summer

What Are You Going to Eat at the State Fair This Summer?

Dana Velden
Dana Velden
Dana Velden's first book, Finding Yourself in the Kitchen: Kitchen Meditations and Inspired Recipes from a Mindful Cook (Rodale Books) is available where ever books are sold. She lives in Oakland, CA.
published Aug 15, 2016
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(Image credit: Susanna Hopler)

There are certain foods that one only eats at the state fair. In the olden days, folks would look forward to an enormous cream puff as their special fair indulgence. Nowadays, you don’t want to know what people are doing with red velvet cake and a deep fryer. Only, secretly you do.

So go on: Gather up your pals, pile into the car, and head to the closest fair grounds.

What you will find there is that absolutely everything ever made for human consumption can be wrapped in bacon. And that once everything has been wrapped in bacon, it can also be deep-fried. Luckily, you will also discover that a whole lemon, when shaken vigorously with sugar and ice by some poor, sticky high-school kid saving for college, makes a fantastic refreshing lemonade.

So for the sheer crazy joy of it, get yourself to a state (or county) fair and indulge in at least one of the over-the-top concoctions you’ll find there. Enter the corn dog-eating contest, visit the jar of jam that won the blue ribbon! It’s only once a year, so you can get a little reckless. Just be sure to ride the tilt-a-whirl first before you head over to the bacon-wrapped red velvet funnel cake stand.

Can’t make the fair this year? Bring it home!

(Image credit: Susanna Hopler)