Sunday, August 21, 2011

Opa! The Alaska Greek Festival

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!

Sunday, August 14, 2011

Road Trip! Seward

My husband, dog, mother in law, and I just got back from a great trip to Seward, Alaska. Seward is on the southern part of the Kenai Peninsula, at the head of beautiful Resurrection Bay. Seward is one of the older towns in this part of Alaska, and was important as the start of the Alaska Railroad and the Government Trail/Iditarod Trail. It was a really important transportation and supply hub because the bay is open year-round, unlike a lot of ports in Alaska that are frozen in the winter. Today, the port is still important as a base for commercial and recreational fishing, as a cruise ship port bringing thousands of tourists to Alaska every summer, and as a supply point for shipping things like coal from Alaska to the rest of the world. It is also adjacent to Kenai Fjords National Park, and a lot of people come to Seward to take wildlife cruises, go sea kayaking in the fjords, or to go hiking up to Exit Glacier.

Since Seward is a tourist town, there are a ton of places to eat. You'll notice that the prices seem pretty high, but I will point out two things about that. First, this is a town that lives off of tourists, including cruise ship tourists, so their prices are high because of that. Also, so much of the food includes fresh seafood from Resurrection Bay and Prince William Sound, so that makes things more expensive, too. Some of the places that I didn't have time to go include Ray's Seafood Restaurant, which is apparently the most expensive restaurant in Seward. Their seafood is supposed to be pretty good, but mainly they are popular because they are right on the water overlooking the harbor, and they have big plate glass windows giving you an amazing view. Also right next to the harbor is the Harbor Street Creamery ice cream parlor. I really wanted to go there, but didn't get the chance during our approximately 36 hours in Seward.

And while I didn't get any coffee there, I really recommend going to the Resurrect Art Coffee House and Art Gallery. It is housed in the old Methodist Church, which is gorgeous. The coffee shop part is in the front where you come in, and they have teas, coffee, and things like bagels. They have a ton of local art for sale, which takes up the rest of the space, and includes watercolors and oils by local artists, prints of drawings and paintings, jewelry, hand-woven towels, knit hats, hand turned wooden bowls, books about Alaska, photo prints of cute Alaskan animals like sea otters, stained glass, and modern scrimshaw ivory with unusual designs, like an octopus one-man band. The tall church windows let in a ton of light, which is great. There is so much art and display cases that there aren't a ton of tables and chairs, but is seems like there is enough room. And if you go upstairs to where the choir used to be, there are a few comfy chairs and low tables, along with a bookcase of used books for sale. They also have a great bulletin board which advertises things like the photo contest and fundraiser for the SOS animal shelter. So while, since Alaskan love their coffee, there are probably a dozen places to get an espresso in Seward, if nothing else, you should go to Resurrect Art for the ambiance.

Another great place to go, when you need a sweet snack, is to Sweet Darling's candy store. It's on 4th Ave in the heart of Seward, and they make all kinds of tasty candy. They make their own salt water taffy, which my husband loved, and they make their own fudge and truffles. I got a dark chocolate truffle, a hazelnut truffle, a "maple almighty" truffle, and a truffle that was basically a piece of their homemade fudge dipped in chocolate. They had a pretty wide variety of truffles, so I'm sure everyone could find something they liked. They also make fantastic gelato. Not only was it good, but it was really authentic- everything from the flavors (mostly) to the little spatulas they give you to eat it, was more like actually getting gelato in Italy than anywhere else in Alaska. I got two scoops of chocolate and coffee, and my husband got strawberry and fruits of the forest, and they were all delicious. I think the 2 scoop cup was $4. Alaskan towns usually have a ton of choices when it comes to ice cream, but if you're in Seward, you should definitely pick the gelato.

For lunch when we got into town we went to the Apollo, a Greek and Italian place that has been around a long time. It was great when my whole family was down there fishing, and we were cold and wet. We could go here, and the kids could get spaghetti or pizza. This is a very old-style Italian restaurant, though, and the thick cream sauces were a little much for us. We got the seafood stuffed mushrooms for an appetizer. They were pretty much like a crab cake or something, with seafood and breading, stuffed in the mushroom caps, and topped with a lot of really thick cream sauce. I got the frutti de mare pasta, which had very well-cooked seafood, including halibut in it, but again, it was topped with a super thick cream sauce, almost like a roux or bechamel, so I didn't get very far. It is a Seward staple, though, and if you like old-fashioned Italian-American food, or if you need a hot pizza for for your family after a long, cold day of fishing, you should stop by.

For dinner one day, we went to Alaska Nellie's Roadhouse, which is also on 4th Avenue. It was really good, and we wished we had time to come back for breakfast or for another lunch or dinner so we could try more things on the menu. They apparently make really good breakfasts, including hotcakes, corned beef hash, omelets (including one with reindeer sausage), and breakfast burritos. The breakfast prices ranged from $7 - $12, depending on what you got. For lunch and dinner, they have everything from nachos (which looked amazing), to sandwiches, falafel, and seafood baskets. They make their own seafood chowder fresh, and you can tell- it was really delicious. They also have really fantastic burgers, which are served on ciabatta rolls and come with coleslaw or fries, or for $2 you can substitute a cup of chowder or their amazing sweet potato fries. My husband got the mushroom and swiss burger, which was really good. It was cooked more than he would like, but he didn't ask for it rare, so you can't really blame them, and it was still really good. You can also get a caribou burger, a salmon burger, or a halibut burger, which is what I got. It was really great, good halibut, grilled so it was charred a little on the outside, and was perfectly cooked so it was just falling apart. The burgers cost from $10 to $17, and of course the most expensive were the salmon and halibut burgers. They also have dinners that come with a baked potato and vegetables, so you can get your fix of steak, halibut, crab legs, chicken, or caribou filet mignon. They also have a seafood pasta and a cajun chicken or halibut pasta. I didn't catch all the dinner prices, but they were in the $20 range for entrees. Everyone I know loves the food they get here, plus they have great old photos of historic Seward and of Alaska Nellie Lawing, who was a tough pioneer Alaskan woman who ran a roadhouse and was a world-class  hunter back in the day.

The other place I would really recommend, and that we'll also be going back to when we get back to Seward, is the Smoke Shack. They are located in the "Train Wreck" which is a group of four converted Alaska Railroad cars at the corner of 4th and Port Streets. One car is a bike repair and rental place, one is a guide outfit for tours of Exit Glacier, one is a hotel in case you feel the need to stay in a railroad car with a great view of the harbor, and one car is the Smoke Shack. They have a smoker out back, and a kitchen on one end of the car, and the other end of the car has maybe 10 4-person tables. There was a short wait when we went, and as you can imagine, it's so small that there's probably always a line. Their mottos are "Food for the Soul" and "Life's Too Short to Eat Boring Food!" The name of the restaurant is taken seriously - all meat in this place is smoked, from the breakfast meats to the burgers to the ribs. We had breakfast here, but the rest of the menu looks great. My husband had the eggs benedict, as always, and it was really good, but was really unusual. It was served on toasted little baguettes instead of English muffins, and it had smoked ham, and the sauce had a lot of cajun spices in it, that I couldn't quite put my finger on. I got the Huevos Rancheros, which was fantastic and also really unusual. I got it with scrambled eggs, but you could have your eggs any way you wanted. It was a big platter with tortillas on the bottom, covered in potatoes, black beans, cheese, and eggs garnished with pico de gallo. You got your choice of red Spanish chorizo sauce or green chili sauce. I went with the chorizo, which is what the waiter recommended. It was very spicy and delicious, and not at all the Mexican style huevos rancheros I am used to. Their other breakfast selections include frittatas, chicken fried steak, biscuits and gravy, pancakes, and the "Benedict Arnold," which is the Egg's Benedict with vegetables instead of ham (get it?). Breakfasts cost from $6 to $14. Most of the lunches cost from $10 to $14, but the large rack of baby back ribs cost $22. For lunch they have ribs, a smoked green chili burrito, smoked beef or turkey burgers, smoked chicken sandwiches, and smoked pork shoulder sandwiches, all of which come with beans and coleslaw. They also have a couple odds and ends like gumbo and "Cajun baked brie,"which is served warm with tomato salsa on toast. And despite everything I've just described, they also have vegetarian options for lunch - a smoked tofu burger (I told you everything was smoked!) and a portobello mushroom sandwich with carmelized onions and goat cheese. See, I totally have to come back to this place.

There are several other restaurants and bakeries that I didn't get to, but luckily Seward is only a two and a half hour drive from Anchorage, so I should be able to get back to try some more things soon.