The sandwiches and salads are flying off the counter. The cookies are selling out quickly. And the coffee - well, it's fresh and hot and easy to grab during a quick break from work in Howard Circuit Court.

After two years of going without, the county's circuit courthouse now has a lunch stand to call its own.

Two weeks after Nixon's Farm of West Friendship moved into a tiny corner of the building, courthouse employees are making sure to grab their favorite salads before the stand sells out, and customers are singing the new shop's praises.

"The salads are wonderful. The prices are wonderful," said Judge Diane O. Leasure, the county's administrative circuit judge. "It was a bit of a battle to get it done."

For a decade, Howard County jurors, court employees and visitors to the circuit courthouse had local bail bondsman Howard F. Duncan to thank for the snacks, microwaveable entrees and coffee for sale.

But Duncan pulled out in late 2000, saying his stand, which was limited to packaged foods because no running water was available nearby, barely broke even. And no one jumped in to fill the void.

With only two vending machines on site, employees, who often get just a half-hour for lunch, began grumbling, and county and courthouse officials began looking for a way to entice a contractor to take over Duncan's old space.

Their solution? Putting the courthouse space out to bid last spring as part of a package that also included more lucrative space - the sandwich shop in the county's Howard building, which had recently ended its contract with the Maryland Business Enterprise Program for the Blind.

"They were without food service for a very long time," Charles A. Kasky, the county's deputy chief administrative officer, said of the courthouse. "We decided to ... make it a combination contract."

Two companies bid on the contract in the summer, and Nixon's Farm, a 47-year-old business that does catering on its 163-acre site and off, won.

But while Nixon's took over the Howard building site in July, it took longer to move into the courthouse. The farm wanted to settle into the Howard shop first, said Randy Nixon, the farm's principal owner. And the courthouse site required more work; Nixon's had to install sinks and electric utilities and bring in its own counters.

The courthouse shop, which opened Dec. 2, sells sandwiches, salads and cookies made fresh on the farm each day, Nixon said.

In two weeks, "It's exceeded our expectations," he said. "We get hugged every time we go in. It's ridiculous."

Courthouse workers say they cannot be blamed for being excited. For the past two years, all that jury commissioner Steve Merson could offer jurors - some who sit for hours waiting to find out whether they will be needed for a case - was instant coffee packets, a water cooler and two vending machines.

"We have to make jurors' lives here comfortable. It adds to that a little bit," he said. "It's a big county office building. You expect something to be here."