It's That Time Again...

It's Fairtime! That means... fair fooooooooooooooooooooooood!

I'm not going to post about it again... those in the know are either drooling or making gagging noises right now, and the rest of you just shrug and continue... but speaking of food:

After so many years here, I still can't get over the differences between what certain foods are called and what said food actually is. For example, "barbecue." A neighbor once said she was having a cookout and making bbq... to me, and to most of the rest of the country, this means there is a slab of meat being cooked on a fire at some point. Around here, it's sloppy joe on a bun. Homemade or not, Manwich does not = barbecue in my book.

Then there's pigs in blankets. When I was a kid, my mom made those, and they consisted of hotdogs wrapped in Pillsbury dough and baked in the oven. Here, it seems, they're cabbage rolls. No weiners involved, and no Poppin' Fresh Doughboy.

How about those mangoes? An older lady at work was describing a potluck dish she was going to cook and said she needed to buy mangoes on the way home to make it. I thought that was an odd sort of combination, but the food here can be odd at times, so I just assumed that mangoes and onions went together somehow and people liked it. Turns out, "mangoes" are what the locals call bell peppers. >.< HOW they came up with that, no one has been able to explain to me.

Now... let's talk pickles. I went into one of the many burger/ice cream places here once, with a mad craving for a cheeseburger with extra pickles. Upon biting into it, I stopped, shocked to the core... those were sweet pickles. Huge, thick-sliced bread-and-butter pickles, my least favorite kind... on. my. cheeseburger. I had never encountered such a thing before but it seems common here. This rude awakening has since been tempered by the discovery of 1. deep-fried DILL pickles (yummm) and 2. homemade dills in a variety of sizes and flavors (forget store bought pickles, or beets for that matter... homemade ones kick their mass-produced butts all over the place.) I've always loved those giant deli pickles, and I'll still buy a pickle-on-a-stick at the amusement park now and then. Yes, it's a deli dill, on a steeeek! Simple pleasures indeed.

Other weird things I've eaten here, which I believe I've mentioned before... chicken and waffles (made with shredded chicken gravy, quite good actually), scrapple, cheesesteaks with Cheez Whiz and fried onions, an assortment of Polish and Dutch food, pickled watermelon rinds, ham with dandelion greens, hot bacon dressing on potatoes, deer heart marinated in homemade wine (not a favorite), and emu jerky, among other things. I'm planning on eating more weird crap at the fair. I don't think I'm quite up to "fried spaghetti on a stick" though. Maybe next year.

By the way... TODAY is Talk Like a Pirate Day. Avast, mateys! Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr