What Would Mr. Creosote Do? 4 Weekends at the Epcot Food & Wine Festival

Since I am not a member of D23 I am planning to counter the "Stroll & Sip" with "Slurp & Sloth" which means I'm gonna go sit around the Ditch for awhile on October 18. I don't have any demos and I've got Victoria & Albert's for dinner so no big food allowed for me...
 

Since I am not a member of D23 I am planning to counter the "Stroll & Sip" with "Slurp & Sloth" which means I'm gonna go sit around the Ditch for awhile on October 18. I don't have any demos and I've got Victoria & Albert's for dinner so no big food allowed for me...

Because you're not going to get enough wine with dinner at Vicki and Al's? :laughing: Because there's always room for booze:rolleyes1
 
Marty Feldman?

Maybe I should change to the "Young Frankenstein Pictorial Rating System"
 
so... does anyone know who that bald headed guy is on our buttons????? :confused3 :confused3 :confused3 (:lmao: :lmao: :lmao:)
I can just see some other park guest seeing a button and assuming you're a Simpsons fan, and start trying to have a conversation about the show. :laughing:
 
Marty Feldman?

Maybe I should change to the "Young Frankenstein Pictorial Rating System"

That rating would only apply to sweetbreads served at V&A. :laughing:
I don't want to get the Abby Normal one. :rotfl2:
 
I certainly hope you all knew I was kidding!!!! :rotfl2: :rotfl: :lmao:

Me too.. but I was thinking more of Harvey Korman... (flashbacks of Carol Burnette in the "Gone with the wind" curtain scene...;))
 
hahaha you guys crack me up!!!
get me a bucket!

okay, I could quote MP way to much, so I'll just leave it there

subscribing, I loved your last food review Nala, can't wait to read more!!

"It was the salmon mousse!"
 
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:

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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.
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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.
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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.
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Then he sat back down at the kitchen table and Pam brought in the Chef – Douglas “I Didn’t Give You That Recipe” Rodriguez.
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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.

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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.

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Pam and Luis the wine guy got to eat all this.

Here’s our sample.
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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.
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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.
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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.

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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.
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FIRST FOOD KIOSK EXPERIENCE: JAPAN

This is a Spicy And Inadvertently Blurry Tuna Roll.
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It’s a Lisa, a perfectly good bit of spicy tuna roll. Plus, it has more tuna in it than the unbelievably overpriced Tuna Sensation.
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THE 5:30 CAYMUS VINEYARDS WINE SEMINAR

I was late to this one. I mean really late. We were over in Japan showing Mom a Kim Possible mission and we couldn't find the damn clue. Seriously. I had a golden ticket though, so they let me in. They were showing a movie about Caymus Vineyards. Yeah, a movie.

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The three wines were all Pinot Noirs. They all tasted different. My favorite personally was the Clark & Telephone Vineyard (that’s the one on the far left). About halfway through the movie some people without golden tickets came in and sat down and were promptly dispatched by the ever-watchful Festival Center cast members. (I know that sounds like they shot them or at least Tazed them, but no, they just asked them politely to step away from the wine samples and move along.)

Then the Caymus guy got up to take questions and nine-tenths of the questions were about Conundrum, the white wine blend that Caymus doesn’t even produce in its own vineyard anymore. This guy sort of understandably didn’t really want to talk about Conundrum, he wanted to discuss his pinots. He had a bad case of pinot envy by the fifth Conundrum question.
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KOUZZINA BY CAT CORA

Cat Cora must like hanging out in old kitchens because that’s what this place looks like. I know it’s supposed to be a kitchen but would a little COLOR hurt anything?

Before I get to the food I should mention that it took 45 minutes to get seated and the seating turned out to be a little cramped and not all that comfortable. And the server was pretty much indifferent to those of us sitting back in the corner. She forgot to bring and do a lot of things like pour the wine for my friend. But the food…

I ordered some “fried cheese” which the menu calls saganaki.

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It’s really tasty. It has herbs and capers on it and comes with some toast. Squeeze the lemon on it to give it a kick. If it had been hot and runny I would be giving it a Monty. But it’s getting a Lisa and I’d eat it again. We had great fun passing it around the table.
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Cat’s Sangria

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This stuff is nice and fruity and not too sweet. Lisa again
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Here’s where the fun begins.

Mom and I both ordered the whole fish. I know some will think a whole fish is creepy but this snappy snapper was a thing of beauty.

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Mr. Fish is covered in a little stew of onions, fennel and red bell peppers and he’s sitting on a bed of greens braised with garlic and capers and chili, and some olives. He’s stuffed with bay leaves and lemons and some thyme (the stuffing isn’t meant to be eaten). Because I don’t know much about how to deconstruct a whole fish I made a bit of a mess, but Mr. Fish tasted so good it didn’t really matter (make sure you get all the meat under the rib cage). Being a fish freak I think this is almost perfect and it hit a Homer!
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Here’s a couple of desserts: Chocolate Budino Cake (lava cake) with that little chocolate sign that reminds you where you are eating just in case you'd forgotten:

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which was nice and warm and rates a Lisa,
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and this crazy egg roll
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No, really, it’s baklava. Some baklava has so much honey glopped onto it you can’t taste the nuts and cinnamon. This one was perfect, I thought. Full Monty
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Coming up (if you’re Mr. Creosote): More kiosk nibbles, Tutto Italia Food & Wine Pairing, The Interminable Dinner At Artist Point
 
Wow... that sure beats the left over ziti I had for dinner....

Good Start!!!!!
 
hhhmmmmm..that looks SOO good! I am glad I ate dinner first, or I would be SUPER hungry! and I don't even like fish :)
 














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