Morning Roundup: Heart attack on a stick edition

Good morning, Houston. It's no secret that Texans like fried food — so it's no wonder that the Big Tex Choice Awards, the taste-test contest at the State Fair of Texas, focuses on fried concoctions. But this year's Big Tex winner for the best-tasting new food might surprise even the most jaded connoisseur of fried delicacies: It's fried cookie dough, created by Abel Gonzales Jr. The fried cookie dough is a cookie base with chocolate chips, coconut and pecans that's battered and fried, and it's the latest in a string of foods Gonzales has dipped in the deep fryer: In 2005, he won a Big Tex award for a fried peanut butter, jelly and banana sandwich, and last year, he won for fried Coke. "[The food] is the No. 1 reason people show up at the gate," Mitchell Glieber, the fair's senior vice president for marketing, told The Dallas Morning News. "For one month out of each year, the great fair is the fried-food capital of the state of Texas." Now, if you'll excuse us, we're going to go chug a couple liters of Pepto.

>> In Kemah, no fun under the coaster: Remember the Boardwalk Bullet, the 53-foot-tall wooden roller coaster that was being built at the Kemah Boardwalk? Well, it's open now — and people who live nearby aren't having nearly as much fun as the folks riding the coaster. "It's such a shame, really. We all used to just love the peaceful quiet," Carol Killion, who built a weekend cottage on the Kemah waterfront in 1962, back when Kemah was a small, quiet village. "It's what we enjoyed about it, away from the big city." Kemah had no public hearing about the coaster, which officials said met all the city's planning requirements. That means that, at this point, residents don't have a whole lot of chance for recourse. They can, however, sell their homes to Landry's, the company that runs the Kemah Boardwalk — but that doesn't sound ilkely. "As long as I live, [the house] will not be sold to him," Killion said, referring to Landry's President Tilman Fertitta.

>> HISD: No mold here!: Despite claims from custodians that Key Middle School has a mold infestation that made several workers sick over the weekend, HISD says independent investigators found no evidence of mold in the building and said students will be perfectly safe attending class there today. At least seven employees fell ill Saturday after working in the building; they claimed it was because of visible mold, but HISD spokesman Terry Abbott said the problem was caused by custodians cleaning ventilation units in several classrooms while the units were turned on, which sent fumes back into their faces. "School's going to open [today]," Abbott told the Chronicle. "Kids are going to be safe. The union has done a disservice by trying to scare people."

>> This week's weather: OK, the bad news first: The rain we had yesterday is likely to stick around for at least the first part of the week, and those cooler temperatures that showed up in the long-range forecast a few days ago have vanished. But hey, at least you still don't have to water your lawn, right? Right. Expect highs in the upper 80s all week, with overnight lows in the mid-70s and a good chance of rain today through Thursday. This might be the time to invest in a galosh — or even two.

Now, fry something up and check out this morning's headlines ...