October 11, 2014 - 54th Annual Greater Phoenix Greek Festival"

We ate our way through the Greek Festival today at the Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Cathedral located at 1973 E. Maryland.

There is always a small admission cost but when we went today they were not charging senior citizens an admission fee.  How nice!  Gave us more money to eat.

Our first snack was a Tiropita - Phyllo pastry filled with a feta cheese blend.  Even though the pan was marked "Tiropita" I believe they gave us the Spanokopita because our pastry did have spinach in the filling with the feta cheese blend.  That didn't matter to us.  We ate it anyway...and it was delicious.

Tiropita or Spanokopita

Found some great shade in the big tent while we ate...so we decided to try the Calamari.  This was exceptional because sometimes battered calamari can be quite tough and chewy.  This calamari was not.  It was very easy to eat.  It was served with a lemon wedge.  We squeezed that over the calamari and it was delicious.  I did detect a bit of Greek humor though.  At the very bottom of the order was on small battered and fried herring.

Calamari

We followed that up with an order of Greek Fries - a simple thing - French Fries served with feta cheese crumbled over the top and some chives.  It was delicious.  I love feta cheese.  I almost bought a shirt that read "Everything is beta with feta."  Isn't that the truth.

Greek Fries

That was followed with a Baklava Sundae.  Now this is quite yummy.  It is soft ice cream served with crushed pieces of baklava over the top and a cherry.  The lady explained to me that when they cut the baklava there are ends that they are unable to use so they crushed those up and voila the Baklava Sundae was created.  You haven't lived until you try one of these.   I also bought 2 of the Koulourakia.  Those are the Greek Easter cookies on the plate.  A dry cookie with a subtle lemon taste in the dough.

Baklava Sundae

There was a second dessert that we chased down.  The priest who conducted our tour through the cathedral told us about it.  We finally found where the dessert was located.  It is called Galaktobouriko.  We will try those next year because we were on the Las Palmas bus.  We had to buy four of them and they needed to stay cool.  Next year I will take my car with a cooler.  I can hardly wait.