To finish, I added a little coarsely grated ricotta salata, a mild feta-like sheep's milk cheese.
Our diet is simple and often repetitive: every day, our lunch features a tomato, a cucumber and a strong, feta-like cheese that can be almost unpalatably pungent.
Bulgarian cuisine is largely Mediterranean, featuring giant stuffed dolmas; a feta-like white cheese; salads of cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, peppers and parsley, generously doused with vinaigrette; and tarator, a soup of creamy Bulgarian yogurt, cucumber chunks, olive oil and garlic.
Under the Canadian agreement, for example, new feta products manufactured in Canada can only be marketed as feta-like or feta-style, and they can't use Greek letters or other symbols that evoke Greece.
We started with ripe wedges of melon with salty white feta-like cheese, a favorite combination here, stuffed mussels, marinated sea bass, and two smoky eggplant preparations, one chunky and one a puree.
We went outside and sat at a picnic table underneath a grape vine, while the nieces brought forth the Mavrogiannis cheeses: a salty, feta-like one, a hard yellow one, and a soft, young one that slid off the knife like Jell-O.
Another innovative cheese was the Camelicous, the one made with camel milk from the United Arab Emirates, in three types, the soft, the feta-like and the soft low fat.
Add in some feta if you like!
A salad of sweet local cherry tomatoes and watermelon, served with smoked ricotta from Abruzzi (it tastes like feta), channels Strega Nona; a lightly fried artichoke appetizer, with yogurt and specks of mint, complements a gorgeous thick-cut Colorado lamb chop, grilled, with a vincotto glaze, atop faro and chard.
At $11, it is by far the most expensive appetizer, although it resembles a plate that many Iranian restaurants put out on the table free — slabs of milky feta, stacked like bricks in an ancient wall, fragrant heaps of mint and purple basil, and crisp wedges of raw onion mild enough to eat like an apple.
A hearty salad of kale and pumpkin flecked with grains of quinoa and tossed in a sour-cream vinaigrette was perfect topped with powdery cubes of feta that looked like miniature marshmallows.
