Taste-a-Thon 2014

I am absolutely smitten with our local farmer's market. 

Absolutely. Smitten.

Just by chance I was checking out the local market schedules for our area earlier this week and happened upon the Loveland Farmers' Market page which was promoting an annual children's tasting event this week. The Children's Taste-a-Thon gives kids an opportunity to sample an item from EVERY booth. For each item sampled, the kids receive a sticker to mark on their sheet.

  I knew that Sweet Thing would be really eager to taste all of the new foods, but I was a little worried that the Catfish would not want to participate.

 Boy, was I wrong!

 These two tried all sorts of new and adventurous foods. Above they're sampling chorizo macaroni and cheese while below they chowed down on mushroom, zucchini and broccoli pizza!

 They were a little confused at this booth until they realized the goat was there for petting, not sampling!

 The mozzarella cheese was fantastically fresh! My girls were a little disappointed not to be invited to eat everything on the plate.

 The vendors were so excited to participate and were very sweet with the girls. They were encouraging without being pushy and were really gracious about the kids not loving every single thing they tried(yes, I'm talking about you, beet hummus...for the record, I thought it was awesome!). 

 Look at these beautiful veggies! Incredible!

 I was so excited to see my girls sampling so many raw veggies and loving them! We sampled fresh green beans, carrots, zucchini, cucumber,

and some gorgeous, sweet red tomatoes!

 I was kicking myself for buying berries at the grocery this week.

 These blueberries were like candy.

 And speaking of sweet treats, these girls chowed down on homemade waffles from a super cute food truck.

 After sampling the strawberry lemonade, we HAD to buy ourselves each a glass.

Mama included!

I don't even regret for a second how badly we spoiled our dinner tonight!

We will definitely be heading over to this market frequently and are already counting down the days until next year's Taste-a-Thon!