MONROE — Elephant ears, corn dogs and Purple Cows, oh my!
If you’re heading to the Evergreen State Fair today through Monday, it’s likely you’ll need to grab a bite to eat sometime between cooing over the piglets and riding the Ferris wheel.
OK, most of it can’t be listed as health food. But the purely fun meal choices at the fair are so many, you’d have to go each day in order to sample everything.
My granddaughters from Edmonds and I attended one morning last week. Paige is nearly 4 and Ella is closing in on 18 months.
Children that young can’t handle hamburgers overflowing with grilled Walla Walla sweet onions, dripping pulled-pork sandwiches or even caramel-covered apples.
Given those limitations and because we arrived right at 10 a.m., we went first for the Fisher fair scones and bought a baker’s dozen for $16.
Slathered with butter and raspberry preserves, the warm scones offer just the right mid-morning treat. The girls enjoyed their scones as much as I did. Yummy, indeed.
Most Northwest grocery stores sell boxes of Fisher scone mix, but there’s just something about the warm scones sold hot and fresh at the fair. It’s part of the tradition.
Fisher Flour Mills opened in Seattle in 1910. The company began selling its scones at what is now the Washington State Fair in Puyallup in 1915. Now based in Puyallup, the company then branched out to sell scones at the Snohomish County fair in Monroe and others around the Northwest.
At noon, we sampled the corn on the cob from the Nile Shriners of Mountlake Terrace. They buy their corn from Bob Ricci, whose farm is south of Snohomish. The club estimates it sells about 25,000 ears of sweet corn each year at the fair. At $3.50 a pop, that makes for some good-sized donations to the club’s charities.
If we’d had more time and their mom wasn’t so squeamish about their sugar intake, the girls might have been treated to Snohomish Pie Co.’s new “piescream sundae” or a Purple Cow from the Snohomish County Dairy Women.
Never had a Purple Cow? It’s a big scoop of blackberry ice cream floating in lemon-lime soda and topped with a shot of blackberry syrup. This concoction costs about $4.50, but if you time it right, you might walk away without paying. Every 13th Purple Cow order is free, and you’ll know it, too, because the servers ceremoniously ring a cow bell.
I also might have bought my granddaughters some curly fries, Native American salmon tacos, a funnel cake, chocolate-covered strawberries and so on.
You other grandparents know how easy it is to spoil those grandkids. Especially with food.
When the girls get older, they will twist my arm for corn dogs, Walla Walla sweet onion burgers and elephant ears.
What’s a grandma to do?
Eat, eat!
Also at the fair
Look around and you also will find turkey legs, burritos, flautas, gyros, teriyaki, Australian onion bursts, Danish waffle cones, Hawaiian shaved ice, liquid nitrogen frozen desserts, frozen yogurt, frozen bananas, kettle corn, roasted nuts, fudge, pickles, bratwurst and bacon. Oh, my.
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