State Fair

Mankind has produced some amazing things. The wheel. The steam engine. The computer. The deep fried cheese curd.

Yes, I wish I could have been there, at the moment of its conception. I can only imagine the dawn of realization that must have come across some lucky bastard's face, when he realized what would happen if he threw cheese in boiling oil. I mean really, what a great idea. The world has never been the same since.

No event stands testament to such culinary delights as the Minnesota State Fair, and I indulged heartily yesterday with some lawyer friends from school. When you think about it, food on a stick just makes so much sense. It's a convenient and practical way of making almost anything you can think of a hand food. Pork chop? Twinkie? Scotch egg? Hotdish? All can be transformed, by the power of frying oil, into a delicious one-handed snack. And since the State Fair happens but once per year, you can indulge with no guilt whatsoever.

I think the final tally went something like this.

1 - deep fried Snickers bar (on a stick)
2 - smattering of chocolate chip cookies
3 - the aforementioned cheese curds
4 - taste of gator and gator fries
5 - chocolate covered bacon (delicious)
6 - garlic fries
7 - bite of a scotch egg (on a stick)
8 - a quantity of Minnesota's own Summit beer

And I refuse to feel bad about it.

Of course, the fair isn't only about food. It's also about SWAG (shit we all get). I limited my SWAG consumption this year as opposed to years past, and I'm happy to announce that I only left with an MPR magnet, and some MPR buttons. The MPR booth actually, has a story attached to it. A group of us wanted our photos taken, looking superior, since that's the connotation with listening to public radio. And some MPR employee offered to take our photo for their website, and she offered us a small whiteboard to write a message on. Our tongue-in-cheek message read "We are better than you," in reference to the snooty air associated with MPR. And this woman, she just did not get the joke. She actually seemed really uncomfortable taking the photo. I imagined that MPR employees must be the most stuck up of them all, but apparently I was wrong.

I wish I had some of the photos to post from our other fair exploits, but alas, I do not yet possess them. I don't consider myself a very photogenic person, but after viewing the photos, I'm very impressed. There are great photos of us eating the chocolate covered bacon, recreating a cow birth with a stuffed animal at the miracle of life barn, looking pretentious at the MPR booth, looking horrified at the Republican Party's misleading propaganda on health care reform. Just really fantastic photos, I'll be sure to post once I get a hold of them.

So yes, the fair was a grand success, as it tends to be. I had a single moment of revulsion, when I looked into my cheese curd tray and noticed that my cheese curds were swimming about in a layer of grease which layered the bottom portion of the tray. But then I remembered the fair food mantra: no guilt.

I ate them all.