Viva San Antonio, Part 3
by Rebecca on 2008-06-25
This has been a long time in the coming, but I wanted to document the last bit of our fun weekend in San Antonio, namely the time we spent at the Texas Folklife Festival. The best way to describe the Folklife Festival is that it looks like a really big multicultural state fair. There were booths and demonstrations of every kind of handiwork, cooking, and craft imaginable, along with a healthy dose of dancing and loud music from around the world.
But the main reason that I wanted to go was to try the food. I considered this a good opportunity to eat my way around the world and relatively cheaply, at that. Hereʼs a list of the foods that we tried:
- Belgian sausage (Belgium)
- Rij stpap, or Belgian rice pudding (Belgium)
- Falafel sandwich (Lebanon)
- Pierogi (Poland)
- Noodles (Texas Wendish Society)
- Koch kase sandwich (Texas Wendish Society)
- Vegetarian spring rolls (Vietnam)
- Fried bananas with honey (Vietnam)
And there were so many other foods that looked good, so I guess weʼll have to go back to try more.
The exhibit that captured our attention was the Wendish Society booth where we watched a woman patiently make her noodles. (The booth was close to the air-conditioned Institute of Texan Cultures and its precious cold water fountain, which may have added to the appeal of the Wends.) The noodles tasted like Campbellʼs chicken noodle soup, to be honest, but the process of making them was quite interesting. The ingredients were flour, eggs, and water, and from this, she made noodles. Amazing!
She mixed up the ingredients with a hand-held egg beater and started rolling it out very thin. And then she set it aside to dry before cutting. Her work space was covered with pieces of dough that looked like pie crusts. The process took about 90 minutes, which is far longer than it takes to open a can of chicken noodle soup. But Iʼm sure there is some degree of satisfaction to be had in knowing that you can make noodles.
