Easter at Home - Part 1 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Easter at Home – Part 1 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Snow usually covered the ground at Easter in Detroit (Michigan) when I was a child, which meant I wore a new turtleneck sweater and pants instead of a dress to Easter lunch.

My family always spent Easter with my mother’s best friend’s Polish family.

Our hostess and her family members put together a meal that featured baked spiral cut ham with a huge bowl of hand-mashed potatoes with little pools of butter and paprika.  Hand-mashing the potatoes makes them creamy without any lumps.  I loved those and had several helpings.

Other Polish dishes would sometimes appear, too, like kielbasa pork sausage seasoned with garlic and salt.  To go with the kielbasa, there would be fresh, sharp horseradish flavored with beets along with rye and pumpernickel bread.

My mother and I liked to contribute to the food offerings and would a buy a loaf or two of sweet, Polish Easter bread (egg bread made with raisins and currants) in Hamtramack (called Poletown for the large number of Polish immigrants who settled there to work in the auto factories).

Every so often, a lamb made of butter with a red ribbon around its neck would decorate the Easter table.

I always admired the other table decorations: the Polish Easter eggs.  I liked the glistening dark brownish red eggs that obtained their color from being boiled with onion skins.

“Rubbing the eggs with vegetable oil gives them their sheen,” my mother’s friend told me.

One year eggs with a black base color and yellow, red, and green flower designs appeared on the buffet table.  These pysanky eggs came from eastern Poland near the Ukraine, which is famous for its egg decoration.  The Polish traditionally took their decorated eggs to church to be blessed.

My celebration of Polish Easter ended and my celebration of Greek Orthodox Easter began when I went to the University of Chicago and shared a dorm room with my Greek-American roommate.

On Greek Easter weekends, I went to my Greek roommate’s home in an outlying Chicago suburb.  No matter what the weather, a whole lamb is roasted on a spit in the backyard for Greek Easter lunch.  I especially liked the fresh salads with crumbled pieces of feta cheese, black Kalamata olives, and healthy dose of rigani (oregano relative) in oil and vinegar dressing. 

We did not eat one of the most attractive Easter specialties: large, lifesaver shaped loaves of bread with bright red colored eggs baked into them.  All the women relatives compared their golden, brown Easter loaves to see who had made the most elaborate latticework to encase red eggs baked in the circular loaf.

I no longer celebrated Greek Orthodox Easter when I married my French husband and moved to France.

End of Part 1

To be continued.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Greek Festival Pointers - Part 2 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Greek Festival Pointers – Part 2 – by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

The dimotiká folk songs provide music for the folk dances performed by Greek-American teenagers hailing from Salinas, Carmel, and Oakland.  Performing at Greek festivals throughout the state helps the teens keep their Greek heritage alive.

The popular circle dances like the kalamarianos resemble those portrayed on ancient Greek vases.  Line dances encourage everyone to participate.

The large, white napkin that the line dance leader holds is absolutely necessary to signal authority in a culture of strong individuals whose members jokingly describe themselves in the saying, “Twelve Greeks equal thirteen captains.”

Yelling, “Opa!” and line dancing through the crowd should make festivalgoers work up an appetite for even more Greek food with the following 9 items offered:

-village salad – featuring tangy feta cheese made from sheep’s milk and plump kalamata olives

-grape leaves stuffed with rice or beef and flavored with mint

-spanakopita – spinach phyllo pie with pine nuts

-tyropita – phyllo pie made with feta and ricotta cheese

-pastitio – Greek lasagna with beef, macaroni, tomatoes, and a cream sauce seasoned with cinnamon that gives this dish a delicate taste

-moussaka – layered tomato and eggplant cooked in a tomato sauce flavored with cinnamon and nutmeg

-the famous gyro sandwich – made with garlic seasoned pressed beef in pocket bread (pita) with cucumber and garlic sauce

-souvlaki – lamb or pork kebab

-barbecue chicken

As your server wishes you, “Bon Appetit! (Kali Orexi),” it is easy to see how Greek women discreetly rule the home through the stomach.

Wine adventurers might want to try the white Retsina wine made from Savatiano grapes grown in the Attica region around Athens.

Legend recounts that the ancient Greeks added pine resin to this wine to discourage invaders from drinking it.  When I drink Retsina with feta cheese, black olives, and bread, I think it is refreshing just like the modern Greeks do.

Monterey’s Greek community invites festivalgoers to enjoy festival kéfi, joyful exuberance, at their Greek Festival held over Labor Day Weekend in Monterey, California.

End of Article

Notes:

2019 Idea – Maybe a pre-paid “reserve and pick up” dessert and cookie box areas would increase festival sales.  Suggested areas: one in the festival area and another in a far parking lot that would allow drive-thru pickups for the disabled, elderly, or families with babies.

Maybe those dessert and cookie boxes could be sold throughout the year at Demetra restaurants as a dessert and take out item.

FYI – I saw a sign for a gyros restaurant in Seaside, California.  I have not tried the restaurant yet, but it might be worth a try.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France


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Greek Festival Pointers - Part 1 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Greek Festival Pointers – Part 1 -by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

One of the first articles I wrote for the Monterey (CA) County Weekly (Circulation: 200,000) when I was a food writer for the newspaper was about Monterey’s popular Greek festival.  My family regularly attended the Greek Festival when my daughter Florence was little to pick up our box of Greek desserts and cookies.

Parts of the article I wrote about the Greek Festival have shown up in the newspaper over the years, but the following is the original article with slight format modification:

Have no Fear of Greek Gifts

Greek sweets that you cannot find in restaurants should make any visitor to the Greek Festival want to start lunch with dessert.

For Greeks, desserts symbolize joy and good wishes; you always take them to a friend’s home, for example, “to sweeten the friendship.”  With thoughts of festivalgoers tasting the “sweetness” of Greek culture, the ladies of Monterey’s Greek community have been busy making traditional foods for weeks.

Reasonable individuals will start with a plateful of desserts and cookies from the following offerings:

-galataboureko – a custard filled pastry whose crust is built up with layers of thin phyllo pastry softened with melted butter

-karidopeta – cake made with ground walnuts instead of flour and flavored with orange zest and topped off with a syrup made of sugar, lemon, and cinnamon

-koulourakia – shiny twisted butter cookies

-kourabiedes – small crescent-shaped butter cookies sprinkled with confectioner’s sugar

-baklava – You can find this diamond-shaped pastry made with ground walnuts and cinnamon and topped off with lemony syrup in restaurants, but baklava has a different soul when a yia yia, Greek grandma, lovingly makes it.

Telling anyone about melamakarona cookies poses a major ethical dilemma for me, because I want them all for myself.  I used to eat these all the time at my Greek college roommate’s home when I was a student at the University of Chicago.

The spirit of hospitality that the Greeks are famous for, though, requires me to divulge the melamakarona are butter cookies flavored with clove, cinnamon, and orange juice that are dunked in a hot syrup of honey and lemon.  Before they cool, you sprinkle ground walnuts on top of them.

The best way to eat any of these desserts is with a cup of strong Greek coffee.

After indulging in dessert, you can walk around and look at craft items for sale that you always find at paniyeri (festivals) in Greece as you watch folk dancing and listen to music.

The Aegeans band will regale you with dimotiká, folk songs, recounting stories of love, politics, war, and lament whose origins go back to the 15^th century and the Fall of Constantinople, capital of the Greek Byzantine Empire.

End of Part 1.

To be continued…

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Exchange Student in Mexico Day by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Exchange Student in Mexico Day by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

In high school, I could eat my body weight in food and was a welcome guest at my Mexican friend B’s home where they teased me about not eating enough.

Whenever I had been invited to lunch, B. would show up to escort me on the bus from my apartment in downtown Detroit to the west side of town where he lived.

“I can take the bus alone to your house,” I said as we sat down.

He would always tell me that a young lady always gets escorted when she has been invited to lunch.

“That’s the Mexican way,” he would say as I sat in my seat by the window.

I felt like an exchange student for the day when I entered the house and did not know how many times to kiss people on the cheeks.  In my home, we only gave each other bear hugs and pats on the back.

The five-foot high painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe in her blue cloak with golden stars on it seemed mysterious to me, a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant.  B’s parents only spoke Spanish, which made me feel like I was in a foreign country, too.

I was always surprised how meals in my friend’s home did not resemble the combinations of tacos, tostadas, and enchiladas that I liked to eat in restaurants with what I thought was hot sauce.

We would usually start our meals with familiar looking sour cream, guacamole, and warm flour tortillas typical of northern Mexico as an appetizer.

My friend’s mother puréed avocado, tomato, onion, cilantro and jalapeño peppers into her version of guacamole.

“Dairy products kill the flames,” my friend said the first time I innocently delved into the jalapeño-guacamole.

Then, we would have soup.  Looking through cookbooks years later, I found a recipe for my favorite corn soup from the northern Mexican state of Sonora.  The Sonoran soup has squares of green and sweet red pepper and whole ears of baby corn colorfully flavoring a chicken soup.

After the soup, we would eat one of my favorite dishes – tamales.  Steamed masa flour surrounded the spicy pork in these tamales wrapped up in a corn husk wrapper for steaming.

The savory pork was preserved in its own fat like carnitas and was seasoned with oregano, cumin, coriander, onions, and carrots.

I helped make my favorite dessert – buñuelos.  To make these we sat in the kitchen and pulled the elastic dough over our knees and stretched the dough into rounds that were fried and sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon.

I loved the buñuelos with coffee and knowing that the feast day of the Virgin of Guadalupe was also my birthday.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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