Author: John Fladd

Get the flavor of the Highland Games

One of the highlights of this year’s Highland Games will be an attempt to set a new world record for the most bagpipers playing in one venue, which is exciting and splashy, but according to Joshua Auger, one of the Scottish festival’s organizers, some of the really exciting events will involve tasting a range of beers, ales and whiskeys throughout the weekend in venues in and around the Loon Mountain Resort in Lincoln.

The Games, he said, give area breweries an opportunity to express their Scottish side and earn bragging rights.

“We work with eight New Hampshire breweries,” he said. “And we partner with them and ask them to develop a scotch ale that they would like to represent the New Hampshire Highlands. Then we invite patrons of the games to come in and sample all eight of the scotch ales. These are typically smoky, darker ales, brown ales. We invite these people in and they vote for which one that they think is the best. At the end of the weekend, that is our official Scotch Ale for that year.”

Another event will pair Scottish beer and ales with food.

“We host a Brews and Bites event in partnership with the Woodstock Inn Brewery,” Auger said. “It’s for people that are less inclined to go to a concert, who want to just sit down and have a nice evening. We serve four different beers from the Woodstock Station paired with four of their foods. And each one is designed to complement the beer that it’s associated with.” Each course, he said, will be a traditional Scottish dish or inspired by Scottish ingredients.

Auger said there will be whiskey-centered activities for a range of scotch enthusiasts, even the most serious.

“At the mountain itself,” he said, “we actually have scotch tastings where we bring in experts from Laphroaig [a well-respected Scottish distiller]. They will come in and teach our attendees [about] different scotches as part of a seminar. So you’ll go into a classroom and learn how to smell it, how to add a few drops of water to your scotch to open up the flavors, how to correctly drink it, what foods it pairs well with, the differences in the casks that they age it in. They’ll go through all of that. So you can actually take master classes at our games with whiskey experts who are willing to sit down and talk to you about how to drink scotch appropriately, how to drink it correctly, and how to appreciate it. It’s an educational thing. It’s a rare opportunity for a lot of people that would like to learn about something like this. There aren’t a lot of places you can go to actually take a class to appreciate this. For wine you can go to vineyards. We’ve got a few here in the state. But scotch, no.”

Other whiskey events will be less serious. “We’ve also got Spirits on the Mountain,” Auger said. “We hire a professional Scottish storyteller to come over and tell stories, ghost stories on the mountain by a bonfire. And then we pair each story with a scotch from the region of that story. And I just think that’s one of the coolest little things that people don’t know about. It’s just a really neat thing that we do.”

Other spirit-themed events will include a Whisky & Spirits Tasting tent, where Games attendees can sample and compare a variety of scotch whiskies, and mixology classes, where they can learn to build cocktails around scotch.

Ultimately, Auger said, each event at the Highland Games is presented in the hope that attendees will discover a little bit of Scotland in themselves.

“The Highland Games,” he said, “while they’re Scottish, they’re not exclusively Scottish. We’re a New Hampshire event. We’ve been here for 50 years. We don’t care what ethnicity you are or where you come from. It doesn’t matter. As an example, we’ve got some Native Americans who come to the games. We’ve got a chief from Maine, the Mi’kmaq chief; supposedly [a Scot named] Henry Sinclair married into their tribe in [the 1300s].”

50th Annual NH Highland Games & Festival
When: Friday, Sept. 19, through Sunday, Sept. 21,
Where: Loon Mountain Resort, 60 Loon Mountain Road, Lincoln, 745-8111, loonmtn.com
More: nhscot.org

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

A weekend of Greek food and treats in Manchester

By John Fladd

jfladd@hippopress.com

One of the high points of Manchester’s food calendar, Saint George Greek Orthodox Cathedral’s annual Greek Food Festival, Glendi, will take place this weekend. According to festival co-chair George Skaperdas, a huge turnout is expected. His advice to a first-timer at Glendi is, “Get here early and get in line.”

“The strategy as far as I’m concerned,” he said, “is when you’re done eating, take a break and eat some more. Of course, we have the food line with all the great [prepared] food, but we have beer, wine and cold drinks in our Taverna, and inside the Community Center we have all the great desserts.”

For many Glendi-goers the main attraction is lamb.

“As always,” Skaperdas said, “we’ll have a barbecue pit to [cook] lamb barbecue and shish kebabs. We have 2,300 pounds of lamb shanks that we’re cooking.“ Because a shank comes from a hard-working area of the lamb, it requires long, slow cooking. “We’ll be here braising them all day and most of the night,” assured Skaperdas. “So there’s barbecue and then the barbecued lamb dinner of course, and we’ll have chicken dinners and a Greek meatball dinner.”

So what makes a meatball Greek?

“OK,” Skaperdas said. “You have an Italian meatball and you have a Greek meatball side by side. They have pretty much the same spice palette, but they’re mixed differently — how much oregano you put in versus how much thyme.” In any case, he said, there will be a lot of them. “We’re making another hundred pounds of meatballs today, because I thought we might be a little meatball-shy. There will be thousands of meatballs, probably 3,000 stuffed grape leaves, and 150 trays of a spanakopita [a layered dish of spinach, feta, and philo dough]; each tray has something like 48 pieces. The numbers are staggering. We will sell over five or six thousand pieces of the pita [spanakopita] over the three days. The amount of food is just crazy. It’s difficult to track the number of people, total, but we will serve probably 10,000 meals over three days.”

There will be gyros at Glendi, Skaperdas said, but not made from the cones of meat, rotating on a spit that many people expect.

“We just don’t have enough space to store the equipment, so we grill it instead. We’ve got a grill out there and the same team that’s been doing it for 25 years will be grilling it instead.

The other big draw at Glendi is the Greek pastries, Skaperdas said.

“We do have our ever famous loukoumades, which are the fried dough puffs. You can get them with honey. You can get them with powdered sugar, or cinnamon sugar, or syrup — Greek syrup, not maple syrup! We always have kataifi, which is shredded phyllo dough with walnuts and syrup. We’ll have baklava, of course, and we have volunteers here right now making finikia, which is a cookie that can be stuffed or unstuffed with a date. Then, of course, there are the kourabiedes, which are the Greek powdered sugar cookies, so we’ve got those going, too.”

All of this, Skaperdas said, is an expression of a core Greek value: hospitality.

“We do this to create income for the church and all that,” he said, “but in the end, it’s a celebration of heritage and culture. Greek people just love to share their hospitality. You can’t go into a Greek house and not get fed.”

46th Annual Glendi Festival

When: Friday, Sept. 12, and Saturday, Sept. 13, from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., and Sunday, Sept. 14, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Where: St. George Greek Orthodox Cathedral, 650 Hanover St., Manchester; free shuttle service available from Derryfield Park
More: stgeorgenh.org/activities/glendi

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.