Culinary Adventures with Camilla

I was drinking coffee after my #winePW twitter chat yesterday when I received an email from Sarah at Edible Monterey Bay , asking if I could go to the San Benito Olive Festival. In two hours. Not for a story, but for a little research. Okay. Jake and R were busy with Halloween costume prep, so I texted Ulla and she and her girls agreed to join me and D. Sweet! It was a lovely day out beyond Tres Pinos. The sun was shining, but a nice breeze kept it from feeling like an oven. We tastes olives stuffed with everything from bleu cheese to garlic. We sipped olive oils. We tried different vinegars. We listened to honest buskers - "so I can afford a high maintenance girlfriend" declared his sign. We listened to a presentation by Marich Confectionary... then tried some of their sweets. We watched what D called "the comedy chefs," the cooking team of Chef Sam Bozzo and Chef Gene Sakahara. They both ran the Garlic Fest...

  While you can't go wrong with food trucks, beer, and a Rolling Stones tribute band, I was a mildly disappointed by the entire Hops & Hamburgers Music Festival this afternoon. Call me 'silly', but I expected to find more local craft beers at this Santa Cruz portion of the California Beer Fest .  There are so many local breweries crafting great brews. Sadly, they weren't there today. Maybe they were there yesterday. Clearly people were in attendance for quantity, not quality or variety. Jake's beer was pretty skunky, as if it had been sitting out in the sun for a day too long; and there were three booths of the exact same - and not local! - beer by a company who was also peddling the over-priced hamburgers and garlic fries. Ach.  We steered clear of all of it, opting for local vendors' chicken curry naan wraps and gyros...and the one local brewery that was pouring: Discretion Brewing .  Another one of our favorites, Santa Cruz Mount...

This is the only food festival that we attend religiously: the Greek Festival. It runs all Labor Day weekend. There have been years when we ate at least one meal there each day that it ran - Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. But this year, we only made over there for the last day: Labor Day. And we rode our bikes, to avoid the traffic, and met up with Jenn and family for a great lunch. We ate... Stuffed Peppers. Here's a version from a previous post:  click here . Pork Souvlaki. While these look simple and unadorned - no onions or zucchini or anything threaded on that skewer with the chunks of meat - the flavor was outrageously layered. I tasted garlic, lemon, thyme, and - maybe - a glimmer of rosemary. I couldn't decide so I opted for a combination plate with feta cheese, kalamata olives, tzatziki, pita, spankopita, and more. Here are a few hummus recipes   from a previous post. The boys didn't bother to shop around the food stalls. As soon as they saw ...

One of the many things I love about my boys: their adventurous palates! And at the 2012 Sausagefest, they were fearless. We had bacon in our beer and bacon shrouded in chocolate, four ways. Jake tried Uncommon Brewers ' Bacon Brown Ale. Incorporating traditional Belgian brewing techniques with the principles of sustainability, Uncommon Brewers aims, as they say, to make uncommon beers for uncommon people. Mission accomplished, guys! This bacon beer was subtle and intriguing. And for the entire family's bacon fix: chocolate-covered bacon from Marini's Candies ! They start with hickory-smoked bacon, cook it in the oven until it's golden and crispy, then they smother it in chocolate. We couldn't decide on which one to try, so we bought all four varieties. The favorites for the smalls: bacon + chocolate + maple. Jake and I liked the bacon + chocolate + a whisper of ghost chile. Truly unparalleled. And though I didn't try it, Marini's also had brow...

When I saw the blurb in Edible Monterey Bay 's weekly e-newsletter about Sausagefest 2012, I knew that we had to go. Sausage + Beer. And Santa Cruz Brewing Company beers at that! It worked out that we could easily make it there on our way home from San Jose. Done deal. Santa Cruz Mountain Brewing is an award-winning, local, certified organic brewery. Founded seven years ago, Santa Cruz Mountain Brewing handcrafts and handbottles unfiltered, lightly carbonated ales made with organic hops and organic grains. They do not, according to their website, strive to make consistent beer; they strive for great beer. I'm good with that...I rarely do anything the same way twice. At Sausagefest, we not only had beer in our glasses; we had beer in our sausages... Teamed up with the meat-mavens at El Salchichero , Santa Cruz Mountain Brewing offered up some amazingly innovative creations. We had sausages flecked with sugar pie pumpkin, candied ginger, cloves, nutmeg, star anise, ci...

Having won a recipe contest through We Olive, I roped some friends into joining me and my family at the Paso Robles Olive Festival, an all-day celebration of all things olives. We sipped olive oils, bent olive branches into crowns, spooned olive jam onto olive oil crisps, slathered olive oil lotion onto sun-baked skin, and cooled off with olive oil ice cream – topped with balsamic vinegar. What we didn’t do, that I thought we would: taste olives. You know, the actual fruit. I envisioned tubs of green, almond-shaped cerignola ; slightly wrinkled, almost midnight gaeta olives; and the green picholine to the purplish liguria all swimming in their pools of delicious brine. It was an odd omission, considering the name of the festival – it’s not the Paso Robles Olive Oil Festival, after all – and it had me craving slightly salty, meaty olive morsels. But I thoroughly enjoyed the day, surrounded by olive growers, their delicious products, and some...