Saturday was a pretty great day. Well, actually, so was Sunday but I'll save that for another post. Beautiful early summer weather and we started fairly early to enjoy our first week of the Farmers Market. No CSA box yet--that starts next week--but it's hard to resist donuts and bluegrass in a church parking lot on a weekend morning.
We made our usual once-around of the booths before deciding what to buy. First on the list was definitely some of the plentiful strawberries. Not the flavorless, perfect-looking ones you get at the grocery. These are organic, farm-fresh, and look like some strange antique variety more closely related to wild. They taste earthy and sweet, but not sugary sweet. It's a different kind of mineral taste that melts in your mouth and is what leads us to usually eat the box of blueberries before we ever get home. My comment to our farmer we get our farm box from last summer was that her broccoli was spicy. I've never had broccoli have a natural pepper kick to it. Which just goes to show what food can taste like when it's not grown on a mass industrial farm with a thousand acres of bad lettuce. We also bought some greens and radish for a salad that evening. Kelly is quite good at making her own salad dressing and I'm learning. Oh, and we bought a box of donuts...the line for the whole box was shorter than the line for individual donuts. Cole ate his half. Then his mom's half. Then asked for more.
Next up was dropping off some blankets Kelly had knitted for the NICU. And getting Cole a nap before trying to continue with the day.
When we'd decided to go to the wine festival we'd been wondering what kind of dirty looks we'd get bringing the kids and a stroller to such an obviously not-intended-for-kids event. Turns out, a street fair wine festival is the place to go to meet like-minded families maybe. About halfway through our samplings, a little girl Cole's age in a tutu came running up to the stroller complete with the same unique brand of shoes we put our kids in. Leda just sits there in her front seat looking out with a smile on her face until she falls asleep. Cole's new MO in the double is to slump down and try to get comfortable if he has to be in there. Give him a snack and a toy and he's usually ok. The tasting glass was $15 and came with 7 wine tickets. So between the two of us, Kelly and I sampled 14 wines since we each got a different one at every winery. We had some good ones. Had some bad ones. Had ones we liked but wouldn't go out of our way to buy. They were all local to Illinois though so we decided on a couple to get a bottle. Apparently, at street fairs in this state you can't also sell the bottles at the tent even if you're doing glasses. Gotta love America's weird relationship with alcohol. So you had to go to a central location, request your bottles, then go up the street to our cheese shop that has a liquor license to finish your purchase. I'll leave the wine reviews over to Kelly and her wine review blog/Twitter. Though I will say she and I have very different tastes. I like white, she likes red. C'est la vie.