Author: John Fladd

Music, dance and baklava this weekend

The festival is coming together. The tents are going up.

St. Philip Greek Orthodox Church (500 W. Hollis St. in Nashua, 889-4000, nashuagreekfestival.com) is getting ready to welcome visitors to its annual Greek Food Festival. “It’s an experience,” said Festival co-chair Marcy Mazur. It’s about great Greek food of course, but it’s more than that, she said.

“It’s a chance to invite guests to listen to authentic Greek music from our bands and visit our Greek marketplace, where they can pick up food or trinkets,” Mazur said. It’s an opportunity, she said, to watch Greek dances; guests are invited to learn how to dance and even to join in.

But of course the biggest attraction is the food.

Lamb enthusiasts will be excited to see a new cut of meat on the menu this year: lamb shanks. Because shanks are a cut of meat that require long, slow cooking, they are not grilled like the shish kebabs are; they are stewed in tomato sauce until the meat falls off the bone. The shish kebabs will still be grilled, though — chicken as well as lamb — on a special grill designed and built by a St. Philip parishioner. There will be a whole booth dedicated to loukoumades, fried Greek dough puffs served with cinnamon and honey and frequently eaten by the bucket. Adjacent to the loukoumades booth is a coffee station, which is, in turn, next to a pastry booth selling baklava, finikia, and Greek butter cookies called kourabiedes. The gyro station will have four different varieties of the pita bread wraps, including a vegetarian option filled with Greek salad and a vegan one with falafel.

“It’s a wonderful event of tastes and smells and sounds,” Mazur said.

While St. Philip — “There’s no S in our name,” Mazur said emphatically. “It’s very important.” — has been holding a food festival for more than 30 years, last year’s festival was the first since Covid. Mazur said the congregation missed it profoundly during lockdown. “It’s a community event,” she explained — not only during the actual Festival, but also in the months leading up to it. It is the culmination of a year of preparation for Mazur and her co-chair, Jamie Pappas.

“If we can get enough people we can usually finish up each dish in two days,” Mazur said.

If you imagine how the food for the Festival is prepared, you might imagine a group of church women in aprons putting out pan after pan of spanakopita (a pastry made from spinach, feta cheese, phyllo dough and an extravagant amount of butter) over a weekend.

“Yes,” Mazur said, “that’s exactly what happens. We have ample commercial freezer space, so we devote a weekend to making each dish. It’s time-consuming. There are 30 sheets of phyllo in each pan of spanakopita and I don’t even know how many pounds of spinach and feta.” Because making phyllo from scratch is incredibly difficult and time-intensive, the St. Philip ladies use commercial phyllo. “We don’t make our own phyllo, and we don’t grow our own grape leaves,” Mazur confesses.

The parishioners do, however, roll their own grape leaves — about 3,600 of them, as well as another 3,600 meatballs. This is on top of 150 pans of spanakopita and 100 pans of pastitsio (“That’s our Greek lasagna,” Mazur explains. “It’s just about my favorite thing we serve.”) Because it doesn’t freeze well, the weekend before the Festival is Baklava Weekend. “All the ladies look forward to it,” she said. “It’s a gathering of friends who get together, cook and laugh.”

Mazur’s advice to visitors is to plan to stay at the Festival for a while.

“It’s a relaxing atmosphere,” she said. ”The lines are going to be long, but it’s worth it.” Festival workers, easily recognized by their blue T-shirts, will work the lines, providing the people waiting for food with samples.

“It’s a big production,” Mazur said.

Greek Food Festival
When: Friday, May 17, and Saturday, May 18, from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.
Where: Saint Philip Greek Orthodox Church, 500 W. Hollis St. in Nashua
More info: 889-4000, nashuagreekfestival.com
Parking is free. There will be a shuttle to take guests to and from overflow parking at Stellos Stadium (7 Stadium Drive in Nashua).

News from the local food scene

• Competition-worthy cooking: If you’ve ever wondered how good the contestants on Top Chef really are, you can find out for yourself at a Top Chef Dinner on Friday, May 17, at Ansanm Restaurant (20 South St. in Milford, 554-1248, ansanmnh.com) starting at 7:30 p.m. Owner/Chef of Ansanm Chris Viaud, who is a James Beard Award finalist and Top Chef Season 18 alumnus, and four of his fellow Season 18 contestants will cook a five-course dinner celebrating the cultural background of each chef. Tickets are $150 and available through eventbrite.com.

• Layers of knowledge: Add an Italian classic to your cooking repertoire. Tuscan Market (9 Via Toscana in Salem, 912-5467, tuscanbrands.com) will hold a Lasagna Cooking Class on Friday, May 17, from 2 to 4 p.m. Take one more step down the road of your pasta knowledge by making your own lasagna. This is a tradition that should be practiced in every household. This class will feature choices of multiple fillings, including vegetarian-friendly ones. The class will be taught by Chef Jarret Parizo-Kellerman. Tickets are $65 each and available through Tuscan Brands’ website.

• Vines and wines: Experience an immersive outdoor vineyard tour and wine tasting at LaBelle Winery (345 Route 101 in Amherst, 672-9898, labellewinery.com) at a Vineyard Bud Break, Sunday, May 19, from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Sommelier and wine educator Marie King and winemaker Melaney Shepard will guide participants through LaBelle’s vineyards and lead them through a tasting of four LaBelle wines. Participants will learn about the grape varietals grown at LaBelle, how trellising and pruning work, and what it takes for vines to survive and thrive with a constantly changing New England climate. Tickets are $30 and available through LaBelle’s website.

• Tacos and fun: Tuesday, May 21, is Taco and Tequila Night at The Peddler’s Daughter (48 Main St. in Nashua, 821-7535, thepeddlersdaughter.com).

Spice things up by adding some hot sauce to your grilled eats

A classic rite of passage each spring is bringing a grill out of storage and getting ready for the first outside cooking of the year. Nobody looks forward to this more than Phil Pelletier, owner of Smokin’ Tin Roof, a hot sauce company based in Manchester. He says that grilling season brings out a whole new side of his company’s hot sauces.

“Most of our stuff is designed to use any way you want,” he said, “so grilling is a great use for it.”

Smokin’ Tin Roof makes nine products of different heat levels — four sauces, three condiments, and hot pepper jelly. Although only one of the products is a barbecue sauce — the blueberry-based Northwoods BBQ — the other products have qualities that lend themselves to grilling.

North Carolina-style barbecue sauces are vinegar-based. The vinegar might be balanced out with something sweet, such as molasses or fruit, but the acidity is a fundamental characteristic of that type of sauce. Similarly, most hot sauces are vinegar-based as well.

“Our ‘Grow a Pear’ is made with pears,” Pelletier said as an example, “but it’s based on apple cider vinegar. You need that acidity for shelf-stability.”

South Carolina-style sauces, on the other hand, lean heavily into mustard. Smokin’ Tin Roof’s Bacon Stout Mustard works well as a wet rub for grillers who like to build layers of flavor.

Pelletier recommended against using too spicy a hot sauce for grilling, at least at first.

“Extreme heat gets in the way of the flavor you’re using, and you want a solid taste to stand up to the smoke from the grill,” he said. This is something that has come up while developing recipes for hot sauces.

“We use ghost pepper powder to vary the heat levels in our sauces, and we were really surprised that, aside from the heat, it neutralized the flavor of lemon. We ended up going in a completely different direction for that recipe; we used roasted garlic,” Pelletier said.

What a griller has to do, he says, is similar to what they do when working up a new recipe: work backward.

“You have to keep the final flavor in mind, then ask yourself, ‘What do I have to do to get that flavor?’” he said.

He gave the example of when his wife, Melissa, was developing a smokey pepper hot sauce.

“There were so many iterations of that sauce. She would get to a certain point in the recipe, and then it would suddenly go in a different direction, and we’d have to start over, focusing on her vision of a final flavor,” he said.

Keeping complementary flavors in mind — what goes with what — helps simplify choosing a grilling sauce. He uses some of Smokin’ Tin Roof’s products as examples:

Green Monstah is a verde-style sauce with pineapple. It has a bright flavor that is excellent with fish. Grow a Pear, on the other hand, has a fruity sweetness that plays well with the flavor of smoke. Pork is a natural with anything fruity, so Pelletier recommended using his Burnin’ Raspberry sauce with it.

(In a side note, Pelletier said the raspberry sauce might be his most versatile one. “We make it in two levels of heat,” he said, “which opens up a lot of directions you can take it. There is an ice cream business that buys it by the case from us to use as a sundae topping.”)

Smokin’ Tin Roof products are made with food-lovers in mind, Pelletier said, rather than chili-heads who are focused on extreme heat, which makes it a natural for grilling.

“Most serious grillers want to do something different. They want to make a unique match to whatever they want to grill,” he said.

News from the local food scene

• Cake for Mom: Flight Coffee Co. (209 Route 101 in Bedford; flightcoffeeco.com, 836-6228) has two layer cakes, chocolate or vanilla with chocolate or vanilla buttercream, that can be ordered by Thursday, May 9, for a Saturday, May 11, pickup, according to a post on Flight’s Facebook page. Email [email protected] or call 836-6228 to order a cake, which costs $45, the post said. Find more special brunches, dinners and other eats for Mother’s Day (Sunday, May 12) in the May 2 issue of the Hippo. Find the e-edition at hippopress.com; the story starts on page 24.

• Coffee weekend: The Northeast Coffee Festival runs Friday, May 10, and Saturday, May 11, in Concord. The event, which takes place at locations in downtown Concord including South Main Street, the Bank of NH Stage and Red River Theatres, will feature live music, coffee workshops, an outdoor community market and on Saturday a latte art throwdown at 4 p.m. Attending the market and the music is free; passes to other events are available at northeastcoffeefestival.com, where you can also find a map, schedule and more.

• Bacon! Tickets — and merch — are on sale now for the NH Bacon & Beer Festival ,which will be held Saturday, June 1, from 1:30 to 4:30 p.m. at the Anheuser-Busch fields in Merrimack. Tickets in advance cost $60 for general admission and $100 for VIP admission, which includes a 12:30 p.m. admission time, according to nhbaconbeer.com. The event features live music from The Slakas as well as, of course, bacon (from 20 samplers), beer (from 60 craft brewers) and 25 teams competing in a pulled pork contest, according to the website. The event benefits the High Hopes Foundation.

• Berry informative: The NH Audubon will hold a “Growing Backyard Berries” workshop on Thursday, May 16, from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Massabesic Center (26 Audubon Way in Auburn). The cost is $15. The presenter is Steph Sosinski, UNH Extension Home Horticulture Program Manager. Register by May 14 at the UNH Extension site, which you can reach via nhaudubon.org.

The Cake

• 8 ounces (2 sticks) of softened butter
• 1 cup + 1 teaspoon (210 g) sugar
• 3 eggs
• 1 cup (130 g) finely chopped salted pistachios – your food processor can take care of this for you
• 1 cup (96 g) almond flour
• 1 lemon, zested and juiced
• ½ cup +1 Tablespoon (70 g) all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon rose water – rose water is powerful stuff; if you don’t use enough you won’t taste it, and if you use a drop too much this cake will taste like grandmother soap
• 1 teaspoon ground cardamom

The Glaze

• 2 Tablespoons fresh squeezed lemon juice
• 1 cup (114 g) confectioner’s sugar
• 1 teaspoon lemon juice powder (optional) – let’s face it: it is highly unlikely that you have any powdered lemon juice on hand, but if you do it will add an extra kick of lemon flavor without watering the glaze down

Preheat your oven to 350°F.

Butter a cake pan and line it with parchment paper.

“Wait, what? If I’m using parchment paper, why do I need to butter the pan?”

Good question. The butter helps the parchment stick to the bottom of the pan; it won’t flutter away or fold over as you’re spooning the batter in.

“Ah.”

Beat the sugar and butter together. This is called “creaming.” You might have noticed that there isn’t any leavening in this recipe — no yeast, baking powder or soda. The only rise this cake will get is from the microscopic bubbles punched into the butter by the sugar, which will swell when they are heated. Beat the sugar and butter together until they are light and fluffy. This might take several minutes.

Beat the eggs into the butter mixture, one at a time. Eggs play a couple of roles in this recipe. As they cook they solidify, giving the cake structure, but they also act as an emulsifier. There is a fair amount of fat in this recipe, and fats are a little snobby. They don’t want to mix with water-based liquids like lemon juice and rose water; they see it as beneath them. The eggs are mediators. Because they are made up of watery proteins in their whites, and fats in their yolks, they act as ambassadors who can smile and get everyone to mingle.

Once the eggs are thoroughly incorporated into the batter, you can go ahead and add most of the other ingredients — the pistachios, almond flour, lemon juice, lemon zest and rose water. Mix them together thoroughly. Because you haven’t added any wheat flour yet, this mixture is still gluten-free and won’t toughen up no matter how long you beat it.

Whisk the flour and cardamom together, then fold them into the batter by hand as gently as possible. At this point you are adding gluten but trying to keep the cake tender.

Spoon the mixture into your prepared cake pan, and smooth out the top.

Bake on the middle rack of your oven for 45 to 50 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean. Cool in the pan for 10 minutes, then transfer to a cooling rack until it is completely cool.

Whisk the glaze ingredients together thoroughly, until there are no lumps of sugar left, then pour over the top of the cake, letting it drip down the sides.

This is a moist snack cake. It would go well with high tea, but unless you have an aristocratic secret life that we don’t know about, this is a really good meeting-a-friend-for-coffee cake.

It’s one of those foods with a multi-stage flavor. You get hit by the lemon in the glaze first, then the rose in the cake, which is reasonably modest but definitely there. The texture and flavor of the pistachios come through as you chew. Pistachios, rose and lemon are a classic combination — think of a Middle Eastern walled garden and sitting on stone steps, being cooled by the mist from a fountain, eating this cake and discussing poetry.

It is a cake that lends itself to daydreams.

Featured Photo: Photo by John Fladd.