I visited the Labor Day street fair on the avenue around the corner. Lots more ethnic food and fewer stalls with silly merchandise than in previous years, and I only saw one of the old-school Italian-American vans that do sausage with sweet peppers and deep-fried calzones and deep-fried Oreos and funnel cakes. (I can remember when there would be five or six in the nine-block stretch.)
I wasn't much tempted by the various Chinese bao or Japanese squid balls or the Mexican tacos and sopes and such (which are good but easy to come by all year). There was a German stand with bratwurst and curryworst and smoked Bauernwurst; I've had the latter in previous years and it's tasty. Then there were the empanadas. The deep-fried ones didn't look so thrilling, but there was a Colombian stand with (what the sign said were) the various specialty empanadas of Medellin, Bogota, Barranquilla, Cali, and Cartagena.
What I was really torn between were (a) the Caribbean stand's jerk chicken platter with rice and peas and some interesting-looking Caribbean chopped salad at $20, and (b) the Argentine mixed grill (steak, ribs, chorizo, chicken, roast potatoes) that's $28 but I could get at least two meals out of it if I can keep it safe from Annie. There was so much good-looking stuff at the Moroccan stand that I could have spent $50 there. (The couscous seemed unusually appetizing, and the almond tart looked to die for.)
I went for the Argentine mixed grill, but I had them leave out the pork spare ribs (which looked too fatty for my taste). Definitely enough for two meals. Amazingly, the cats seem not to have been attracted by the smells and have left me alone. (My late, lamented Jack would have tormented me endlessly, yowling as soon as he smelled the meat, constantly trying to get his dirty little paw onto the plate, grabbing the fork out of my hand if he could ... He was an enterprising animal.) The chicken was pretty good -- not interestingly seasoned by itself, but succulent and very tasty drizzled with the garlicky chimichurri and the green cilantro sauce that came with. The chorizo is very nicely seasoned and not mealy. With the steak, they had an unusually light hand with the salt in advance, but that means I can salt it to my taste -- and add plenty of black pepper from my beloved peppermill.
The potatoes, for some reason, were unusually satisfying.
I definitely see the effects of inflation. Before the pandemic, the Argentine grill platters would have been $20 or $22; the Bauernwurst, now $10, would have been $7 or $8.
The nice surprise: the superb vegetable stand three blocks from me has had the good idea of taking the fruit that hasn't sold and is about to go bad and making it into slushies. (Whenever I saw strawberries or blueberries at two quarts for a dollar I knew there would be slushies the next day.) Today, for the street fair, they called them granitas instead but put them on sale: 16 oz. for $5. I mixed the strawberry and the lemon; it was delicious.
