the fair fanatic

“I’m the biggest State Fair nerd ever,” says Jessica Buquoi of Winnetka Heights. “You would think I’m like an old lady because I get so into it.”

She’s 34.

Buquoi started entering the pie bakeoff at the Fair when she was 25, and she says she’s usually the youngest competitor.

The hair stylist enters food competitions as well as collections. And her three-time, blue-ribbon-winning collection items are unusual. They’re Victorian-era hair receivers. Highly decorated and made of porcelain, they look like tissue boxes. Victorian women used them to store hair collected from their brushes, and they would use the old hair to make rats to get that Snooki-like height in their hairdos.

“It sounds gross, but there’s not hair in them now,” she says. “I have them displayed in my living room.”

This year, she’s also entering the maximum of two items in State Fair of Texas souvenir collections, a necklace from 1972 and a bottle, both featuring the likeness of Big Tex.

Buquoi also has entered the chili cook-off for about the past six years. That’s fun, she says, because it’s held on the eve of the Fair’s opening, and it adds to the excitement for her. Plus, the chili cook-off people, while dead serious about competition, create a sense of community.

Buquoi grew up in East Texas, and her parents took her to theFair when she was a kid, but they weren’t fanatical about it. Starting when she was around 13 years old, though, Buquoi found a way to get to the Fair’s opening day every year.

Now she buys a season pass annually and goes just about every day. She spends hours, literally days when you add it all up, in the Creative Arts Building.

“There’s a food contest every day, so even if I’m not in it, I like to go and support it,” she says.

Some competitions she does enter, of course.

Aside from the chili cook-off and the pie bake-off, Buquoi last year entered Central Market’s “Guess What’s Cookin’?” competition, where contestants are given a box of 16 ingredients and an hour to concoct something tasty using at least eight of them, all in front of a live audience.

Last year, the box included blueberries, almond butter, sweet potatoes, beets, apples and popcorn.

“I was definitely the youngest person,” she says.

She made a “caramel-apple-popcorn thing,” and she was the only contestant who used the popcorn, but she didn’t win.

The experience was so challenging and nerve-wracking that she swore she would never do it again.

“It was crazy,” she says. “I can’t believe I signed up again.”

Watch Buquoi compete in Central Market’s “Guess What’s Cookin’?” on Thursday, Oct. 11, at 9:30 a.m.