Salt Lake Greek Festival 2012

Every year, the weekend after Labor Day, Holy Trinity Cathedral, a Greek Orthodox church in downtown Salt Lake City, has its annual Greek Festival. My husband and I really enjoy attending - lots of good food, dancing, cooking demos, choir performances, and interesting things to peruse. The Cathedral is also open, which is especially interesting to us because while it's a gorgeous church, my husband is a quarter Greek (his father had been brought up Greek Orthodox), so we feel some ties to the the religion and culture as well. And it's interesting to us to compare the seemingly minimal differences between Greek Orthodoxy and our own Roman Catholicism.

But of course the food is a big draw. We waited in line nearly an hour and a half, but boy, was it worth it! The line moved constantly, and it was warm weather, so the time seemed to move pretty quickly, and we filled up on a lot of excellently-prepared food.

I had keftedes (baked meatballs with mint and tomato sauce); a gyro (meat, tomato, onion, and tzatziki sauce, served on amazing pita bread); and souvlaki (chicken grilled on a skewer, marinated in oil, salt, pepper, oregano, and lemon):

I also had loukaniko, a Greek pork sausage flavored with fennel seeds and orange peel:

And for dessert, Kourambiedes (cookies, butter, and crushed roasted almonds generously dusted with powdered sugar); Melomakarona (cookies soaked in syrup of diluted honey, then sprinkled with crushed walnuts); baklava; and Amigdalota (almond cookies flavored with nutmeg and sprinkled with nuts):