Last week, due to work related issues, I had the chance to visit Fanshawe College for an annual gathering of all of Ontario Colleges’ IT personnel. The conference was very interesting and I learn some new field related things, however before the conference even started, my focus was on the food!
The first dinner at Fanshawe is a gigantic outdoor Barbecue Party. Gouda grill cheese, was prepared on a food truck and next to the truck is a station filled with hamburgers and hot dogs. There were other stations of food and drinks around the patio, including a poutine station and a hot chocolate station. However that is not where the focus of this post is on. It is the dessert station that will really give you a heart attack. There were two types of dessert and both are very tasty but are definitely not good for your health.
First, there is deep fried wagon wheel!
A wagon wheel with a stick in it, covered with batter, and fried. Served with a dash of icing sugar, chocolate sauce, and caramel sauce. It is quite good, sadly it is not as good as its evil brother from the same station, deep fried Mars bar.
Same idea as the wagon wheel, Mars Bar on a stick, covered with batter, deep fried and served with the same three toppings.
The difference between the two is that the wagon wheel, once warmed, isn’t as tasty as it was when crispy. The Mars bar on the other hand, was AMAZING! It was soft and chewy, sweet, and so different than what Mars bar taste like when not fried. It took all my concentration and self control to refrain from helping myself to seconds. Actually I am drooling while typing this (my keyboard!).
I tried the grill cheeses and they were good, however what I didn’t expect was that the station which carried the burgers and hot dogs didn’t actually have burgers at all. What I initially thought were sampler hamburgers is actually a full vegetarian dish.
They were all Portobello Mushroom burgers! Some kind of leafy green was placed on the bun while some feta cheese was sprinkled on it. As a Meatatarian, I must confess, this burger with absolutely no meat in it, is amazing! It was so good that I went back for a second one. On comparison, the hot dog, which was a meat, or the grill cheeses (Spinach or Bacon) are not as great!
Of the food stations available, the only one I didn’t stop by is the poutine and corn chips station. The reason was initially due to the long line up which later converted to the fact that the gravy was cold. Here is a dish of corn chips a colleague of mine took.
Everything was cold. If the weather was around the 20s, it might have been good, but it just happened to be in the low teens (Celsius) that night in London Ontario, I didn’t felt like lining up for a plate of cold fries with cold gravy and cold cheese. :3 Also I was focusing all my attention on ignoring that deep fried Mars Bar!