My Darling B and I went to Taste of Madison this year even though we hadn’t planned to. We ended up going anyway because this was the first time that the weather was so nice we wouldn’t sweat off ten pounds while we were walking around the square. Every year before this, the temps were so uncomfortably high that we would sample the food by scuttling across the street with it to the nearest patch of shade we could find, like squirrels snatching food out of your picnic basket and running off with it.

On our visit this year, though, it was pleasantly cool and completely overcast, no uncaring sun blazing down on us as we made our way around the square. A few drops of rain even fell as we made our way up Carroll Street, and as we turned down the home stretch on Pinckney Street, the rain began to come down steadily. I came prepared with an umbrella and popped it up then, but B bluntly refused to walk underneath it. “I won’t melt,” she bragged.

The food was delicious as it always is, and a good thing, too, because we were both famished when we got there, having eaten nothing since breakfast. We started off sharing a yummy gyro from – where else? – Gyro House that was stuffed with a generous helping of lamb and plenty of yogurt, so generous that, if I’d eaten it all by myself, it would have probably filled me up. The portions they’re serving now are lots bigger than the morsels they were doling out when we first started visiting the Taste.

The one other really amazing dish worth mentioning was the teriyaki chicken from Teriyaki Samurai. The sauce was not so heavy that it overpowered the chicken, and the chicken was so very tender. And they gave us two heavily-loaded skewers to share. We stuffed ourselves.

The most unusual, new food that we tried was deep-fried cajun boudain balls. They’re rolled-up balls of rice, some kind of meat and cajun spices, deep-fried but to a crisp, not greasy at all, and not crazy hot the way some people think cajun is supposed to be.

The most disappointing new food I tried was something called a reuben roll, which was corned beef, sauerkraut and cheese rolled up in a spring roll and deep-fried. Could’ve been tasty if it hadn’t been dripping with grease.