More Cheese More Chocolate

While Mexican food is easily my favorite cuisine, Mediterranean food is a close second.  Pitas, hummus, falafel, gyros, tabouli, or anything involving feta – I’ll take it.  I’ve seen the banner in Uptown advertising for the Minneapolis Greek Festival for the past few years, and every year I tell myself I’m going to go but never actually make it.  Since I became an Uptown resident and found myself driving by the banner on a daily basis, I knew that I could not pass it up this year.  After spending a beautiful fall afternoon laying on the couch watching college football and working up an appetite, we headed over to St. Mary’s Greek Orthodox Church for live music, dancing, people watching, and food.

To maximize the number of things we got to try, we ordered a few things to share: a gyro, pastitsio, salad, and Greek fries.

We also had some awesome desserts, but I was way too excited about eating them to stop and take a picture.  Thank god we decided to walk to the festival, because I ate my weight in loukoumades.  Did I really just say that?  Yes, because it’s true.  If you’ve never had these little honey-coated balls of fried dough, get your hands on some immediately.

The festival food was good, but as is the case with most meals prepared cafeteria-style, it was far from the best Greek meal that I’ve ever had.  For the next week I kept thinking about making my own pastitsio, and before I got around to looking up recipes I remembered that a few months back I had bookmarked a recipe for Greek mac and cheese.  This mac and cheese is like a vegetarian version of pastitsio with spinach and fresh dill taking the place of the meat.  It still has the nutmeg- and cinnamon-hinted béchamel sauce like the pastitsio, but replacing the meat with greens lightens it up a bit.  Before baking you top the dish with buttery breadcrumbs and feta, so it’s not really light, but it sure is heavenly.  My girlfriends who came over for dinner agreed.

These pictures really don’t do it justice, but I can assure you that it’s worth the time and effort.

The recipe, from Saveur: Greek Mac and Cheese

I went to three grocery stores and couldn’t find graviera or kefalotyri cheese, so I used Fontina.  I also ended up using more pasta than the recipe called for, and I skipped the spinach chopping without any problem.

When I found myself eating mac and cheese for three meals in a row, I decided that I should probably eat some carrots on the side.  I had to freeze the rest of the leftovers to stop the streak at three meals.

One last thing – you can still vote for Challenge #2 of Project Food Blog until this evening.  Thanks for voting!