We’re back home after a nice weekend at the Food and Wine Festival. As usual, I am short on time, so this will be shorter than I wanted – hope to catch up with some other info later this week.

I have updated the Festival Menu Page with the menu items for this year, including pictures of many of them.

We had a wonderful time at the Sweet Sundays event this morning, but I will have a LOT more to say about that. For now I will say that they certainly didn’t scrimp on the desserts – dessert #3 was called “A Trio of Chocolate”, with *three* different chocolate desserts. I was a VERY happy camper. 🙂

But for now I thought I’d talk in a little more detail about the menu items that we sampled this weekend.

Our favorite from the Taste of California Marketplace was definitely the Beer Battered Halibut ($5.00). Made with Karl Strauss Woodie Gold beer and served with malt vinegar and a slice of lime rather than with tartar sauce. The halibut was on the menu for a couple of the first Festivals, but has been missing for the past two. This was featherlight, crisp, moist and a pretty good-sized piece of fish, too. It might be even better than the fish & chip shop at Epcot.

Also returning this year is the Beer Cheddar Cheese Soup served in a mini sourdough boule ($4.25). Last year they served it at the Pacific Wharf Cafe in a full-sized boule – I thought it was too much since the soup is so rich. The soup is just as good as ever, but unfortunately both times we tried it they hadn’t been very good about hollowing out the sourdough boule, and so all we got was a couple of tablespoons of soup. A little more than that would have been nice! I do have the recipe for this, which I promise to post.

Lee tried the Marketplace Slider, braised beef with spicy mayo on a brioche roll ($4.50). He enjoyed his, but one of our dining companions said that hers was dry. It was a pretty reasonable serving for the price.

We split the Mucho Gusto Quesadilla ($4.25). This had chunks of chicken and melted pepper jack cheese in a spinach tortilla, with some pico de gallo on the side. It was pretty tasty – a little bit of kick from the pepper jack cheese, but not overly spicy.

The Santa Rosa Pear Salad is another dish we both enjoyed ($3.75). Very nice fresh greens with slices of pear, toasted almonds, and crumbled bleu cheese, tossed in a light vinaigrette. I thought it needed more pears, though. One interesting thing about this is that the salad was served in a lettuce leaf (a nice big bibb or butter lettuce leaf – NOT iceberg), so you could roll it up and eat it like a wrap. It was great to see something green on the menu – one of my complaints about Epcot’s F&W Festival is that there’s not much in the way of fresh vegetables being served – but this really fills that niche very nicely here. I thought it was a pretty generous serving for the price.

The Island Ahi ($5.00) I was a little reluctant to try, since I don’t like the texture of raw fish. This was poached/marinated in broth, so it’s more like a ceviche, and didn’t have that “raw” texture. A couple of my dining companions ARE sushi fans, though, and said that it was not really “raw” enough for them, but that it’s a good compromise for those not used to eating sushi. The cabbage slaw served with it was good, though I didn’t taste the wasabi aioli. But there wasn’t very much ahi – just four pieces, I think, and you can hardly see it in the photo next to the slaw.

I think the thing I was most disappointed in was the Artisan Cheeses plate ($5.00). There were four different cheeses, but they were very small servings, and the ones I got had apparently been sitting out and uncovered for a while because they were very dry on one side – I should have taken it back and gotten a different plate. Two very small pieces of bread and a small bunch of raisins came with it. So it seemed overpriced and not very good.

The last thing we tried at the Taste of California Marketplace was the Ghirardelli Chocolate Profiterole ($3.75). I should know better by now – cream puffs are just not my thing – the pastry is too dry and I don’t care for custard. So, this might have been an excellent profiterole, and it was certainly attractive and nicely presented, but it just didn’t appeal much to me, or to Lee either.

We only had the chance to sample three of the offerings at the counter service restaurants – for the most part these are full-size entrees and not appetizer-sized, so it’s harder just to sample them unless you’re having a meal.

The one that appealed most to us from the description was the Southwest Pulled Pork Sandwich from Taste Pilot’s Grill ($9.59). Pulled pork with chipotle BBQ sauce, caramelized apples and onions, served on a toasted cornbread muffin. Unfortunately it didn’t quite live up to the description. The pork was good, but there was some weird flavor in the apples and onions that I thought was pretty nasty. At least it was the bottom layer on the bun, so it was easy to get rid of it. This came with the usual fries served at Taste Pilot’s Grill. The price/size was comparable to the other sandwiches served there.

Our favorite of the counter service offerings we tried was the Anaheim Chile Relleno from Cocina Cucamonga ($9.99). This was served with their usual sides of rice and beans, a little lettuce and guacamole, and some pico de gallo. It was covered in Ranchero sauce, and here we had a difference of opinion – I thought the sauce was a little too hot, and overwhelmed the flavor of the chile relleno, whereas Lee really liked the sauce – he took what I had scraped off and put it on the rice and beans, too. This is one that we would get again, and would be happy to see it remain on the permanent menu – though not if that means replacing the chicken tamales with this. (The chicken tamales were last year’s Festival food item that remained on the menu after the Festival was over, and are still one of my favorites.)

Last but not least was the Thai Rice Spring Roll from Lucky Fortune Cookery ($3.99). This and the Dulce de Leche Cheesecake at Cocina Cucamonga are the only two non-entree-sized food offerings from the counter service restaurants. It was cute – came in its own miniature take-out food carton with a container of ginger sauce. It was tasty – filled with carrot and red bell pepper strips, green onion, and rice noodles in a rice wrapper. This would have fit in price-wise with the offerings at the Marketplace, but seemed a little out of place at the Lucky Fortune Cookery – it wasn’t enough of a meal by itself, but your meal suddenly got very pricey if you got one of the Asian rice bowls to go with it.

So food-wise at this year’s Festival… definitely a few hits, a couple of foul balls, but also a few misses as well. It’s great to have the Marketplace back again — I really missed that last year – with a slightly larger selection than they have had in the past.

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