Isn't spam sushi actually a thing?
The picture just makes it look like a variation on spam musubi, so it's not really a bizarre combination whatever it counts as. I don't particularly like spam, but the more I look at it the more I think that it actually could be pretty good.
I like the look of the bacon donut slider too. There's a food market stall near my work that does something similar. Have yet to try them though.
That's a lot of shock and ALLCAPS for foods that seem pretty normal. Spam musubi isn't everyone's cup of tea, but it's a common food and kind of delicious. Number 5 is just an overstuffed version of Korean/Japanese carp-shaped waffles. They're usually filled with red bean jam, but I've seen them filled with custard or ice cream. And isn't 15 just hot dogs? I guess there are TWO of them?
Have you checked your cholesterol lately? I'm thinking it might not be normal.
Yeah, actually these don't look especially bizarre, and indeed most of them look pretty tasty for fair food - home-made donut with real whipped cream and strawberries? Battered, fried, spiced paneer? Artisanal, locally-sourced corndog? I don't think I'd be able to eat all three on one visit to the fair, but one would probably be pretty tasty. My heart yearns toward the carp waffle cone but I will probably do my usual and get fried green tomatoes.
The best thing I ever had at the fair was a home-made banana flip - sponge cake, whipped cream, banana slices. It wasn't flashy enough to succeed and this was before the artisanal-homemade fair food thing so the vendor never came back to the fair, but it was a very tasty dessert.
The fair is definitely one of the things I miss about MN, though the deep-fried Twinkie and the chocolate/bacon things that I ate there weren't anything particularly special. The bucket of chocolate chip cookies, though...
There's a lot of Minnesota State Fair food that's pretty impressively good: it's basically a competition at this point.
I'm disappointed to see that they're moving away from what is truly important about fair food, though, which is that it's on a stick.
Also if you follow the link it turns out that that stand that sells pickles and pickle-related foods now has a version of their pickle spear wrapped in pastrami with cream cheese that is based on a reuben. I don't know if that sounds good or not to people but I can attest to the fact that their pickles are absolutely wonderful, especially when it's a hot day and you've been walking around for a while.
As a traditionalist, I want to know what they've done with the deep fried butter (not to mention the DFB on a stick)!!!
As a traditionalist, I want to know what they've done with the deep fried butter (not to mention the DFB on a stick)!!!
Burger King, the restaurant chain backed by 3G Capital and Warren Buffett, will begin selling deep-fried sticks of macaroni and cheese encrusted in Cheetos-flavored breading, part of a trend toward blending fast food with well-known snack brands
Big Fast Food moving in on Big State Fair.
13: Am I the only that did not know about Fried Jesus?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abel_Gonzales
Now I must spread the Word.
Does the Wisconsin State Fair also pride itself on items like this? I don't think the Pennsylvania one does.
I never knew PA had a state fair until I googled just now. It really doesn't seem like a very big deal. Even the Big Butler Fair seems bigger.
Here in Ohio we're very proud of our state fair that has many deep-fried foods and a butter cow, but you aren't allowed to eat the butter cow.
When I went, they had a butter John Glenn.
20: There's always a butter cow, and every year they have additional butter sculptures of prominent Ohioans. Smart money is on a butter Lebron James this year.
I wonder if the Florida State Fair sculpted him in whatever animal secretion they are famous for.
1, 7, 8, etc: Neither the article nor the Fair is claiming that these foods are new on the face of the earth; they're claiming, presumably correctly, that they're new to the MN State Fair.
I was deeply disappointed by the burnt ends at Arthur Bryant's. OTOH, biking the riverfront and City Market area was pretty great.
What is "rancher's slaw"?
Sometimes in the old west, a man had to take the slaw into his own hands.
As a traditionalist, I demand the return of Machinery Hill! And root beer flavored milk!
22: I can't tell if the obvious answer is on Standpipe's blog or a funny joke that I should make.
BTW, I hadn't seen this before:
I couldn't recall the name of Arthur Bryant's, so I googled up "kansas city bbq", the map for which search includes not only restaurants, but also brief, 2-line descriptions (e.g. "Long-standing BBQ joint with a patio"). That's pretty good. Also impressive is that it's a condensation of a longer, but still-brief summary that's in the sidebar (it turns "seasonal outdoor seating" into "patio").
We have a state fair but it's in Sacramento so most of the people who live in the state never even have heard of it. I've been, though, and it was pretty great, though roughly on the scale of the LA County Fair. I still remember when the latter had large sections featuring the extensive intra-county agriculture, but I've gotta be one of the youngest people who can say that.
I think Megan is a habitué of the CA state fair, but of course she lives in Sacramento.
I don't think I've been to the CA state fair since the 80s. I remember there was a lot of livestock related stuff, but I also remember not paying much attention to it.
33: You might want to check the bottoms of your shoes.
I don't have any shoes left from the 1980s.
I've been to the California State Fair. It was OK, but not a patch on the MN one.
I think the MN one is something like the second largest/most popular one in the country, after Texas' state fair. And I think I've heard that disputed too given that the Texas one is open way longer so the per day/per fair attendance numbers are different. It's a lot larger (and more fun) than I expected before I went there.
Even more than the food I liked the display of really old tractors (with an old guy wandering down the line starting them up and showing how they worked every so often), and the room full of quilts where I got to see my mother's Mennonite heritage come out full force as she walked around judging people for using sewing machines to make their quilts. (She wasn't that mean, I guess, but it was clear that she had standards in quilting.)
If you're going to use a sewing machine, why not just buy the quilt at Marshall's?
They were very pretty, but it loses something when you know the patterning is basically just programming a design into the machine rather than doing the hard work of actually quilting.
In my quadrant it's OK to use a machine to piece, though you'd better not lower your standards for flat corners, but a machine-quilted quilt is to be treated as a purely utilitarian object, not for show (much less shows).
I've sat around other people's quilting frames quilting their quilts, but never done one of my own.
Ooh, your mom does Mennonite quilting, MHPH? I can't really say I quilt by hand in that I haven't actually finished any of my projects, though I've pieced two things almost big enough for my bed and am a little afraid of the quilting piece. So first I've been patching an old quilt from an antique store and then I'll bind that, except I started last fall and then stopped making progress. It gets a lot of use even unfinished.
Unless you have a many-thousand-dollar machine, machine quilting still takes quite a lot of effort. Lots of the automated machines sold, though.
Then there's Pale Gray Labs...
That's only one of the fifty shades of gray.
If I could sew, I could make my own quilt for backpacking, if I could figure out how to fill the quilt with down without making a mess. If I didn't already have two quilts for backpacking.
How hard can it be, Moby? You make essentially a pillowcase or envelope, fill it with down, stitch the fourth side closed, and then quilt it evenly enough that the down can't scrunch up in any given place, right? I'll bet you could do it!
I mean, or just buy two quilts for backpacking. But what's the fun in that?
43: Not at all, actually, which is what made it so hilarious that she could tell the difference from ten feet away and had standards about it too.
My Grandmother (her mother) quilted, though, and managed to make a full quilt for each of her grandchildren before her hand tremors got too severe for her to live up to her standards (10 an inch*). To be honest mine has been tucked away somewhere in storage in Pennsylvania for years and years - I think it was blue but that's about all I can remember. But if I ever end up with a house I'll think about hanging it up** because from what I can remember it was genuinely really nice.
*I won't say she was proud, because that has awkward cultural connotations. But I will say she was satisfied with an even ten stitches an inch.
**The idea of which cracks me up because I can imagine with total clarity the ambivalence she would have felt about that: on the one hand he's displaying what I made for him and really likes it; on the other hand, well goodness, it's not going to keep anyone warm up there on the wall is it.
49: You should read the Alice Walker story "Everyday Use" (or something like that if I have the title wrong) for exactly the dynamic in your second footnote. Even in my bad little self-taught stitching, I've been surprised how quickly practice can lead to mostly even stitches and to being able to eyeball 1/4 or 5/8 inch or whatever you need. I should really get back to that, except now I'm finally knitting again and I don't even really find the time for that.
49.3 is perfect.
I notched marks into my thumbnail to stay even enough for the older quilters. Oh, and they saved particular corners for me as the only lefty.
Neither of my grandmothers would have thought of quilting - one was brought up to white work and embroidery (and hated it and became a flapper expatriate) and the other was dubious of all crafts and thought piecing specifically was low. Especially if That Woman who trapped her son was doing it.
I notched marks into my thumbnail to stay even enough for the older quilters.
Dang.
47: You have to make a baffles or you're fucked in the cold. My good quilt has a dozen or so compartments that run the long way. Each of those compartments needs filled with a relatively small amount of down (about an ounce, but you need a different spreadsheet to calculate how much for each as they differ in size).
My less good quilt* is made exactly the way you suggest, but that process won't produce something suitable for anything but summer use. The parts where you did the quilting would not have sufficient loft and you'd lose heat.
* It's actually a very high quality quilt that I bought for cheap because it was a display model, but it says its only good down to 45 and by that they mean you won't die over night. You're only going to be comfortable to about 55 or 50. But it only weight 13 ounces.
53: Don't you need two sets of longitudinal down channels, offset so there's no through-line of stitching? Like having double offset studs so you can serpentine batt insulation between them.
Wouldn't a sleeping bag be more comfortable?
If you're going to use a sewing machine, why not just buy the quilt at Marshall's?
Because Marshall's doesn't have the design or the colours you want. This is like telling a writer that if they're going to use a word processor, they might as well just read Harry Potter.
57: Heavier for the warmth, isn't it? You don't get much insulation out of the part of the bag you're lying on, because your weight crushes the loft out of it. (I believe, from my city apartment with very little actual outdoor experience.)
That's the theory. You sleep on an insulated pad.
54: I think I may have seen that in a very expensive bag for very cold weather. I don't think two rows of needle holes that are separated by a couple inches of down makes for much of a difference down to freezing (which is the coldest ones I've looked at deliberately).
Wait, you're going backpacking with a quilt? How are you getting to the trailhead? Horse and buggy?
It's just the term used for a sleeping bag that isn't a bag, but flat or mostly flat.
Aren't you up really early? Did you get a dairy?
Because I think the west coast is ready for artisanal, organic fried butter.
No, I got insomnia. So I should probably get a dairy, to be more productive at 4 am.
58: "This is like telling a writer that if they're going to use a word processor put a set of pre-written paragraphs in an order they like, they might as well just read Harry Potter."
"Quilting" literally just means the kind of stitching involved. If that's not happening, and especially if the patterns are programmed in (seriously), it's more like having someone who has rigged up a sewing machine to reproduce patterns in needlepoint. I mean, yeah they're sitting there making sure everything is working and guiding the fabric through it, but it's not really the same thing.
My first thought was, "hipster quilters? What the hell?" My second thought is, hipster quilters is actually not surprising at all.
Actually, I quite like Harry Potter.
Heavier for the warmth, isn't it? You don't get much insulation out of the part of the bag you're lying on, because your weight crushes the loft out of it
That's why you have a camping mat, surely. And sleeping bags are really light these days.
But a quilt will be about 3/4ths the weight of the equivalent bag. The down is close to weightless (if you get the good stuff), but you have a bunch of material and don't need any zipper.
Yard sale today had a Double Wedding Ring in pleasant shades of blue on cream, excellent shaped binding, completely hand-quilted at about six stitches the inch, $12. I didn't get it because, as my mother is a quilter, I have no lack, but I considered getting it for her.