If it's fried, it must be at the Big E

Today we made the pilgrimage to The Big E, the multi-state state fair in Western Mass, to do two things:

1) Eat disgusting fried food
2) Check out the farm animals

Let's take them in reverse order.

Cows!



Sheep!



Woolly and naked sheep!



Mexican wrestler sheep!



Just-back-from-jazzercise sheep!



Real Sheep of Beverly Hills!



Okay, enough of that. Now to the food.

One of my goals was to find a place selling deep-fried butter, which debuted at the Texas State Fair in 2009, hit Iowa earlier this year and finally (finally!) showed up on the East Coast.

Butter? Meh! How about this?



It was a tough decision, but we opted for the butter and the Kool-Aid.



The latter, it turned out, would be easy to replicate at home: the secret ingredient is Kool-Aid powder in the batter, with a generous amount shaken like sugar over the dough while it's still hot. Inside, they're a stunning color not found in nature.



And they were pretty good; the slightly tart flavor of the drink powder gave a nice contrast to the sweet dough.

And then to the other. The secret is to freeze the pats of butter so that they don't immediately soak into the dough. There's a pool of hot, cinnamon-sugary butter inside each ball, which means you have to eat them very carefully.



I liked the butter better; The Boy had expected a more salty, savory taste, so preferred the hot pink variety. Neither of us felt the need to eat anything else for a while.

After a couple of hours of sheep/cow/piglet/chicken/goat-gazing, however, we were ready for more. In particular, I had my eye on something I'd seen advertised in previous years but never tried: the Craz-E Burger.

All I knew was that you could buy t-shirts that said something like, "I finished the Craz-E burger!" which led me to assume it was either so huge, or so rich, or so labor-intensive to devour that the few who did so were hailed as champions.

Now I realize that it's because the Craz-E burger is crap.

Thing is, when I think "bacon-cheeseburger inside a doughnut," I imagine a hot, fragrant Krispy Kreme, fresh out of the oven, glistening with melted sugar, enveloping a patty of sirloin, cooked medium. The cheese is melting onto the meat; the bacon is crisp. The flavors dance together, varying levels of sweetness and saltiness playing off each other, creating a perfectly balanced whole.

This is what we got.





The doughnut was cold, the meat was gray, the cheese probably didn't even possess the capacity to melt. And yes, maybe I shouldn't have expected more from something served up at a state fair, but still. It was sad.

Thank goodness happiness was close by.





Hot, salty, with a crisp batter and perfectly soft cheese.

Then, as we have on previous visits, we headed to the houses of the individual New England states for dessert: rich, eggy Finnish pancakes with blueberry sauce;



and fresh raspberries.



And then, just because: a piece of bacon covered in dark chocolate. That's how you do the sweet-salty thing.



All in all, a fun trip, though not one we need to make again for another couple of years. The attractions were pretty much the same as on our previous visit (we later realized we'd taken photos of the exact same food stalls in 2009 as we did in 2011), and state-fair-food trends move so gradually that we're not likely to miss out on the next deep-fried delicacy if we skip a season.

Though I can't say the same about the spring line of sheep fashion ...

Gray days, blue berries

It's the last day of our vacation in Gloucester, where we've been renting a house on the Annisquam River. The week has been perfect — fresh air, long walks, kayaking, and peaceful stretches where the silence is broken only by birdsong and the sound of a cormorant's wings hitting the water as it takes off.

(Full disclosure: as I write this, however, there are buzzsaw noises and salty language from across the street, where contractors are building a McMansion for a speculator who apparently razed a nice wooded lot for the purpose. Good luck selling that, jerkfaces!)

The week started off hot and sunny, but around Wednesday afternoon gray clouds rolled in, and it has been foggy and wet, alternating between drizzle and torrential, ever since. But heck, we're on vacation, and I'm English, so we've still been sitting out on the porch in rocking chairs, staring out across the water. The river is tidal, so the view changes every few hours.



Just so you know it's not always so gray, here's a sunset from earlier in the week:



When the breeze picks up and drives us back indoors, we retreat to the kitchen, of course. The house has been in the same family for at least three generations, and the cooking equipment reflects the passage of time. I love these cabinets.



One section of the countertop is metal; I don't know whether this was common at one point, and whether the purpose was to provide a place for hot dishes or a colder surface for rolling out pastry. Any thoughts?



This is a family that likes to cook, if the preponderance of baking tools and recipe books is any indication. The best discovery was the box of handwritten recipe cards, including annotations and comments.



Blueberries feature in many of the recipes. As we'd just bought a pint, and needed a reminder that it was actually summer, rain notwithstanding, we decided to try a blueberry cobbler adapted from this recipe. The berries are briefly boiled with sugar and lemon juice before being poured into the baking dish on top of the batter.

Before:



After:



The fruit was intense, the cake acted like a sponge for the juice, and the leftovers made a lovely breakfast.

I also wrote down the family's recipe for blueberry slump, in which the batter is dropped onto hot fruit and steamed like dumplings. I'll be making that when we get home.

It's good to have vacation mementoes you can eat.