It’s that time again!  This weekend was the Greek Festival in downtown Columbia and we went on Saturday.  We being me, Donna and Jennifer.  Suprisingly enough Jennifer had never been to the festival so we were excited to bring her along.  We also ended up meeting up with more friends Dawn, Edie and Edie’s daughter Haley.

Now looking at the vendors is all well and good but the main reason for going to the Greek festival is the food!  Speaking of food, I would like to take this opportunity to poll my readers about the pronunciation of one particular Greek dish.  The gyro.

I grew up on Long Island where a gyro is phonetically pronounced “ji-ro” and then I moved to South Carolina where everyone phonetically pronounces it “e-ro”.  Supposedly I’ve been saying it wrong all along but I just can’t bring myself to change my ways on this one.  I’ll say “buggy” instead of “cart”, “highway dept” instead of “DMV”, even “wreck” instead of “accident” but I just won’t budge on how I say gyro.  How do you say it?  I’m curious.

And yes, we both ordered gyros for dinner and Jennifer got chicken strips.  The gyros had a plain yogurt sauce on them with some onions and tomatoes.  They were good but Donna found hers to be little dry due to the cook being a little stingy with the yogurt sauce.  Now on the other hand, the chicken that Jennifer ordered was delicious.  The chicken itself was very moist and the breading was extremely tasty.  I was very pleasantly suprised by this.  We didn’t even need dipping sauce, it was that good.  Next we headed to the building where the desserts were.  My sister was originally going to come with us but she was sick and had to pass on this crawl.  Although she did put in a request that I bring her some baklava to help cure what ailed her.  Uh huh.  Baklava is the best medicine for any illness, no?

Instead of getting the traditional baklava that is layer upon layer of filo dough I chose the chocolate baklava, which is rolled instead of layered.  I actually preferred this over the traditional being it wasn’t as syrupy sweet.  It was delicious.  Funny thing, the way my dad judges if a dessert if good or not is by how much it weighs.  If I bring him a sweet, he’ll hold it in his hands and checks the weight.  He’ll eat it regardless of how much it weighs but he prefers one that’s heavy.

Now this photo was obviously not taken this weekend (it’s cooled down a little but not quite to the “I need a knit hat” temp) but I just wanted to include a picture of my dad and his love of sweets.  Why?  Because I think he’s pretty great and I wanted to share that with all of you.  So if you have someone in your life that you too think is pretty great, tell them.  Life is short.