Things are cooking at St. George

LYNN – As members of St. George Greek Orthodox Church prepare for their upcoming annual Grecian Festival Labor Day weekend, making enough food for everyone who attends is paramount on their minds.The festival, which is the church’s largest fundraising event of the year, will take place Sept. 4-6, and between 2,000 and 3,000 people are expected, said Sophia Pentikis, office administrator at the church.Preparing dishes for the event is no easy feat. The men tackle meal items, such as spanakopita (spinach pie) and pastitsio (a Greek version of lasagna) at Sidekim Foods over the span of a few days.Sidekim Foods owner Peter Mikedis has been personally working the festival for 30 years and has been a lifelong member of the church, he said. This is the eighth year he has held cooking for the event at his company’s kitchen.”We used to go to various restaurants and ask for five to six pans of food,” he said. “When I opened here, I said ?why don’t we just do it here?’ We have a nice, consistent product. The pastitsio you get on Friday night tastes the same as the pastitsio you get on Sunday.”Mikedis also donated the supplies and food, including the pistachio, lamb, and moussaka, a layered eggplant dish.”The men do the food and the ladies do the sweets and all of the pastries at the church,” said Manny Argiros, who helps to plan the festival. “We started with the spinach pies on Tuesday, and the ladies start the last week of August.”We bake them all and put them in the freezer, and then we pull them out at the festival, heat them and serve them,” he said.A group of volunteers from the church completed 82 trays of spanakopita. On Thursday, they worked to make pastitsio and completed 50 trays. There are about 15 servings of pastitsio to each tray, Mikedis said.The volunteers are all people who have been members of the church since they were children, said Arthur Argeros, who was busy preparing food.”When I was a kid, there was always a festival,” Argeros said. “Any type of church like ours depends on the festival,” he said.”We need more, newer volunteers,” he said. “We need kids to step in.”Bill Booras has been a member of the Parish Council since 1981, he said.”I was baptized there 73 years ago,” he said. “I went to Sunday school there, Greek school there. My father was a member before me.””It grows a little every year,” Booras said. “This is the big moneymaker for the church, it’s the big event.”There is also a big raffle, and tickets are sold leading up to the festival. The grand prize is $25,000, second prize is $2,000, and third prize is $1,000, Booras said.For a number of years, the grand prize was a Cadillac, he said. It would be parked outside the church, and people walking by would buy tickets.The ladies of the church prepare sweets such as koulourakia (butter cookies), kourambiedes (sugar cookies), baklava (layered filo with nuts and sweet syrup), and possibly the most sought-out dessert at the festival, loukoumades (the Greek version of fried dough).”We do baklava sundaes, which sold out last year,” Pentikis said. “They were very popular.”There will also be a “kafenio,” or Greek cafe, in the center of the festival, she said. It will offer iced coffee and traditional Greek coffee, which is a lot thicker and stronger.”The food and pastries are probably the biggest attraction,” Pentikis said. “You see people come in and they go straight to the food lines and then they go and get pastries and they get loukoumades.”Everything else is nice but I think a lot of people really come for the food,” she said.Leftover food is donated to local charities, Mikedis said.Admission for the festival is free for children and free for adults until 4 p.m., after which it is $3.