So last weekend Ellie and I were wrapping up some organic veggie shopping, homemade GF gelatto slurping and live music listening and she says that she noticed on some blog or something that there is a gluten-free fair going on this weekend just a few miles up the road. Now, when I hear the word "fair" I don't associate that with carnival rides, sulky races or things like that. In my mind “fair” means skinny little French fries with malt vinegar, deep-fried Twinkies, or deep-fried anything for that matter, washed down with mega quantities of lukewarm beer in paper cups. So I was having a little trouble trying to reconcile my view of a fair with GF food, but it was on the way home so I was up for it.
The fair was sponsored by this little GF store that is owned by a woman whose child has high-functioning autism. We had a nice chat with her. She said that she got into selling GF products because she had put her son on a GF diet to see if it would improve his symptoms and it did. She had trouble finding GF stuff at a reasonable price so she opened the store. While we were there we bought a few items, like burrito-sized GF tortillas, that we had not been able to find anywhere else. Then we hit the fair.
Right away I could see that we weren't going to be munching on any deep fried thangs. No beer either. Not even GF beer. Despite that the fair was pretty neat. We were really surprised to see how many booths there were. I don't know why but I was expecting maybe two or three of them. Seems like a lot of folks must be getting into GF diets because there were at least a dozen booths and way more people there than I had anticipated. There was also a much larger variety of GF products than we had seen in one place before.
A couple of the booths were manned (actually womaned) by manufacturer's representatives. One brand that I remember being represented was Glutino. All of those booths had free samples of their products. We had brought along a reusable shopping bag so we started stowing samples of everything that looked interesting.
I guess we had thought that all of the GF products we would find would be assembly-line manufactured, pre-packaged foods. So we were pleasantly surprised to find vendors with locally baked goodies. There were a few free samples of those, but they were little bites that were intended to be eaten on the spot. We tried a sample of GF berry pie that was so good you wouldn't even know that it wasn't made with wheat flour. We bought a snack-sized pie to take home. It was five bucks for about a four-inch pie. The full-sized pies were twenty-five bucks, which was way out of our price range, but the little pie we bought was good and I guess the full-sized ones would be worth it to someone who could afford them. None of the local vendors that we spoke with had storefronts. Most of their wares are sold over the Internet, although at least one woman sold her baked goods through a local drugstore. That's one place I would have never thought to look for local homemade GF goodies.
The only retail store booth that we saw at the fair was from Sprouts. It was a good one though. They had brought a stack of reusable grocery bags and had so many GF food samples there that it was easy to fill an entire bag with items just from that one booth. The other good thing about the Sprouts booth was that at least one of the people there was a buyer. So we got to have a discussion with him about GF products we were interested in but had not been able to find at Sprouts when we shopped there. I was especially interested in finding Bards Tale beer, a type of GF beer I had read about on the Internet, and I was glad to hear that Sprouts plans to stock it.
By the time we packed up and headed home we had filled three bags with what I estimate was at least $30 worth of GF goodies. We had a lot of breakfast and snack bars including things like a pomegranate blueberry pistachio bar from Kind and several flavors of bars from Soyjoy and Enjoy life. We picked up half a dozen flavors of granola from Udi's and Bakery On Main. There were snacks like Funky Monkey Purple Funk chips, Boulder Canyon rice and adzuki bean chips (and potato chips too), Crisproot cassava root chips, Lucy's cinnamon thin cookies, several flavors of Pamela's cookies, and Mary's Gone Crackers crackers (redundant, but that's the way it is). We also got Pamela's baking and pancake mix and Lundberg short grain brown rice, and other things too numerous to mention here. I'll be trying these things in the upcoming month and I'll let you know what I think of them.
All in all Ellie's and my gluten-free fair adventure was a success, and I didn't even miss the the deep-fried Twinkies. Well, maybe a little.
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