San Diego County Fair: The Food

When it’s that time of year for the San Diego County Fair, you know it’s time for you to go and pig out. You eat things you wouldn’t normally eat. You see foods that you see no where else. You think about trying the foods and wonder if you can really stomach it or not. Here’s some of the things I ate at the fair this year. If Alyssa had gone with me, I bet she would have tried some of the things I faltered on (like the chocolate covered bacon and the oatmeal cookie chicken sandwich – WTF).

Roxy Restaurant is usually one of the first places I hit at the fair. I can’t pass up the Garlic Battered Mushrooms with Ranch sauce… if you’re a mushroom lover like me, this are divine. I didn’t even realize until this year that Roxy Restaurant is in San Diego County – in Encinitas even! HOW DID I NOT KNOW THIS? Sorry for the shouting, but my surprise was truly great in knowing that I could have been having garlic battered mushrooms all year long! Trust me when I say you’ll see a review of the restaurant on this blog some time this year!

Oh, looking at this photo makes me long for another mushroom. I did notice that compared to my photo from last year, they put one less mushroom on the stick. Arrrgh. I will console myself with the knowledge that I don’t have to wait until next June to get these again.

Next up! Potatoes. There are so many ways to have a potato at the fair – fried, Australian battered, chips, covered in stuff, or baked with other kinds of stuff! I must also mention that the day we went to the fair was a Tuesday. Tuesdays you can get a $2 taste of items at every food booth in the fair. I got the $2 baked potato from the California Pita Co., which was 1/3 of a baked potato with butter and chives.

Uh, I’m pretty sure I could not have eaten a full sized potato if this was 1/3. It was so good, I ate every buttery bit, including the skin. This filled me up though and I started wondering how much more I could eat. Not everyone has a bottomless stomach like our dear friend, Alyssa.

Chicken Charlie’s is where you can get some of the crazy food. Like the Krispy Kreme Chicken Sandwich (which Alyssa has had), Deep Fried Avocados, Deep Fried Frog Legs, Deep Fried Smores, the Oatmeal Cookie Chicken Sandwich (the Kookie Cookie) and the Zucchini Weeni. Let’s guess what I got from here!

If you guessed Zucchini Weeni then you win an imaginary prize! Congrats! This is a hot dog stuffed inside of a zucchini, which is then battered and deep fried. It was pretty good, the only lame part was that it fell apart before I finished it. Also, there was no mustard or anything besides ketchup available. I don’t like ketchup! Damn it. Oh well. Still tasty.

At this point I was starting to wind down. Not too much room left in the stomach and I felt I was getting close to being borderline sick so I didn’t want to eat too many more fried things. Onto dessert it was at this point!

Mmm, cinnamon rolls.

I adore cinnamon. I would marry it if I could. This cinnamon roll was packed with lots and lots of cinnamon. I only wish there was more frosting. The cinnamon roll seemed to absorb the frosting and by the time we finished it, there was no frosting left, just little cinnamon bites.

My last item of the day? I can’t ever go without this, even though the last few years it wasn’t quite up to par. But my last item of the day was a Date Shake.

I’m very happy to report that this year’s Date Shake is much, much improved. With date bits in every sip, I was chewing through my shake and enjoying the milkshakey goodness. The past few years the Date Shake was seriously lacking in dates, but they have more than made up for it this year. So happy!

Are you planning on visiting the San Diego County Fair this year? Don’t forget that you can get tickets at Albertson’s for $11. Or, you can do like I did and enter a One Day Contest for free admission to the fair. Go and pig out and enjoy summer at the fair.