Jeff Houck

The Tampa Tribune’s food writer since 2005, Jeff Houck covers the way people live through their food. He also hosts the Table Conversations food podcast and believes that everything crunchy is good.

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Tampa’s Greek Festival Starts Today [St. John The Baptist Greek Orthodox Throws A Great Party]

Posted Nov 6, 2009 by Jeff Houck

Updated Nov 6, 2009 at 10:40 AM

For more than two decades, St. John the Baptist Greek Orthodox Church has put on the Tampa Greek Festival during the first weekend of November. And for all that time, Mary Nenos has prepared the baked goodies.

A member of the church since 1956, Nenos, 82, was one of the women who started the festival.

“I recruited everyone,” she remembered. “I went to the parish council, who were all men, and they were afraid to do it. I hit the table. I said, ‘If you don’t do it, the women will do it.’ They said, ‘We can’t let the women embarrass us.’ So they did it.”

That first festival took place at Curtis Hixon Hall on the Hillsborough River. There was no school or gymnasium at St. John’s like there is today. The event was a huge success. Curtis Hixon is now gone, but the church has a school and a gymnasium and enough land to have the event on its property.

The festival, which draws thousands of visitors, begins at 11 a.m. today at the church on the corner of Swann and Armenia avenues and runs through Sunday. Proceeds will benefit LifePath Hospice.

Nenos and dozens of helpers started baking in early October to prepare for the onslaught of hungry patrons who will want to fill their bellies with tasty spanakopita spinach pastries, gyro lamb sandwiches, honey-dripped baklava and powdery kourambiedes butter cookies with almonds.

During one Monday in mid-October, Nenos was busy preparing hundreds of pounds of dough to make a spice cookie called melomakarona.

“You can call it phoenikia if you want,” she told a visitor. “It’s easier.”

As 13 women in an adjacent room rolled the dough she made, Nenos manhandled 25-pound bags of flour and sugar with a helper handing her two pounds of butter and a half-dozen eggs at a time to dump into a mixer. The four cups of Crisco for every batch? She scooped those herself. She also handled the few ounces of Henry McKenna sour mash straight bourbon whiskey that gives the cookies a caramel flavor.

“One tablespoon for the pot, one for the cook,” a helper joked.

“No, no, no,” Nenos said with a laugh before noting that all the alcohol burns off when you bake. She then asked a friend to remove a large pan of pastichio from the oven. Nenos cooks lunch for her helpers, too.

The favorite treat among festivalgoers is koulourakia twisted butter cookies.

“People like to dunk them in coffee,” Nenos explained.

What makes Greek pastries so good?

“Love,” she said with another hearty laugh. Nenos laughs a lot.

Need proof? Check out the end of this video:

The irony is that she never learned to cook before she got married.

“I didn’t even know how to boil water,” she said. “My sister told me, ‘When you get married, you’re going to call me to make breakfast for your husband.’ You know what happened? I made him cook. I was smart.”

Cooking for thousands doesn’t intimidate her. The first week of October, she and the parish women baked 6,100 koulourakia in one day

“People don’t have the guts to cook,” she said. “Me? If you spoil it one time, that’s alright. The next time will be okay.”

Here’s a gallery of photos I shot the day I visited Nenos and her co-horts:

IF YOU GO

WHAT: 2009 Tampa Greek Festival, with food, music, Greek dancing, outdoor shopping and kids’ activity area

WHEN: 11 a.m. – 10 p.m. today and Saturday; 11 a.m. – 6 p.m. Sunday

WHERE: St. John Greek Orthodox Church, 2418 Swann Ave., Tampa

ADMISSION: $2 at the door; free for ages 12 and younger