By Kaye Ross
 A group of women from the Antiochian Orthodox Church of the Redeemer prepare warak anab, or stuffed grape leaves, last Thursday for the church’s annual food festival. |
There was no question what would be my first stop at the International Food Festival at the Antiochian Orthodox Church of the Redeemer - the knafeh.
Several days before the festival, held this past weekend, I had stood in the church hall’s small kitchen absorbing thousands of calories by osmosis as parishioners prepared jelly-roll pans full of the delicacy for baking at the festival.
Fadi Haddad was pulling strands of raw phyllo dough out of a package. Nina Azar manned the food processor, chopping the strands into fork-size bits. Her husband, Bill, was ladling the rendered (or clarified) butter, colored bright orange for eye appeal, into bowls of phyllo until the mixture looked like orange shredded coconut. Several other men were patting a thin layer of dough into the pans.
What I would not see was Bill concocting his special sweet, soft cheese mixture that goes between two layers of dough. “I’m taking my recipe to my grave,” he said, laughing.
A sugary sauce is poured over all. The dessert is baked briefly at a high temperature and served warm, right out of the oven. The slight crunch of the sweet phyllo dough is the perfect foil to the warm creamy cheese center. It is just slightly sweet and so buttery I could feel it rush blissfully from my mouth straight to my hips.
Members of the Magdalena Avenue church in unincorporated Los Altos Hills worked for weeks on such foods before the festival. Most of the Church of the Redeemer’s parishioners are Arab, yet the foods they enjoy are “international” in flavor because of the derivation of Orthodox membership.
The Orthodox Church is Christian, and shares beliefs similar to those of Catholicism. In 1054, the Eastern Constantinople-based Orthodox Church and the Western Rome-based church split over doctrinal issues. Centuries of Orthodox growth followed in Russia, the Slavic nations, Greece and the Middle East.
These Orthodox cultures share basic delicacies but each one makes them a little differently. Kibbee - ground meat, cracked wheat, allspice and onions - can be patted flat into square pans the Lebanese way. (”The lazy way,” one of the Church of the Redeemer cooks commented.) The kind of kibbee served at the festival is in cylindrical patties with pine nuts in the center.
The 20-some people who prepared food Thursday night at the church hall worked on the knafeh and warak anab - “warak” for leaves and “anab” meaning grape.
At the tables, women wearing hairnets pulled on sterile gloves and began delicately spreading out one grape leaf at a time on the table. They put about a teaspoon of filling - raw medium-grain rice, ground beef and spices - at the rough end of the leaf, then rolled it up toward the pointed end into a little package. (It’s harder than it looks.) The rolls went into big pots to be cooked with fresh tomatoes and lemon juice for flavor.
As generations before them, the women made a party out of the work. Stories told in English broke into Arabic and Greek at times, and laughter sealed most every one of the stuffed grape leaves.
It was the church’s women who kept things going after the church sanctuary was burned down in April 2002, said Father Samer Youssef.
No one has been charged in the fire, but some believe the church was torched because of hatred toward Arabs.
The festival is always scheduled the weekend after Labor Day. This year, the last day of the event was the fourth anniversary of Sept. 11. Youssef led a prayer and the crowd observed a moment of silence in memory of the victims of Sept. 11, Hurricane Katrina and the violence in the Middle East.
There are still complaints about parking on the public street during the festival, and some neighbors find fault with other aspects of the celebration.
“But it’s like with all people,” said May Araj, one of the festival organizers. “There are good Arabs and bad Arabs. Everybody knows that, don’t they?”
