Sandwich Fair

For three days in October, our sleepy little New England village is inundated, overrun, invaded, mobbed by thousands of people flocking to the Sandwich Fair, a large country fair that includes a mid-way with rides and fried dough vendors, but at its heart is a celebration of agricultural and rural life. There are pigs, goats, chickens, rabbits, cows, oxen, and horses, lots of horses, which makes me very happy. I love horses.

I’m really not interested in the mid-way area, a big field next to the fire station, stuffed full of a hodgepodge of rides, games and vendors. (That’s where you get fudge!) I will say, though, that when it’s all lit up Friday evening, when families come to ride the rides for a flat rate, it looks beautiful from a distance. Have a look:

Also on Friday late in the afternoon, townspeople and fair workers gather for the International Soccer Game. Many of the workers are from Mexico, and they enjoy playing soccer with our locals. It’s always in good fun, and there’s usually pizza involved. If you ask me, it’s Sandwich at its best.

Sourdough Bread

For me, the Friday before the fair is exciting because it’s the biggest baking day of my year. Among the exhaustive (and exhausting) list of contests is the Baked Goods competition. I always awake that morning with butterflies in my stomach, eager to fire up the oven and get to it. I always enter the King Arthur Flour competition because the top two prizes are sizable gift certificates to the KAF baking store. Shazam! But here’s the thing ~ this category is tricky because King Arthur Flour controls the recipe.

Last year, the KAF competition recipe was their Old Fashioned Apple Cake. (Todd likes to take me to the pub, buy me a couple of cocktails, and have me tell this story. Apparently it’s very entertaining!) After going online and digging around to research the competition guidelines,  I came across a rubric that listed “creativity” as one of the judging areas. Hooray! I went to work on the recipe, adding a bit of cream cheese to make the frosting more lustrous, and removing the nuts from inside the cake to decorate the outside. When I was finished, that caked looked downright beautiful, and it tasted great. Low and behold, it was never even tasted by the judges because it was disqualified based on appearance. Apparently I was supposed to follow the recipe exactly. Good grief. I stick to my original conclusion: My cake was disqualified because it was too pretty. There it is on the left; you be the judge.

This year, the recipe was a strange one. Classic Cinnamon Buns sounds promising, don’t you think? But hold on — it isn’t online anywhere at the KAF site, nor is it in either of the two big KAF cookbooks on my shelf. It struck me as an old-timey recipe, one from before power appliances and the ready availability of all kinds of ingredients. The instructions are also rudimentary. You actually have to apply some technique of your own to make it come together. So, okay, that’s all good, except that the rolls themselves don’t taste all that good. I made the recipe three times, to practice, so I know of what I speak. I almost abandoned the recipe to focus on other categories. (I also entered cookies, muffins, yeast bread, and savory categories.) In the end, I decided to go ahead and enter, and ironically enough, this time I won. Go figure!!!! Here’s the proof: 

Lemon Ricotta Cookies

That good-looking loaf of multi-grain sourdough bread pictured above didn’t win anything (note to self: the yeast bread category is tough!), but I won a blue ribbon for my Cinnamon Sugar Mini-Muffins, which I renamed Sugar & Spice for competition purposes — kind of like a stage name. (I blogged the recipe: click here.) My Lemon Ricotta Cookies won third (clearly presentation wasn’t a factor… just sayin’), and I won a blue ribbon in the brand new “Savory” category for my Caramelized Onion & Gruyere Thin-Crust Pizza. In all fairness, I suspect that I was the only one to submit an entry in the category, but it’s a fantastic recipe. (Don’t you think I should have one first, second, and third place?

For Pete’s sake, enough about me, let’s talk about horses! There’s a show ring on the fairgrounds where both English and Western riding competitions are held. (That’s a barrel racer in Rachel Bartlett’s fantastic view-through-the-fence photo.)  But my absolute favorite event is Horse Pulling, where pairs of beautiful, majestic draft horses fairly dance with excited anticipation as they’re hitched up to a sledge and then pull with all their might, snorting, muscles bulging. (These animals are healthy and well-treated; I couldn’t bear to watch otherwise.)

If you’d like to see a short video of horses pulling at this year’s fair, click here to go to my YouTube channel. (It was rainy on Sunday, so it’s not the best quality video, but you’ll see enough to know what I’m talking about!)

Below are some more shots from the fair. The kids grooming the animals are 4-H members.