Fair Food

Dear Husband and I maintained our annual ritual of meeting a friend for dinner at the 40th Urbana Sweetcorn Festival this year. Okay, it was the second time we had done so, but it followed much the same pattern as last year: standing in line, complaining about the prices, questioning the healthfulness of much of the food for sale, and half -heartedly listening to the music. (I will never forget my first visit, taking my Chinese roommate to hear the former guitarist for Santana, her first outdoor concert. It rained, so when we got back to our apartment, she made us hot tea. Unfortunately for me, it was green tea, and I was still very caffeine naive. I was awake until 5am, reading.)

After getting our tickets, we started in the corn line, of course. The corn was boiled and buttery; I wish I had not missed the table with the salt shakers due to the crowd. JS told us about roasted corn on a stick with a variety of Mexican sauces out in California that sounded intriguing.

Since we had eaten BBQ for lunch, I asked DH to buy me a corndog while JS and I waited for in line. He came back with the biggest corndog I have ever seen. Good thing it came with french fries--it cost $10, which was all the tickets he had with him. He had ordered it at the first place he found selling them, and I didn't have the heart to tell him later that another both offered smaller dogs for three bucks. He graciously helped me eat it, although the crust was a little doughy in the center.

JS bought an excellent pad Thai dish, probably the best value at the whole market. She didn't think as highly of the tofu wrap from a different vendor. For dessert I chose a large, vegan snickerdoodle, crispy on the outside and gooey on the inside. DH had a vanilla cone. Taken as a whole, the fair food was just...fair.

We tried to dodge the cigarette smoke to listen to a band of amateurs, but it wasn't worth looking for a place to sit, so full and out of tickets, we bid our good-byes to summer and each other, as the next day I left for four weeks in Madison, Wisconsin. (You can read about some of those adventures here and here.)

Editor's Note: Other posts you might like include reviews of Taste of Champaign and Taste of Madison.