Jewells of Thought

Last Thursday was such a beautiful day to be outside and walk around the fairgrounds. I came prepared; Mom and I have not been walking all summer long for nothing. Yet while my feet had been ready, it was my head and stomach that I was uncertain how they would perform in these circumstances.

The day was not too hot with a little bit of an overcast from morning to early afternoon. One of the nice perks of the fair are the air conditioned buildings. The new Swine building was in fact one of those we walked into and were glad to for another reason as well.

Going into the building we went straight inside and saw the pigs who were happy to be in the A/C. While we were gazing at the big metropolis before us on the floor something else was happening to the left of us. People had bags and were leaving with… Ice Cream.

Isn’t leaving with Ice Cream always a good sign to look for… free Ice Cream?

Okay usually I would say absolutely, but I did get the raw end of this deal. I am the Chocolate girl of the family next to my niece. I always ask for Chocolate. So how on earth did I get vanilla, mom got strawberry and dad got my chocolate that afternoon?

It was totally wrong, wrong, wrong. Usually we all have fits when things like this happen. Dad is the strawberry or vanilla guy, mom will go for chocolate or vanilla, me strawberry or chocolate… but I got the plain vanilla. To be honest they all had hard chocolate, but I like my chocolate ice cream.

Anyhow that was one of the last stops of this very curious raised partition in the Swine building. The Indiana Farm Bureau was sponsoring the ‘Taste of Indiana’ and we just literally walked into a fun taste testing of Indiana food products.

There were about a dozen products and subsequent tables for each setup. Facts were on the table about health and how products ranked in the state and with other states. We are next to California for Dairy Farms with 777 of them in the Hoosier state. Plus Popcorn and Apples are some of our biggest products.

I really don’t remember taste testing like this at all in recent years. It was really kind of cool.

Popcorn was the first treat, then there were Apple Slushies. Dad told them he remembered making his own Apple cider with his Grandpa Lester. It was neat hearing Dad explain his memory. Of course, they loved that. Then there were pickles, it was hard going from apples to pickles but we did.

Then on the other side which took a good 5 minutes of waiting for the line to move we got Duck Jerky which was in interesting taste and seemed like regular Beef Jerky. Then we had a decision to make chocolate covered pretzel or gummy bears chocolate covered. I picked the later I love gummy bears. Next was when we were given what we thought were all vanilla ice cream bars and found out different.

Yet there was one more left before we even opened our chocolate. It was Lamb Summer Sausage. I couldn’t tell if it was lamb even though I love lamb. All of these are made in Indiana it was a nice respite and refreshing little snack time we didn’t see coming.

The Pork Burger was very juicy and very delicious! The food I had literally 5 minutes before we had walked into that wonderful building.

We had so many people looking at us eating Ice Cream. I even had a lady ask me where I got the bag!! It was awesome that people thought we were in the know when we weren’t only a short time before.