It's that time of year again - The Great Minnesota Get-Together starts in August, and there are 34 new foods and seven new food vendors to try! So, dust off your map, fire up a spreadsheet, and get started on your Minnesota State Fair food plan of attack!

The Minnesota State Fair is the biggest party of the year in the Land of 10,000 Lakes.

It's one of the largest fairs in the country, with an average daily attendance of around 150,000 people.

Of course we want to see all the seed art and the biggest vegetables and the heftiest swine.

But the real draw is the food - especially the new food, dontcha know!

This year, it seems, three dominant themes emerged among the new food items.

The first two themes are pickles and donuts, which together, comprise a large percentage of this year's flavor profiles.Take, for instance, Hamline Church Dining Hall's new paletas (think of them as Mexican popsicle-style treats). They come in two flavors: mini donut and dill pickle lemonade. Now, do you see what I mean?

Apart from the paletas, you'll find a handful of other new-to-the-fair treats in the donut genre.

These include birthday cake mini donuts (pictured); donut delights (mini donuts on a stick, wrapped in bacon, topped with peanut butter and raspberry sauce); and Amish donuts from Peachey's Baking Company (a new vendor this year). Although they're not exactly donuts, I'm going to throw the stuffed churros, from Churros & Aguas Frescas, and the fruity cereal milk biscuit from LuLu's public house into this category. A churro is just a straight donut; and if you make a sweet biscuit, drizzle it with icing, and top it with cereal, it may as well be a donut.

This brings us to the surprising large number of new entrants in the pickle (and pickle adjacent) category this year.

You've got the dill pickle lemonade paletas, but you've also got dill pickle lemonade from a completely different vendor, Nordic Waffles. Then there's the Miami mango pickles, as seen above, and pickle fries. Plus, you've got the Sota-cuterie board and the bacon-wrapped waffle dog - both served with pickles.

The final entrant in the pickle category, the dill pickle cheese curd taco, brings us to our final category of new food items this year: riffs on cheese curds.

Cheese curds have long been a staple at the Great Minnesota Get-Together, and this year folks seem dead-set on messing around with this classic. In addition to the pickle-cheese curd tacos, at this year's fair you'll also find a cheese curd stuffed pizza pretzel and cheesecake curds. I'm also going to include The Blue Barn's hot honey cheese sticks in this category because, at base, it's breaded hot cheese.

Of all the new foods I'm looking forward to trying, the one I'm most excited about is probably the galabao from Hmong Union Kitchen.

It's a traditional Hmong-style bun that's stuffed with egg, ground pork, and spices, then steamed and served with a sauce. I'll have to get this either first or last... (The length of the line will probably make up my mind for me).

In terms of the most Minnesotan new entrants, I'd say it's a toss-up between the walleye fritter pops from Giggles' Campfire Grill (breaded fried walleye on a stick) - served with, not surprisingly, dill pickle relish...

Or the crispy lutefisk steam buns from Shanghai Henri's.

Sure, there's an Asian twist, but there's not much that screams "Minnesota!" more than lutefisk from Minneapolis-based Olsen Fish Company - the world's largest purveyor of the Scandinavian "delicacy." (I'm a little afraid of this one...)

So pull on your eatin' pants, slap on some sunscreen, and let's go try all this new Minnesota State Fair food!

Which one will you try first? Let us know in the comments!