I'm home in Pennsylvania this weekend for Easter.  For whatever reason, they decided this year to start giving us Good Friday off... I'm pretty sure we've never had it off before, but I could just have been missing something.

My aunt, uncle, and cousins were in town for a surprise birthday party we had for my dad last night, and today I gave them (and Betsy) the tour de Lancaster, food style.  Let me give you a run down.

We started by going to Central Market, the longest running indoor farmers market in the country.  Yes, the WHOLE country.  It's pretty cool.  Normally I can get all my groceries there, and spend very little money.  But today I didn't need groceries.  Instead I got snow peas (for the car ride home tomorrow), marinated string cheese (mostly because it's the most delicious salty cheesy food ever), and chicken pot pie.

Lets pause for a second so I can explain to all of you what chicken pot pie is.  If you are picturing something with a crust, I'm sorry.  You've been mislead your whole lives.  If it has a crust it's a chicken pie.  The "pot" in chicken pot pie implies that it's made in a pot.  Made with potatoes, chicken, thick noodles, and salt.  The only role vegetables play is in the making of chicken stock, should you choose to make your own (which, PS, you should.  Chicken pot pie is delicious.  Chicken pie can be, but it's never as good as chicken pot pie.

Okay, so back to the PA food tour.  After central market, we came home, and then promptly took my cousins to the Bird-In-Hand Bakery (located in Bird-In-Hand, PA).  They have whoopie pies.  And the worlds best molasses cookies.  Please, don't argue.  It's useless.  Unless you have TRIED Bird-In-Hand bakery molasses cookies, you can't judge them.  Anyway, back to the whoopie pies.  Whoopie pies are cream filled dense cake sandwiches... in a nutshell.  The original whoopie pies are made with chocolate cakes and cream filling.  They also have peanut butter (chocolate cake and PB filling), red velvet (red velvet cake and cream filling), and pumpkin (pumpkin cake and cream cheese filling).  Amish make them best.  With Amish love.  It's a secret ingredient that no one else has.  We got 2 dozen whoopie pies, 6 molasses cookies, and 2 chocolate chip cookies (those were for my cousin... special request). 

After the bakery, we went to Starbucks (not uniquely PA, but I thought it would be good fun to give all three girls lots of sugar and return them to their parents...

When we got home from that, my aunt recommended we go to the Sturgis pretzel factory (the oldest commercial pretzel factory in the country.  Yes, the WHOLE country.  You can take a tour, where you get to learn how to hand twist pretzels, see the old brick ovens, and learn that they used to dip pretzels in straw water and lye to give them the color and taste.  Lye... that sounds safe.  Now they use super-strong sodium hydroxide I think.  We picked up some pretzels (they are SO much better than the pretzels you can get in NC), and then headed home... until we realized that the Wilbur chocolate factory was right around the corner!!!

Wilbur makes super super super delicious chocolate (they export some for Godiva to use to make their chocolates), and these things called wilbur buds, which look like Hershey kisses but have a swirly pattern on the bottom and are imprinted with "Wilbur".  Yummmmmm.  So my aunt got some Wilbur buds, I got some Easter coconut cream eggs, and we headed back to the car.  We also saw some baby ducks... 9 brown ones and one yellow one.  They were adorable.  But since the theme is food, and we didn't eat the ducks, I won't dwell on them.

We got home from Lititz (the home of Sturgis and Wilbur (oh, by the by, Wilbur uses Sturgis pretzels to make their chocolate covered pretzels)), and it was time for dinner.  Like we needed to eat.

After dinner, Betsy and I decided to go to Hershey Chocolate World because she hasn't been since she was a little one, and doesn't remember it.  We went on the free ride (which I can pretty much sing along to, but it's still always fun!), got some free chocolate, and then perused the store for a while.  I didn't get anything, but Betsy got some coconut kisses.  Then we went home.

So let's review.  We covered Central Market and chicken pot pie, Sturgis pretzels, Wilbur chocolate, Bird-In-Hand bakery and whoopie pies and molasses cookies, and Hershey.  I think the only thing we didn't covered (in a single day) is ham and bean soup.  I'll save that for another day.

We're fully stocked for our ride home tomorrow.  I would have bought stuff to stock up my freezer... but I'm trying to empty my freezer! 

Oh, and I'm going to show you my new house soon.  So be on the lookout!

Adios,
Kari