It's about this time of year that I start looking forward to the Apple Festival.

The Apple Festival has been going on in Hendersonville, North Carolina for 61 years. It's not surprising that there's a festival...the apple crop in Western NC is worth about $20 million each year.

Hendersonville is located in the foothills of the Appalachians. The mountains rise up sharply from there with Mount Mitchell, the highest peak in eastern North America, only an hour away.

The Apple Festival represents the best and worst of Western North Carolina simultaneously.

I won't dwell on the worst; I'm sure that we've all seen the obsession the media has with showing fat and ignorant Southerners. Luckily, they're actually pretty thin on the ground in Hendersonville.

The best is the enthusiastic mountain music, street dancing, the homemade kitschy, yet sometimes helpful, wares for sale, and my favorite, the festival food.

Most is centered around apples, as you'd expect.
There are candy and caramel apples, jams, jellies, and preserves, apple butter, apple barbecue sauces, apple cider, hard cider, sparkling apple juice, baked apples, and of course, every kind of apple grown in Henderson County and surrounding areas.
Every year they present not only the regular Braeburn, Red and Gold Delicious, and so forth, but also the various hybrids or variants they've developed. There was a Cortland variant one year that was fantastic.
Sometimes they have heirloom apples that originated in North Carolina, but are very rare, like the Dula Beauty or the Gragg.

Other than apple products, there's always funnel cakes, boiled peanuts*, corn on the cob, and randomly enough some brilliant Cuban beans and rice.

I'm not sure how the Festival will go this year. Unseasonably late frosts have decimated the 2007 apple crop.

I stopped into Marks and Spencers during the week. A bottle of apple juice, marked 'Lady Apple Juice' caught my eye. I'm not usually a fan of apple juice, but I thought I'd give it a go. I'm glad I did.

I may not be home for Apple Festival, but I got the taste of it...even if just for a moment.

Any food related festivals take place near you?

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* I don't know why, but boiled peanuts always taste best when boiled with just a little bit of cheap beer. Oh, and any North Carolinian will tell you that it's pronounced 'ba'ld', not 'boyld'. :)