Today is the first day of fall and it’s also my birthday, so I’m going to recap one of my favorite parts of summer, the MN State Fair. The best part of course is the food, here’s a sampling of what I ate during the three days I went:
Somali sambusa with spiced ground beef and onions. aka breakfast 
Marinated tomatoes and peppers, farmers cheese, rhubarb jam, gluten free pita. Nice fresh contrast to the usual fried fair foods 
The classic Pronto Pup. Some people prefer corn dogs and that’s FINE 
Sweet corn cola float. The cola was sweet corn flavored and they also brought back the sweet corn ice cream to float in it 
This cider was supposed to have coconut flavor or something but just tasted like cider, it was fine 
Union Hmong Kitchen is always a standout, the new thing this year was grilled sticky rice which I opted to top with the shredded Hmong jerky 
Fried olives, so simple but one of my favorite things 
Twist cone from the dairy building 
Sweet Martha’s cookies 
Amish donut 
Lefse, brown sugar filled 
Yes, I had the deep fried ranch. The hot honey was really good with it 
The interior wasn’t really ranch dressing, it was more like ranch-flavored cream cheese 
A new vendor that uses all-indigenous ingredients. This was pretty good but I think they’re still getting dialed in, the bison meatballs were pretty tough. I also tried the fried crickets
No trip to the Fair is complete without checking out the seed art, which had a great variety as usual. The second gallery has the more explicitly political ones, Politics Thread yada yada just skip it if you want.
One of my other favorite summer things is getting outdoors, so you can follow my posts about this year’s canoe trip over in the Nature Threads: http://disq.us/p/30efg8k