Today we took my daughter to the West Side Nut Club Fall Festival. For kids, the main attraction is the carnival rides (including my daughter's new favorite, the State Fair Slide); adults come for the four-block long array of food booths, said to be the second largest street festival in the United States. The menus are dominated by conventional street food, with the emphasis on fried, such as the familiar corn dogs and French fries, fried mushrooms, and fried pickles; but also including state fair favorites and more eclectic items like fried stuffed olives, fried Coke (?), deep fried candy bars, deep fried cookie dough, and deep fried Oreos. Since the booths are all run by local non-profits, each vies for customers by offering unusual fare, ranging from brain sandwiches to chocolate covered crickets to alligator stuffed potatoes to scorpion pops to kangaroo burritos (and yes, all those items really do contain the named ingredients). But there's local food to be had even here. One of the booths sold mini fruit pies made from locally grown apples, blackberries, and peaches. I had the peach.
Incidentally, today the Evansville paper ran a story on Tim Schaefer, who runs Oasis Country Farm in Mt. Vernon IN. Mom bought her eggs from him at the farmers market.
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