The area around San Jose is noted for agriculture. Before all the techno businesses moved in and built sprawling campuses, the land was covered with crops and fruit orchards. You can still find clusters of fields here and there. And we are fortunate to have many capitals near us…. That’s agricultural capitals. We have Castroville, the artichoke capital of the world. And Stockton is the Asparagus capital of the world. We have Holtville – Carrot capital, Greenfield – Broccoli capital, Oxnard – Lima Bean capital, and Fallbrook – Avocado capital just to name a few. We even have the Poison Oak capital of the world – Forestville (in the Wine country). But the best one of all is Gilroy – Garlic capital of the world. And to celebrate its fame, Gilroy has an annual garlic festival. And, of course, we had to go! Out here, garlic is planted in October, harvested in early June and then dried for six weeks before it is ready to sell. So the festival is in mid-July each year. The festival, established in 1979, features cooking demonstrations, professional chefs competing, Gourmet Alley with a zillion food booths all serving stuff made with garlic, craft booths, music stages…. On and on. We drove down US101 and knew we were getting close when we could SMELL the garlic from the highway! No kidding! You can really smell garlic – even with the windows rolled up. And then we got in a car line with all the 100,000 other people attending. Mark heard from another commuter on Cal Train that you DON’T want to go on Saturday as the crowds are REALLY big. So Mark, Natalie and I went early on Sunday. The festival opened at 10am – we were in our car line that started at 101 by 10:30. It took us over 30 minutes to make it to the parking lot and walk in to the Festival. We entered the gate by all the commercial booths like Foster Farms. They had 2 giant chicken balloons floating over the park and chickens you could stand next to for a photo op and drawings for chicken and much much more.
We quickly moved through all of that looking for garlic. We found the gourmet cooking stage and watched a local chef prepare salmon. The chef and her husband started the Garlic Festival 32 years ago to highlight the farmers in the area. We were hoping to see Fabio from our favorite cooking show – Top Chef – who was master of ceremonies. But he wasn’t on until later when the professional chefs started competing.
After a while, we wandered over to the Crafts. Garlic is the theme with garlic-shaped hats, garlic handblown glass, garlic Christmas tree ornaments. We had heard about garlic ice cream. And, yes….. they were serving free cones. So we got in line and had a taste….. imagine a not-very-good vanilla ice cream with garlic powder liberally mixed in. Hmmmm……. NOT in the shopping cart for us!
And every time I saw a garlic photo op, I made Natalie pose....
Gourmet Alley was the highlight of the event. Anything that can be eaten was mixed with garlic and served. We found garlic sausage several ways, garlic stir fry, garlic fries (covered with parsley and little chunks of raw garlic – more garlic than fries and VERY yummy!), garlic chocolate, scampi with garlic, mussels with garlic…. You name it, it was there. It was hard to wait until lunchtime. I found a delicious local sausage with sauerkraut (the sausage was full of garlic). And once we were full and reeking of garlic, we headed over to the booth selling garlic braids. We bought several along with garlic pesto. And we were given little bags of garlic to be planted with instructions on how to grow garlic.
By now, we were hot, dusty, slightly sun burned and the crowds were getting pretty bad. So we trudged back to the car and headed home. My friends couldn’t believe that we were going until they heard that we had never been. Oh, I guess you have to go at least once – they said. But I must say, that it was rather fun. And, after all, anything with garlic HAS to be good!
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