A Fair Piece
CWAN: the Ossipee edit
Fair Food Rules: if you are going to get a Bloomin’ Onion, everyone has to commit to the Bloomin’ Onion.
Wiser words were never spoke so it almost goes without saying that they came from Peter. The Bloomin’ Onion1 is certainly among the charismatic megafauna of fair eats - the drama of the side tent where the giant white onions are chopper-ooed and then dunked in batter, their boiling oil bath, then handed off with a little plastic tub of secret sauce tucked in the middle to complete the floral analogy. And a well-fried Bloomin’ Onion is good! Until you are about a quarter of the way into it and you realize how much onion there is to go so you offer it to everyone in your party and they take a petal or two but they are dealing with their own Live-Free-Or-Fry fair food so they don’t take a lot and you’ve still got half a goddamn onion left. At which point you finally understand the Rule of Peter: if someone is getting a Bloomin’ Onion, everyone has to commit to it.
Suffice it to say that we did not get one.
New Hampshire in October used to be a command performance for us, but of late we have not gone up to enjoy its pleasures. The C-bridge Laskins last gathered as a fam for April’s eclipse adventure but the stars and schedules aligned for Indigenous Peoples’ Day weekend in NH, complete with a fair, a hike, and some cooking without a net!
The Sandwich Fair offers one of the best fair food scenes in New England. This may be due to timing - at three days, it is a solid commitment for vendors and they stand to make a good amount of $ - or size - total fair attendance may top 40,000 - or just all-aroundness - this fair has a lot going on so you can make a day of it. So in addition to your standard fair fare of fried dough, italian sausages, pizza, burgers, chicken fingers, fries, bloomin’ onions, and all the soft-serve you could possibly want, there is also barbecue, buffalo burgers, deep-fried Vermont cheese curds, corndogs, several homemade donut vendors, apple crisp, fancy grilled cheese, rice bowls, burritos, crepes, muffins, shumai, gyoza, fried pork belly on a stick, coffees, lemonades, and that Laskin fam favorite: the pulled pork sundae. This is basically a soft-drink cup with a large scoop of pulled pork, a smaller scoop of mashed potatoes, and then a half a cherry tomato on top because you can’t have a sundae without a cherry on top.
What there are not are smoked turkey legs like at Disneyworld and that feels like an extremely missed opportunity because I would have had one of those and felt virtuous but instead had to settle for pork belly on a stick. TBH this was pretty great, if small, although really how much fried fat should one eat anyway? Bill is a purist, always heading for the sausage. We wanted to try the deep fried Vermont cheese curds, but she was frying them to order and had a very long line so we headed off to view prize-winning vegetable and baked goods and other jelly.
We are particular fans of the vegetable creations although it seemed that there were fewer entries than in years past. And the food-in-jars competition was frankly a bit sparse too - is no one preserving these days?
One can be forgiven for foregoing the standard fair soft-serve if Sandwich Creamery is in the house.
And of course there is a LOT of meat on the hoof at this fair.
That little kid on the left kept turning around to tell everyone that those two enormous black beasts were his sisters. Not clear if that meant they were HIS sisters or they were his sister’s but he was right in there regardless.
Everyone knows that when visiting with the offspring, you have to be a good parent and take your kids out for a nice dinner. So we did some research with our local expert.
That glass of cabernet sauvignon may have been worth every penny of its $6.50, but the Village Kitchen seriously delivered on the prime rib.
From the Cooking Without A Net department, our airbnb lodgings in Ossipee were completely soul-less but reasonably comfortable and most importantly, had an OVEN and a sink with RUNNING WATER.2 This meant that we could have an actual fam dinner that was cooked inside which was a good thing because by Sunday night it was pouring rain. Before that though, I needed to make some sandos for our hike that day, up and around Mount Livermore with our server Peter.3 If you really want to learn how to make a wicked good sandwich, you need to study with my friend Patty4 for whom sandwich-making is maybe not an art, but definitely an artisanal craft. When creating a sandwich, Patty thinks about things like textural variety, moisture barriers, flavor pops, rich v. lean balance, healthiness, and the structural integrity of the bread. She creates with restraint but never skimps, resulting in a right-sized lunch that leaves you neither hungry nor over-stuffed. Having studied her methods, I was pretty pleased with these ham and cheddar and tomato/ginger/sultana chutney jobbers although she questioned my choice of Dijon mustard as a moisture barrier.
Reader, it worked quite well. Here’s the pre-sandwich, pre-rain view from Mount Livermore.
First fam dinner in MONTHS featured Chicken Bog, eminently suitable for a soggy October night. You poach a whole chicken in chicken broth and aromatics, then put the bones back in for further reducing after you take the meat off. Then the next day you cook the meat with rice and a good smoked sausage in that double broth, and serve it with hot sauce if you want a kick or just plain if you want to wallow in comfort which is how I like it. Chicken bog travels nicely, given the two-part prep and minimal finishing required. I also had a hankering to try these cider-roasted apples, which ended up more like cider-exploded apples but were still super delicious.
Dunkin’ breakfast in the car the next morning while delivering the Mule to her Maine quarters was something of a comedown and decidedly non-photogenic so I’ll leave you with more snaps from the fair.
That last group is the peanut gallery at the antique tractor pull,5 where this kind of thing happens:
That’s a FULL PULL!
Or Awesome Onion, as it is technically known at fairs because the blooming kind are a specialité de la Outback Steakhouse. But blooming is more fun to say.
And the requisite S&P
Peter is an Americorps volunteer with the Squam Lakes Association this year and he has learned that you don’t work for Americorps, you serve.
She of the pre-Vineyard loaner kitchen.
Tractors made before 1965 vie to pull the heaviest stone boat - which is a metal slab loaded with concrete blocks. The boat weighed almost 20,000 pounds by the last pull!