Fermented cabbage. Fragrant. Sour. Buckets and buckets of sauerkraut. All you want, all weekend, free. What more inducement do you need to visit the small town of Henderson, Minnesota during the weekend of June 24th through 26, when they hold their annual Henderson Sauerkraut Days? Be sure not to overdo it on the kraut if you’re planning on competing in the sauerkraut eating contest. You want plenty of appetite available for the competition. You’ll be consuming two pounds of the stuff as fast as possible. Winners typically complete the challenge in a matter of four minutes or less, often after squeezing as much brine as possible from the shredded cabbage (they’ll give you 30 seconds to “prepare” your two pounds of kraut). Continue reading
Tag: Minnesota food festivals
From The Kolacky Capital of the World comes the 81st annual Kolacky Festival in Montgomery, Minnesota! First held in 1929 when … what’s that? What’s a kolacky? We quote the festival website: “A kolacky is a small dinner roll-like pastry which is folded, enclosing filling in the center. The most common fillings include prune, poppyseed, apricot, apple, blueberry and raspberry.” They come from the Czech Republic or, to be more accurate, Bohemia, which is what that region of Europe was called when Montgomery was settled by Czechs in the mid-1800s. It’s been over 150 years and they have not forgotten! Continue reading
What’s a raspberry festival without raspberries? Why, that would be the Hopkins Raspberry Festival in Minnesota! When the festival began, in 1934, the area was surrounded by raspberry farms. The farms are long gone and, while the festival continued to be held, the raspberries eventually disappeared from the raspberry festival as well. In 2009, for the 75th edition of the raspberry festival, they experimented with bringing the raspberries back – pints of berries were sold all over the festival, just like in the old days. But the gesture towards a new tradition didn’t take. Continue reading
