Welcome Back, DC State Fair!

For those of us inside the beltway, calling D.C. a state isn’t as strange as the out of the district dwellers may think.  And we now have a State Fair!

DC has  a  strong  “state”  attitude,  a  beloved and  popular  newspaper,  excellent  colleges , and fatastic restaurants — it seems all the interesting  “Top Chef” contestants have a restaurants and a presence here, including  Spike Carla and Richard Blais.  Each month somebody considered famous is here to testify about something  close  to  their  heart  on t he Hill,  and our special brand of power and history draws more than  3,000,000 visitors each year. You  can  turn  the  corner  and step into an  Angelina  Jolie  or   Matt  Damon  film,  and  Michelle Obama can be seen planting a garden or picking up burgers from Five Guys.   Can  you  tell  I’m  a  DC  native?  While many believe we’re taxed unfairly (our  license  plate  tag?  “Taxation  Without  Representation”)  we take it all in stride because that’s how we roll.

Well, we also have a state fair, which launched last year and it was a great success.  I started to hear about the first annual DC State Fair last year online and via friends on twitter, and from there it seemed everyone in town was writing and reporting on it.  I was in, and excited to attend.  I  was  convinced  to enter some of our container veggies in the fair’s vegetable contest, and our lemon cucumbers won first place in the  “funkiest” veggie category.   That win led me to talk about my DC State Fair memories  with  Kenneth  Moore,  president   of  the  DC State Fair, who blogs about gardening and cooking as The Indoor Garden(er).  I hope you’ll read the interview, and check out the DC State Fair blog.  If you’re, as we say,  in the distirct, at the end of August, come check out our state fair.  For more infomration  you can visit the DC  State  Fair  blog,  or  tweet  Ken at  @indoorgarden_er.

One of my favorite memories of the event?  All the wonderful pies entered in the  pie  baking  contest,  which  I  got  to  judge.