It's time to start planning your Minnesota State Fair eating strategy

There are times when you question your Minnesota Citizen Quotient, and I had one such moment the other day. I realized I had not studied the list of new State Fair foods, as one should, preferably with an absorbent towel around your neck to wick away the drool.

We're supposed to be fascinated by these culinary innovations, as if they had just invented pie. Every year, a strange new list:

• Broasted Llama Thyroids on a bed of basmati rice, garnished with lark's eyelashes.

• Hand-mushed sprouts encased in banana leaves with a side of viscous couscous for dippin'.

• Ice cream in an appalling flavor so odd it has to be good, such as sausage, or cigar.

And so on. They're all good, I'm sure, and I have no doubt this year's offerings will be delicious. There will be people who starve themselves for a day or two and head out with a map to try everything, bringing along their favorite fair feather to tickle the back of their throat so they can make room for the new Apple Pie A La Mode Burger.

But some of us look to the first fair day and see ourselves doing exactly what we did in the past. Oh, we might get around to a bowl of mulch 'n' crickets, it's the latest thing, but first there are traditions to observe. (I am perfectly content to observe the tradition of doing no more than that: observing cricket-based food.)

You have your requirements, and sometimes it depends on which entrance you take. Coming via bus? You'll pass the pickle place, and maybe that's how you start: a crunchy, juicy, briny bite. You might proceed past the Mexican Hat, because your inner voice always says, "We have tacos at home."

You know where to turn for the first corn dog, and you head there with a sense of disappointment as well as anticipation. The latter because it will be everything you know it will be: hot with two smears, red and yellow. Disappointment with yourself, because you really should branch out after 41 years. Maybe this will be the year you have the crocodile jerky smoothie. If there's room.

It's a lesson for summer, I think. Before the fair arrives we're full of things we want to do, or think we should want to do. As if the weeks are boxes we tick off. Me, I'm content with an ordinary day, especially if I do not have to get a tick off my leg. It's enough sometimes just to be, not do.

It's hard to just be when it's 20 below; you're concerned about not being if you don't get inside. It's hard to just be when it's spring because everything is new and green, and you want to plant and paint and sit outside at a cafe and toss bon mots. Fall you want to walk and contemplate: "Well, there go the geese, honking their usual refrain of, 'Sucker.'"

But summer, sometimes you just want to exist in the perfection of it all. It's enough just to sit in a familiar place and eat your 44th fair corn dog. Let others get giddy-addled by some new taste invention. You will have a summer day so unremarkable in its simple perfection that nothing could improve it.

If this seems like an elaborate way of trying to convince my wife that I really don't think the shed needs painting, and I want to just be, you're correct.