A QUICK CURE
You can cook all you want but you can’t cook it up like this. I can actually smell that food cooking. I know. I know. Street fairs are not a 5 star Zagat rated culinary experience. However, they sure are tasty. Except for my Funnel Cake experience.
I love Funnel Cakes. Sugary, fried dough, crunchy yet soft, finger licking good. YUM! With all the variety and selection of street fair food, I only had eyes for the funnel cake. And there it was, right before my very eyes, the funnel cake stand. It was a rather small metal self-contained wagon. It had wheels, a glass window, corrugated siding, and a small door. I emphasize the small door because the guy inside of it was huge. I don’t know how he even got in there. Did he go in as a small guy and eat so much he couldn’t get out or did they just grease him down with some of that cooking oil and give him a good shove? Anyway, there he was and it wasn’t pretty. It was a sweatbox and my new best friend TINY was dripping in sweat. The whole thing was disgusting and a saner person would have walked away right then and there. But I had a funnel cake addiction and could not see past the sugary piles of confectioner’s sugar. I only saw swirling patterns of fried dough. And I wanted them. I wanted them really bad, I was almost salivating as I plunked my $3.00 down and asked for one funnel cake. I used great restraint not asking for two but hey they are hard to handle and I could always go back for another piping hot one in say – two seconds. As Tiny works his magic and pulls the crackling fried dough out the vat of grease I start to salivate. Just put the freaking sugar on it and hand it over buddy. Whoa. Wait a minute, was that a drop of sweat that just landed on my funnel cake? He notices it too, gets distracted, and puts too much sugar on the funnel cake. I look at him, he looks at all the sugar, and he looks at me. He knows I know about that sweat droplet. He is just about to shake the sugar off when the powdery cloud of sugar rises to his nose and makes him sneeze. A huge giant sweaty sneeze. Thank God he didn’t sneeze on my funnel cake. Ugh that would be the worst, No, he turned his head away and sneezed into his left hand. I’m ok with this because he is holding the plate with MY funnel cake in his right hand, so we are still good. It is all relative with street food. I know you are starting to cringe but up to this point my need for the funnel cake is stronger than my common sense about germs. And then he takes his left hand, YES THAT LEFT HAND, covers my funnel cake with THAT LEFT HAND, and flips the paper plate over onto THAT LEFT HAND, and shakes off the excess sugar. And then flips the plate back onto his right hand and starts to hand it out of the window to me. I stood there and watched this whole procedure that was executed with such precision it appeared to have been rehearsed.
He happily handed me the funnel cake and I took the funnel cake. My mouth was wide open but I never said a word, My eyes were wide open but I couldn’t look at him. My mouth, just minutes before salivating like a Pavlovian pooch, was dry as a bone. I just took the snotty funnel cake and I proceeded directly to the first trash can I saw and tossed my once precious funnel cake in to it. I have never had another funnel cake since that day. It was the fastest cure to an addition I have ever seen.