Fran Couldn’t resist visiting the piglets right when we got there.
The pronto pup. It’s not a corn dog!
Turkey to Go. Still our favorite sandwich at the fair. I wonder what the tiny man on my shoulder is thinking?
Always fun to go see all the judged food categories. Good thing these were behind glass!
Have to take this photo every year.
New margherita pizza from Mancini’s was very good.
Possibly our favorite fair dessert. Waffle ice cream sandwich from West End Creamery.
Ate that waffle ice cream sandwich while sitting on the ampitheater hillside listening to Charlie Parr!
Katie taking in some fair history at the Heritage Building.
Big crowds for our second trip to the fair!
Almost forgot to take a picture of this. :) The Honey Do pie at Sara’s Tipsy Pies. Extra cool because the owner has a child with Down syndrome and all proceeds go to the Down Syndrome Association of Minnesota.
Henry zonked out before he could try one of the new items getting the most buzz: Butter Queen Coffee ice cream at the Hamline church dining hall. It was yum! (Made by Izzy’s special for the fair, for you locals)
He took a nice two hour nap in the stroller!
The maple bacon beer from Giggle’s was a flop. No good.
Henry was in heaven at the John Deere store.
Driving tractors.
Katie and Henry had a fun time on the slide.
Prizes for the best wool. Who knew?
Henry got a special treat when one of the goat owners invited him and his cousins into the pen with the animals!
That’s not a beer, that’s a nitro cold press coffee! Just like nitro in beer, it’s infused with nitrogen and served from a tap. It tasted super creamy and I already can’t wait to try it again. Also, the maple bacon caramel roll. Both at the Farmer’s Union. Roll baked by Birchwood Cafe. Both amazing!
Seed art. Everything in those pictures is made up of a seed. Pretty amazing.
More seed art.
Giant pumpkins. The winning one was almost 1,200 lbs.
Butter chicken samosas from Hot Indian Foods.
Honey Sunflower ice cream sundae from the honey booth in the Agriculture Bldg. Amazing!
This is the Sweet Dream peach. It’s hard to see the scale of this thing - it’s almost the size of a softball!
Apple Rollover from Minnesota Apple Growers booth. This and the cider freeze (like an apple cider flavor squeeze ice thing) were both really good!
My niece Eleanor won 3rd place for her Buddha!
People at my office made this quilt for our boss to commemorate his term as President of the Population Association of America. It’s hard to tell from the photo, but the quilt has things like the original census forms which show his parents being counted (our center does research on census data).
We hit the Fair on its last day early, and gathered up some breakfast items we hadn’t had a chance to get to earlier this year. First up was the Scotch Egg. It gets points for not skimping! It was decent, but the sausage was pretty bland, coulda used more seasoning. Henry liked it, though.
This is the Wild Rice Egg Benedict Muffin from Lulu’s Public House. I thought it was very good! The muffin has wild rice baked in and the egg was still a little runny like it should be. Would do again!
Gorilla Bread, also from Lulu’s. Pretty standard monkey bread kinda thing, which is to say, gooey, decadent and delicious.
Then we hit the horse show. Today there were a lot of speed events. Henry was pumped!
He was really good at cheering the horses on to the finish line!
Mama was also into it.
At times, the cheering was pretty intense!
The barrel racers were a lot of fun, especially the team event.
The most impressive were the drill team, they were so good at keeping all the horses in sync!
After the horse show, we moved on to lunch. After years of being Pronto Pup devotees, we thought we’d try a Poncho Dog (corn dog). We may be switching back to the corn dog camp, the texture was more interesting than the Pronto!
Henry opted for the beef stick from the smokehouse. Always a meat afficionado, this was no surprise.
We hit the Kidway for a couple rides. Henry enjoyed the animal safari train a lot.
Mama joined him on the monster trucks. Henry loved it! Mama…well, she took one for the team.
Lunch part 2… the pork chop is WAY up on our list of favorite fair foods (it has to be this pork chop though - Peterson’s, near the Dairy Building). Lines wrapped around to the back of the stand, for good reason.
It was an A+ again this year. How do they do it? It’s so yummy.
Fran wanted to give some love to the local scene, so he hit up The Rabbit Hole at the Midtown Global stand in the International Bazaar. What you’re looking at there is a bona fide fried pig tail, with ginger scallion sauce. It wasn’t bad! A little like pork belly. Pretty tasty. It was very much a tail, though (was more obvious once I’d eaten some). Takes some fortitude to do that one - adventurous eaters only! The drink is a roasted corn and barley green iced tea - that one was a miss.
Finally, we closed out the fair with some Sweet Martha’s cookies and the all-you-can-drink milk. The chaos that is the Sweet Martha’s kitchen (they sell 2 million cookies a day). We didn’t opt for the full-on 4 dozen bucket today.
Katie with our large cone of cookies (with about a dozen already eaten - they stack ‘em high!)
Artistic cookie shot, courtesy of Katie. Henry was zonked out by then, another successful year of Fair-going in the books. Already planning for next year!
