the county fair!

it's happened. i've suddenly found myself knee-deep in county fair culture and i don't see myself ever coming back. and i don't think i need to because there are multiple county fairs every weekend during the summer in minnesota and north dakota. multiple! is that normal? are you not technically a county unless you throw a fair every summer with fried food and creeptastic rides and 4-h ponies?

i'm really tempted to spend an entire summer only going to county fairs on my weekends for a statewide county fair tour. i think i would learn a lot. even just from going to this one, i witnessed my first cow competition, met the biggest bunnies i've ever seen in my life, and learned all about cat diabetes from a presentation by a kid who is sure to be a future veterinarian of america. there was also an actual hay growing competition! 

this whole time i thought that fairs were just about the fried food, but i've been proven wrong. 

i can't wait until i get to go to the state fair, where there is all of this fried madness and, rumor has it, an entire barn where you can watch animals giving birth. i meannnnnnn....whoa.

how was your weekend??

-yeh!

---

p.s. read all about what i ate at the county fair in last week's grub street diet!

pictured: bag // dress

strawberry and peanut butter cookie salad

i don't know if you and i have ever truly sat down and discussed the elephant that fills up the entirety of the upper midwest: there are no vegetables in salad. salads here contain jell-o and mayonnaise and sweets of all sorts (whatever, yes, grapes), but unless you specify a vegetable salad, there's a very good chance that asking a true midwesterner to bring a salad to the potluck will mean making more room for dessert. 

the salad chapters in the stack of church cookbooks sitting beside me are my favorite. oddly they're where you'd expect a salad chapter to be, right after the appetizers and before the mains, but ingredients like miniature marshmallows, cool whip, and cream cheese make regular appearances. after experiencing a few long winters here, the best reason i can think of for not using vegetables would be limited access to fresh ones. but why marshmallows? why cookies? do you know why? this all sometimes feels like a never-ending punchline where the joke is actually on me because in the end, i get to eat salad and have my cookies too. 

out of all of my new midwestern food friends, cookie salad might be the one that i've had the most fun with. a typical cookie salad is fudge striped cookies, vanilla pudding, buttermilk, cool whip, and mandarin oranges or bananas. you can find a recipe for that here. but when you start making substitutions and taking liberties like a millennial, you realize that a cookie salad is not so different from an eton mess or perhaps a breakfast parfait. 

i have an eton mess inspired version of a cookie salad in the latest issue of saveur along with a little story that i really want to show you! i had so much fun with it. i haven't seen it yet because magazines just take longer to get here, but perhaps if you're near a newsstand, you could pick one up??

and then here is another version of a cookie salad. it's a slightly healthier take, as the cream and pudding get swapped out for yogurt, but it feels right for both breakfast and dessert. you can use plain yogurt, as i usually do, especially if it's for breakfast, or you can use any flavored variety that you'd like. it's also embarrassingly easy. are you ready?

---

strawberry and peanut butter cookie salad

ingredients

for each serving you will need:

a big plop of yogurt

a handful or two of peanut butter cookie crumbs (i used this recipe)

fresh sliced strawberries

and, yes, sprinkles

clues

stir all of the ingredients together in a bowl and serve immediately or the next day (it's actually really good the next day when the cookies have absorbed some of the yogurt!) or layer them artfully in individual dishes and let your guests toss their own salads. 

enjoy!

---

-yeh!

thank you to the wonderful celeste for stopping by and helping me make these little cookie salads on her drive across the country! come back, celeste! we forgot to eat them! 

pictured: coasters // glasses // wooden spoon

bismarck

while half of my instagram feed was in iceland this weekend (???), i was enjoying a lovely weekend of firsts:

first time in bismarck, the great capitol of north dakota, filled with rolling hills and "now hiring" signs in front of every single fast food establishment.

first albino buffalo friend!! i saw them from a distance, outside of jamestown. we didn't actually become friends, but they look kind of friendly?

first fried egg roll skins as nacho chips, first bacon wrapped cheese curds

first days as a 26-year-old

first visit to space aliens (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) it was everything.

first north dakota man bun sighting (at my first north dakota speakeasy experience)

first nanaimo bar!

first neapolitan pizza this far from new york. it was really good and squishy.

first missile silo sighting

...

it was so crazy and fun! and now i'm recovering from all of the cheese curds and the open bar at the wedding. oops! how were all of your weekends??

-yeh!

a little tractor adventure

well, it was a big tractor, but a little adventure.

the tractor needed a new part, so eggboy had to drive it to the fix-it man.

junior cat was not allowed to come.

but i was! here is the view from the buddy seat as we drove down the highway and stopped traffic. tractors don't go very fast! eggboy was focused on not hitting any bunnies but he still smiled for my rearview mirror picture. what a guy.

(no cars ahead of us, they are all stuck behind us.)

we even drove across the bridge to north dakota.

past my favorite sign... 

and my other favorite sign... (look, the grain mill in the background!)

and then we arrived at the tractor fix-it place on the edge of town, where a row of combines welcomed us with glee.

eggdad picked us up in his pickup and gave us popcorn because you can get free popcorn at a lot of the farm shops in town. it was salty and tasty and perfect with eggboy's hat sweat. 

the end!

-yeh!