Greek salad with potatoes and halloumi. The best one you can make

Vefa Alexiadou is like a culinary institution in Greece - her cookbooks are in almost every home, and the television programs in which she cooked enjoyed record viewerships for decades.

Today, Vefa is over 90 years old and is still cooking. She prefers classic recipes - claiming to have gathered over 100,000 of them on her computer's disk! - but she also makes some transgressions. For instance, she recommends a mustard-based sauce and cooked carrots for the classic potato salad!

This is an interesting tweak, giving a tasty effect, somewhat akin to our vegetable salad and proving that the only limit when it comes to potatoes salad is the imagination of the person cooking. Because there are countless non-canonical recipes for this brilliantly simple and delicious dish - both on land and on the islands. In the Cyclades, capers are the dominant flavor in this salad, on Rhodes I ate a version with mayonnaise, on Skiathos - with mint, and on Naxos - with fried halloumi and grapes (my favorite variant).

Fast and easy to prepare, filling, and if we add a lot of fresh herbs to it, it turns into a flavor bomb. Ideal for any time of the year.

• 3-4 servings,
• about 40 minutes,
• gluten-free.

Ingredients:

• 3.3 pounds of new potatoes,
• 2-3 red onions,
• 2 tablespoons of capers,
• 2 tablespoons of chopped dill,
• 2 tablespoons of chopped parsley,
• 4 tablespoons of olive oil,
• 15-20 favorite olives,
• 3-4 stems of chives,
• juice squeezed from 1 lemon,
• salt, pepper,
• optionally: 0.48 pounds of halloumi cheese,
• 0.33 pounds of favorite grapes,
• zest grated from 1 lemon.

Method of preparation:

1. Clean the potatoes, cut them in half, and boil. When they cool a little, transfer them to a deep bowl, add thinly sliced or feathered onion, olives, dill, parsley, capers, chopped chives, salt, and pepper.
2. Pour in olive oil and lemon juice and mix thoroughly but gently. In a pan, heat a spoonful of olive oil, throw in the cubed halloumi cheese, and fry it on both sides until it is golden brown (2-3 minutes).
3. Add the cheese to the ready salad, and then the grapes cut in half, if you're using them. Sprinkle the whole with flakes of grated lemon peel. Eat while the cheese is still warm.