Roots Festival & So On

I had the brilliant idea of taking the honyocks down to the Roots Festival. It was a pretty good distance to cover, but it didn't look like rain and I figured it to be more or less equivalent to a county fair as far as attractions and wallet vacuums.



Yes and no. It’s a big barbecue competition, which means the town square of Paola is ringed with the trailer-type smokers towed around by that flavor of fanatic. It's also a music festival, though that was kind of county fair like too, because this is the second time this month I've heard a band doing Foghat covers.

Mo pretty much sums it up, as far as the band we heard goes.



There was an admission charge, which irritates me. They know they're going to skin you good on overpriced refreshments and whatnot, it ought to be free to get in. I was the only one in my party over age ten, but still, eight bucks, and it doesn't even have as cool a rides as the county fair?

We did get homemade ice cream. Or rather, serious commercial ice cream made with an old fashioned rig.



I would have rather gone to Ani DiFranco in Lawrence, but there were a few glitches in that plan. For starters, I only got the spam from TicketBastard urging me not to miss Ani DiFranco on Thursday evening. Two days ahead of the show, it must have been a total last minute booking. I'd checked her tour dates a while back and she wasn't playing anywhere near here.




Plus, it would have been more expensive, especially if I took the girls along. I don't know how Mo would fair at an Ani show, and I know Em claims to hate Mr. DiFranco's music.



Grilled salmon and burgers for dinner when we got back. Great sale on burger this weekend, I spent less on four and a half pounds of it than a trip to McDonalds runs us, and I'm set with leftovers for a fortnight.



So then, today, Em gets an idea from watching Crocadile Hunter to start her own version of the Queensland Zoo. Except without animals. She figured she'd set up a nature exchange, lemonade stand style, and swap items from nature such as a pear she picked while we were walking the dog. With the throngs of nature tourists that come by our house in a steady stream.



It reminds me of when I used to put my parent's junk mail in a wagon and go up and down the street, 'Mail for sale! Mail for sale!'

Em was very disappointed to find that, as you might expect, Americans don't care about the outdoors. A couple of kids on bikes stopped to ask what she was doing, but then they didn't understand her explanation. She took this to be indifference to the environment as a whole.



So then we did pizza. But not ordered out. I got a copy of Cooking Light and did something out of character. I read the article on pizza and actually followed their directions/recipe.

I still improvised a bit, I can't not do that, but they at least explain why they prefer a given approach so you can make the stuff the way you like it. Best damn pizza crust I've ever made. Preheating the pan, then prebaking the crust a bit, that turns out to go a huge way toward making up for the woefully inadequate temperatures domestic ovens reach.

I knew pizza ovens ran hot, I've heard about it since I was a tiny lobster: Dad owned a pizza place before I was born, so every time we had pizza I got to hear about how it would be better if we had a 900 degree oven.



Plus, portabellas were on sale. It's what's under the pepperoni, cheese, olives on the rectangular pan. Damn, that's good. More leftovers, too!