Minnesota State Fair 2012

You didn’t think we’d let the state fair commence and not write about it, did you? We had the luxury of an office-outing and treated ourselves to one of the biggest attended events in the nation: the Minnesota State Fair.

1,788,512 attended the fair during its’ 12 day run this year. That’s the second best attended in history. It surpassed last year’s attendance by 18,640 guests and fell short of the record set in 2009 by less than 2,000 guests. The very first state fair was held in 1859 (the year after Minnesota was granted statehood) and finally found a permanent 320-acre parcel of land located between St. Paul and Minneapolis in 1885.

There were approximately 311 food vendors so this gave us quite the challenge of trying to consume as much as possible within a few hours. Since us foodies are always “hungry” for a challenge, we created a check-list of some of the newest vendors along with a few all-time favorites.

Needless to say, we were not able to conquer the entire list (we were easily distracted with the Giant Slide, karaoke, a game of skee ball, the carved butter creations, the Miracle of Birth barn and a group sing-a-long to “Love Shack”). However, we still managed to demolish quite a variety of mini-meals which included:  Duke’s Poutine (fries smothered in gravy topped with cheese curds), red velvet funnel cake (a fancy step-up from ordinary cake batter), macaroons, garlic fries (fries literally topped with a generous helping of minced garlic) fried mac n’ cheese (how can you go wrong with these savory bites?), deep fried cookie dough (is there anything better?) pronto pups (similar to a corn dog), pickle rolls (a spread of cream cheese on top of sliced pastrami rolled into a pickle) nut rolls (fluffy-goodness surrounded by salty pecans and such) and lastly we had nachos chased down with beergaritas (yes, a beergarita is exactly what you think it means).

Going into a food-coma and realizing our gluttony, we decided we were happy with our full bellies and made note to prepare ourselves for next year. Tell us what YOUR favorite vendors were!