Arduinna

This past Saturday was the day that four thousand university students arrived in town, making it an excellent day to not be in town! Happily, there's an annual garlic festival on that day, about half an hour north of here, so just as we did last year, Geoff and I headed on up.

it's basically a small farmer's market, only focusing on garlic. I hadn't realized, before we went the first time, that there were that many varieties of garlic! I mean, I suppose it shouldn't be surprising, I'd just never really thought about it. In any case, my palate is not refined enough to bother about the subtle differences in taste among them: slightly sharper, slightly sweeter, slightly earthier, and so on. Also some are better keepers, but I don't try to store garlic for months, I just buy less of it more often, because I'm not farming it. But it's very fun to look around!

Although it's focused on garlic, there's other things on sale as well. Many of the garlic farmers bring a few punnets of veggies as well, and there's a lot of canned and pickled veg for sale. A beekeeper comes with a hive in a glass frame, so it's fun to watch the bees and look for the queen (she's always smaller than I expect her to be). We bought some honey from him last year, which was very good. There's also a soapmaker, and a couple of woodworkers; the friend we went with this year bought a beautiful turned elm bowl from one of them, and also a bud vase of . . . chestnut, I think? a darker wood, anyway, and then he gave her a second bud vase for free! One or two people were selling various knitted things, and for some reason there's also somebody selling bamboo sheet sets.

I tried black garlic, which I would think would be very much the sort of thing I like, and yet I did not like it. One dealer sells honey-garlic tarts, which Geoff tried last year and rather liked, and got another one this year to munch on, but I think they're vile. (And there's not a lot of food I think that about!) On the other hand, someone was selling jars of candied jalapeno slices, which have nothing in particular to do with garlic except I imagine they would go well with garlic; they're not candied in the sense of being entirely sugar-coated and sticky, they're more a very sweet (and spicy) pickle? We tasted them (all the dealers give out samples, because they're not dumb) and they were delicious. I asked the seller what he does with them, and he said they were great on nachos and grilled cheese sandwiches, and I said, "I guess I'm making nachos this week!" and bought a jar. I did indeed make nachos the next night, and they were indeed fantastic. Next I'll try them on on barbecue chicken pizza...and they look pretty easy to make as a refrigerator pickle, so I'll be looking up some recipes!