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Hopping around to area festivals

Did you ever eat buckwheat pancakes for breakfast when you were young? It seems as if my mother did not have any other type of pancake mix, and we had them every Sunday. After a while I came to love that slightly bitter taste.

I was treated to buckwheat pancakes again when Lamont and I visited the Algonquin Mill Festival two weeks ago. All I needed was some of the sorghum that was being sold as syrup and was being made when a horse with a human leading him around in circles caused a press to extract juice from the sorghum stalks. It was quite interesting, and I got to taste a sorghum salsa, sorghum candy and pumpkin butter made with sorghum at their demonstration station.

Back to the pancakes, a group made up entirely of men from a Carrollton organization — sorry, I did not learn the group’s name — served a plate of three huge pancakes, almost as large as the plate they were on. There were mounds of butter you could slather all over the pancakes and low calorie and real maple syrup. Like, who needs low-cal syrup after indulging in three whopper buckwheat pancakes though?

We always encounter someone from our area when strolling about and saw Dave Thompson and Tony and Judie Phillippi of the Smithfield area.

They have apple butter demonstrations at the mill festival, and Todd Davis was using a wooden oar to stir up the popular spread. He and his brother, Lynn, were doing the demonstrations.

There was a huge framed certificate in the farm homestead. It was of the 33rd regiment of the Ohio infantry, with photos of privates, field and staff officers and noncommissioned officers. They also had an old Victrola, record player with the horn-type instrument on top; a pedal Singer sewing machine; and an ironing machine that I thought was called a mangle, but maybe that is what it does to hands if put between the heat element and the roller.

Then, I did my festival hopping again last Saturday when I dropped in at the Unionport Apple Stirrin’ to check out the gifts in the Christmas Cabin, where Janet Carr has been the lady in charge for many years. And I had to buy some cookies and a tiny pie there as well.

Then I went about my annual delight in judging the apple pie baking contest with two men who had ideas of their own on pies — state Rep. Jack Cera, D-Bellaire, and Mike McElwain, with lots of Herald-Star titles after his name. There were eight pies, down a bit from years past, but we had to taste test a few of them twice, as we had some ties. It was a delight tasting the different kinds of apples that were used in the recipes. Each apple has a taste of its own.

(McCoy, a resident of Smithfield, is food editor and a staff columnist for the Herald-Star and The Weirton Daily Times. She can be contacted at emccoy@!heraldstronlilne.com.)

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