Category: Food

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.

Salsa music meets Somali food at this year’s Concord Multicultural Festival

By John Fladd
[email protected]

This weekend’s Concord Multicultural Festival will have participants from more than 70 countries. According to Jessica Livingston, the Festival’s Director, restaurants, food trucks and individual community members from the Concord area will share food from almost every corner of the world.

“The food is everyone’s favorite part [of the Festival],” she said. “It’s the hardest part of organizing the festival, but it’s so worth it.”

Livingston credited Concord’s Multicultural Festival with bringing the community closer together. “It’s probably the most impactful part of the festival,” she said. “When we started out, years ago, there were just a couple of food vendors who were actually just neighbors in the community who were newer here and they were sharing their food.”

Now the Festival’s website lists 12 community members and nine professional food vendors at this year’s celebration. Special care is taken to help community members prepare and sell their food.

“We have to follow obviously, the City of Concord’s food health safety rules for food,” Livingston said. “So having all of these non-commercial food vendors cook is a challenge. We are grateful to be able to work with the New Hampshire Food Bank, who has a beautiful state-of-the-art kitchen down in Manchester. They work with us and help the food vendors — the non-commercial food vendors — develop their menus and their pricing. And then the day before the festival, all of the cooking happens down at the food bank. There’s so many people there, probably 15 different food vendors and their helpers and then the other kitchen helpers, and it’s like it’s a really beautiful multicultural production of food, which is a lot of fun.”

Livingston said she’s heard that the Saturday prep session is the most fun part of the Festival. “I actually had somebody a couple years ago, after volunteering at the Food Bank that day, come back and say, ‘That was the funnest thing I’ve ever done; you should charge people for that experience.’ I was like, ‘You want me to charge people to volunteer in a kitchen?’” she said.

According to Livingston some participants find selling food at the Festival empowering.

“It’s a great universal way to bring people together,” she said, “because everybody loves food and especially like different types of food. But the great thing about the food production here is that it’s led to actual businesses like food businesses. … we have a food vendor who’s been with us almost since the beginning; this will be her 12th year. Her name is Batulo [Batulo Mohamed, last year’s Capitol Center for the Arts’ Culinary Artist in Residence, and owner of Batulo’s Kitchen, a Concord food truck], and she started as a food vendor. She makes Somali meat pies, and she’s so popular. Her food is so popular that every year people would be like, where can we get these throughout the year?”

Concord Multicultural Festival
When: Sunday, Sept. 22, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Where: Keach Park in Concord Heights.
The Festival is free and open to the public. Free parking is available at 70 Pembroke Road (formerly Community Bridges).

The food
Food served at this year’s Multicultural Festival by community vendors includes Empanadas (Argentina) by Roy, Aloo Dam (Nepal) by Bhagi, Kunaffeh (Egypt) by Abeer Shabaka, Fried Rice and Chicken (Sierra Leone) by Agnes, Rice with Kofta Meatballs (Afghanistan) by Asif, Man’ouche and Rose Lemonade (Lebanon) by Christy, and Ivorian Rice (Côte d’Ivoire) by Tina.

Restaurants and food trucks at the Festival will include Batulo’s Kitchen (Somalia), Bubble Bee Milk Tea (China), Katmandu (Nepal), Sue’s Kimbap House (South Korea), the Cannoli Stop (Italy) and Don Quijote (Caribbean).

Featured Photo: Courtesy Photo.