Easy Greek Recipes That Actually Work on a Weeknight
Summary
Easy Greek recipes are the ones with few ways to go wrong: tzatziki, horiatiki, lemon potatoes, pan chicken souvlaki, fakes and spanakorizo. Start with lentil soup (40 minutes, no soaking), bake potatoes at 200 C for 65 minutes, marinate chicken thighs 1 to 4 hours, and always check quantities that videos only say out loud. Skip moussaka and baklava until you have practice.
Easy Greek recipes exist, but not every Greek dish with "easy" in the title earns it. We went through the usual lists and ranked what holds up on a Tuesday night: six dishes, each with a time, a temperature or a ratio you can trust, plus the ones we would skip at first.
Which Greek recipes are actually easy?
Easy has two meanings in a kitchen: few steps, or few ways to ruin it. Greek home cooking is good at the second one. The dishes are built on olive oil, lemon, oregano and garlic, so a small mistake rarely wrecks the plate.
Here is our ranking by real effort, from least to most:
Tzatziki: 10 minutes of work, 30 minutes of resting, no heat.
Horiatiki (village salad): 8 minutes, no dressing beyond oil and oregano.
Lemon potatoes: 15 minutes of work, 65 minutes in the oven, no attention.
Chicken souvlaki in a pan: 4 minutes per side, after a marinade.
Fakes (lentil soup): one pot, 40 minutes, no soaking.
Spanakorizo (spinach and rice): one pot, 30 minutes.
Fasolada, the white bean soup, comes after that. It is simple, but it asks for a night of soaking, so it is easy in skill and slow in calendar. If you want a wider list to browse, Mia Kouppa's roundup of 40 Greek recipes starts with picks for people new to Greek cooking, and its marinated chicken thighs, lemon potatoes and lentil soup match our shortlist.
Tzatziki and horiatiki: the two that need no heat
Start here if you have never cooked Greek food. Neither dish touches a stove, and both teach the same lesson: the ingredients do the work.
Tzatziki. Grate 1 cucumber, salt it lightly, and squeeze it in a clean tea towel until it stops dripping. This is the step most videos rush past, and it decides everything. A wet cucumber gives you soup, not dip. Stir it into 400 g of thick Greek yogurt with 2 grated garlic cloves, 3 tablespoons of olive oil and a teaspoon of red wine vinegar. Rest it 30 minutes so the garlic settles down.
Horiatiki. The village salad has no lettuce. Cut 4 ripe tomatoes into wedges, slice a cucumber and half a red onion, add a handful of olives, then lay a single slab of feta on top (about 150 g). Oregano, a generous pour of olive oil, nothing else. Do not toss it. The slab is the point: people break off pieces and mix their own.
The honest verdict: horiatiki is only as good as the tomatoes. In October in Thessaloniki the tomatoes are still good. In a supermarket in February, skip it and make the lentils instead.
Greek Flavours makes the same point in its five-recipe starter list, which pairs tzatziki and horiatiki with souvlaki, fava and dakos, and tells you to buy proper Greek olive oil and real feta because simple dishes have nowhere to hide.
Why lemon potatoes carry the whole dinner
If we could cook only one side for the rest of the year, it would be this one. Lemon potatoes make chicken, fish or a plain salad feel like a meal, and they cost almost nothing.
The method that works, in order:
Peel 1.2 kg of waxy potatoes and cut them into thick wedges, about 4 cm.
Put them in a baking dish with 120 ml of olive oil, the juice of 2 lemons, 4 crushed garlic cloves, 2 teaspoons of dried oregano and 1 teaspoon of salt.
Add 250 ml of hot water. Yes, water. The potatoes braise first, then roast.
Bake at 200 C (180 C fan) for 65 minutes, turning them once at the 35-minute mark.
They are done when the liquid has mostly vanished and the edges are golden, not before. The classic mistake, which you see in many short videos, is a pan with no water: the outside browns, the inside stays hard, and the lemon turns bitter.
One rule saves the dish. Use waxy or all-purpose potatoes. Floury baking potatoes fall apart in the lemon and turn to mush.
How do you make chicken souvlaki without a grill?
In a pan, and it works better than you would expect. A heavy frying pan over medium-high heat gives you the charred edge in 8 minutes total.
Cut 700 g of boneless chicken thighs into 2.5 cm cubes. Thighs, not breast: breast dries out in the 4 minutes it takes to brown, and thighs forgive you. Marinate with the juice of 1 lemon, 4 tablespoons of olive oil, 3 garlic cloves, 1 tablespoon of dried oregano and a teaspoon of salt, for at least 1 hour and at most 4. Longer than that and the lemon starts to turn the meat mealy.
Thread onto skewers, or skip the skewers and cook the cubes loose. Cook 4 minutes on the first side without moving them, then 3 to 4 on the others. Serve with pita, tzatziki from the section above, and sliced tomato and onion.
The video version of this dish always says "marinate for a bit". On recipe cards online, a "bit" ranged from 20 minutes to overnight. Pick 1 to 4 hours and you will not be wrong.
Fakes, spanakorizo, fasolada: three pots, three evenings
These are the dishes Greek families actually eat most weeks, and they are the real answer to "what is easy". One pot, cheap ingredients, almost no technique. They also happen to be vegetarian by default, which is how Greek food works during the long fasting periods.
Fakes (lentil soup). Rinse 250 g of brown lentils, no soaking. Sweat 1 chopped onion and 2 garlic cloves in 4 tablespoons of olive oil, add the lentils, 2 bay leaves, 2 tablespoons of tomato paste and 1.5 litres of water. Simmer 35 to 40 minutes. Add salt at the end, and finish each bowl with a spoonful of red wine vinegar and more oil. The vinegar is not optional. It is what makes the soup taste finished.
Spanakorizo. Sauté 1 onion and the white parts of 4 spring onions in oil, add 500 g of chopped spinach until it wilts, then 150 g of rice, 400 ml of water, dill, and the juice of 1 lemon. Cover and cook on low for 18 to 20 minutes. Rest 5 minutes off the heat. It is soft, green and slightly sour, and it reheats well for lunch.
Fasolada. The one that asks for planning. Soak 300 g of white beans overnight. Next day, boil them 10 minutes in fresh water, drain, then simmer with 2 carrots, 2 celery sticks, 1 onion, 3 tablespoons of tomato paste and 6 tablespoons of olive oil for 60 to 75 minutes. It is the national soup for a reason. Thick, a little sweet, better on day two.
If you only pick one, pick fakes. It needs no soaking, no fresh produce you cannot buy in winter, and it forgives a distracted cook.
What changes when you cook it from a video?
Most people now meet Greek recipes through a Reel or a TikTok: a grandmother in Crete, a creator in Athens, a 90-second clip of a pan. They look easy because the editing removes the waiting.
The video says "a bit of oil" and "cook until it looks right". It does not say the 65 minutes the potatoes needed, or that the spinach was 500 g before it shrank. The recipe is in the clip, but it is not written down.
That is the gap a recipe-saving app fills: you share the video, it reads captions and audio, and you get a list of ingredients and steps. The pattern with these tools is consistent:
They do well when the creator writes the quantities in the caption.
They guess when quantities are only spoken, and "a glass" of water becomes 200 ml, 250 ml or 300 ml depending on the tool.
They almost always miss oven temperatures that appear as on-screen text for two seconds.
So read the saved recipe once before you start, and fix the numbers against the ratios in this article. Apps that save from social video include:
Apple users have a native option too:
If you prefer to type Greek recipes in by hand and keep them forever, a one-time-purchase manager is still the calm choice:
Which ones should you skip at first?
Opinions, since you asked.
Skip moussaka for now. Every list calls it easy-ish, and it is 3 separate preparations: eggplant, meat sauce and béchamel. It is a Sunday project, not a weeknight dish.
Skip baklava until you own a pastry brush and a free afternoon. Phyllo dries out in 3 minutes on the counter, and a wet towel is not a joke.
Skip any recipe that calls tomato-and-feta salad "Greek salad" and adds lettuce, bell pepper and a bottled vinaigrette. That is the Greek-American version. It is fine, but it is a different dish, and it is not the one we mean here.
What should you cook first?
Tonight: fakes. It needs lentils, an onion, tomato paste and vinegar, all things that live in a cupboard.
This weekend: lemon potatoes and chicken souvlaki on the same evening. The potatoes occupy the oven for 65 minutes, and the chicken cooks in 8 on the stove, so the timing works with no stress. Make the tzatziki while the potatoes bake.
The point of easy Greek recipes is not the speed. It is that once you have cooked each of these twice, you stop looking at the page, and that is when the cooking starts to feel like yours.