my mom kept a garden going, vegetables and flowers crowded in together, abundant in that specific way immigrant gardens are, abundant. I grew up immersed in all of it, the way you do in the diaspora, one foot in each place, and food was the thing holding both together.
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There were years I ate disconnected anyway, from my body, from where food actually comes from, from the specific things my grandmother knew, because to her it was the ordinary. When I went vegan in 2013, I assumed I was leaving the tradition behind. It took me a while to understand I was actually finding it again. Meat was a Sunday thing in my grandmother's village home, the one big meal of the week. The other six days were legumes, vegetables, olives, bread, maybe a little cheese, the actual daily diet of a Greek village table. Going vegan meant taking dishes that lived only in someone's hands and someone's memory and figuring out how to keep them true. Xorta needs no meat to begin with. Other dishes took real failed batches, a lot of lemon, a lot of patience, and the occasional swap that would have made my grandmother raise an eyebrow and then, probably, ask for a taste.
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This is the actual work now, a woman keeping a specific inheritance alive in a form her grandmother would recognize by hand, if not by ingredient, by what gets served when someone comes through the door hungry. Parade quoted me on why sourdough makes the best French toast, a nod to my Yiayia's bread making, and again on a Greek pasta salad, where I got to talk through how patatosalata and horiatiki influenced a dish you'd actually find on a table here in the US. I sat down with Victoria Moran on the Main Street Vegan podcast to talk through exactly this, and had an essay featured on both Main Street Vegan and All-Creatures.org.​
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When I'm not at the stove testing whether a recipe survived its translation, you'll find me walking with my partner Chris and our dog Louka, or back in the Mani in summer, watching my family's olive trees do what they've done for generations on their own.​​
​​What you'll actually find here
This is where I teach what I had to learn myself, how to carry a family food tradition forward when the tradition itself has to change. Not vegan recipes in general, and not Greek cooking in general. The specific, harder work of taking a dish that was never written down, that only ever lived in someone's hands and someone's memory, and keeping it true while changing what it's built on.
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Underneath that is something slower. My grandmother never explained why she rested after lunch, or why a dish was better for sitting two hours before anyone touched it. She just did it, because that's what the season and the day called for. I'm the one explaining it now, because someone has to, or it disappears with her generation.
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And underneath that, the truest thing. The table itself still important. Feeding someone who walks through your door. Sitting long enough at a meal for something real to happen between the people at it. That's worth protecting on purpose, in a life that won't hand you that structure the way a village once did.
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What I'm building, and what you'd actually get from it​
This is a few real things, each one built to give you something specific.
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The Laïki - my monthly letter, out the first week of every month. A short, honest note from my kitchen, so you always have one thing to look forward to opening.
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Substack - where I actually write. Reflection essays and the recipes tied to them, the deeper version of what I do, for anyone who wants the memory behind a recipe, along with the recipe itself.
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Seasonal Guides - four short guides, one for each season, each ending in one recipe. Free, and built as a starting point, wherever you are in the year, there's one that actually matches your season.
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Seasonal Ecookbooks - the fuller collections, real recipe books built around each season, for anyone who wants a whole season's worth of recipes to work from.
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Live gatherings - a seasonal bookclub for real conversation with other women who care about this, seasonal cooking classes if you want to actually stand in a kitchen with me, and a small retreat in Greece if you want to go further than a screen can take you. A few real touchpoints, spread across the year.
A note on the memoir
I'm working on a memoir, slowly, on its own timeline. When there's more to share, you'll hear about it first through The Laïki.
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Find me
[Substack] · [Instagram] · [The Laïki]
Contact christina@consciousvegankitchen.com 242 Main Street, Beacon, New York 12508