Something very important to note about me, if you don’t know already, is that I absolutely love avocados. They are pretty much the best thing ever. I have avocado earrings to prove my everlasting devotion (I also really like earrings, but that’s another story). I did a report about avocados in my Spanish 22 class. It’s become a joke in my family that you can’t leave me and an avocado alone in a room together. Even my little nine-year-old brother is in on the teasing, making jokes about it. I once had a highly amusing experience in the Coop Fountain trying to convince the cashier to sell me an avocado straight up.
This past weekend, however, I was able to take my obsession—I mean love—a step further and attend the California Avocado Festival in Carpinteria. Somehow I managed to get two friends to come with me, though it was a two hour drive each way, on Saturday evening to the festival.
We didn’t know exactly what we would find. I think I was imaging kind of an avocado extravaganza, where all sorts of crazy dishes were made with avocados, like avocado pie, avocado pancakes, avocado quiches, fried avocado, avocado smoothies, etc etc etc, to the point where if you didn’t like avocados good luck finding something to eat (But how could you not like avocados?). However, it was nowhere near that extreme.
There were a bunch of food booths, with all kinds of things like popcorn, pretzels, sausage, roasted corn, snow cones, “Asian” food, tacos, funnel cake, shrimp cocktails, and more. Most of the booths had an Avofest menu, and many had a dish or two that involved avocados, but it was by no means exclusively avocado based. Perhaps it just drew together people who happen to like avocados—or just like fun festivals, gathering of communities to eat and converse on a closed off street. There was also live music in various places and all kinds of crafty booths, as well as activities and bouncy houses for the kids (so tempting!). Plus the whole thing was along this street that is a direct parallel to the Village, with all the cute little shops on either side.
It was a lot of fun, though, and I did get to try a couple things involving avocados I’d never had before. I had avocado ice cream (kinda funky), avocado bread (not much avo flavor), and roast corn with avocado oil (a bit of a stretch for the avocado theme), along with guacamole and an avo-filled egg roll (that was my favorite). At first the rule amongst my friends and I was that everything we ate had to involve avocado, but when it came time for desert and they didn’t like the avo ice cream they moved on to churros. In the end, it was more about an enjoyable evening with music, people, and food than just about avocados, and it served as a really nice way to connect community in a tasty way.
