Author: John Fladd

Festival brings together foods from Caribbean and Central America

According to Peter Escalera, if you want to learn about a culture you need to learn its national anthem and eat its food.

“We are connected in so many different ways,” he said. “National anthems of countries speak about the country, what they were going through when they were formed. With food you will see the similarities of various different meats, seasonings and vegetables and fruits that have different names but are consumed by so many different people.”

Escalera — “In Spanish, it means ‘stairs,’” he noted — is in charge of organizing the food vendors at this weekend’s We Are One Festival in Manchester. The festival, which focuses on the food and music of cultures throughout the Caribbean and Central America, will bring together vendors selling foods from Puerto Rico, El Salvador, Mexico, Jamaica and many other countries.

“We have Pal Carajo restaurant coming,” Escalera said. “It’s a Puerto Rican restaurant, and they’ll be having stewed chicken and stewed beef and empanadas and maduros, roast chicken and all types of tropical drinks. Don Quijote restaurant will be having the yellow rice or croquetas, and pernin, which is the roast pork. We’re excited this year because everyone’s bringing in a lot of different types of flavors, the guacamoles and the different seasonings from various different countries.”

Escalera’s personal favorite food each year at the festival is mofongo.

“Mofongo is plantains,” he said. “They are put into this round, long mortar and pestle. You take 15 or so pieces of fried plantains and you mash them until it becomes a butter. You mash [them] with a little salt, a little pepper, and some nice garlic. You mash it until it’s soft, and mound it up on your plate. On the side you will have camarones al coco. Camarones, meaning shrimp; it’s in a pink coconut sauce that will have you saying, ‘Ooh, la, la!’”

Francisco Murillo is the owner of Pal Carajo. His restaurant, which specializes in Puerto Rican and Honduran foods, has only been open a few months; this will be his first We Are One Festival. One of the foods he is planning to serve is alcapurrias, a deep-fried Puerto Rican dish. “It’s made with green plantains — green banana. You can put green pepper, red pepper in it. You mash it, put that in the fryer. This is so good. It’s very traditional in Puerto Rico.”

Another specialty is Pal Caraho’s tripleta sandwich.

“The tripleta is a personal sandwich,” Murillo said. “It’s named for three different meats; it’s ham, it’s pork, and steak, with mayo and ketchup.”

“And then,” he said, with a grin, “you put on the nacho cheese. You can put lettuce, tomato and potato sticks, too.”

One of the challenges of serving hot food at a festival, Murillo said, is that it is very difficult to deep fry it on site, which makes serving empanadastricky.

“Everything is cooked here at the restaurant,” he said, “then [we] bring it to the park. It’s difficult. We’re planning to serve maybe 200 empanadas, 100 alcapurrias, 100 tripletas. A lot of people will be there.”

We Are One Festival
When: Saturday, Aug.16, from 11 a.m to 6 p.m.
Where: Veterans Memorial Park in downtown Manchester.
Admission is free.

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

Find treats, meats and more at Mahrajan

One of Nikki Bullock’s earliest memories of the maharajan is tied to her memories of her mother. “I think my earliest memory is of my mother cooking for it,” Bullock said. ”She was the co-chair [of the festival] for a very long time and the head chef. She passed away a year ago, and I’ve kind of taken over her role, but I think definitely my earliest memories are her standing behind the tent.”

The Mahrajan Middle Eastern Food Festival at Our Lady of the Cedars Church has been a mainstay of Manchester’s summer food festival season for decades, said Thomas Steinmetz, the church’s pastor.

“Our festival is an annual festival that we have. It’s called a mahrajan, which means ‘big festival.’ It’s an Arabic word, and this is a Lebanese food festival, actually. The parish here was founded by Lebanese families and so they have continued to perpetuate the food and the culture in the parish. It has a variety of attractions including quite a menu of different Lebanese food, a cash bar, and things for the kids like a petting zoo.”

For Nikki Bullock, this festival is an opportunity to show how much Lebanese food culture has in common with other Mediterranean cultures, but with a definite Lebanese slant. She used kibbeh as an example. On a surface level, kibbeh seems very much like Greek kebabs.

“We kind of call it Lebanese meatloaf,” she said, “but it’s baked, spiced ground beef with cracked wheat and pine nuts and lamb and onions. I think the biggest flavor differences between this and other Middle Eastern foods is definitely those spices. We have a lot of allspice and cinnamon, sumac and cumin, spices like that.” While there are traditional versions of kibbeh that are served raw, she said, the kibbeh at Mahrajan is not. “We don’t mess around with that. It is totally baked to temperature.”

As you’d expect from a Middle Eastern food festival, there are plenty of grilled meats, Bullock said — “there’s lamb kebabs, chicken kebabs, and chicken and lamb shawarma” — but what she personally looks forward to is falafel [deep fried balls of herbs and chickpeas]. “The falafel is just something that is hard to master making at home,” she said. “I work in the kitchen, so I get it hot out of the fryer, which is pretty magical.”

According to Bullock, one of the big draws at Mahrajan each year is the pastries.

“I think every culture in that region of the world has its own baklava interpretation,” she said. “So the Lebanese have — we call it baklawa. It’s very similar to the Greek, but we use a simple syrup as opposed to a honey. So it’s a little bit lighter, a little crunchier. I mean, I love both, but I think ours is a little less sweet. But we have a hot chocolate version, a walnut version, and a pistachio version with a little rose water. So we bring in a little, again, a little bit of that Middle Eastern flavor in there. We also have what we call date fingers — it’s like a buttery pastry dough and then there’s dates in the middle of that and that has powdered sugar on top. And we have a nut version of that too, called mamoul, which I believe is still one of the oldest cookies in the world, the mamoul. It’s super-unusual. It has an ingredient in it called makhali, which is actually ground cherry pits that we kind of sprinkle on the pastry.” Bullock remembers seeing a challenge on The Great British Baking Show a few seasons ago when the contestants baked cookies from Cyprus that used makhali. “I remember seeing that and getting really excited,” she said. “I was like, ‘I can bake that!’”

Mahrajan Middle Eastern Food Festival
When: Friday, Aug. 15, from 5 to 10 p.m.; Saturday, Aug. 16, from noon to 10 p.m., and Sunday, Aug. 17, from noon to 5 p.m., according to the website.
Where: Our Lady of the Cedars Church, 140 Mitchell St., Manchester, 623-8944, olocnh.org
More: bestfestnh.com

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

Za Dude Pizza plus Kettlehead Brewing plus tunes

Josh Migliori and his partner Brett Murray have been working to redesign the entire menu for a chain of breweries, but first they were heavy-metal musicians.

“I grew up in the early 2000s,” Migliori remembered. “I was part of the metal and hardcore scene; I was playing a lot of screaming music. I was touring full-time in the late 2000s. And then I kind of retired from doing that in 2010, and got into the restaurant business around that time.”

After that, Migliori said, he worked in a number of restaurants, and in recent years he and Murray ran pop-up restaurants and cooked for events as Za Dude Pizza Co.

“We were basically like a food truck without the truck,” he said. “We would pop up at breweries throughout New Hampshire and Massachusetts and Maine for the past couple years, just working at festivals and catering.” Eventually, Migliori and Murray were approached by the owner of Kettlehead Brewing in Nashua to redesign the brewery chain’s food service.

“We opened up in [Kettlehead’s Nashua] location in April,” Migliori said. “We started as a pizza pop-up before we ended up here; we’re not just doing pizzas now. We have the ability with a full kitchen to take the crazy and wacky kid foods that we were doing and take that to the next step.”

In Kettlehead Nashua’s menu, that sense of fun is apparent. Migliori’s take on grilled shishito peppers, for instance, is called You Think You’re Hot Shishito?! They are served with a charred scallion and citrus vinaigrette and kimchi. The Party Animal Fries are covered in caramelized onions, queso and “gnarly sauce.” Other dishes make reference to classic rock bands. C.R.E.A.M. stands for “Corn Rules Everything Around Me”; it is a spread inspired by Mexican street corn, and includes a charred scallion lime crema, cotija cheese, cilantro and Taki dust.

The idea, Migliori said, has been to design a new menu from the ground up, being as innovative as possible but still serving pub food that is consistently delicious.

“We’re excited to keep putting out daily specials, collabs with the chef, and working on seasonal things,” he said. “We’re bringing in a lot of local farm produce, working with the local businesses and purveyors in the area, just trying to do really good, upscale pub food. We’re taking everyday bar food and taking it to the next level.”

Going hand in hand with Kettlehead’s food evolution, Migliori said, is its approach to live music. “Having the ability to have a venue of our own that is coinciding with a restaurant and a brewery, we really wanted to be able to provide something different that a lot of venues in New Hampshire don’t really do. We’re able to kind of take our skill and our menu that we’re doing right now in Nashua and tweak [the dishes we serve] during the day. We can now do slices during the late nights … or if they just want to grab some fries or a hot dog or a number of different late-night apps that we have on the menu. It’s really quick [for our customers]. Within a couple minutes they have their food and they’re able to go back out and enjoy the music and enjoy the night with their friends.”

’90s Pizza Party
What: A night of music with cover bands Dangerous Nights and A Blockbuster Summer featuring ’90s music, a special pizza menu and more, according to a post on Kettlehead’s Facebook page.
When: Saturday, Aug. 16, at 8 p.m.
Where: Kettlehead Brewing, 97 Main St., Nashua, 204-5718, kettleheadbrewing.com

Featured photo: Brookford Farm (courtesy).