Nashua church gets the baklava rolling
According to Jamie Pappas, a co-chair of this weekend’s Greek Food Festival put on by St. Philip Greek Orthodox Church in Nashua, the event fills a critical need.
“People in the greater Nashua area absolutely love Greek food,” she said, “and we don’t have many Greek restaurants where they can reliably find it. We have a lot of restaurants that do serve Greek food, a lot of the pizza places, for instance, but not dedicated Greek food restaurants. So people really love our event and we actually have people that come to the event two or three times during the two-day event because they want to get enough to last them a while.”
This year’s Festival will take place Friday, May 15, and Saturday, May 16, from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Pappas said one factor in the success of the event is the authenticity of the food.
“Everything that we sell is homemade by our church parishioners in our facility,” she said. “Even the tzatziki sauce for the gyros is homemade. Every pastry we sell is homemade.”
“One of the newer items we’ve had for the last couple of years,” Pappas continued, “are the lamb shanks. We used to do just the lamb kebabs and the chicken kebabs, but a few years ago we started making lamb shanks and those are incredibly delicious.” Because lamb shanks come from a hard-working part of a sheep (the shins), they require long, slow cooking. “That’s why those are started in the week before [the Festival], she said. “You have to start the cooking process earlier and the braising and the marinating and the tomato sauce and cooking. So it’s an added, a little added pressure, but it’s worth it because people enjoy it and they go like hotcakes”
The Greek dishes don’t just attract Greeks to the Festival, Pappas said. “The non-Greeks too, they love it. They really do. We offer the lamb, but we also offer chicken, chicken kebabs and other foods like that. There’s pastitsio, which is kind of like a Greek lasagna. And then the spanakopita, which is the spinach and cheese pie. We have the dolmades, which is your stuffed grape leaves. And meatballs, Greek-style meatballs. So there are other things other than the lamb. Believe it or not there are even a few Greeks who don’t like lamb, but we worry about them.”
For many Greek food enthusiasts the best part of a festival is the baked goods, and in particular the baklava. “We’ve been making that for the past week,” Pappas said, pointing out that volunteers from the St.Philip congregation work in teams to make the dishes for the Festival. “I’m in charge of the baked goods myself,” she said. “We’ve been working every weekend since the end of January. We’ll get anywhere from 10 to 20 people coming to make the doughs and to make the cookies and to cook them and to pack them away and then general cleanup afterward. From soup to nuts, we have to do it all. We have multi-generational families that come. Up until a couple of years ago, when my mom passed, it was something that we did together as a family.” Each batch of baked goods carries a degree of variation, she said.
“We have a standard recipe for everything. If we have 100 pans of spanakopita, there are 100 pans with the exact same ingredients, but especially with the baked goods, they might be put together a little differently. Some people make sesame cookies long and skinny and people make them short and fat, but it’s with the same amount of dough. They’re shaped a little differently or they look a little different, but they taste the same because it’s the same dough and the same amount going into each cookie.”
Saint Philip Greek Food Festival
When: Friday, May 15, and Saturday, May 16, from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.
Where: St. Philip Greek Orthodox Church, 500 W. Hollis St., Nashua, 889-4000, stphilipnashua.com.
More: There will be free parking, a shuttle bus, Greek dancing and live music. Visit nashuagreekfestival.com.
Featured photo: Greek Food Festival at St. Philip Greek Orthodox Church. Courtesy photo.
