Parkdale/Maplewood Community Hall
Maplewood, NS
This is one of the annual suppers I look forward to. This year, we had some extra family friends 'in tow' which always makes it more fun. We met up at the hall, surveyed the parking lot flush with Buicks and found our way to the ticket table.
We found our way to the Parkdale/Maplewood museum to purchase our tickets. We had a bit of a wait ahead of us so we meandered around from building to building. The museum is an interesting slice of local history, and there was live music inside all afternoon. That Saturday was particularly humid so we quickly escaped outside and checked out the lovely perennial gardens surrounding the building.
There were several other small buildings with craft vendors (I'm guessing selling hand knit wool goods on a hot day was a hard sell), demonstrations (i.e. snowshoe making) and of course food vendors. Everything looked amazing, from the sweaty squares in their plastic bags (actually, everything was sweaty), to the lemon loaves, the pies and all manner of pickled and jellied goods.
Eventually our numbers were called and we entered the hall. How the work staff survived that heat all afternoon is beyond me! We only had to endure ~30 minutes and some in our party were feeling like fainting....The set up was different than the usual long tables, and sit where you can sit ordeal. This year, there were numerous tables to seat 10 or so, which I'm sure made sitting groups together much easier for the staff. Also a lot of fun for groups of 5 like ours!
Food service was luncheon style and we inched down the line getting a little bit of everything on our plates as we went. Eventually, it looked like this:
Delicious! Lunenburg sausage and pudding (I believe the cheese was meant to be eaten with the pudding), sauerkraut and sauerkraut salad, smeltz potatoes, hodge podge and solomon gundy all fit on this plate.
The brown bread was moist and sweet with molasses, I couldn't stop helping myself to another piece....Smeltz potatoes are so good, they consist of potatoes, pork scraps, onions apples and blend. Man, I'm hungry.....Hodge podge is usually an early summer dish made with the first crop of carrots, peas, beans and potatoes, all cooked until tender and served with cream (and lots of salt and pepper). Saurekraut salad is like.....coleslaw minus the mayo? Here's a recipe:
Sauerkraut Salad
1 quart sauerkraut (rinsed and drained)
1 cup celery (chopped)
1 medium onion (chopped)
green and red peper (chopped)
Dressing:
1 1/4 cup white sugar
1/2 cup cider vinegar
1/2 cup salad oil
Stir dressing ingredients until sugar is dissolved. Add to other ingredients. Mix well. Keeps for several weeks in the fridge. Easy, eh?
Last but not least was dessert. I had to try the blueberry grunt. This consists of small dumplings covered in cooked blueberries. The pie also looked great and both were obviously made from scratch. Hard to declare a winner, but my personal fave is the grunt, just because it is uncommon. Stay tuned for a picture of the grunt, blogger is being...ehem...unresponsive to uploading pictures at the moment...
