Festival food

I watched some of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival live on a streaming broadcast over the weekend; the performances were fun to see -- but it was the shots into the crowd that caught me up in nostalgia. My husband and I used to go down for Jazzfest every year for almost a decade. Everything about it was fun: the $11 guest house room we stayed in, the music, the city, the crowds. . . .yeah, and the food--food I'd never had before, because it was just at the beginning of the Cajun food craze of the '80's. Nothing like waiting in line for Natchitoches meat pies, alligator on a stick, church-lady fried chicken, shrimp etouffe, turtle soup, Italian ice, jambalaya, big buckets of crawfish, and eating them with a Cajun band or gospel choir as sonic sauce. . .

We didn't go this year--haven't been for awhile. Instead, we went to Cincy-Cinco out at Riverbend on Sunday. On a smaller scale, it had the same feel. The vendors are caterers, little restaurants, grocery stores--not professional concessionaires. And we explored some new foods, all with the right music for background. My daughter, having been to Argentina last summer, wanted to try every kind of empanada--there were several, and all different. She also was excited to find alfajores, rich little butter cookies filled with dulce de leche. We loved the Colombian arepas: a thick corncake stuffed with white cheese, with fresh salsa to put on it. A short little lady was standing on a step stool to cook the papas rellenos at another stand: hot fried mashed potatoes filled with spicy meat. My husband bought a coctel de frutas, with cucumber, melon, guava and mangoes. With some salsa music in the background, Panamanian dancers, or a solo mariachi guitar player singing songs with amateur accompaniment, it was a nice cross-cultural day. Try it next year. . .

One place I tried that I'm going to have to try in its home setting is a restaurant called Santo Domingo in Hamilton, which served up big plates of carbohydrate-heavy food: plantain, rice and beans, yucca and stewed meats.