Fairytales and Fitness: Epcot Flower and Garden Festival

Better late than never.... We couldn't let the Flower and Garden Festival end without documenting our time there this year.

Usually during any Epcot festival, we work our way through the festival passport.

For every festival, there are 10 dishes that qualify for the free treat. This year those dishes are indicated as "Garden Graze Menu Items"

You must get stamps for purchasing at least 5 of those Garden Graze items to earn the treat.

Epcot Flower and Garden Festival, Germany Potato cakes

I started off with the Potato Pancakes served with apple sauce from the Bauernmarkt (not a typo) in the Germany pavilion. They were very tasted, but would have been even better had I been able to have them with ketchup (which they did not have at this booth).

As we looked over the other offerings on the Garden Graze menu, we decided that there weren't many items that sounded appealing to us, and some of the items we had last year at the festival. I guess there was no use in trying to fulfill the passport for the extra treat, so we just decided to try a few new things from the booths even though we would not be getting any stamps for them.

So here is what we tried at this year's festival.

This was a good dish. It was topped with bacon and a vinaigrette which was a little different, but it worked.

The Northern Bloom booth in Canada is always one of our favorite. We had some good dishes there in the past as well.

Lacey had this Shrimp Scampi poutine and said it was tasty.

The pretzel bread pudding isn't part of the festival but it was an item I've been wanting to try for a while now but kept forgetting about it. This was so yummy and thankfully can be found all year long at Sommerfest in Germany!

The frozen violet lemonade is another item I always want to try at the Flower and Garden Festival and then end up forgetting about it. This time I finally got to try it. It was definitely a refreshing treat but tasted like any other frozen lemonade, just less tart.

I didn't even know I wanted to try this dish until I saw someone in front of me have it. It looked refreshing and by this time we were ready to try another snack. I hate onions and was planning on picking these ones out, but they were marinated and so tender that they didn't bother me at all. I also enjoyed the avocado that was on it. We got this dish at the Farmer's Feast near Test Track.

We stopped at two different Joffrey's stands for these festival cold brews. The Key lime cold brew was near the American Pavilion and the Orange cream cold brew was near Disney Traders (going towards the Mexico Pavilion).Although these both sounded like fun drinks, neither one of them had that much flavor and you couldn't really tell what flavors they were if you didn't already know.

And of course we enjoyed the topiaries. Here are a few new ones we noticed this year and some of our favorites.

Next to this topiary was a cast member handing out packets of mint seeds. I am looking forward to planting mine and seeing how they grow. The cast member said it would only take 2 or 3 weeks to get mint leaves!