I had the wonderful fortune to attend the Foodbuzz Festival in San Francisco this past weekend.  It was the most well-organized event I have attended in recent memory; watch out online world of food, Foodbuzz is THE force to be reckoned with and after the festival I know why.  Can you imagine hosting an event for 250 discerning, top-shelf food and drink bloggers from across the world? I would be quaking in my boots knowing that each and every one of them was calculating, composing, photographing and judging everything you put before them in order to head back home and shout about it from the (virtual) rooftops to all their readers.  If you think of the viral networking aspect of that, 250 people could conceivably reach half the population of the world pretty quickly considering the 6 degrees of separation.  Every event I attended- from a street food dinner composed of a dozen stalls of local cult eating establishments distilled down to their very best item or two to a dinner put on by Outstanding in the Field conisting of a single table set for 250 people- was beyond spectacular in its own right.  The oyster in the shot above is from the street food extravaganza, and was the single best oyster I have ever eaten.  It was from the Hog Island Oyster Company- an establishment that deserves high praise.  The other standout from the street food faire was the steak and gruyere mini pie from The Pie Truck. 

The most informative portion of the festival was a Farm to Table discussion led by Chef Paul Arenstam and the amazing spreadsheet cowboy Brian Kenny of Hearst Ranch.  Kenny is a picture-perfect cowboy upon first glance, but the second he opens his mouth you can tell he mixes in a bit of street and book smarts with his affected Western drawl.  He has been helping the Hearst family (of publishing fame) convert their gargantuan cattle ranch to free-range, grass-fed and finished beef, and boy does the man know his stuff.  He’s the kind of public speaker college commencement commitees lust after- presence, humor and the ability to command the room in an unassuming way all contribute to his trademark charm.  More importantly, he’s on a proselytizing mission to create a truly sustainable model of agriculture that other ranchers can mimic in order to improve the health of the overall industry.  The Hearst Ranch sells their products online, and for a limited time they are offering my readers 30% off their beef.  Just type in the coupon code “foodbuzz” upon checkout and enjoy the taste of superior-to-Whole Foods beef at less than Safeway prices!

It’s truffle season again, my darlings; get out your sniffers and let’s get down and get woodsy with it.  I have heard tell that this season isn’t considered a vintage year in the grand scheme of things, but my craving is so strong once I go an entire year without a whiff that I’m willing to do just about anything for a fine white truffle from Alba.  I asked my friend Shane who works at DeLaurenti to keep his ear to the ground about impending truffle arrival and he gave me the heads’ up a few days ago that now is the time.  I headed down to pick up the fine specimen he hand-selected for me, and we did a mini photo shoot with Rachel, the Pike Place Market pig before I collected my prize and hunted for the rest of the ingredients of the feast. 

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                                                                                -TS Eliot

I don’t know what it is about the last stanza of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock that has always made me think of beets.  I mean sure, the word red is in there, and red is eponymous with beets, but I don’t think that’s it.  I think it’s because I get some vision of waiflike sirens with rosy cheeks and garnet lips billowing on fragile seashells on the crest of a wave.  Red lips and cheeks always bring beets to my imagination because I love to paint the faces of everyone in the kitchen with halved beets whenever I’m working with them.  If no one is game, I step it up another notch and take out my 12” chef’s knife, drizzle beet juice all over it and my finger, and commence to bloodcurdlingly scream. That get’s them every time, of course then they really won’t let me paint their faces since they’re so mad at me. 

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Wonton wrappers, wonton wrappers, what shall I do with the rest of you?  I am quite certain I’m not alone in this predicament; those packets the size of my pinkie seem to yield a bottomless supply of paper-thin panes and a girl can only eat so many wonton crisps with her Ahi Poke.  As is regularly the case with my culinary creations, I decided to adopt a fused approach.  Wontons are from China, so let’s go with Italian pastry cream infused with Cardamom- primarily an Indian spice (I realize this is debatable).  Throw in some chocolate from Belize and the Dominican Republic packaged by a UK company and you’ve got your next United Nations Convention dessert settled.  Top it all off with Mexican dulce de leche made from goat’s milk called cajeta and garnish the plate with kiwi berries grown in Oregon (of all the places to miniaturize a kiwi!) and you’ve got a dessert that can take you around the world for a lot less than the cost of the plane ticket. 

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The title is erroneous right off the bat, but Clippertrip just doesn’t have the same ring to it as roadtrip.  The Clipper is the nautical vessel one takes from Seattle to Victoria. It is essentially a high-speed shrunken version of a ferry, though it feels eerily like an airplane inside.  In any case, the whole fam hopped the Clipper for the two hour jaunt up to Victoria for the weekend as I had a half marathon to run on Sunday.  We spent Saturday tooling around Victoria- this is a city I could really get into.  I pictured it as a quaint little burg lost in time. It actually was very cosmopolitan and wore the inevitable rustic charm that comes with being a seaside tourist town known for High Tea with understated cool.  Off the main drag, the shops were edgy and on-trend and the locals could not have been nicer. 

There were no dearth of dining options; however it being marathon weekend I knew I wanted to steer clear of the herds clamoring for plates of linguine in all the Italian joints, so I chose French.  This may not have been the wisest meal to consume the night before running 13.1 miles, but I was very happy with my time so I’ll leave carbo-loading to those who wish to indulge in bland potatoes and limp noodles.  We selected Matisse based on its reputation as one of the finer French restaurants in town, and we came away quite pleased. 

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We were waiting for our burritos to come up at the neighborhood taco truck when we noticed a curious business operating out of a van parked next door.   It turns out that every Saturday some local Vietnamese farmers load their chicken coop into the back of their van and park on the corner of Martin Luther King Wy and Othello St. They vend live hens, cocks and turkeys, leaving the neck-wringing up to their grateful patrons.  Jonas wanted to take a peek just so he could show Bentley the furry fowl, but I had other designs.  I started eating meat six years ago after a 20 year hiatus.  I decided when I was a small child and my father slaughtered my beloved pet cow, Slobber that meat just wasn’t for me.  In my early 20’s I started relaxing my rules, first with the introduction of fish, then chicken, beef, and just in the last couple of months, pork- the final frontier.  I still have huge reverence for animals and I really appreciate meat when I eat it, but I’ve always been a “take the bull by the horns” kind of girl, and I feel that buying a nicely-packaged disembodied chicken breast at Whole Foods is sort of a copout.  If I’m going to fully embrace this whole meat thing, I should be comfortable going from farm to table, right? 

To make a long story short, we drove home with a live chicken pecking her way around my trunk.  I posted a quick video on facebook of the chicken purchase and asked my friends if anyone had any experience with the inevitable next step.  I was shocked at the squeamishness of many folks who I know to eat meat on a daily basis.  It really reaffirmed what I was doing- if the animal is going to give their life for my pleasure, the least I can do is be able to stomach the process, and if I cannot, perhaps I don’t belong amongst the carnivorous denizens after all. 

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