Apron Free Cooking ~ Fair Food

By Noel Lizotte

The county fair means dif­fer­ent things to peo­ple. I’ve heard folks talk­ing about how they can’t wait to ride all those twirling rides. I’ve heard peo­ple dis­cussing the best way to load live­stock and haul feed into the fair grounds. Other peo­ple have com­mented that they are look­ing for­ward to the dis­plays in the mer­chant build­ing, 4-H barns and mid­way games.

Mostly though, I’ve heard peo­ple talk­ing about the “Fair Food.” It seems like there’s a vari­ety of food rea­sons to go to the fair. Ele­phant Ears are quite pop­u­lar. Home­made ice cream is high on the list. Fair Fries (with a ton of vine­gar, of course) are men­tioned just before a glazed-over-eyes expres­sion crosses the speaker’s face. Lemon shakes, ham­burg­ers, hot dogs, bratwurst, and the Lykens Fire Department’s food tent have all made the list too.

I under­stand why peo­ple look for­ward to the fair. I remem­ber spend­ing long days at the 4-H barn and antic­i­pat­ing what spe­cialty of “Fair Food” I was going to eat for sup­per. We didn’t pur­chase all our meals from the food ven­dors. We packed our break­fast, lunch and snacks from home and had the treat of sup­per to look for­ward to. Most often our sup­per was pur­chased from the 4-H food stand.

With five kids tag­ging along, my mother got to be a real expert at pack­ing food for the day. She was espe­cially good at pack­ing food that would sur­vive the heat and long hours of a day at the fair. We ate lots of peanut but­ter and jelly sand­wiches. We munched our way through bags of potato chips. We nib­bled more than our share of Oreo cook­ies. We drank gal­lons of Coun­try Time Lemon­ade and Wyler’s Grape Drink.

Tips for pack­ing food for the fair:

1. Use a cooler and ice packs to keep meat and may­on­naise based sal­ads cool.

2. Wrap sand­wiches indi­vid­u­ally to make it easy for 4-Hers to grab a bite between judg­ing events.

3. Pack an entire jar of peanut but­ter, jelly and a whole loaf of bread if you plan to make sand­wiches as you go through­out the day.

4. Water bot­tles and the indi­vid­ual fla­vor packs that are avail­able now pro­vide a vari­ety of bev­er­ages to choose from. Keep a few water bot­tles cold in the cooler with ice and replace with new ones as the cold ones are used.

5. Mini car­rots and apples are easy to add veg­eta­bles and fruits to the menu with­out wor­ry­ing about cook­ing or preparation.

Enjoy the fair and all the won­der­ful food they offer on the mid­way! But if you plan to spend the entire week at the fair, pack some meals so your food bud­get doesn’t go sky high. You’ll also be able to enjoy the spe­cial treats even more if you’re not wor­ried about off­set­ting the nutri­tional value of pink cot­ton candy!

Noel Lizotte is break­ing free of cor­po­rate stress with con­ve­nience cook­ing! Her just release cook­book is avail­able at www.apronfreecooking.com. She also writes a monthly col­umn at www.culinarychat.net.

Posted by Noel Lizotte on Jul 19 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.