October 2, 2021

Greek Festival time!.....

 

I know it's hard to see what's going on here.....shelves and shelves of baked goods for sale at the festival.  Tsoureki, paximadia (plain and chocolate), kourabiedes, baklava, etc.  These represent months of baking, I believe they started in June.  Last week was a whirlwind of last minute baking of things that don't freeze well, clearing out the hall, putting up all the decorations.  It is a huge production.  I only helped with a tiny bit of it.  Next year I can be more involved since I won't be working (YAY).  

I worked yesterday from 9:30 am to 6:30 pm.  I was exhausted.   We started with stocking the shelves, moving frozen items from the freezer to one of the refrigerator units.  As the shelves emptied, we restocked and restocked.  I would have thought Friday would be relatively low key ~ but no!  We were fairly busy until about 3 pm when it ramped up.  My friend who is the head of all of this said she thinks we will run out of pastries today!  But we'll see.  More than once people asked me who baked all of this, and when I swept my arm around to indicate all the women working the booth and said "we did" they were amazed.  I guess they thought we bought all of this stuff, lol.  

One of the reasons we had so much traffic on Friday was folks that buy the pastries every year, and really missed not being able to get any last year.

This is not one of this year's dancers, I haven't taken any photos of that yet.  I plan to do that today.  Luckily I can enjoy a relaxed morning since I'm not signed up until 2 pm.  

This is also the weekend that the International Balloon Fiesta begins.  Romeo turned on the tv and we watched with amazement at all the people who are on the field.  My thought that people are just hungry for places to go and things to do must be spot on.  Covid be damned, haha.

Well, I'd best finish my coffee and slice a piece of tsoureki before I shower to go! 

Love, 365



4 comments:

  1. Is there a large Greek community where you live? Or just one very enthusiastic lover of Greek culture that had passed on the enthusiasm? It might be different in rursl Greece to my experience of city life. Everyone i know buys their bakery food, and most refer to someone of their Grandmother's generation as being the last in their family who prepared all this at home. Tsoureki for Easter,kourabides and melomakarona for Christmas... I have acquired an extremely old Greek cookbook with my apartment - one full of hand written notes of a woman who was extremely elderly in the early 1990s and made Vasilopita from it for our new year pie cutting. Well done everyone in your group for the success of your festival.

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    1. Our church is the result of a Greek community that gathered together, bought the land for the church, had it built...so on. I only know a few of the older Greek parishioners, some are in their 90s! So, the Greek Festival was a way to raise money, introduce people to the Orthodox Church, etc. These days (47 years later) it's more of a tradition to have it, we don't depend on the money it generates.
      That is so cool on the cook book! Sounds really special!

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  2. Thinking like Tigger. How big is the Greek population. That's an amazing amount of work and organisation. Sounds as though it was a roaring success. Wouldn't mind a slice of tsoureki with my morning coffee!

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    1. I think it's around 17%...but the stats I looked up are old, and so many people moved around during the past two years due to the pandemic. There are probably 20-30 people at different times (as they are available) that help with the baking ~ we've always had great bakers and kitchen managers that set up all of this many years ago!

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