This weekend was the annual Alaska Greek Festival. It's held every year in Anchorage at the Holy Transfiguration Greek Orthodox Church on O'Malley Road. This year they are finishing up the renovation of the church, so all the profits of this year's festival are going towards that. I went with my husband and my parents for lunch, and our timing was great. Not only was it sunny, but the lines for food were a quarter as long as they were when we were leaving, plus by mid-afternoon they were starting to sell out of the most popular things.
For the main course we shared a few different things. We got a pastitsio, which is kind of like a Greek lasagna. It's made with lamb meat sauce, macaroni noodles, and bechamel sauce. So it's like the richest lasagna ever. I like getting it in Greek restaurants because I know from experience that it takes a long time and a lot of pots and pans to make at home- you have to make the meat sauce, cook the noodles, make the bechamel, then bake it all. The pastitsio at the festival is really good, but a little dry, since it is made in mass quantities in big buffet sheet pans, but what are you going to do? The pastitsio, lamb, and moussaka come as dinners with Greek salad, bread, and a tiropita. If I had more room in my stomach I might have come back to this booth and gotten the Athenian Chicken Wings, which are marinated in lemon and oregano and served with tzatziki sauce. They also had a vegetarian option (the only main dish without meat), the fasolakia yiahni, which is made with green beans, tomatoes, and potatoes. For the rest of our lunch we got a couple of gyros and a chicken souvlaki. You should know what a gyro is already, I hope, so I won't say what's in it. These were traditional, hot and tasty. Souvlaki is a kabob, and I think it's normally made with pork, but you could get pork or chicken at the festival. The kabobs were so tender the meat was just falling apart. They were so good I'm kind of surprised how much better the gyros were selling. The guys selling the gyro and souvlaki also had the best shirts- one had a shirt that said "got ouzo?" and my favorite said "Gyro-Trash."
We got several things to fill out our meal. We had some dolmades, which are grape leaves stuffed with rice, herbs and spices. These were so good that my dad went back for more later. And we got spanakopita and tiropita. Spanakopita is the better known of the two, and made by filling lots of layers of buttery filo dough with spinach, onion, and feta cheese. I like making little personal spanakopita filo cups for parties. The tiropita is not nearly as well known, but I think it's even better than the spanakopita. Apparently in Greece it's the indulgent thing you eat at Easter when you can finally eat dairy again after Lent, and since it's spring you get super fresh goat and sheep cheese. In Alaska, you can't get cheese that fresh, so they make it with feta, cream cheese, and ricotta to make a creamy approximation, and again, it's baked in filo dough. I'll definitely be making these at home. They have a beer tent, but it wasn't until after we were finished with our food that I noticed that people were getting bottles of wine from there, too. I was totally bummed that I didn't notice that earlier- add a bottle of wine to the sun, the fresh Greek food, and the old guys playing bazoukis all afternoon, the transportation to the Greek riviera would have been complete!
For our first round of dessert we got loukoumades. They had a sign on the counter that these were the prizes for athletes at Ancient Greek religious festivals. They're basically doughnuts, but the thing that makes them Greek (and freaking amazing) is that they come hot out of the fryer, get rolled in honey syrup, and then sprinkled with cinnamon sugar and chopped nuts. Oh my God they are good! And I was the first one after they brought out a new batch, so we had super-fresh hot ones. Mmmmmm....
After we digested for a minute we went to the bakery tent to get more desserts, and we got a bunch of things to try and take home for later. You can get baklava at a lot of places, so we actually skipped it here, so we could try other things you don't find the rest of the year. We got the melomakarona, which are spiced cookies with walnuts and cinnamon, and dipped in honey; the kourambiethes, which are for holidays and weddings, and are almond cookies with powdered sugar and rose water, and can also be made with whole cloves inside; koulourakia, Easter cookies which are not really sweet at all, and are often eaten as snacks with coffee; karithopita, which is honey-soaked walnut spice cake; and my husband and mom's favorite, the galactobouriko, best described as a Greek eclair- it's rolled up filo soaked in lemon syrup and filled with semolina custard. It's also one of the most popular things they sell, and when I was in the store looking at the grocery store items they have for sale (orzo, Greek coffee, olives, grape leaves, etc), the woman in front of me bought the last package of frozen take-home galactobouriko. I should have gotten a little cup of Greek coffee to go with all the super-sweet desserts, but it slipped my mind when we got up to the counter. Of course, if you haven't noticed, most of the desserts involve lots of honey and nuts, so really, how can you go wrong?
Besides all the leftover desserts I brought home, I also brought home a cookbook of recipes collected from the men and women of the Anchorage Greek Orthodox Church and sold to raise money for the Church renovation, "Tastes Like Home: Mediterranean Cooking in Alaska." It has lots of recipes from the Festival (including tiropita and all of the desserts I mentioned), and also has Mediterranean recipes for Alaskan seafood, including salmon and dungeness crab, besides more traditional Mediterranean seafood recipes for octopus, squid, scallops, and shrimp. It's a good thing I got this cookbook, because even with four of us sampling lots of things, I didn't get to try all the things I wanted. Hopefully by next year I will have forgotten my initial annoyance at how bad the traffic and parking always is, but remember how well all the Alaskan Greeks cook and that it's totally worth going if you're here in town. Opa!
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