Now that I’m back home, the Wilson Country Fair and I
are starting a new relationship, complete with grown up photo ops and all new fair memories. For
instance, three years back, (my year of firsts) I was back home full time; I
was growing my first garden ever, and I was brand new into cookbooks, which
gave me the bright idea of hanging at the fair in daylight hours just to see
what kinds of people entered baking contests. I wanted to know these ladies…Study
them like a hawk…Ask them trade secrets… Get them to share a recipe or two if
they would. So I called my best bud to come hang with me at the women’s building so
I could study bake-off competitions and their people.
Since
we were going to be there a few hours anyway and because my friend is a seriously good baker herself, (her name is even “Baker”) she said, “Well, if we’re going to be
there anyway, I’m entering a cake~I have a recipe that never loses.”
“Knock
yourself out. Grab the ingredients. Win or lose, we’ll take a picture and put
it in the next cookbook. I'll pay for things."
She
came into my house, touting 2 bags of groceries and one sad face. “I can’t
enter," says she, spilling bags on counters…You have to be a resident of Wilson
County.” (She hails from Dekalb.)
“How hard is it?” asks the girl whose never
made a scratch cake in her life.
“It
takes time, but if you can read and follow instructions, you can do it…I’ll walk
you through it, but I can’t do it for you. That would be cheating.”
With that, I began the tedious process of baking from scratch, sifting every ingredient, squishing up bananas, doing everything by the book. I was up for the experience, both on how to bake a decent scratch cake
and how to enter a contest. (2 more firsts) Standing in line with some seriously fine looking
cake people, I was asking myself “What WERE you thinking, Evins?”
Good
news is, sometimes you gotta put thinking aside and go with the flow…When in Rome… I was loving the experience and amazingly I DID win! My friend was right. It was an awesome recipe (in book 2). Why I left that women's building with my very first blue ribbon that day…The Wilson County Fair and I were a match made in heaven... well on our way to being best of buds, UNTIL…
The next year’s fair, where I was no
longer entering contests, but now invited to judge one. (Another first and
one I didn’t think through when I signed on; mostly I was just thinking “next
cookbook” and meeting more nice ladies I could turn to for advice on more baked
goods…This time “pies”~)
In the moment it was a fun experience, albeit not an easy one. I saw old friends (like Lisa Patton from Channel 2); and I
made oodles of new ones. But believe you me, judging is HARD work. As if making a
final decision wasn’t hard enough, the amount of pie I digested in a 2 hour
window of time was really hard and what became really, really hard were my insides after eating too
much gluten in such a short window. (I’m not blaming anyone’s pie; they were all
delightful. I’m blaming poor judgment by a girl who’d forgotten her family
history of Crohn’s). Yep, that little photo op landed me in not one, but two
emergency rooms before the weekend was over. My doctor said I was in “gluten”
shock. Having never sweated the whole gluten free kinda stuff, I didn’t know you could
have such a shock, but turns out, you can!
Ah, the memories of fairs past~ I
can’t say as I didn’t have a blast at the time, but from now on, I must curtail
my intake of all things junky and limit myself to portions more in keeping with my size. 37 bites of 37
different pies with a pickle in between for palet-cleansing purposes, was probably not my wisest move. But I'm not a total gluten virgin, corn dogs and funnel cakes being what they are...
So here's to year 3 at the hometown fair~
This time I'm neither entering or judging.
I'm just going.
(And I can't wait!)
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