Category: Food

Showing off chocolate from near and far

Annual expo returns to Manchester

Tickets are on sale online for the annual Chocolate Expo in Manchester, happening Oct. 11.

“This is Year 4 for the Chocolate Expo in Manchester,” said Cristy Bergeron-Charest, “but this is our 20th year of producing events.” Bergeron-Charest works for Baum Image Group, the company that puts on the Expo.

She said that after so many years of staging events her company has learned that an important aspect of staging an expo for something as popular as chocolate is providing something for everybody.

Many of the people who attend chocolate expos just love chocolate, she said, and want to learn about new chocolate products.

“New Hampshire favorite Van Otis Chocolates is joining us this year, and Loon Chocolate as well, but we also have a lot of vendors that are coming up from New York and Long Island as well joining us. We have [French macaron maker] Mariela’s Bakery, which is coming up from Rhode Island. We have a vegan and dairy-free chocolatier, [but] we’ve got Bacon Bites, who has been on Food Network, and he has dark chocolate-covered bacon, milk chocolate-covered bacon. He’s got some great pairings with bacon and chocolate that you would never think go together. We have Vivilicious, which is coming up from Massachusetts, and she has Brazilian chocolate, beautiful truffles, delicious truffles. Worldwide Chocolate is our sponsor; they’re out of Rochester, New Hampshire, and they provide chocolate from around the world. But you have small businesses. La Nef out of Maine; her chocolate wrappers have a digital downloadable MP3 — you can digitally download their music from their chocolate wrappers.”

Other chocolate fans are interested in the technical side of chocolate making, Bergeron-Charest said.

“For the Chocolate Expo,” she said, “we’re always interested in the new trends, and trends are changing for sure. And we find that sourcing your chocolate locally is one of them. We have some chocolate makers that actually have chocolates made in Paris that come to the Chocolate Expo. These are chocolates you’re not going to find everywhere else. And they’ll tell you how it’s sourced. They’ll tell you the process of turning beans into bars. Loon Chocolate is very informative. He actually takes the stage at our Chocolate Expo event and he tells you about making chocolate from global to local. He’ll take the stage and guests can ask questions and ask, ‘How is this chocolate made? Where do you source it from?’ Companies like Villakuyaya, who joins us, all of her chocolate is sourced in Ecuador. Vivilicious, her chocolates for her tasty bonbons are actually sourced in Brazil. So we’re finding that people really are liking that, you know, instead of going to a store and just buying chocolate off the shelf. Our guests are loving that you get to sit there and buy a chocolate from a chocolate maker that’s at the event that two days before made their chocolate themselves.”

Other people come to enjoy the spectacle, Bergeron-Charest said. “We have the cast from the movie The Sandlot from the ’90s, and they’re coming, meeting fans, signing autographs, and then you get to sample chocolate. There’s an 11-pound chocolate-smash; volunteers are called upon to come up on stage and smash it open and then share it with the audience. We have a balloon scavenger hunt for kids. We have a world-renowned balloon twister who has larger-than-life balloon sculptures. And our guests can take photos with the balloon sculptures — they’re 10, 12 feet tall.”

The Chocolate Expo
Where: DoubleTree Expo Center, 700 Elm St., Manchester
When: Sunday, Oct. 11, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Tickets: Timed-entry tickets are $20 for adults and $10 for children 5-12. Children under 5 are free. Online “Late-Day Special” tickets are $10 per person, for admission after 4 p.m. Online only VIP tickets are $30 for adults and $15 for children, which includes early preview admission at 9 a.m., plus priority admission at any time. Tickets at the door are $30 for adults, and $15 for children. Visit thechocolateexpo.com/nh-doubletree-expo-center-tickets.
More: A list of vendors is available at thechocolateexpo.com/vendors-new-hampshire.

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

The Weekly Dish 26/10/01

• Book club with wine: Wine on Main (9 N. Main St., Concord, 897-5828, wineonmainnh.com) will host its next book club night Thursday, Oct. 1, from 6:30 to 8 p.m. October’s book is murder-thriller The Last Time We Saw Her by Jaclyn Goldis. There will be a guided discussion by local writer and author Jocely Winn, a wine tasting of four wines inspired by the book, light snacks and more. The cost is $33.85 through Wine on Main’s website.

• Pies at Stone Mountain: Stone Mountain Farm (522 Laconia Road, Belmont, 731-2493, stonemtnfarm.com) will hold its fifth annual apple pie baking contest on Saturday, Oct. 3, from 10:15 a.m. to 1 p.m. All entries must be two-crust apple pies, cooked in disposable foil pans. They must be all apple, without other fruits or fruit juices. Prizes will be $100 for first place and the Golden Apple Trophy. Second place is $50 and third place is $25. To enter text Cindy at 731-2644 with your name and phone number or send a message through Facebook.

• Bringing in the grapes: Black Bear Vineyard (289 New Road, Salisbury, 648-2811, blackbearvineyard.com) will celebrate its annual harvest from noon to 5 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 3, and Sunday, Oct. 4. Watch as freshly picked grapes are brought in and processed through the crusher-destemmer, and see them transformed into fresh juice for future wine. Enjoy live music and explore a market of local vendors. Bring a chair and come early. Visit blackbearvineyard.com.

• Chili and beer: The annual Powder Keg Beer & Chili Festival will take place in Swasey Parkway in downtown Exeter on Saturday, Oct. 3, with general admission at 1 p.m., noon for VIP ticket holders, according to powderkegbeerfest.com, where you can purchase tickets.

• Sunshine Supper: The Bookery (844 Elm St., Manchester, 836-6600, bookerymht.com) will host the Second Annual Sunshine Supper Series Dinner Saturday, Oct. 3, from 7 to 9:30 p.m. Harper’s Eden Catering will serve seasonal, story-driven dishes inspired by sunshine, warmth, and the beauty of gathering around the table. Tickets are $100 each through the Bookery’s website. Part of the proceeds will support Project Sweet Peas (projectsweetpeas.com), which supports NICU and bereaved families.

• Boot and tassels cake decorating: Make Sweet Art (978-300-0494, linktr.ee/MakeSweetArt) will hold a Western-themed hands-on guided cake decoration party Sunday, Oct. 4, from 1 to 3:30 p.m. at The Farm and Flower (4 Maple Knoll Drive, thefarmandflower.com). Included in each ticket is instruction for all skill levels, a prebaked cake, colored buttercream, and essential decorations and tools. There will be instruction and demonstration in piping, fondant, and other decorating techniques. Tickets are $78 through Make Sweet Art’s website.

• Sushi and Soju: Local Street Eats (112 W. Pearl St., Nashua, 402-4435, local-streeteats.com) will present an evening of SUSHI + SOJU: ROLL. SIP. SEOUL., An Interactive Sushi Rolling + Soju Experience, Wednesday, Oct. 7, from 6 to 8 p.m. This will be an interactive night where you’ll learn the art of sushi-rolling while sipping your way through perfectly paired soju cocktails. Tickets are $96.81 through the Local Street Eats website.

The Weekly Dish 26/09/24

By John Fladd
jfladd@hippopress.com

• NH Brewfest has been canceled: In a Sept. 10 press release, the Prescott Park Arts Festival, in partnership with the Master Brewers Association of the Americas (MBAA), District New England, announced that the annual New Hampshire Brewfest normally held in Prescott Park in Portsmouth will not take place in 2026. “This year’s decision to pause the event follows careful consideration of a number of factors,” the announcement read, “including ongoing challenges in securing a suitable location, broader headwinds facing the craft beer industry, and a festival landscape that continues to evolve.“

• Wines of the world and charcuterie: On Friday, Sept. 25, beginning at 5:30 p.m., Tuscan Market (Tuscan Village, 9 Via Toscana, Salem, 912-5467, tuscanbrands.com) will host a guided evening where its sommeliers will lead participants on a tour through wine regions from Italy and France to Spain, Argentina and beyond. Sample a curated flight paired with an artisan cheese and charcuterie board built from the market: aged Parmigiano Reggiano, creamy taleggio, Prosciutto di Parma, salami, olives, honey and freshly baked bread. Tickets are $65 each through the Tuscan Market website.

• Dolly Day: Friday, Sept. 25, is Dolly Day at To Share Brewing (720 Union St., Manchester, 836-6947, tosharebrewing.com). Wear your best Dolly fashion, support a great cause, and drink excellent beer. Ten percent of all sales will be donated to Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library program to put books in the hands of children. There will be beer, food and nonalcoholic drinks available from 4 to 9 p.m.

• To Share Oktoberfest: To Share Brewing’s (720 Union St., Manchester, 836-6947, tosharebrewing.com) 8th Annual Oktoberfest will be held Saturday, Sept. 26, from 1 to 8 p.m. In an announcement on Facebook the brewery referred to this event as their “biggest day of the year, packed with German-inspired food, great beer, games, prizes, and plenty of reasons to raise a stein.” It also marks the release of To Share’s Oktoberfest Altbier. Admission is free. So is the fun.

• Fall cookie decorating: Station 101 (193 Union Square, Milford, 249-5416, station101nh.com) will host an evening of cookie decorating with Posy Cottage Cookies (801-7590, posycottagecookies.com) Monday, Sept. 28, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Learn five early autumn-themed cookie designs with four colors of royal icing. Posy Cottage Cookies will provide all the materials needed to create beautiful and delicious cookies. Tickets are $64.80 each through the Posy Cottage website.

One day of Greek goodies

Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church will hold its annual Greek Food Festival

By John Fladd
jfladd@hippopress.com

On Saturday, Sept. 26, the Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church in Concord will hold its annual Greek Food Festival, the last of the region’s Greek festivals for the year. Constantine Newman is the priest at Holy Trinity.

“It’s a one-day festival,” he said. “We feature a lot of good Greek food, all of it homemade, favorites like the lamb kebabs and the chicken kebabs, moussaka, pastitsio, Greek meatballs and spanakopita. On the line we’ll have gyros and the ladies have a whole setup of Greek pastries that they’re selling.”

The Greek Food Festival is Holy Trinity’s biggest fundraiser of the year, Newman said. “This helps us get through the year. But it’s also a lot of fun, too. It’s not just a monetary thing, but it’s nice for showcasing Greek culture and food and just having a nice time together.”

While months of preparation go into the Festival, he said, there is always a last-minute scramble to get everything ready in time for the big day. “Some of the things we can prepare ahead of time. Some of the things though, you can’t really freeze them well, so we do them in the last week. Of course, all the meat that we get has to be cut and trimmed and then put on the skewers. It has to be marinated, so that can only be done in the last week. [In the days before the Festival] we will be doing the moussaka, the baklava, the galaktoboureko, and then all the meat stuff.” All the meat will be finished on the grill, he said.

For many Greek food enthusiasts, the acid test of a festival is the spanikopita — spinach and feta cheese sandwiched in many layers of buttered, paper-thin phyllo dough. Margaret Gegas is the head of the Spanikopita Committee. She said a really good spanikopita has only a few ingredients but they have to be of the best quality. “We put in a lot of fresh spinach — not frozen — and we use a good amount of feta cheese crumbled in each pan and olive oil. Every layer of phyllo is buttered. We put in the pita — maybe 25 sheets each of phyllo dough. At home, some cook might put dill, and they may put a lot of dill, or a lot of spearmint, but we do not alter that flavor because one may not like dill, one may not like spearmint, so we just stick to the recipe we have with scallions, and it blends very well with spinach and olive oil.”

Even more important, Gegas said, is to have a bone-deep understanding of the particular oven it is baked in.

“It is a lot of work,” Gegas said, “and baking it correctly is crucial. [Our spanikopita] are baked in a convection oven so they have to be watched carefully.” She said even if somebody used the exact same techniques and ingredients but tried to make the same recipe in their home oven, their timing and temperature would be off. After years of experience, Gegas and her team know that in the church’s ovens a batch of spanikopita should take exactly one hour.

“They go in,” she said, “but we.check them and change the position [of the pans] in the oven, just to be sure all the air is circulating correctly with each pan. We’ve made 35 pans this year.”

The Spanikopita Committee does not monitor the internal temperature of the pans while they bake, Gegas said. “It’s by eye and timing. We time them. … So after an hour, we know how it should look. It’s about the browning; if they’re not brown on top, they’re not ready. So it all works out together — the baking and the color.”

Greek Food Festival
When: Saturday, Sept. 26, from 11 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Where: Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church, 68 N. State St., Concord
More: holytrinitynh.org

Featured photo: Kids’ activities at a previous festival. Courtesy photo.

A fall pudding

Traditionally the most fall-ish dish in New England was arguably this pudding. Over the past few decades it has slipped into obscurity, but it is warm and hearty and almost requires you to wear flannel. This recipe is adapted from a collection of holiday recipes that ran in the Boston Globe on Dec. 23, 1923.

  • 1 cup (156 g) yellow cornmeal
  • “A lump of butter the size of an egg” – let’s call it ¼ cup (½ stick)
  • “1 cup molasses” – Molasses was the inexpensive sweetener of choice in New England for generations. For modern tastes it is a little bitter. Let’s go half-and-half with molasses and maple syrup: ½ cup (170 g) molasses, and ½ cup (156 g) maple syrup.
  • 1 egg
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • ½ teaspoon each ground ginger and cinnamon – alternatively, 1 teaspoon of pumpkin pie spice
  • 1 quart (4 cups/908 g) milk
  • 1/3 cup chopped, crystalized ginger (around 50 g)
  • Another 2 cups (454 g) cold milk
  • 1 cup (227 g) water

The original 1923 recipe recommends cooking everything on the stovetop, then baking it in a bean pot. If you cook it in an oven-proof pot, you can cook it, then move it to the oven. I like to use a 3-gallon soup pot with a tight-fitting lid.

Preheat your oven to 275°F — the 1923 recipe recommended a “slow oven.”

In your oven-proof pot, bring the quart of milk to a boil over medium heat.

Turn the heat down to medium-low, and whisk in the cornmeal, butter, molasses/maple syrup, egg, salt and spices. (If you’re worried about the egg cooking before you can get it mixed in properly, maybe stir it in with the molasses and syrup before you add them.) Whisk continuously until the mixture comes back to a boil and thickens up, then stir in the crystalized ginger pieces.

Mix the remaining milk and the water together, then gently pour them on top of the cornmeal mixture. If you pour it over the back of a spatula, it should go on top without splashing. Your goal here is to top the pudding with a layer of liquid.

Cover the pot with a lid, and transfer it to the oven. Bake it for four hours.

After the four hours are up, remove the pot from the oven, and set it aside to cool.

You can take the lid off and look inside if you want to, but be aware that at this point the pudding is the stuff of nightmares. A hundred years ago puddings were commonly made using a process called “wheying.” A pudding would be baked covered with a layer of milk — or even cream, if you were fancy. As it baked, the dairy fats and proteins would get absorbed into the main body of the pudding, leaving a layer of whey on top. It is supposed to be there. But to modern eyes it just looks wrong. It is better for your peace of mind not to look at it until the pudding has had a chance to meditate and self-actualize.

After half an hour or so, whisk the whey back into the pudding, then serve it warm, with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

Featured photo. Photo by John Fladd.

A twist on a famous drink, and games

Downtown Dirty Shirley Crawl brings book series to life

Alex Pellerin, the event coordinator for Bookery in Manchester, said that while it is perfectly possible to take part in Saturday’s Dirty Shirley Bar Crawl without knowing any of the cultural references behind it, there is an actual literary theme to the event.

“There is a really popular book series called Dungeon Crawler Carl,” Pellerin said. “It’s recently exploded in popularity. ln the books there’s a cat named Princess Donut who talks, and at [a bar called] the Desperado Club she finds out she really likes Dirty Shirley Temples [very similar to the popular non-alcoholic drink Shirley Temple, with grenadine and ginger ale, but with a vigorous slug of vodka]. She eventually gets cut off from them and can only have regular Shirley Temples.”

“So we are hosting this event in conjunction with [Granite State] Comicon,” Pellerin continued, “to give folks who are going to Comicon some things to do after the event. [Comicon] will end around 5 p.m. and we want to continue the celebration and community-building. We thought it would be fun to connect people to other businesses in the area while celebrating the book series and Comiccon. We’re [organizing] a Dirty Shirley Bar Crawl to find the best Shirley Temple in what we would call The Dungeon, but really on Elm Street.”

Each of the participating bars and restaurants will serve its take on a Shirley Temple, both “dirty” and traditional. Crawl participants will have the opportunity to vote for their favorites, and the bars will earn bragging rights.

Pellerin said the Dungeon Crawler Carl series is popular with readers of all ages and interests, and the Dirty Shirley Crawl will reflect that.

“It’s 100 percent inclusive,” she said, “whether you drink or not. And we know that doing a bar crawl isn’t everybody’s thing; [ Bookery] is going to actually be staying open later. Typically we’re only open till 7 p.m., but that night we’re going to be open until 9 p.m., and in the store from 5 to 9 p.m. we’ll be doing Dungeon Crawler Carl-themed activities, games, giveaways and raffles. We’ll have a bunch of fun Dungeon Crawler Carl merch for people to purchase too. So for anyone not interested in doing the Crawl there’s still stuff going on here they can participate in, or they could do both. We’re turning this whole place into a dungeon, which will be very, very exciting.”

“For instance,” Pellerin said, “we’ll have a High Rollers Roulette Wheel, which is a classic in the Desperado Club, where people can win different prizes — or maybe not win some prizes — based on what the wheel gives you. We’re going to have a photo booth, There will be some voting activities for readers’ favorite book, and we’ll build a ‘Mob’, which is like building monsters that people get to collaborate on. It’s going to be really fun. We’re really excited.”you’re satisfied, but there can always be a little bit more satisfaction.”

Dirty Shirley Bar Crawl
When: Saturday, Sept. 19, from 5 to 9 p.m.
Where: along Elm Street in downtown Manchester. A statement from Bookery (844 Elm St., Manchester, 836-6600, bookerymht.com) reads, “While we anticipate that most participants will visit locations individually, a larger group will depart from the bookstore at 6 p.m. following a specific route. Below is the complete list of participating bars, with the locations on the main group route being underlined/bolded.”
Diz’s
Stashbox
Without
The Shaskeen
Boards & Brews
Bad Brgr
Strange Brew
Thirsty Moose
Shoppers
Industry East
Hop Knot
Critical Mass Coffee
Manchester Distillery

Featured photo: Photo by John Fladd.

Stay in the loop!

Get FREE weekly briefs on local food, music,

arts, and more across southern New Hampshire!