Each year the “host” of the festival is Papa Gnocco, who looks more like Santa, if santa wore a colorful outfit:

Papa Gnocco, 2017

There’s a parade …

.. plus a tradition to eat gnocchi (potato dumplings) for lunch. As usual when we make it here for this festival, we willingly followed tradition:

gnocchi with ragu d’asino

Gnocci with marascapone cheese and sausage

With a few cornmeal and raised fried doughballs through in for a traditional Veronese Carnival season dessert:

Corn meal fried dough with currants

Today’s weather wasn’t perfect parade weather, but at least the rain only sprinkled, it never came down in a deluge. However, the gray skies were not as festive or as photogenic as the bright, sunny day that greeted us in February 2009 when we came to Verona on  venerdì gnocolar for the very first time. Here’s a link to an old video montage of the 2009 parade I made (with a special soundtrack added) from footage Chris shot that day.

If you want still more photos/videos from the parade on sunnier days in the past, you can check out the links below.

1. Post from 2011 about Papa del Gnoco, the “leader’ of the celebrations
2. Post from 2011 about the Verona Carnival celebration in general
3. Videos from Verona’s 2009VenerdìGnoccolar parade:
   1. Floats
   2. Marching bands
   3. Scenes and Sounds

Enjoy and Buona Feste!

First, a photo:

Tortellini with Onion Cream Sauce

BTW, that’s freshly made, meat-filled tortellini. Freshly made not by me,  you understand. Rather, it was freshly purchased by me (and Chris) at a bakery here in Verona that is famous for making that kind of thing. I did make the sauce from scratch, though: it’s cream and sautéed onions, where the onions were sautéed in a little olive oil and a tad of butter, and then the cream was mixed in.

It’s a recipe that a Greek-German woman who ran a little deli told me about years ago when we lived in Tübingen. The deli sold tortellini,  and the owner once recommended this dish as something quick and easy, but a little bit more special than serving the pasta with just a basic tomato sauce.

Anyway, fast forward a few years to two weeks ago. Chris and I are standing in line at a butcher shop here in Verona; we’re behind two little old ladies dressed to the nines in fur jackets and hats. It’s still more than a week before Christmas, but these two women are in the midst of a debate about what is the proper traditional meal to make on Christmas Eve. One is lamenting that she needs to run all over the place to find the necessary “7 fishes” makings for the traditional fish dinner on  Christmas Eve. However, the woman who is standing nearest to me is exasperated, arguing emphatically that one does NOT need to do that whole fish dinner on Christmas Eve.  Rather, she says, a simple meat-filled tortellini, served in a quick cream and onion sauces, is all you need.

And then she turns to me for support, saying, “Am I right? I’m right, aren’t I?”

Yes, well. I rapidly consider:

1. I have heard about there being some 7 fish traditional meal  on Christmas Eve, but I don’t really know what that is exactly.

2. I actually have made that tortellini dish with cream and onion that she just described, and it was indeed good, and it was indeed easy to make. And it certainly does sound easier than having to track down 7 of anything, particularly fish — which, btw, the store we’re in doesn’t even sell. I’m not even sure why the issue of fish has come up between them as they are standing in this butcher shop, actually.

3. I realize that no good can come from getting dragged into the middle of a debate that is being conducted in Italian between two little old ladies at a butcher shop in Verona.  I haven’t actually followed 100% of their argument, and I realize at that moment that they might not actually be speaking in Italian — which I speak somewhat — but rather in Veronese, the local dialect — which I don’t speak at all.   But then, I do realize that I did actually understand the whole tortellini part of the discussion, so maybe they are speaking in Italian after all.

Anyway, what to do, what to do. The woman advocating for the tortellini waits for my support.  I smile and nod sympathetically at her,  but then try to cover my bases by also trying to nod sympathetically at the other woman, too.  Smile and nod, smile and nod.

I don’t think either one was completely satisfied, but they went on with their debate without me, which was just as well. FWIW, their discussion appeared to be set to continue even after Chris and I got what we’d come for and left the store.

But the following week, when we were trying to decide what to make on Christmas Eve,  I remembered that conversation. And decided that the tortellini woman was right — that tortellini dish with the cream and onions is a bit more special than my regular tomato sauce, but it’s also quick and easy to make. So, score one in the Christmas Eve wars for the tortellini woman.

So, to recap, Chris and I now have a new tradition for Christmas Eve:  an Italian tortellini dish made by an American according to a recipe provided by a Greek woman who runs a deli in Germany and endorsed by an Italian little old lady in a fur coat in Verona.

It would be hard to get a more multi-cultural food than that for a Food on Friday.

Although Osteria al Duomo has been our favorite restaurant in Verona for a number of years, I noticed today that I’ve really never mentioned it on the blog by name. There’s a reference to eating at a favorite place in this old post, and a reference to eating my favorite foods at our favorite place in Verona on my birthday in this post. But neither post names the place nor has photos from the meals we always have at  ‘al Duomo’.

I think over the years I’ve tended in general not to post much about Verona, because we come here a lot, and we do a lot of the same things every time. So, I guess it never occurs to me that I haven’t really posted about these simple things before.

But, since we’re been in Verona two weeks, and eaten at al Duomo twice already, you’re in luck: this time I have some photos of the meals.  Osteria al Duomo is a tiny little place that serves excellent examples of typical Veronese food, so the food is fairly basic, simple and very tasty.

For example, one of our favorites is a pasta dish with macaroni, sausage, and marscapone cheese uses the local tastasal sausage.  This is one of our typical go-to dishes in recent years; we had it at our first lunch two weeks ago, and again last week.  The funny thing was that I thought my photo from two weeks ago was blurry, but in the second photo below you can more clearly see it’s served hot and steaming, which can look like blur:

Macaroni with Tastasal sausage and marscapone

Steam rising off the macaroni dish

Here in Verona, as it the rest of Italy in general, a pasta dish is typically the first course, aka primo, and a meat dish is typically the second course, aka secondo. Chris and I don’t always have a secondo, although at al Duomo we typically get 2 primi and then split a secondo. We had different secondos on our two visits this month:

Cotechino with cabbage

Polenta with pastissada

 Cotechino is a type of cooked salami, often served with polenta or lentils, but on our visit weeks ago it came with a warm cabbage side dish that had a dash of cumin and was very tasty.

The other dish, pastissada is a traditional Veronese stew. It’s  made with horsemeat marinated — and then slow cooked — in a strong red wine.  Years ago I blogged about making this stew on year in Bolzano; my old post is about the oddity in our cookbook,  where it seemed like an automatic spell-checker had “corrected” pastissada to “pesticide” as the name of the dish. The real Italian name sounds a lot better, of course.

But I digress.

Anyway, as I said, Chris and I typical share one secondo at al Duomo, but we always get two primi pasta dishes and split them.  We sometimes vary one of the pasta dishes that we order, but we always get an order of the bigoli con ragu d’asino, thick spaghetti with a sauce made with donkey meat.

Bigoli with Ragu d’Asino

Both horse and donkey are typical Veronese meats, and these meats feature prominently in many Veronese dishes.  Our favorite place to get them in Verona is Osteria al Duomo — we’ve been going there for years, the owners typically recognize us (and split the seondo for us, as you can see from the pastissada photo above.  It’s definitely one of the restaurants we seek out more than once on a typical visit, and we will vary the items we order there up to a point. But Osteria al Duomo is invariably our “first lunch in Verona” tradition – we look forward to it every time we come to Verona.

Well, at least we look at a pizza tradition that Chris and I have had over most of the last 14 years.

Now, in Italy, and particularly in Verona, people eat late. So, if you arrive rather late, e.g. 8pm, it’s actually rather early for dinner. I mean, Italians will often go out to eat around 9pm. So, even if you arrive in Verona at 8pm there are still going to be plenty of restaurants open after that for dinner.

But early on in our visiting here, we didn’t necessarily understand that. At least early on we always wound up arriving late in the day, and were in those days worried that we wouldn’t be able to find dinner if we got in late.

However,  we did know that pizza places are always open very late, unlike other restaurants. So, having been to a pizza place on our very first visit, San Matteo Church, we knew that it was a decent pizza place that was sure to be open late when we arrived in Verona.

Now, over the years, we have learned that it’s actually possible to go to other places on the days we arrive in Verona late.   But our little tradition is still to choose to go to San Matteo on our first night. It’s quick and easy, and the pizza — while not as good as 14 years ago, due to a change in the management — is still predictably pretty good.

So, last Wednesday, when we arrived in Verona late in the day (by train from Tübingen), and even though we knew we could have done something different, we headed over to San Matteo for a pizza after checking in at the hotel.

Now, we don’t always have the same kind of pizza; their menu has 50-70 different possible combinations.  Here are the two we selected last Wednesday:

Pizza with spicy salami, black olives, and onions

Pizza with prosciutto and mushrooms

Each pizza is served to be eaten as a “personal pan pizza” concept; it’s a very thin crust, and you eat it with a knife and fork.

BTW, the San Matteo Church is a pizzeria, but the name is accurate, as it is in a building that was a former Catholic church (called San Matteo). Not often you eat pizza in church, eh? (In the interest of full disclosure, though, San Matteo is not the only pizza place in a former church here in Verona, either; we’ve eaten in at least one other one, but I don’t recall the name right off.)

Anway, while we lived in Europe we used to go to San Matteo several times a year, and even before that on average more than once a year since 2002. But this is our first trip back to Verona in the last 20 months. So, it was fun that the maitre d’ — who used to be a waiter many years ago — still remembered us!  He’s always pleasant, and always seems to get a kick out our telling him that it’s our tradition to go there for our first meal on every visit to Verona.

So, that’s it for today’s Food on Fridays post. Doing these posts is another tradition that I’m happy to get back to, particularly when I get a chance to introduce you to a traditional pizza — er, rather, a pizza tradition — in Verona.

——

As I’ve just explained,  I know why piazza at San Matteo Church is our tradition. By contrast, Tevye doesn’t know why certain things are a tradition in the opening number from Fiddler on the Roof. However,  I’m including links to clips of that song below anyway. After all, including a Broadway show tune in a post on this blog is another tradition.

• Tradition (song) from Fiddler on the Roof – movie version
• Tradition (song) from Fiddler on the Roof  – Broadway soundtrack version performed by Zero Mostel.  I saw him perform in a revival of this show in Philadelphia many years ago; thanks, Mom, for getting those tickets for us!

I should start by saying that there are some rather large slugs here in Arcata:

Our slug “neighbor”

That’s a photo of the slug that often shows up on the wall across from our outdoor tub/shower. In this photo it seems to be curled up – maybe it’s taking a nap? But it is more typically stretched out straight along the wall like this:

Our slug “neighbor” stretching out

Except, that is, when it is on the ground,  as it was earlier this week when Chris almost stepped on it. It later left a trail of slug slime as it slithered away, so we knew that it had survived the encounter. But oddly (or perhaps not) we then didn’t see it for days. But it appeared this evening – the second photo above was taken today.

But that’s not what I want to talk about in this post, since this was originally supposed to be a Food on Friday post.  You see, the Slug Slime I really want to talk about is a special condiment made by a bagel place in Arcata called Los Bagels:

Bottles of Slug Slime, Los Bagels, Arcata

Cucumbin Bagel, Los Bagels, Arcata

Another Slug Slime, seen in a local supermarket

OK, well, I can’t say for sure that these unusually hued vegetables are particular to Arcata, or even to Northern California. I do recall seeing purple carrots in Santa Barbara, for example, although I don’t seem to have a photo of them, even though I did buy some while we were there to try (they tasted like carrots but looked a little odd as they were purple). Unfortunately, though,  I can’t find any photos I might have taken of them. Ah well.

But down in Santa Barbara, it was just the carrots which were odd colors. Here in Arcata, though,  we have run into a couple of vegetables that are oddly not green, even though you would expect them to be.

First up,  purple broccoli:

Purple Broccoli or Cauliflower

Oddly green-purple cooking water from cooking that purple vegetable

Or maybe that’s purple cauliflower.  The sign said it was broccoli,  but then I asked the guy at the stand last week and he said it was really all colorful cauliflower. It also comes in green — which, when I thought it was broccoli didn’t seem odd, of course.  It comes in other colors, too, including gold:

Golden head of broccoli/cauliflower

The color of the water after cooking this one was just pale, with no green or gold or even yellow overtone.

FWIW,  both kinds tasted like regular white cauliflower. Well, except the purple one maybe tasted a little more like broccoli. Hmm, or maybe not.

Anyway, there was also a purple pepper:

Purple Pepper

It didn’t taste like much of anything, actually, it was crunchy but very bland. Perhaps if Peter Piper picked a peck of purple peppers to pickle, that would add a pinch of pizzazz.

OK, well, maybe not.  But at least it’s not purple prose — just a bit of purple produce for today’s Food on Friday.  

First, though, I should note that while my original sources online for June 3rd spelled the delicacy in question as “doughnut”, the official poster spells it as “donut”:

NDD2016 Poster

Of course, “donut’ is the accepted spelling for doughnuts with holes in Germany (to distinguish them from proper German Berliner doughnuts), so maybe that spelling has now been adopted world-wide as the “traditional” spelling for these things, even back in their homeland in the U.S.

Anyway, to celebrate the day, Chris and I split the following types of do(ugh)nuts:

Maple-Glazed Do(ugh)nut, Santa Barbara, NDD2016

Butternut Do(ugh)nut, Santa Barbara, NDD2016

Chocolate-Glazed Do(ugh)nut, Santa Barbara, NDD2016

Acceptable as examples of their do(ugh)nut genres, they weren’t exciting enough to prompt ideas of going back to that particular shop anytime soon. Probably just as well – it’s only a few blocks from our vacation apartment here in Santa Barbara.

On the opposite end of the food scale,  Chris and I set off the next morning to check out the extensive Santa Barbara farmer’s market.  It was filled with stand after stand of delicious fresh fruits and vegetables, and I sampled a bunch of peaches, oranges, etc. before settling on which ones buy.  It’s been great all week having some really wonderfully tasting fresh fruits and vegetables to enjoy.

Last Saturday, after our purchases at the farmer’s market were all finished, Chris looked across the street and spotted a sign for something we just couldn’t pass up: a cafe that made fresh cinnamon rolls.  Cinnamon rolls as a pastry is not something that you find in Italy or Germany, or at least not in the parts where we lived (or looked).  So, it was a treat to find a place that offered a freshly made cinnamon roll:

Cinnamon Roll, Santa Barbara

It was good, but in the end not all that spectacular. Although it was better than the coffee we got at that same place.  Of course, the cafe bills itself as having “Australian style” coffee which, as far as I can tell, involved assigning different meanings to standard Italian terms for coffee drinks, mostly involving making all the drinks bigger in size.  I’m not sure if that is what “Australian coffee” really is, but that was the impression we were left with.

Anyway, our plans for tomorrow are to visit the farmer’s market again for some more of that great fruit like we got last week.

That’s not to say that we’ll necessarily be entirely healthy, of course. You see, there are also stands that sell homemade pies. Including rhubarb, which is CC’s particular favorite. In the interest of full disclosure, I should admit that we actually did try a small one of those pies last week, and it wasn’t bad. But since I forgot to take a photo of it, we may just have to get another one tomorrow… just so I can take a photo for the blog, of course.

Stay tuned.

Chris and I just arrived in Santa Barbara tonight (June 2nd), but Chris has done research ahead of time. So we have some places on our list that will (hopefully) allow us celebrate this “holiday” appropriately. Hope you read this in time so you can do the same!

To inspire you on your quest, here’s a fun doughnut photo from Will that he calls Recursive Donuts. Thanks, Will, for a fun photo – and good luck to everyone on their doughnut expeditions today.

Recursive Donuts (photo provided by Will Leben)

To start last Friday off, Chris and I went out for breakfast. We don’t go out to breakfast that often, so it was the first time we’d tried a place a couple of blocks away from where we’re staying,  that billed itself as a “local institution” for breakfast: Julia’s of Wallingford. . The first item on the menu was an upscale Cinnamon roll:

Cinnamon Yum Yum: Fresh baked cinnamon roll from our bakery: sliced and dipped in our l’orange crème. Grilled and served with orange butter and syrup

Cinnamon Yum Yum, Seattle

Of course,  we did get spoiled in the Basque country last year. We had a dessert there called torrija empapada en yemas de huevo y nata fresca, caramelizada en la sartén, con held causer, roughly translated as “French with cartelized sugar” (with a side of homemade ice cream). What a great concept for a dessert.  Sadly, I have no photo of that wonderful dessert, even though Chris and I ate it at least 3 times on that trip. But we’ve looked through all our photos and can’t find a single photo of something that was truly “Yum Yum.”  Ah well. We’ll just have to go back and have it again, clearly. Just for the blog, of course.

Grilled Octopus with chickpea puree

Ramp ravioli with fava beans and sun-dried tomatoes

Squid-ink linguini with seafood in a marinara sauce

The grilled octopus dish was a little odd, which is why I have presented it oddly in the photo. At least it adds some interest. Ramp is a vegetable related to a green onion, and I guess it’s trendy? Anyway, the ravioli wasn’t bad, but it was an overly small serving for an overly high price, IMHO. The linguini with seafood – meh. Ah well. We should know better, but we are always optimistic that an Italian restaurant will be good.  Even if we’re not always in Italy – and last May 20th that’s where we were.  So it’s not fair to compare that meal to this year’s offering. It’s inevitable, though, since May 20th is our wedding anniversary, and a certain amount of reminiscing goes with the territory on those occasions. But apparently the food last year was so good that I didn’t take any photos, though — so at least this year we have something to remember the meals by in this blog post, because I’m not sure that they otherwise would be very memorable.

You’re excited. I can tell.

Now, the official announcement says that it will be broadcast at 3pm in the afternoon, EST. Which is a bit confusing, actually, since mostly we’re already on DST, so does it mean that it will be broadcast at 3pm EST in the few places that don’t switch, but at 2pm DST everywhere else?  Hard to say.  Ah well, there always has to be something wacky about Eurovision, other than the songs.

BTW, in case you have forgotten how the contest works, you can consult my old guide to the contest. It’s a little out of date, unfortunately, as this year  they have tinkered with the judging and awarding of points. They are trying to avoid having any country wind up with  the dreaded “null” points this year, apparently. But I think the gist of the original guide still applies. Here’s a link from a British perspective that includes a graphic that compares the old and new rules. Scroll down the page to find it.

Now, I haven’t actually kept up this week with the contest’s semi-final rounds. So, I don’t know if there are any songs that involve food to make this somewhat appropriate for a Friday post. But here’s a link to one that involved food from a few years ago: Cake to Bake.  Nothing wrong with cake.

And in further keeping with the Food on Fridays theme, here’s an unusual photo from a recent Japanese meal we had here in Seattle. It’s a slice of Japanese radish (daikon), topped with marinated (pickled?) seaweed and a thin slide of red radish. The wasn’t anything we’d ordered, just an amuse-bouche that the chef offered to start the meal. It was quite tasty.

Of course, the food and the photo has nothing to do with Eurovision, of course. Although, it was a an bit unusual … and Eurovision is that. So may there is a connection after all… 

Radish amuse-bouche, Miyabi restaurant, Seattle

In any case, the main reason for the post is a photo from Volunteer Park. From a particular vantage point there you get a nice view of the Space Needle off in the distance. In fact, there is an iconic shot that you get from there that frames the Space Needle in the center of the modern art sculpture that is placed in front of the Asian Art Museum in the park. Technically, the name of the sculpture is Black Sun.

But the sculpture is referred to by locals as “The Doughnut”:

Black Sun (“The Doughnut”) sculpture

Yup, it does resemble a doughnut.

In fact, it looks just like a real doughnut that Chris and I sampled last week. Except, of course, the real doughnut didn’t provide a view of the Space Needle inside the middle like the sculpture did:

Chocolate Doughnut from “The Mighty O” in Seattle

As I said, this post was intended to be a Travel Tuesday post from Seattle. But I guess it just proves that no matter where we go or what the topic is, and despite my best intentions,  the discussion must necessarily always come back around to doughnuts.

—–

For whatever reason, this song kept running through my head when I thought about writing up this post: But the World Goes ‘Round.  Not a song about doughnuts, and not quite a crazy Broadway show tune – but it was at least written by Broadway composers, and doughnuts are at least round.  

Turkish food, that is.

Yesterday was our second visit to a Turkish restaurant that’s just a few blocks from where we’re staying here in Seattle.  The food is good — not the best ever, perhaps, but consistently good on a second visit, and you really can’t ask for more than that.

So, we started with a couple of appetizers. First, some lentil patties, which are served cold:

Lentil Patties

Then some grape leaves, which were interesting with an unexpectedly interesting (in a good way) flavor. The filling was rice and pine nuts,  with flavors that included cardamom and cinnamon.

Turkish grape leaves

For our main course, we had a spinach-and-feta-cheese-stuffed filo which was very reminiscent of the same kind of food at our favorite Bulgarian restaurant in Vancouver:

Turkish fillo stuffed with spinach and feta

Our neighborhood here in Seattle might not have quite the selection of ethnic restaurants that we found in the West End in Vancouver, but it’s still possible to find something here that is tasty and fun for a Food on Friday.  

I actually wrote this list up a while back, but apparently never posted it. But FWIW, here are some of the restaurants we tried in Sante Fe, in ranked order, with some of our favorite dishes. Almost all are (northern?) New Mexico style food. Thanks to Chris for typing up the initial list, to which I have added my own annotations as well.

1. Pasqual’s http://pasquals.com We went there twice for the cheese and green chile tamales, as well as a chile relleno stuffed with melted cheese and fried in a batter. At Pasquals it’s served sliced in half, “omelette style”.  Plus for one of the meals we also had a spicy egg and polenta dish, topped with lots of red sauce. (good, but not pictured below):-)

Chile relleno with red sauce, tamale, beans and rice combo platter

Chile Relleno with red sauce, etc. –  2nd visit

2. Tune Up   http://tuneupsantafe.com The apartment owner’s favorite little place, which served a combination of New Mexican food (we had a breakfast burrito with egg and beans and cheese and red sauce), as well as Salvadorean pappusas (essentially a thick tortilla stuffed with beans and cheese).

3. Counter Culture  http://www.yelp.com/biz/counter-culture-cafe-santa-fe – a real locals feel to this place, where you order at the counter and then they bring you the meal. We had a cheese grilled polenta dish that was outstanding, along with the requisite red sauce.    They were also reputed to have the best cinnamon rolls in town, so of course we had to try them.They were huge – each one was more like a loaf of cinnamon bread.

Cheese polenta with red sauce

Closeup of cinnamon roll

4. Jambo http://jambocafe.net (Afro-Carribean; the chef is from Lamu, Kenya)  OK, so this was our non-New Mexican food day. We had a lentil stew and also a goat stew served with a starchy porridge. Really tasty.

5. Maria’s    http://marias-santafe.com – kind of (to me) a standard mexican style place, with tacos and enchiladas.  The owner of our place commented that she’d only be there to drink Margaritas, as they have something like 100 different types of tequila. We also tried the food; the enchiladas were OK, but the  house-made chips and salsa were quite good.

Anyway, as you can see, we ate quite well during our stay in Sante Fe. So on an a-typically sunny afternoon here in Seattle, we celebrate the food of Sante Fe. But that’s OK. After all, Food on Fridays can take you anywhere.

Well, the “village” here is the University Village, or the “U Village”. That’s a big (and getting bigger) outdoor shopping mall in another part of Seattle. It’s actually not that far away from where we’re staying, but I have been referring to it as my alternate home in Seattle as I have been to the U Village far too frequently these past 4 weeks. You see, that mall is where there’s an Apple Store, which has been the site of many a trip with my ailing computer.

But for once we did NOT visit the Apple store on a trip to that area. Nope, instead we went there in order to go to a restaurant that specializes in house-made Taiwanese dumplings. There’s actually a window into the kitchen in this place, where you can watch a small army of chefs preparing the dumplings of various shapes and sizes. Talk about fresh, eh?

The dumplings are mostly steamed (and served)  in bamboo baskets, as opposed to fried. You order by ticking off what you want on a list, which is sort of like some styles of ordering sushi.  By default, most of the dumplings come as a serving of 10 pieces, so it’s best to go with someone. Between us,  Chris and I had no troubling polishing off 20 dumplings (10 each of two different kinds), plus a serving of green beans with garlic sauce (which were on a plate, not in a dumpling), and a serving of just 2 warm buns with black sesame paste as dessert.  Photos below.

Note that the dumplings that aren’t green in the photos below were filled with soup. Yes, soup.  I’d never had anything like that before.  But boy was that good! The veggie dumplings (the green ones) tasted kind of healthy, and the green beans were good enough, but the soup dumplings and the black sesame buns  — those are worth going back for. In fact, this was actually a return trip for Chris, as he went there a couple of weeks ago with an old acquaintance from Stanford and said it was so good, we had to try it together.  Thanks, Chris – you were right!  So without further ado, I give you the photos – to give you a virtual Food on Fridays taste of Taiwanese dumplings.

One of the soup dumplings

An order of steamed veggie dumplings in bamboo steamer

A veggie dumpling and some green beans with garlic sauce

Black sesame bun

Black sesame bun showing filling

What’s a sagra, I hear you ask? Well, it’s an Italian word for a particular kind of little food festival.  Back in Bolzano, there would periodically be these small festivals in different neighborhoods. Each sagra had a particular theme, usually a region of Italy. So during the festival people would sing traditional songs, dance traditional dances, and eat traditional foods from that region or town (e.g. the region of Tuscany, or the city of Mantova, etc.). Click here to see a list of links to old blog posts about the sagras (note that not all the photos in those old posts still work, but the text still does).

Anyway,  the sagras in Italy were always fun: the food was all made by the locals putting on the festival, and people of all ages participated.  Sort of like a small-scale school fair, perhaps, also with more focus on food and music.

So it was interesting to discover that the last day of our visit in Silver City, New Mexico last year coincided with the annual Tamale Festival.  Tamales are cornmeal dumplings filled with a variety of ingredients, perhaps pork, or beef, or cheese; there’s even a sweet kind made with pine nuts and raisins. The dumpling is then wrapped in a corn husk and steamed, and served with and without sauce.

Pine Nut and Raisin tamale, Silver City festival

Both Chris and I really love tamales — on our trip through the Southwest we sought them out as much as possible.  So, when we learned that the annual tamale festival was happening the day we were scheduled to leave town, we arranged with the hotel to allow us to check out in the afternoon so that we could visit the festival. We had a great time, catching a few of the performances and sampling the locals’ cuisine.

School-aged performers, Silver City festival

Those little kids dancing were having a blast twirling around like that.  The band members you can see in the background were really outstanding; they were a high-school mariachi band who had travelled to Silver City from out-of-town for the festival, and one of the guys was really fantastic.

Anyway, we sampled a bunch of tamales, but I don’t seem to have any photos of anything but that sweet one pictured above.  All the ones we tried were offered by various groups (e.g. high school organizations or private music or sports groups), with the tamales having been made by the members of the groups (or the members’ mothers and/or grandmothers).  People were relaxed and catching up with friends, and nobody seemed bothered by the fact that we clearly weren’t from there, even though it seemed like everyone else knew everybody else.

So before leaving New Mexico we spent a few hours soaking in the atmosphere of a Silver City sagra. A fun Food on Friday memory of a fun festival and some delicious tamales.