Flowering Onion, MN State Fair, St. Paul, Minnesota, September 2009, all photos © 2009 by QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.
It’s Labor Day, final day of the Minnesota State Fair, when the last of 12 Butter Queens will take her place in the Butter Booth at the Dairy Building. The Fair signifies the unofficial end of Summer (officially marked by shadows of the Fall Equinox). We spent 6 hours walking around the Fairgrounds last Friday.
The art in the juried show seemed of a higher caliber this year. We saw some great work in the Art Building, including the commemorative painting from artist Leo Stans displayed front and center.
In the food category, we bought a paring knife at Standing Buffalo Knives and a Grill It! in the Merchandise Building. As strange as the Grill It! looks (an engineer must have designed it), we made the best bacon ever for breakfast yesterday morning. But we weren’t as adventurous as usual when consuming Minnesota State Fair foods on-a-stick.
Liz and I are eating 8 leftover Tom Thumb Donuts as I type and trying to recall what else we had to eat last Friday. We split a Flowering Onion four ways with our friends, a bucket of fries with vinegar and ketchup, a Papa Pronto Pup from one of the original 1947 stands, two large cups of fresh squeezed lemonade (refills half price), and a few morsels of chicken from the Grill It! demonstrator.
We brought home Saint Agnes Baking Company’s blueberry lemon sourdough bread, named after the widowed Grandma Agnes Rod who began baking in the 1940’s. That might be all we consumed in the food department. Well, except for our personal best — Peach Glazed Pig Cheeks from Famous Dave’s.
Peach Glazed Pig Cheeks On-A-Stick, MN State Fair, St. Paul,
Minnesota, September 2009, all photos © 2009 by
QuoinMonkey. All rights reserved.
These little morsels are pork cheeks marinated in garlic, herbs, spices, and honey served on-a-stick and grilled with peach chipotle glaze. Our friends really liked them. But we found them a little gamey. Though they were extremely tender, they tasted more like dark meat than the white pork I tend to eat. The peach glaze, however, was fantastic.
I did a little research and it seems that the pig cheeks are different than the jowls. I’m no expert, but I read that the pig jowl tends to be the actual fatty part that is almost like pork belly in its striation and normally does not include the pig cheek.
The pig cheeks are mostly from the side of the head, not from under the chin. The upper part is rather thin and mostly skin. The lower part is adjacent to the true jowl, so it is thicker than the upper part and has the same striations as the jowl.
Whether cheeks or jowls, I’m not much for consuming dicey parts of a pig. But I’m glad we tried them. My favorite times were when we stopped to chat with people like Stan Stokesbary of Standing Buffalo Knives who handcrafts knives out of old buzz saw blades. Or Ronald Kelsey who has part of his collection of 500 vintage seed bags displayed in the Horticulture Building.
How many pounds of seed are in a bushel? You’ll see the number on the bottom corner of each and every sack.
-posted on red Ravine, Happy Labor Day, Monday, September 7th, 2009
-related to posts: MN State Fair On-A-Stick (Happy B’Day MN!), MN State Fair On-A-Stick II – Video & Stats, On-The-Go List Of Must-Haves (MN State Fair), Nightshot – Carousel, Mary In Minnesota, food on-a-stick haiku
-More photos from this year’s Fair in QuoinMonkey’s Minnesota State Fair Series
Alright! You can stop it with the posts about the MN State Fair! You are making me soooo jealous . . . and a bit homesick!
😉
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Do they still back the big tanker of milk in and, for a reasonable price, let people buy a glass of milk that you can replenish for the entire day?
That was always my favorite time. And hanging with the guys from the KQRS morning show . . . I so miss Tom Barnard. I know, there’s the internet, but it’s just not the same . . .
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Sounds like you had a great day! As for the pig cheeks, there is still no way I would try them. I wouldn’t be brave enough! D
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I never got to our state fair this year. Maybe next year, my third here, will be the charm?!.
I don’t do well in large crowds so perhaps I just won’t get around to going. If that’s the case, I’ll sit back and recall the memories of the county fairs I’ve been to. The one in Los Angeles County is/was bigger than the state fair in California. It is/was just huge. It has been a while since I’ve been but there are a lot of good times there. I’ll have to write about some of them.
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It’s kind of sad to think that the Minnesota State Fair is already over. Sheesh, that was fast!
I don’t consider the cheek to be too dicey a pig part. In fact, it doesn’t seem all that different from, say, the neck. The pig tail, and definitely any pig innards, are super dicey. But something about the word “cheek.” It doesn’t fit to think of cheeks and meat at the same time.
Glad to hear you tried them, QM, and that you did photos. And it’s good to know about the difference between cheeks and jowls. Makes sense that the jowls are more fatty.
I love bloomin’ onions. Haven’t had one in years, but they are yummy. Hey, I thought you avoided onions??
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ok QM…I knew you’d be adventurous and try them…I would have too before I gave up meat. Sounds like it’s a good thing there was a glaze on those cheeks.
I went to the Orange County Fair last month and they had chocolate covered bacon! Who knew! I must have wandered that place an hour looking for something to eat. I finally found Spanakopita.
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Heather, yes, just had to try them! We were lucky that our friends were up for it, too. The glaze was fantastic. Peaches.
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Brian, no more worries about the State Fair posts. They are over for another entire year! They do make for a little fun and food over the 12 days of the Fair though. I always enjoy learning more about the history of the MN State Fair.
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Corina, thank for stopping by. I don’t like crowds either and am usually exhausted after a day at the Fair (though the people watching is great). Last Friday, we sat down out behind the Farmer’s Union and again at Famous Dave’s for the pig cheeks. So we took a little rest now and then. Maybe I’m getting too old for a raucous Fair visit!
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ybonesy, yeah, the word “cheek” sure doesn’t seem to fit with meat. I had no idea what it was or what it would taste like. The onions — I don’t like raw onions; they don’t settle with me. And onions don’t settle with Liz either (she does love them). I do like cooked onions though and can eat onions in chili or spaghetti sauce. In the case of the flowering onion, we made an exception and the battered outside and the deep-frying seemed to counteract any negative reactions!
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State fairs clearly rock. I need to make time, so I can eat some of this crap. Mmmm.
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J, lots of healthy choices at the MN State Fair, too. Though I don’t write about them as much because they aren’t quite as fun.
The Minnesota apples are in season and when we were in that building our friends got an apple juice freeze pop. I took a shot of pop but it ended up being blurry (or I would have posted it). I did post the MN apples though.
Hope you make it to the State Fair some day. Make it one of the larger ones — MN or Texas or Iowa. I’ve always wondered what the Texas State Fair would be like. A whole other culture.
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[…] post on red Ravine. We’ve covered a lot of history over the years, including the debut of Peach Glazed Pig Cheeks On-A-Stick, the fine art of Princess Kay of the Milky Way (and the Butter Queens), Minnesota State Fair poster […]
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[…] Nightshot – Carousel, MN State Fair On-A-Stick II – Video & Stats, food on-a-stick haiku, Peach Glazed Pig Cheeks On-A-Stick, the fine art of Princess Kay of the Milky Way (and the Butter Queens), Minnesota State Fair poster […]
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[…] course, the Minnesota State Fair is about more than food or the debut of Peach Glazed Pig Cheeks On-A-Stick, and our State Fair posts are always chock-full of history. Last year we covered F. Scott […]
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