Katerina’s Greek Cuisine – Manassas

I am not what you could describe as an adventurous eater.  In fact, for most of my formative years, I considered lettuce to be a food stuff to be avoided.  Garlic?  Ha!  Would not touch the stuff.  Now part of that is the environment I grew up in and certainly at school I was not exposed to things that generally are considered flavourful.  But thanks to a friend, I was introduced to Greek food (specifically gyros) before I learned about a taco (no, I am not kidding).  Since then I have forced myself to try new and different foods.  I am still not hot on things like eggplant and you can keep your broccoli, even if it is covered in soy sauce.  But I still like a good gyro, and I am generally willing to dive into most Greek foods.

So, this weekend, as part of our no chicken fingers pledge while the Elf is at camp, we went to dinner at a new Greek restaurant in Manassas called Katerina's Greek Cuisine.  Now we like to patronize our local restaurants. Most are family run, tasty and offer a good deal and Katerina's is certainly a fit in all three.  The portions were healthy and we left after three courses for under $50.  Of course, that was without wine (they are still waiting their ABC permit) and as you know we both like wine.  I am hoping they have a good selection of Greek wine when they finally get their license.

It was a wonderful dinner.  We started with Saganaki, which is Kaseri cheese flambéed at the table, and it was very tasty - you squeeze some lemon juice on it which really makes wonderful.  I had a gyro platter with lamb (it is the only time I will eat lamb) and found out that pork is the traditional Greek way of making a gyro and the chef graciously gave me a small sample of it.  It is very different if you are used to the lamb version.  The pork was light and floral rather than the spicy lamb I am used to and I will certainly give a try next time around.  My wife had a selection of spreads, and other than the hummus, I cannot tell you what they were, other than very tasty as well.  One of the ones we had was lots of feta, garlic, some sun roasted tomatoes and a couple of other things tossed it - it was very tasty and our favourite of the bunch.  We wanted the rice pudding for dessert, but they were out, so we had the Galaktoboureko –  a creamy baked custard and filo dough drenched in lemon & orange infused syrup. I highly recommend it!

I give it five stars.  The food is good, the atmosphere is friendly and you want to go early, because it only has a handful of tables and when we left at 6:30, it was already full.

Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam.

I have a number of email accounts.  Some for work, some for play, some for junk and some for testing.  Of all of these accounts, I only pay for two.  One from my ISP and one from 1 & 1, which is where this blog is hosted, along with another site I maintain.  This morning I got an interesting email, supposedly from 1&1 (it isn't) and I though I would highlight this to those of you are less savvy about tech.  This is a hoax - do not get burned.

The email reads:

THIS MESSAGE IS FROM OUR TECHNICAL SUPPORT TEAM This message is sent automatically by the computer. If you are receiving this message it means that your email address has been queued for deactivation; this was as a result of a continuous error script (code:505)receiving from this email address. Click here and fill out the required field to resolve this problem

Note: Failure to reset your email by ignoring this message or inputting wrong information will result to instant deactivation of this email address

I have removed the link.  The one I got is supposedly from the tk TLD, and Wikipedia says, based on research from McAfee, that the  .tk domains were twice as likely as the global average to be used for "unwanted behaviors."  

So, like most email, if you are not expecting it, do not click on it.  If you think it is legitimate, then contact the provider directly, using another method.  In most cases however, despite the dire warning, you can hit delete without concern.  Which is what I am going to do, now that I have documented it for you.

Technical Note: The 505 error means the Web server (running the Web site) does not support, or refuses to support, the HTTP protocol version specified by the client (e.g. your Web browser or our CheckUpDown robot) in the HTTP request data stream sent to the server.