2022, Family, Food, Kids, State Fair, Uncategorized

Fair Eats

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My stomach was a little unsettled yesterday.  Not actual distress… just feeling a little sensitive.  I suppose after five days of fair food, it’s only to be expected.  Especially Sunday.  In looking back, except for the cookies and the Hawaiian shave ice, every single thing I ate was fried.  Yikes.

I’m blaming a lot of this on YA and the State Fair marketing types.  For years YA and I have gotten our coupon booklets ahead of time; we used to go through them on the bus on the way to the fair but last year and this year, YA went through a week in advance and put post-it notes on the foods she was interested in.  Then the marketing types sent us an email listing all the new foods for 2022.  YA perused this seriously and then made a list.  Yep, she’s my daughter, isn’t she?!

A few items got listed after I took the photo and what you also don’t see is that each night that we got home from the fair, she highlighted any of the foods we’d eaten during the day.  Truly the apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree.

It will be much easier to tell you what we DIDN’T get to.  We passed the vegan corn dog trailer more than once but it never seemed the right moment.  I’ll try harder next year if they come back.  We did want to try the sweet potato poutine but you have to really want it to stand in the lines at The Blue Barn in the afternoon.  We stopped at the global market for arepas and moletes but neither of them looked that good so we tried something else.  And even though YA put the tirokroketes on the list, she was never in the mood when we passed Dino’s.  She also decided against the cotton candy float.

Some of the items got multiple tastings (cookies and Hawaiian Shave Ice are daily staples) and cheese curds, of course.  We hit the fried blueberry pie more than once – it was a new food and it was terrific.  Cheesy Siracha Funnel Cake Bites (way better than you’re imagining), Fried Pickles and Roasted Corn are favorites.  We got the pickle pizza on the first Saturday before it went viral; the lines were blocks long in both directions on Sunday.  It was fun but again not worth standing in line that long.  In fact, I always buy my cookies in the first hour and put most of them in a Tupperware that I raid as the day goes on, because I can’t do the afternoon lines. 

Just reading through all of this had made me realize that as much as I love the fair, it’s probably a good thing it only happens once a year.  It might take my stomach until next year to recover!

When was the last time you got carried away with anything?

50 thoughts on “Fair Eats”

  4. What Bill said. The three freezers in our basement are prime examples of our getting carried away. August and September are such wonderful months for going overboard with produce. I only went one time to the peach man. Going twice would have been too much. Our tomatoes are late this year, but I had enough to can seven quarts this far.

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    1. Renee, as a relative newcomer, even I am well aware that you and Chris like to grow things and cook them.
      And just in case you run short, you seem to like to buy things and cook them, as well.
      It’s a marvel to read about.

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      1. Thanks! We love to cook and garden. My phantom gallbladder makes me quite unable to tolerate fried food, so most Fair food would be off limits for me.

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  7. As soon as I have a little wine, it seems like a great idea to tell all kinds of stories, some applicable to whatever conversation is ongoing, some not so much. Let’s just say I get started and cannot stop… until I see either people’s confused expressions, or their eyes start to glaze over.

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  9. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    Carried away:
    in my garden. Planting too much, loving it too much
    Sweets—can eat them till I am sick
    Genealogy—I can have lost weekends going back and back and back
    Dislike—#45 is just revolting. I could spend my days hating on him and who wants to live like that? Just ignore the guy.

    And now I must rush out the door to the gym—trying to get my stamina back. Every time I am almost there something happens. So frustrating.

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    1. You have a good one there about 45. I have wasted hours and hours catching up with his latest idiocies, and writing pointless, antagonistic insults to cult members in the YouTube comments. Doesn’t make me feel any better.

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  10. I always get carried away with buying secondhand books, and I definitely got carried away over the last year with collecting Pusheens (I was very depressed over my hearing loss at the time, and it helped to have an interest). We are rather overrun with Pusheen plushies at the moment, so I can’t have any more. Except maybe the taco Pusheen from It’Sugar…and this year’s Halloween costume Pusheens from Hot Topic…and the new ice cream-themed blind box collection…

    I tried the vegan corn dog, along with the new vegan foods from French Meadows and Herbivorous Butcher. The corn dog was a Morningstar Farms veggie dog (which aren’t too bad) and it was made fresh. French Meadows was good, as usual; Herbivorous Butcher was stratospherically high-sodium, as usual. Since I’ve had Herbie Butcher’s fried chick’n before, I tried the “Steakorcist.” I was expecting seitan textured to resemble steak, like mock duck, but the faux meat was much more like sausage–reminded me of a vegan chorizo I’d had from Field Roast, only without the spice. I did try the arepa, never found the moletes. My favorite Fair foods after all these years are still Harry Singh’s chickpea roti and the roasted corn!

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    1. We liked the veggie sliders at French Meadow but didn’t get anything from the Herbivorus butcher. I don’t really feel the need to have my non-meat so much like meat and that’s what I was worried about there. But one of these days I’ll try their products.

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      1. Oh, I agree with you about the non-meat–I like my veggie burgers to have bits of veg and grain in them, myself–but at the Fair I try to get every vegan food in order to encourage more plant-based choices there. I will say that Herbie Butcher makes excellent fried chick’n, if you can bear the sodium (unfortunately it’s so high it makes my hypertensive roommate sick, so we have it very rarely). Their mac-n-cheeze is also good, but also packed with sodium.

        I just realized I also missed out on the Hmong Kitchen, which annoys me because they had a tofu dish and a lychee-coconut milk drink I wanted to try!

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  11. I only go to the Fair once or twice a decade (usually much too crowded – so I go early and only stay a few hours). This year in my 4.5 hours there I treated myself to a cream puff (which are twice as large as back in the 80’s and 90’s). The fried foods are totally unappealing. I am one of the distinct minority who do not go to the Fair for the food.

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  12. WP won’t let me “like” anything but I definitely agree with Jacque’s dislike of #45. Can’t stand anything about him so I try to ignore. Also did not like walking past the long line at the Republican booth that had big signs shouting “Lockdowns”, “Vaccine mandates”, and “Businesses closed” – misleading advertising as well as repulsive.

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    2. One of the many things that bother me is: were people specifically waiting for that particularly strange kind of “charisma”? Or would just any lunatic have filled the bill?
      I’m not sure I’ve really explained what I mean.
      I mean, how on EARTH could you think THAT guy was going to fix anything? How on EARTH?

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    1. Actually if you look really closely at the header photo, it’s the very last thing. Number 19. And we did have Australian Battered Potatoes this year and they were fine although they have never been my favorite. In fact I have never gotten them on my own but only when I am with other people.

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        1. It probably won’t make anyone feel better but nothing of our stuff has been going into spam the last week or so.

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    6. I did get an order of Australian Battered Potatoes. One order is about three servings, so I had leftovers for a couple of days. The first year they had them at the fair, the people at the booth were trained to speak in faux Australian accents. They don’t bother with that anymore.

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    1. In England, you can buy huge bars of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk chocolate. I would buy a bar because it’s a very economical way of buying chocolate. I would tell myself, I will eat so much per day. You know the rest.

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      1. The Cadbury chocolate in Europe has a different taste than the Cadbury chocolate here in the US. I actually like the European because it’s different to what we get over here. Any time I used to travel in Europe I would buy several at the airport. And I had the same problem that you have Fenton, no matter how many times I told myself I would be better this time.

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