Festival Recap

Two Nashville Festivals from October

I keep looking at photos from 2 Nashville festivals from October, and remember having a nice time.  Here is a summary of those festivals.

I love the Celebrate Cultures Festival!  There is music and dance performances, there is a parade, and there is the food.  This year we tried Greek, Croatian, Ethiopian, and Laotian food.  We enjoyed the parade of the traditional parade dress for various cultures.  The Croatian food is of the style of the Balkans region with offerings of a potato salad, cabbage rolls, and herb spiced meats.  We liked the Greek spanikopita sprinkled with cilantro.  Goha Restaurant was the Ethiopian offering at the festival, and they are a solidly good Ethiopian restaurant in Nashville.  Goha is hard to find, it is at 2525 M'boro Road, southeast of the airport, is in a little one-story ranch house set back from the road amonst big box stores.  The building is hard to see from the street and is unexpected to be there because of all the sprawl around it.  King Market offered the Laotian snacks at the festival.  It was a bit of a tease, they only really had egg rolls, where King Market offers a lot of Laotian home cooking options.  King Market is located at the corner of Haywood Ln and Antioch Pk next door to the Dollar General.  Go there and try a soup, or play "Iron Chef" by collecting a few ingredients from the grocery store and "Mama" the cook will whip up a dish for you.  King Market also makes rice noodle fresh udon (not wheat) so it is possible to have a gluten free style udon!  Delicious!

The annual Leiper's Fork Chili Cook-off happens in mid-October every year, and is one of our favorite Chili Cook-offs in the area.  People entering a chili option take the contest quite seriously.  Our favorite was #10 this year.  They had the longest line for tasting, and we were going to skip tasting because the line was too long and move on to the next.  Well, after a few people came off the line saying how good it was, we got in line, and I am glad we did.  We thought they were the best.  I look forward to next year's contest!