Families share recipes, traditions at Sweet Potato Festival

Think of any dish or dessert you’d like to see cooked with sweet potatoes. Chances are you would have found it at Livingston’s fourth annual Sweet Potato Festival.

Sweet potato-filled shrimp, sweet potato cream cheese, sweet potato-flavored barbecue sauce and sweet potato pancakes, just to name a few, were some of the bites available at the event’s culinary exhibit.

“You name it, we have it sweet-potato style,” said Toni Marquez, recreational specialist with the city of Livingston.

What started as a single booth has become a three-day family festival that was expected to attract 20,000 and 30,000 visitors, organizers said.

“Our expectations were pretty high this year, after last year’s event,” Marquez said about the festival that ran Friday to Sunday. “Once the sun goes down, it gets crowded.”

On Saturday, the event featured a recipe contest that encouraged cooks to run with their imagination when preparing sweet potato casseroles and dishes. The festival also featured a petting zoo, pony rides, carnival games, rides, live music, a beer garden and a scarecrow exhibit.

Jaime Hernandez drove his wife and grandchildren from Stockton to Livingston on Saturday. He said he learned about the event after seeing a billboard on Highway 99. The event caught his attention because of the childhood memories provoked by sweet potatoes.

“My grandma use to make a sweet potato atole,” Hernandez said about a traditional Mexican hot beverage. “Now I want to share this with my grandkids.”

Also a fan of the sweet potato, Atwater resident Connie Ramirez and her family made their way to the festival for the first time. While she was enthused with the culinary exhibit, her grandchildren enjoyed the petting zoo and were fascinated by the presence of a camel, she said.

Throughout the setting at the Max Foster Sports Complex, fun facts and nutritional information about the “superfood” were available to passers-by.

According to Marquez, this allows festivalgoers to learn more about what is being grown at home.

California is the country’s third-largest sweet potato producer, behind North Carolina and Mississippi, according to the California Sweetpotato Council, and 95 percent of the state’s crop comes from the Livingston area.

The festival, according to organizers and City Council members, is important for branding the city, which made moves last month to officially call the city “The Sweet Potato Capital.”

This story was originally published October 4, 2015 at 2:43 PM with the headline "Families share recipes, traditions at Sweet Potato Festival."