Helmut's Strudel

Helmut's Strudel is one of my fondest food memories from my decade of running The Indianapolis News's Indiana State Fair Bureau.
Helmut, who was from Austria, made fabulous delicate, multilayered flaky strudel with his grandmother's recipe and it was abso-freaking-lutely delicious.
This is (from left) me, Jane Judkins (now Stegemiller), and Helmut in front of his stand, sometime around 1981.
I think Helmut was living in or around Houston, Texas, at the time. Jane managed to talk him out of a couple of cases of frozen strudel that we used as treats for months later.
The spinach puffs were good too, but the strudel was spectacular.

Mister Hanky is sooooo popular!

Since I installed the Feedjit Live Traffic Feed widget on this site a week or so ago, I've been able to tell how people get here.
Some, who know where they're going and maybe even have it bookmarked, come in directly to the blog's URL. A few get here through our friend Lauri's blog link.
And the rest come via a Google search for a subject that I've written about at one time or another.
Guess what the most frequent Google search is that bring people to my blog.
An Oct. 15, 2007, post titled "Unfortunate Resemblance" in which I noted how much the Goobertown Tree Farm Christmas peanut looks like Mister Hanky, the Christmas Poo, from South Park.
Well, now I've given Google yet another Mister Hanky reference to find.
And just for good measure, here's a photo of a larger-than-life (think about it) image of Mister Hanky that adorns a commercial building down at the west end of Front Street in Fairplay, Colo., which is where the real South Park is. I shot it about three years ago while visiting our friends Tim and Linda in nearby Alma.
Come to think of it, we're overdue for some Colorado mountain air.