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noshing among the booths
May. 22nd, 2011 05:19 pmThis area teems with weekend festivals, taking over one compact downtown at a time, at which the same crafts and food booths turn up over and over, but I went to the one this weekend because it had a Louisiana theme, thus increasing the chance of food booths featuring cajun and creole, cuisines I don't get as much of as I'd like. And indeed, among the usual offerings of funnel cakes and teriyaki chicken-on-a-stick were half a dozen interchangeably-named "New Orleans" or "Louisiana" this or that.
Selected offerings from two or three of these made a hearty meal, so after forming Saturday's lunch this way I came back on Sunday and did it again. The offerings varied, quite. One booth (the one next to Lockeford sausage) offered a gumbo sufficiently richly-flavored and fully stocked with high-quality ingredients that I went back to buy a serving of their baked jambalaya (unlike gumbo, a dry dish and hence more easily transported) and took it home in a bag. It is now sitting in my fridge waiting to be microwaved for lunch tomorrow, which is quite the best thing to do with jambalaya anyway. While another (the one loudly offering alligator-on-a-stick) had a dull gumbo stew I didn't finish, not entirely because their idea of sausage was slices of frankfurter and their idea of seafood was imitation crabmeat.
Little else at the fair reminded me of Louisiana in the slightest, though thoughts of the seething and roiling Atchafalaya drowning the countryside were passingly evoked by the search for parking spaces. I was, however, pleased - even delighted - when, as I was leaving today, a small jazz brass band which had taken a stand in the middle of the central intersection struck up a hearty rendition of the theme song for tomorrow's holiday, "Don't Buy the Liverwurst" (or "Down By the Riverside" as I believe it is known to non-cognoscenti). I sang it to myself all the way home.
Temporal space between servings was filled less by the booths - men with huge biceps selling delicate jewelry, that sort of thing - then by my discovery that one of the better local used bookstores has a second branch right in the middle of the overtaken downtown. And inside, parked among the original books, was the largest collection of Jane Austen spinoffs I have ever seen. Not just the recent wave of Sense and Sensibility and Seamonsters and the like, but no fewer than three different authors' concoctions of Mr. Darcy's diary (one of whom also produced Mr. Knightley's diary; I dare them to write Mr. Edward Ferrars' or Mr. Edmund Bertram's diary, or expect anyone to read it if they do), several sequels to Pride and Prejudice, some apparently taking place in later generations (how many know that T.H. White once wrote one of those?), an actually commercially-published Darcy/Bingley slash novel (oh dear oh dear oh dear), and at least two stories in each of which a modern young woman falls asleep and wakes up in the body and time of an unmarried maiden of the Regency, one of them inside an Austen novel and the other outside of it (which at least permits her to re-read Austen in first editions while deciding what to do with herself). The last of these, Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict by Laurie Viera Rigler, seemed quite the most interesting of the entire bunch.
Selected offerings from two or three of these made a hearty meal, so after forming Saturday's lunch this way I came back on Sunday and did it again. The offerings varied, quite. One booth (the one next to Lockeford sausage) offered a gumbo sufficiently richly-flavored and fully stocked with high-quality ingredients that I went back to buy a serving of their baked jambalaya (unlike gumbo, a dry dish and hence more easily transported) and took it home in a bag. It is now sitting in my fridge waiting to be microwaved for lunch tomorrow, which is quite the best thing to do with jambalaya anyway. While another (the one loudly offering alligator-on-a-stick) had a dull gumbo stew I didn't finish, not entirely because their idea of sausage was slices of frankfurter and their idea of seafood was imitation crabmeat.
Little else at the fair reminded me of Louisiana in the slightest, though thoughts of the seething and roiling Atchafalaya drowning the countryside were passingly evoked by the search for parking spaces. I was, however, pleased - even delighted - when, as I was leaving today, a small jazz brass band which had taken a stand in the middle of the central intersection struck up a hearty rendition of the theme song for tomorrow's holiday, "Don't Buy the Liverwurst" (or "Down By the Riverside" as I believe it is known to non-cognoscenti). I sang it to myself all the way home.
Temporal space between servings was filled less by the booths - men with huge biceps selling delicate jewelry, that sort of thing - then by my discovery that one of the better local used bookstores has a second branch right in the middle of the overtaken downtown. And inside, parked among the original books, was the largest collection of Jane Austen spinoffs I have ever seen. Not just the recent wave of Sense and Sensibility and Seamonsters and the like, but no fewer than three different authors' concoctions of Mr. Darcy's diary (one of whom also produced Mr. Knightley's diary; I dare them to write Mr. Edward Ferrars' or Mr. Edmund Bertram's diary, or expect anyone to read it if they do), several sequels to Pride and Prejudice, some apparently taking place in later generations (how many know that T.H. White once wrote one of those?), an actually commercially-published Darcy/Bingley slash novel (oh dear oh dear oh dear), and at least two stories in each of which a modern young woman falls asleep and wakes up in the body and time of an unmarried maiden of the Regency, one of them inside an Austen novel and the other outside of it (which at least permits her to re-read Austen in first editions while deciding what to do with herself). The last of these, Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict by Laurie Viera Rigler, seemed quite the most interesting of the entire bunch.
