The Atlanta Greek Festival

I have a love hate relationship with the Atlanta Greek Festival. I adore the food, the music, the crafts, the Cathedral itself. I hate the crowds. Unfortunately, there seem to be thousands of people who adore the same things I do there, so it's elbow throwing time. It's been a nearly annual stop for us ever since I was in college. One of my professors offered extra credit to anyone that attended the Cathedral lecture at the festival. Learning + food = I will be there. That first year we had a great lunch of roasted lamb sandwiches, attended a greek cooking class, and bought a crazy amount of cheese and olives. We were hooked.

However, the crowds just keep getting worse and we stay a shorter and shorter time each year. I think we'll skip it next year, in favor of the smaller Cumming Greek Festival.

I got some great pictures though and I did pick up some cheese and cookies.

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Greek pastries for sale outside the Cathedral. I can never recall, or spell for that matter, the names of any of these things. We bought a bag of the twisty looking cookies. They are slightly sweet and crisp. I think they are perfect with a mug of hot chocolate on a cool fall evening.

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The selection of cheeses available. For years, this was the only place where I knew I could get some of these cheeses. My favorite is the manouri, which is a soft, mild sheep's milk cheese. We also bought some feta, which will be part of my lunch tomorrow, and a sharp white cow's milk cheese. I'm going to be eating pieces of that for breakfast along side Honeycrisp apples from the farmer's market.

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Lamb, roasting on spit outdoors. Not something you see every day. Unfortunately, their lamb is so popular and the roasting process takes so long, they had supply issues. So we sadly skipped eating lamb from the Festival this year. Which was a pity, because my husband wanted to buy a pound to take home for nibbles.

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Since there was no lamb for us at the Festival, we had dinner at Veranda instead. I had meant to take pictures of our food BEFORE eating it, but I, uh, forgot. So those are the remnants of my lamb chops and stewed lima beans in tomato sauce.

If you'd like to flip through all my photos, here's the link. I got some great pictures of the inside of the Cathedral.

greek festival