Baked corn dog and cole slaw. Photo: you can count on me.

As we bid goodbye to state fair season, this picture reminds us of how good trashy food can be, if done properly. We can already taste the wonderful combination of salty dog offset by a slightly sweet cornbread batter.

This home version is baked, rendering deep-fryer guilt obsolete. A side of coleslaw that looks as if it were made from real cabbage really boosts the health quotient. It's practically a food pyramid on a plate ... or at the very least, an excellent attempt at good-for-you fair food.

[Via Flickr]

It all started so innocently, didn't it? Some guy speared a hotdog with a stick, dipped it in corn batter, and deep-fried it into a corndog. Now at stat fairs across the country, a corndog is just so...boring. We've got everything from deep-fried cheesecake to Coca-Cola. Remember the winning food in the Texas State Fair food competition last year? A Coke flavored batter deep-fried and served with cola syrup! Dip anything in batter, throw it into hot oil, and you could have a prize-winning food.

And it seems that every year, it gets crazier. At the Texas State Fair, which doesn't even start until the end of September, there are seven entries into the food competition, some of which are reasonable given history, like the Fried Cookie Dough (one step before deep frying an actual cookie, like an Oreo), and others that are just weird, like Fried Guacamole Bites:

• Deep Fried Latte
• Fried Cookie Dough
• Fried Guacamole Bites
• Country Pride Peach Cobbler on a Stick
• Fernie's Fried Chili Frito Burrito
• B.W.'s Original Fried Banana Pudding
• Mama's Fried Sweet Potato Pie

Chili and Fritos wrapped inside a tortilla, fried, and served with cheese sauce? It's like people are trying their darnedest to make the most heart-stopping foods they can. Literally.

A few months ago I wrote about a beef and potato sundae, which many found to be at the very least bizarre, if not completely unappetizing. Worth1000, the Photoshopping web site, has just wrapped up a contest that involved combining dinner with dessert. I came across it while trolling the web last night and, thus, haven't seen the results yet.

In case you haven't figured it out yet, the contestants didn't actually cook anything, rather they manipulated images to combine dinner and dessert. The entries I looked at made the meat sundae seem like a four-star meal. They ranged from a corn dog coated with ice cream and chocolate to Sundae Side Up, a fried egg with stripes of hot fudge whose yolk has been replaced with a scoop of chocolate ice cream.

But the, er, best was the herring in aspic pictured here. Clearly the chocolate coating studded with nuts and the stick were meant to riff on high-end ice cream pops. I fear it may be a while before I look at herring as appetizing.

An enterprising Seattle waiter with a Foodsaver snatched up leftovers from Britney Spears and Kevin Federline and has put them up for auction on eBay.

Hard as it is to believe, as of this writing there have been only 40 bids. The top one thus far exceeds $200. I myself may purchase these items, before some evil scientist grabs them and clones the celebrity couple.

The seller claims to have acquired Britney's half eaten egg salad sandwich and K-Fed's corn dog at a music industry party he worked a few months ago. I wouldn't plan on eating these items though, the seller notes they're strictly for memorabilia purposes not consumption.

Update: The winning bid was for $520 from Golden Palace Casino, the same guys that bought the Virgin Mary grilled cheese sandwich and other weird food things.

Is it because it's summer? Festival-, fair-, and carnival-season?

Suddenly corn dogs are not only "hot," but they have been elevated from their mall food court status to haute cuisine, as corn dogs are appearing on menus of upscale restaurants in LA. Santa Monica's BOA Steakhouse uses Kobe beef hot dogs and serves them with the traditional condiments. Bistro retsaurant at uber-hip Chamberlain hotel in West Hollywood has single-bite chorizo corn dogs and at both Honey restaurant in Hollywood and new Republic, they are serving lobster corn dogs. I guess it's kind of the way macaroni and cheese was the "it" comfort food about two years ago.

I don't know. I kind of just want a Hebrew National dipped in corn batter and deep fried. Nothing fancy. Well, except for some super hot mustard.

To be truthful, I have no idea what a corn dog is, and quite frankly I may be better off in ignorance. But apparently it involves plenty of beer (which is fine) and something called tater tots. To me, tots are children so anything that involves them, microwave ovens, ("sure you can squeese another one in they are only little!"), yellow mustard and ketchup might not turn out to be too bad. 

National Corn Dog Day is coming up on the 18th of this month. It might just be too much to cope with if this quote from the Official Corndog Day website is any indication - "it as the happiest day of basketball and meats on sticks that you'll ever have. National Corndog Day coincides with the Saturday of the final 32 teams in NCAA basketball tournament . This Saturday is the only day all year that one can watch a quadruple-header of college basketball games (that’s a good 7-8 hours of college hoops) from start to finish without having to change the channel. NCD officially starts with the tip-off of the first game – 10 am Pacific/1 pm Eastern. To help pass the time, have fun with our friends, and to celebrate being blessed with such a thing as a college basketball tournament, we eat Corndogs.! Lots of Corndogs..."

No please... I'll pass. But if you want to join in there are a list of states with events listed; parties I assume in aid of this national celebration (that frankly can stay in the US!).