FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 25 2009
This is the first official day of the Food & Wine Festival.
For this weekend I had my mother with me (we have both done a festival weekend since 2002 when the Party for the Senses was called something else and was held in the Odyssey, but I digress). We picked two of the paid seminars to try: the Barcelona Tapas and Wine and the Caymus Vineyards.
First thing’s first: Upon entering the festival center it was time to check out the lay of the land. For those who didn’t like ambient noise, the bad news is Palmhenge is back.
Palmhenge is a circle of potted palm trees that serves as the only barrier between you and your $5 to $8 culinary seminar and the rest of the Festival Center. The good news is, Palmhenge Central has a cool new set sponsored by Thermedor (not Lobster Thermidor) with the space-age induction cooktop described by Pam Smith, our erstwhile Festival hostess, as “Induction With A Difference.” Of course, to Pam almost everything is With A Difference as that seems to be her catch phrase this year.
Palmhenge also has some new rectangular tables and the space taken up by it is larger.
When you get to the Festival Center in the Pavilion Formerly Known as the Wonders of Life, you have a couple of options – you can check in and get your tickets for your pre-booked culinary and wine demos (you can pick up your whole day’s tickets at once but you must pick up the wine ones at the wine area and the food ones at Palmhenge) or you can go to the desk at the front of the pavilion (the one right next to the wine store – not the Information desk outside the area where they’re selling knives) and buy tickets for today’s seminars if there’s room in them. You can’t get the $5 discount tickets there; those must be ordered ahead of time via the Internet.
You might want to walk over to Palmhenge and check the schedule posted there – it will tell you what dish the guest chefs will be serving for their demos. Mom and I did that and we decided to pick up ($8) tickets for the first scheduled demo because Chef Douglas Rodriguez was going to serve tuna.
We got in line to buy the tickets. Be forewarned. There was a couple in line ahead of us who had just found out they had to buy tickets. They spent a good 15 minutes trying to decide what to buy tickets for – finally deciding that they would purchase tickets for every demo on Friday (which cost them $64 and took another 10 minutes to ring up). There’s only one desk to purchase tickets and only one person ringing them up. If you want to buy tickets, grab a weekly schedule brochure and decide which tickets you want before you get in the line to buy them.
Then it was shopping time because I had $17 still burning a hole in my pocket from the birthday fun card I got last month. Yes, the birthday fun cards are good at the festival center.
This year they have some really cool tee shirts – and they had messenger bags made out of last year’s festival banners – the ones that were used as decoration all over the World Showcase. They had them from a number of countries. I had to pick a country because I was definitely buying one. This is the one I picked:
The Bologna, Italy bag, which one of my clever friends later dubbed the Baloney Bag. Ah well. My Bologna has a first name, it’s L-I-M-I-T-E-D. My Bologna has a second name, it’s E-D-I-T-I-O-N. I heard they wouldn’t have very many of the bags available – they only had so many banners. By Saturday they had apparently sold out, according to the cashiers in the Festival Center.
Then it was out to wander around until the 1:00 demo. We went to Mexico for a chilaquiles fix. Thing is, the Mexico booth does not sell chilaquiles this year. To pick up the slack, Cantina de San Angel does.
Here’s the first food review: A Mess O’ Chilaquiles.
It’s a half-decent substitute if you’re dying for chilaquiles. However, it has red sauce instead of the killer tomatillo sauce we used to get at the kiosks, and it’s best described as Cornbread with Pollo Incognito. It was really difficult to find any chicken in there. If you like cornbread, it’s great, but don’t expect it to cluck. It’s a Lisa because it tastes pretty good and the portion is large enough for sharing and there’s loads of hot sauce available to put on it.
Then we went to the Ditch (La Cava del Tequila – Cava translates to “ditch or excavation” on at least one English-Spanish translator online) and waited for them to open the doors. There was a slightly unruly crowd waiting for the doors to schwing open (they open at 12 noon) which turned out to be a slightly unruly crowd of Disers (really). They got their booze and they were happy. I had an Aguacate which I’ve reviewed before. Mom had their non-alcoholic specialty called the Pinata. It’s very good. There’s coconut in it, and pineapple and strawberry. And yes,the bartenders remembered me.
THE 1:00 CULINARY DEMO
Back at the Festival Center, they still form a line before the demos start, even with paid tickets. Got a seat down front. They now have a little kitchen set where the wine guy sits before and after making his presentation about the wine sample.
The wine guy for this session was Luis from Marques de Caceres in Spain. He served a white wine and talked some about Spanish wine. Although here it looks more like he and Pam are singing a duet.
Then he sat back down at the kitchen table and Pam brought in the Chef – Douglas “I Didn’t Give You That Recipe” Rodriguez.
The nickname comes from the fact that he served Sugarcane Tuna with Malanga Puree (with goat cheese), which he did give us the recipe for. He also served it with a shrimp salsa – which he did not give us the recipe for and said so – because he wanted us to come up with our own accompaniments. I don’t think he anticipated that we might actually want to make the shrimp salsa because there were several requests for the recipe anyway and he had to say they should come up after the demo to get it.
They also couldn’t make the Induction with a Difference stove work properly and he couldn’t sear the tuna at first.
A malanga is also known as taro. We got a big ole taro passed around so we could all see that it is covered with disgusting hairy bark.
Which was not enough for the several persons asking questions about whether or not there was ANYTHING that could be prepared with taro skin. I guess they didn’t like wasting it because he was cutting it off along with big gobs of taro.
The tuna dish was a big hunk of spiced seared tuna with a skewer of sugar cane through it.
Pam and Luis the wine guy got to eat all this.
Here’s our sample.
You can see the itsy bitsy wine glass. The common refrain is take a sip to taste the wine while it’s being presented, then drink the rest with the food. It needs to be rationed because there’s about two eyedroppers full in the glass.
The tunasicle was pretty awesome though. Full Monty Burns for giving us a whole hunk of tuna like that.
THE 2:45 CULINARY DEMO
The wine was presented by a guy from Greece and was a Brazilian chardonnay (go figure). Only at the festival. The wine was quite good really. They sell it at the Brazil kiosk out on the World Showcase – Miolo Chardonnay.
The food was presented by Adam Greenberg and Andy Pforzheimer who are also not the guys you’d expect to be plugging Spanish tapas.
This was Andy’s show and Adam works for Andy. So Andy did most of the talking.
The food was Herbed Goat Cheese and Wild Mushrooms Montaditos. It’s a bunch of mushrooms cooked with balsamic vinegar and herbs, served with some goat cheese mixed with cream cheese and more herbs. Andy waxed lyrical about how he microwaves the mushrooms and cheese so that the cheese melts into the mushrooms a bit. This was the highlight of the dish for him.
Out came the samples and the goat cheese had not been melted in the kitchen. There’s poor Andy asking the folks at the front tables. “Are those COLD? You’re kidding, right? They’re COLD???” and he sends Adam back to find out what the kitchen is up to while he stays on stage trying not to do a Gordon Ramsay and kick the trash can (which he couldn’t have done because as Doug Rodriguez pointed out in the earlier demo, Disney neglected to put a trash can on the demo stage for the chefs to use).
So we got cold goat cheese unmelted into the mushrooms, but the goat cheese and mushrooms were both awesome. Should say that if the wine glass for the first demo was itsy bitsy, this one was teeny weeny.
It gets a Monty for the taste. Yes, you’d want to make this goat cheese at home. Forget the mushrooms, just make goat cheese and get a spoon.