Fair Food At Home!! – The Oklahoma Pastry Cloth

You Can Have Your Fair Food And Eat It Too!

Well, it’s that time of year. Fair time…and in Oklahoma, as the song states over the radio, ♪♪ It’s a great state of a-fair! ♪♪ Okies look forward to the Oklahoma State Fair. Even in this hoity-toity, modern world, the exhibit buildings are still full of canning and garden entries, photography contests and the tasty baked goods from home cooks itching for a ribbon and winner cash. The barns overflow with show cattle, sheep, pigs and horses and the drone of announcers instructing showmen in the rings permeates the agriculture part of the fairgrounds. And of course, every tornado shelter company, shop building firm and hot tub emporium has a display of their particular pride and joy features, not to mention the thousands of home product hawkers housed in the fairgound’s numerous, spacious expanses of concrete and skylights.

This year, Mr. Fix-It and I got to spend a day at the fair with the daughter, son-in-law and 9 month old granddaughter. Now THAT was a trip!! Watching my little grandbaby taking in all of the sights was pretty funny. And sights there were. Oh my goodness. I crawled out of my cave and noticed today’s fashions, evidently for the first time. I’ve decided that the fair is the excuse for any human being to leave home without ever looking in a mirror or even opening their eyes to judge their clothing before walking out the door. Older men and women in jeans obviously from a time when they were in high school and 200 lbs lighter, thought nothing of leaning over to expose bare buttocks and rotund waists. Lace shirts over brightly colored underwear and shorts with holes so big that I wanted to run to the rescue with a safety pin to help them avoid any humiliation – which they obviously felt none. We giggled at men with the dumbest hats, won at various arcades, and they wore them proudly to the chagrin of their wives or girlfriends. Of course, the callers at the arcades wore the same, dumb hats.

The strangest piece of clothing we saw came in the form of boots worn by a boatload of men. I’ve never seen them before. Back in “the day” here in the midwest, we used to have pointy-toed cowboy boats called, “Roach Killers” because one could trap a roach in a corner and squash it with the very pointed toe of the boot. But these new boots defy explanation, as the toes are so long that the longer worn, the more they curl back toward the ankle. We saw one pair of candy apple red and cream boots that curled so much, they looked like jester’s shoes. And I thought our 70′s fashions were weird!

These boots looked brand new and had obviously not been broken in to the curled toe yet. And these weren’t even as long as the red ones!

The dirty little secret about going to the fair, though, is that inside every fair-goer’s heart is this lame excuse to go berserk over foods that no ordinary individual would consider logical, let alone healthy! And my daughter is the fair-goer food officianado. She enters the front gate, brushing past the ticket taker with a wave of her receipt and a single-minded purpose in her eyes – heading toward the various food shrines like a teenager preparing to pay homage to Lady GaGa. My daughter walks the entire length of kiosks that stretch for a 100 miles (it felt that way to my feet anyway), to assess what kind of damage can be done to one body in the form of calories, grease and salmonella. Then, she maticulously makes a list in her mind ordering which confection will be first and which will be last. Sweet always comes first and protein comes last.

People storm the expanses of food kiosks

At least strawberry crepes are kind of healthy. They have fruit, right?

Everybody’s got to have a smoked turkey leg, especially if it’s jumbo!.

And you eat bacon for breakfast, so how bad can that be? Even chocolate covered. Ewww.

This little jewel comes with its own penance instructions for afterward – a battered and deep-fried snickers bar.

One of the fair treats that is of lesser offense to the health conscious psyche is the funnel cake. The batter is very basic and if cooked in a healthy fat and dusted with just a little powdered sugar, one can share a fair-sized cake with nine or ten people and really feel smug over the idiot eating the chocolate bacon!

The batter is poured into a funnel and then evenly distributed in concentric rings into a deep vat of hot peanut oil to achieve the characteristic pile of crisp and tender bread dusted with powdered sugar. For extra money, the cooks will add fresh strawberries topped with whipped cream to make this confection so much more healthy. I said that it’s fruit, right?!! Well, funnel cakes are something that this cook has been making at home for years. The kids loved them and it was a treat that I could give them on occassion without having to fork over $100 for tickets to go have someone else make them at the fair. I thought that I’d share my recipe with you and that way, you can have your own fair experience at home, just in case you don’t make it to the real thing!!

Funnel Cakes
Ingredients:
2 cups milk
2 eggs
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp vanilla
1 tbsp melted butter
2 to 2 1/2 cups sifted flour

Printable Recipe

Directions:

Add milk to eggs and beat until frothy. I use my small, electric hand mixer.

Add salt

And vanilla

In a separate bowl, mix 1 cup of flour with baking powder.

Add the one cup of flour and baking powder, a little at a time, to the egg mixture and continue to beat.

Continue to add second cup of flour, slowly, until batter has the consistency of a thin pancake batter or pudding. Add more if needed, but do so slowly so as to not add too much.

Beat in melted butter

Pour batter into a medium sized funnel, keeping the tip of your finger over the funnel end to prevent any batter from running through.

Over a skillet of 1/2″ to 1″ oil – peanut or coconut oil is good – heated to 350º, remove finger from the end of the funnel and move the funnel around to create concentric circles in the hot oil. After getting the size cake you want, bring the batter back over the cake to add more circles.

Turn the funnel cake when browned and cook the other side.

Remove and drain on a paper towel. Sprinkle with powdered sugar, using a shaker or sifter. Serve hot. For an added tasty treat, put fresh, sliced and sweetened strawberries on top and a dollop of whipped cream.

I hope the fair is coming near you!!