festival weekend

Pancake breakfast. Corn roast. Sausage dinner. Clambake. Chowder cook-off. Grape stomp.

Whatever name they go by, we don't make it to nearly enough food festivals. After reading Calvin Trillin earlier this year, I had a real taste to get to some festivals (the dream would be Breaux Bridge in time for the crawfish), but the busy-ness of the summer meant that the prime festival season got away from us again. So imagine our luck to find ourselves at two (2!) food-centric festivals this last weekend. We made sure to get our fill.


A good friend of ours has parents that run an apple root-stock farm out in Gaston. Now it only makes sense that someone growing the roots would happen to grow a few apples as well, but what do you do with them when a few hundred pounds ripen all at once? Make cider. For years, her family has been pressing their apples into jugs of cider (unfortunately not the hard sort) and it has grown into a huge, apple-themed gathering. This was our first year out for the festivities and while we missed the 70s cover-band, we did get an overload of fruit.


We spent our Saturday afternoon touring around our friend's family farm, chopping apples and wrestling with the rattling, roaring press. I have never seen nor eaten so many apples in one day. We ate some off the vine. We snacked on the chopped slices. We sipped cider. We ate fritters. Oh, the fritters: one family member was manning a propane-fueled deep-fryer, into which he dropped batter-dipped apple rings to puff up nicely. Once out of the oil, they received a quick toss in cinnamon-sugar. It was a perfect chance for me to practice the old "Leonard burn" by biting into the rings even when I knew they would scald the roof of my mouth. Hot, but delicious. If only I could have tasted them. Luckily, for all of our labor (if you count eating fruit off the vine and riding around in the farm jeep as "labor"), we left with two liters of the fresh-pressed cider.


After a full day of cider festivities, we couldn't bear the thought of a typical Sunday. That's where my Polish heritage came in handy. When we moved a month ago, we realized that we ended up only a few blocks away from St. Stanislaus, just a month prior to their annual Polish festival. What could be better than church-sanctioned mid-day drinking?

Growing up, my steady diet of chicken fingers and grilled cheese was supplemented on holidays with cabbage, sauerkraut, and things stuffed in cabbage. I don't think that went over too well. Fortunately, as I've gotten older, I've definitely developed a taste for the bitter, stinky and pickled, renewing my interest in some of my family's food heritage. It doesn't hurt that there were always some categorically tasty Polish foods (pierogi, potato pancakes, kielbasa - I'm looking in your direction).

Ever since we visited New York in the spring and missed Lomzynianka, we'd had a bit of an odd craving for some Polish food. The Portland Polish Festival (apparently the largest West coast celebration of its kind) had pierogi in excess. They also had an excess of bad (though technically good, I suppose) polka.


We had soft, fried plocki (potato pancakes) topped with applesauce and sour cream, great sauerkraut and mushroom pierogi, and kielbasa-studded bigos (a sauerkraut stew). Polish food is by no means a "light" cuisine; the word "hearty" comes to mind. And "leaden." It certainly helped to have some Polish beer to wash it down and a plum-filled donut to cap it off. I, for one, felt closer to my roots, or at least a good deal stockier.