Author: John Fladd

4 Tablespoons (1/2 stick) butter, plus enough to grease a soufflé dish

¼ cup (30 g) all-purpose flour

1½ cups (340 g) warm milk

A pinch of an herb or spice that you feel like adding – Aleppo pepper is a particular favorite of mine

6 eggs, separated

salt and pepper to taste

½ cup (72 g) grated Parmesan cheese

½ cup (72 g) grated cheese — if you have nubbins of several left-over cheeses, this is an excellent way to use them up. If the Universe has stepped on your last nerve, and you can’t even, feel entirely free to pick up a bag of pre-shredded cheese at random and use that. If you want to get fancy at some point and invest in a half pound of Peruvian llama cheddar, you can do that someday when you aren’t so emotionally fragile. Believe it or not, a soufflé is comfort food, and right now let’s concentrate on getting this bad boy in the oven, so you can drink a beer in the shower while it bakes.

Preheat the oven to 375°F and grease a soufflé dish. If you don’t have a soufflé dish — and seriously, why would you? — try to find something oven-safe that is deeper than it is wide. Round is better than square. Straight sides are better than curvy. A large coffee can might work in a pinch.

Melt your half-stick of butter over medium-low heat, until it stops sputtering and foaming, then add the flour. Stir it until the flour is slightly cooked and darkens a little. This is what’s called a roux — it’s used to help thicken sauces. Whisk in the warm milk, which will do funny things to the roux’s texture, but don’t panic; that’s normal.

Keep stirring the milk sauce until it thickens, then remove it from heat and leave it to cool for a while.

With your stand mixer or hand mixer, beat the egg whites until they reach fairly stiff peaks. This means that when you pull the beater out of the creamy egg whites they will leave little stalagmites behind.

Wash your hands, then stick a finger into the milk sauce. If it feels like a very warm bath, add the rest of the ingredients in — the egg yolks, seasonings and the cheeses. Whisk them together, then transfer the orange-colored sauce into a bowl.

Use a rubber or silicone spatula to beat in about a third of the stiff egg whites into the yellow mixture to lighten it up, then fold in half of the remaining egg whites, followed by the last of them. If you’ve never “folded” anything with a spatula before, here’s what’s going on:

When you whipped up the egg whites, you were beating air into them and creating hundreds of thousands of tiny bubbles. Because egg whites are very sticky and protein-y, they will hold all those bubbles in a foam for a while — not weeks or anything, but long enough to make a soufflé. When you “fold” that foam into your other mixture, the eggs are really happy about being reunited with their other half, but you want to do this gently, so you break as few of those micro-bubbles as possible.

When everything has been (gently) mixed together, and there aren’t any dramatic white streaks of egg white, use your rubber spatula to gently turn the batter into your greased dish. Put it in the oven and bake it for about half an hour. My particular oven takes 35 minutes, but check on it at 30. This is a good opportunity to take your beer shower.

When your soufflé looks ready, test it with a skewer, like you would a cake or brownies. If the skewer comes out clean, the soufflé is ready to come out of the oven. This is when it will look the puffiest and most Instagram-worthy, so take a picture now, but give it five minutes or so to cool down before serving and eating it.

Featured Photo: Photo by John Fladd.

And butter — in a panoply of Greek pastries

According to Margaret Gegas, the secret to a good spanakopitais butter. More butter.

“We use fresh spinach,” she said, “and feta cheese, eggs and good phyllo dough. And butter; a lot of butter.”

Gegas has been cooking for the yearly Taste of Greece festival at Holy Trinity Church (68 N. State St., Concord, 225-2961, holytrinitynh.org) for more than 20 years. Church ladies are crucial to every Greek church food festival, and over the years she has probably made everything on the menu at some point.

“I love the moussakawith the eggplant and meat sauce and a bechamel sauce,” Gegas said. “That is a favorite that goes pretty quickly. Another item is our macaroni dish called pastitsio; it’s macaroni with meat sauce and a bechamel topping to that too. And then the other things that are on the hotline are chicken shish kebab and lamb shish kebab and rice to go with it. We have a lady that makes all the meatballs and sauce, Greek-style.”

Except for a break during the Covid lockdown, Holy Trinity has been hosting a food festival every fall for the past 22 years. Constantine Newman is the parish priest. He is always impressed by how his parishioners throw themselves into the Taste of Greece event.

“It’s just a very festive event,” he said, “and the parish pulls together and works for the day to serve and to clean and do all the stuff that needs to be done.”

He isn’t entirely certain how many people attend the festival each year.

“I don’t know if we got an exact number [last year],” he said, “but I know that from at least 11 o’clock to easily 3 or 4, the line stretched from the food line all the way down toward the street.” Constantine said most Greek churches hold their festivals in the summer because that’s when most people have enough time to devote to hosting or attending them. Holy Trinity’s event puts a cap on the Greek food festival season.

“The festivals start around the end of May and June,” he said. “That’s the beginning of the festival season. We’ve always done it [Holy Trinity’s festival] toward the end of September … usually a week or two after Glendi in Manchester.” He said Glendi gives a big boost to Holy Trinity’s festival. “The sort of people who go to these festivals have that in mind [at the end of September] because they’ll go to Glendi and then they’re looking for more Greek food somewhere and then they can come to us.”

Margaret Gegas agrees with that theory, pointing out that most of the people who attend Taste of Greece aren’t actually Greek.

“Because the Greek families make these things at home, you know, it’s their own menu, their own diet. See, that makes sense. There will be Greek people there because some of them don’t cook these things, so there will still be Greek people, but basically I’d say it’s pretty much mostly non-Greek,” Gegas said.

Father Constantine said the weather plays into the success of this festival, too.

“I don’t think we’ve ever had any problems with the weather, at least not as long as I’ve been here,” he said. “So it’s usually sunny and just warm enough that it’s not too cold yet. So the end of September has always been good for us. And it’s not so buggy. It always ends up being a really nice day.”

Both Constantine and Gegas emphasized how many savory and sweet Greek dishes there will be, from loukanikos — Greek lamb or pork sausages flavored with fennel and orange peel — to galaktoboureko, a sweet custard baked in phyllo.

Which brings us back to the spanakopita.

“We just finished making 37 pans of spanakopita,” Gegas said. “That’s because our festival is just a one-day event. If we were three days, we would have to have made over 100.”

Which is a lot of butter.

Featured Photo: Courtesy photo.

News from the local food scene

• Closing: The North End Bistro in Manchester has closed. In a Sept. 18 post on the restaurant’s Facebook page, the owners cited the normal “big challenges” of running a restaurant and a family emergency for North End’s sudden closing, and thanked their staff and customers.

• Burgertober: New England Tap House Grille’s (1292 Hooksett Road, Hooksett, 782-5137, taphousenh.com) October Burger of the Month will be a bacon apple cheddar burger featuring locally sourced beef, crispy bacon, Vermont cheddar cheese, sliced apple, arugula and a drizzle of honey mustard nestled in a bun, for $18.50.

• Cupcaketober: The October martini-cupcake pairing at the Copper Door (15 Leavy Drive, Bedford, 488-2677, and 41 S Broadway, Salem, 458-2033, copperdoor.com) will have a spooky theme. A Trick-Or-Tini features 360 Chocolate Vodka, butterscotch schnapps, Frangelico, Trader Vic’s Dark Chocolate, cream,chocolate syrup and a candied Halloween rim for $14. October’s featured cupcake, Batty for Boston Cream, features vanilla sponge cake, vanilla bean pastry cream, chocolate ganache, chocolate frosting and a chocolate cup for $11.

• Wine Saturday: Appolo Vineyards (49 Lawrence Road, Derry, 421-4675, appolovineyards.com) will hold a Rock #thecrushpad event Saturday, Sept. 28, from 3 to 6 p.m. Reckless Luna will perform with Chef Chase preparing food.

• Polenta: There will be a cooking class at the Cooking School at Tuscan Market Salem (Tuscan Village, 9 Via Toscana, Salem, 912-5467, tuscanbrands.com) Saturday, Sept. 28, from 2 to 5 p.m. Learn to make polenta with sausage ragu. Tuscan Chef Jarrett Parizo-Kellerman will show attendees how to make a classic polenta and turn it into polenta squares or fries, along with a demonstration of a sausage ragu to go with it. Tickets are $70 through the Tuscan Market website.

• Bread: The Culinary Playground (16 Manning St., Derry, 339-1664, culinary-playground.com) will hold a focaccia bread art workshop on Sunday, Sept. 29, from 10 a.m. to noon. The cost is $65.

Thomas Babington Macaulay lived in a time when politicians were expected to be, or at least were comfortable being, intellectuals. Macaulay was England’s Secretary of War and Queen Victoria’s Paymaster General. He also served as the Rector of the University of Glasgow, wrote what was considered at the time to be the authoritative history of England, and published a large volume of epic poetry set in early Rome.

He is best remembered today for a passage in his 1842 Lays of Ancient Rome, in a poem called “Horatius”: “Then out spake brave Horatius/ The Captain of the Gate:/ “To every man upon this earth/ Death cometh soon or late./ And how can man die better/
Than facing fearful odds,/ For the ashes of his fathers,/ And the temples of his gods?”

Man, that’s good! It’s enough to make you want to unsheathe a sword and frighten some barbarians.

By contrast, I am not so civilized. A few years ago, while developing a recipe using cucumbers, inspired by Macaulay, I wrote the following:

Then up spake brave Cucumber

The Captain of the Crisper;

“To every vegetable upon this Earth

Death cometh with a shout or in a whisper.

And how can a cucumber die better

Than facing cutting boards;

For the peelings of his fathers

And the temples of his gourds?”

I bring this up only because I am stupidly proud of my little poem, and today’s cocktail has cucumbers in it.

The Irish Maid

2 ounces Irish whiskey – I like Paddy’s

¾ ounce fresh squeezed lemon juice

½ ounce simple syrup

½ ounce elderflower liqueur

2 slices of cucumber

garnish – 2 more slices of cucumber

Drop two slices of cucumber into the bottom of a cocktail shaker. (This is a personal preference, but I like to do little high-pitched voices as I do this — “No, no! I’ll tell you what you want to know! Aaaaaahhh!” **Thud**)

Thoroughly muddle the cucumber in the bottom of the shaker, then add the whiskey. Dry shake it — this means without ice — and set it aside for 20 minutes or so. This is to allow the alcohol in the whiskey to strip out volatile flavor compounds from the cucumber. As if it hasn’t been through enough.

After waiting a respectful length of time, add the lemon juice, simple syrup and elderflower liqueur, and ice, then shake thoroughly, until your hands get cold and you start to hear the ice breaking up inside the shaker.

Fine-strain it over fresh ice in a rocks glass. I have a mesh drain screen that I save for jobs like this.

Garnish with the remaining two slices of cucumber, then sip, listening to Etta James singing, “At Last.”

The bridge that ties the ingredients of this cocktail together is the simple syrup. Surprisingly, both whiskey and cucumber are enhanced by sugar. The acid from the lemon keeps everything from getting too sugary, and the elderberry gives a faint background taste of sophistication. The alcohol is definitely there but for once has decided to take a back seat to the other flavors. You can imagine it smiling and gesturing to the other ingredients on the stage, whispering, “Shh. It’s their big night.”

Something about holding a substantial rocks glass with a cold, good cocktail in it seems — civilized.

Repeat with the remainder of the dough, for a total of two dozen cookies.

Your convenience store banana’s Last Grand Gesture was not in vain. These are solidly banana-y cookies, crispy along the edges and chewy in the middle, with random crunchiness from the Nilla Wafers, and random pops of salt. They are outstanding with vanilla ice cream.

Featured Photo: Photo by John Fladd.