GARLIC INFUSED FUN

This weekend we were at the Hudson Valley Garlic Festival. One of my favorite shows of the year! Because of the delays with my mother-in-law's estate and never imagining that we would still be here on the East Coast we do not have a Fall show schedule. We were on the waiting list for the Garlic Festival and we got the call on Thursday night that someone had dropped out and there was a spot open for us. Whew!
It was a blast of a weekend. We normally do art shows not street fairs/festival type events. We do two festivals in our year. One is the Garlic Festival and the other is the Fremont Fair (in Seattle). They are both just "to die for" fun.
At the Garlic Festival there are craft vendors, food vendors, garlic farmers, lectures, cooking demos, people wearing garlic and people dressed up like garlic. Everyone is in a good mood. Lots of laughing, smiling faces. I saw garlic ice cream go by a few times but never got motivated enough to go and buy some.
We rocked. We were so busy that I only had enough time to go to one lecture or demo. I chose to go to one about growing garlic. It was way interesting. Do you know that garlic needs alot of sulphur in the soil to do really well? Or that garlic, like the banana, has lost it's fertility over time? Garlic's roots grow to about 4 feet in length. It's one of our most ancient plants and there are only 10 varieties in the world. There are many variations of the 10 original but only 10 original. I can't wait to get back to Lopez and get into the garden and plant me some garlic.
Michael and I walked around on Sunday morning before the show opened and bought garlic. We just had to go back to a few growers that we bought from last year and just loved their garlic. We bought Elmer's topset (I bought this last year because it had a funny name. The farmer doesn't know exactly what variety it is and his neighbor, Elmer, got the seed from his grandfather). We bought Korean Red (very spunky) and music (my all time favorite, it is mildish and has uniform large cloves). We bartered for jazz (a variation of music), reisig, and italian red. We also bartered for some fantastic locally made garlic-ginger chutney and some lemon-fig chutney. They are by a woman out of Cooperstown (I think that it's good for the homeplace of the Baseball Hall Of Fame to have good chutney joo-joo).
Since we were so busy, I didn't get to walk around and take pictures of my favorite artists there. So, I came up with the idea of trying to capture reactions to Michael's work on film.
I was sitting outside our booth with a table full of garlic roasters:

Here are few pictures of people's reactions to the garlic roasters:




It was a much harder task than I expected. I learned that there is a big difference between looking and reacting. Capturing someone reacting was really hard. I think that I want to play around some more with this idea.....
We got to stay in Woodstock with our friends Bernard and Judy. We had two fabulous dinners at some amazing restaraunts. One of them, New World Home Cooking is a place that I wanted to eat at last year but we never got to. I have heard the owner/chef on NPR often and like his philosophy on food. The meal we had there was great! On Friday night after we set up we were driving to meet Bernard and Judy for a celebratory Rosh Hashanah dinner and we passed this place called Lucky Chocolates. It was closed, lit up like a christmas tree, and there was someone running around inside with pink hair. Of course, we had to stop and look in the windows. Rae, the pink haired owner, let us in and we bought lots of delicious chocolates!!! Rae is a talented chocolatuere. If you are ever in Woodstock you should check her out.
So that was our weekend. With all the angst that we've been going through this summer we needed some garlic infused fun.