#they're literally just fried sticks of dough

[peridot-tears]

Ngl all my Chinese ass can think of is this:

I'm screaming.

I'm swimming through Chinese side of Assassin's Creed fandom rn, and one ship name I've seen for Arno/Jacob?

Well, in English, we call it French Frye. That's self-explanatory.

In Chinese? 油炸法棍。Fried baguette. Fryed Baguette.

Have fun with this knowledge.

[hisuianhellion]

(From the @shadow-cafe account)

Hello! I'm curious about something~

What's your favorite food and how do you like it?~

I'm bouncing around to try and expand our selection and see what humans like!~

-Catherine

Huh. It... looks like this SHOULD be from an account, but. Meh. More spoiler stuff. The ask itself doesn't seem to be screwy, though.

Pierogies. A simple as hell thing, but god it is good. It's literally a dumpling of dough, pressed tight like a ravioli but even tighter. The first difference is the filling: mashed potato is practically necessary. You can have a little bit of cheese and some herbs for taste, but normally it's what they're cooked with that makes 'em shine. They're an addition to a dish in most cases, but they're filling enough on their own.

How you cook them is the other difference: because they're thicker on the dough side than ravioli, they're actually meant to be fried. Pan-fried is best, but I highly, HIGHLY recommend that you don't just fry them on their own. Butter fried is fine, but adding in onion and garlic will, on their own, do wonders. And if you're REALLY feeling saucy... make some sausages with them. Salty ones are good, you tend to wanna avoid the spicier kinds, but after frying them? Stick the pierogies right in with the onion and garlic cloves.

You'll thank me later.

[selenite-drywall]

Malenfant Secret Ingredient Gravy

I've been making biscuits and gravy a lot lately so I figured I'd share the recipe. The best biscuits for this are the Pillsbury kind out of the can but they're so easy to make on your own anyway. I'll put some biscuit stuff at the end of this post but for now it's Gravy Time.

Sausage gravy is an Acadian condiment and it's good on everything. The dominant flavor is black pepper, but the stuff that comes out of a can (the stuff they use in a hometown family diner) is absolutely disgusting because it lacks the Malenfant Secret Ingredient: garlic powder. Garlic powder adds a little bit of tang and reconciles the sweetness of the roux and the sharpness of the black pepper. It's not healthy, nor can you make it healthy.

Before you start, make sure you have:

A deep-walled frying pan

A sturdy spatula (metal is best, but use wood on a nonstick pan)

Milk

Flour

Ground meat (I prefer bacon and breakfast sausage, but I've done it with vegetarian substitutes. Just make sure the meat is seasoned)

Someone (preferably a friend and lover, but a family member works just fine) to prepare biscuits while you make this gravy– trust me you won't be able to do it at the same time.

Black pepper

Garlic powder (real garlic actually doesn't work for this— the texture and flavor profile is different)

How do you do it?

Brown your meat. Like I said, I like breakfast sausage and bacon; about two strips of bacon to a pound of sausage. Put a little butter in the pan and chop the bacon into little pieces. Cook it almost to edible before you add the sausage, breaking it into small pieces. Cook the sausage on pretty low heat, making sure you don't have any bits sticking to the bottom of the pan. Do Not drain the grease out of the pan; we will need it.

Add black pepper and garlic powder to the meat. Don't wimp out here! The rest of the gravy will be flour and milk, so you need the flavors to be strong. You literally want to add ~2 tablespoons of each per pound of meat. That's not a typo. Just cover it in pepper and then add maybe half that amount of garlic. My dad likes to put smoked paprika in at this stage, but it turns the gravy pink so I prefer to sprinkle it over the top when it's on my plate.

Now this is where the flour comes in. Sprinkle in about a tablespoon at a time and mix it until you can't see any more flour. Make sure the flour is toasting, but not burning. Repeat this process until the meat is no longer palatable and looks like it's covered in a grey film (about maybe six to eight tablespoons per pound of meat, all depending on how much grease is in the pan. Don't try to put it in all at once, though: you'll end up with clumps and a gravy that's way too sweet).

Toast the flour for a hot minute and then add in the milk a healthy splash at a time, stirring and scraping the bottom constantly. The milk will thicken around the meat almost instantly, which is when you add more milk. Keep this up until you get a nice thick gravy. Remember you can always add more milk (as long as there's heat under it). If it's too thin, don't try to add more flour. Just keep it on the heat until the milk boils off and thickens up.

Serve it on literally whatever. Fries, biscuits, a hamburger? The possibilities are endless.

Biscuits?

The most obvious thing to put sausage gravy on is biscuits. Like I said, storebought biscuits are great. If you don't have them, you can make them yourself. Or, if you just don't feel like it, slap this gravy on some sliced bread for a special treat we like to call Shit on a Shingle.

Our family recipe for biscuits is as follows:

These can be drop biscuits, but by following good technique you can get a nice flaky biscuit. Use cold butter, chopped real small, and cut the biscuits out of the dough instead of clumping them into balls.

Now go, and enjoy the least healthy breakfast human hands can make. And then maybe eat like a green salad for dinner. Stay frosty.

-s-d

[chirpingfromthebox]

As a Minnesotan I feel obliged to have opinions on people's state fair foods.

For any non-Minnesotans, I should mention that we have a strange obsession with our state fair over here. It's at a level that you really can only understand if you live here. But know that it's a thing.

I should also note that considering the wild foods you can find at the MN State Fair? All of their answers are quite basic. So just putting that out there.

Also I really want to know who the team members are that go for wild new items of the year...

Lee Stecklein's Pronto Pup

These aren't a MN only thing, but they certainly contained to very specific regions in the country, so they're definitely not a national thing by any means. But for those not in the know, a pronto pup is basically a corn dog, but instead of using a cornmeal batter, it uses a pancake batter.

I'd say this is perhaps the #1 or #2 most stock standard answer you'll probably get amongst the fair goers? It's not my stick dog of choice and the lines are often ridiculously long, so I almost never partake.

Grace Zumwinkle's Sweet Martha Cookies

Zummie has followed up Stecklein with the other contender for #1 most basic answer to this question. When I've asked people what their favorites are Pronto Pups and these cookies are by far the answers I hear the most.

I can't remember exactly, but there's at least two sweet martha stands at the fair. But one of them doesn't have a big femme robot cookie on the top that will wink at you from on high. So clearly some are built different.

They are basically heaping servings of little chocolate chip cookies. You can get them in a paper cone, or the more infamous giant pail.

I think they are slightly overrated in terms of taste. But I can't say they aren't fun. Eating a pail of hot chocolate chip cookies with your pals? (perhaps by the unlimited milk booth?). Plus it's one of the few fair foods that will leave you with sweet treats left to have the next day too.

Sophia Kunin's Corn dog

Okay, so hear me out here. This response could go a couple different ways.

On one hand a corn dog is something you can get at almost any U.S. fair/fair-like. And because it isn't something you can only get at the state fair, it could be argued that this is the most run-of-the-old-mill answer yet.

However! I submit to you that it depends on where she is getting these corn dogs from!

I'm actually with Kunin here that corn dogs are superior to pronto pups. But not all of them are! The state fair corn dogs are not built equally.

For instance, there is a place in the food building that has wild rice corn dogs and they are one of the things I grab one of every time I go to the fair. There's almost never any lines and I love them.

Natalie Buchbinder's Fried Dough

Like a corn dog, this is definitely more of a standard fair food than a definitively state fair food. But I still respect it for its purity. It's cuts through the static and gives the people what they want: delicious sugar and oil.

Denisa Křížová's Hot dog

Okay, this is a hard one to defend, because you can literally get great hot dogs any time of year all over the cities. And I feel like someone's favorite state fair food should be something you can only get during state fair season.

But like with Kunin and the corn dogs: it depends a lot on where she's getting them from. And my opinion of this option could range anywhere from "Okay, I totally get it" to "Girl...you deserve better."

Nicole Hensley's Fried Reeses

The spiciest of these answers! I feel like a great favorite state fair food choice has to be specific.

Those other options don't tell you much about a person, but this? This speaks volumes.

Here's someone who knows what they're about. Who wants something they love, but pushed to the extreme.

Aka: what state fair foods are all about.

And in case any of them encounter this post and feel the need to nitpick my own favorite, I understand. So in the interest of fairness...

My favorite MN state fair food are the frozen apple cider pops from that stand in the agriculture/horticulture building. I know they aren't the flashiest of options, but I love them. They're super cheap so you can get multiples throughout the day, they're a refreshing treat on a hot fair day, they're sweet and tart, apples are one of my favorite foods, and cider season is my favorite season. So there! ;p