I went to a beautiful foggy wedding in at the botanical gardens in Fort Bragg yesterday:
huddling because it was breezy and chilly
5d
Eat Real Fest 2010 Part 3 – Pig Butchery Competition
This is part 3 of my photos from Eat Real Festival 2010. For part 1, click here, for part 2, click here.
Dave the butcher and Dan the butcher from Jim N Nick’s BBQ faced off in the pig butchery competition on the afternoon of Sunday the 29th of August.
one of the judges holds up a loin:
Anya Fernald does the play by play:
more dave the butcher:
Dave the butcher liked this one:
These guys were really getting into it:
A few more shots of the pig butchery crowd:
Eat Real Fest 2010 Part 2
This is part 2 of my photos from Eat Real Festival 2010. For part 1, click here.
After his Chinese Noodle Pulling demonstration, Chef Gordon from ARK Chinese restaurant in Alameda started a watermelon carving demonstration. The stage MC joked that he’d be going at half-speed so that the people in the audience could observe his technique. He specified that he’d be carving a peony:
I like seeing the watermelon rind scraps all strewn about.
A little chunk fell out as Chef Gordon was carving. He explained that he usually uses less-ripe watermelons because they’re firmer and thus less likely to fall apart.
Chef Gordon also threw a carved carrot into the mix. He said these need to be fresh so they they’re still firm and crisp. Here’s a bird:
I did some walking around after watching the demonstration. Here’s some roast pig, ready for serving from Chop bar:
Here’s a hen (taxidermy?) in front of the Food Skills stage in the Urban Homestead area. As seen on Oakland Local.
Goods from the prizewinners of the Urban Homestead competition:
Samples for the crowd from the Melon Mania workshop in the Urban Homesteading area.
Elote to be:
What comes next? Half eaten elote:
Lobster roll from Sam’s Chowdermobile. My favorite food of the festival.
Gigantic Gerald’s Paella Pan. You could fit a family of 6 on it!
shot of the eat real 2010 crowd:
Carne Cruda performing at the Lawn Stage – They were goofballs.
Eat Real Fest 2010 Part 1
Eat Real Festival 2010 was amazing. Jack London Square was beautiful. Oakland is beautiful.
Here are the photos:
Food Vendors and the Marketplace
Sometime Emeryville vendors Primo’s Parilla showed up with their meats and grill. They’d recently run into some sort of permit issue with Emeryville regarding the grill but that wasn’t a problem at Eat Real.
Folks from Boccalone (“Tasty Salted Pig Parts”) had a small stand:
Toussant from Besto Pesto providing samples of his pesto with super-delicious organic rigatoni pasta from the pasta shop
Rachel and her crew from Blue Chair Fruit selling some wonderful jams (including black fig, strawberry-pink peppercorn, and spiced burbon-tomato)
This guy was getting ready to make a watermelon salad in the Marketplace area:
A sale at Marshall’s farm natural honey:
The Taco Guys had a sweet paint job on their truck.
Chinese Noodle Pulling
In short, the Chinese noodle pulling demonstration was amazing. At first, being unfamiliar with the art, I was almost bored – this guy is just kneading dough. But then, he started doing some twists and stretching..
Chef Gordon from ARK restaurant in Alameda, CA gets to work, starting with a lump of dough.
pretzel-like:
In a short amount of time he went from what appeared to be a few strands of dough to hundreds of noodles:
I was able to get an aerial view of part of Jack London Square. Super-crowded. It’s an interesting contrast compared to how empty it normally seems.
This is Dave the Butcher participating in the live pig butchery competition against Dan the butcher from Jim & Nick’s BBQ . Apparently he liked the photo enough to tweet/facebook update about it: http://twitter.com/davethebutcher/status/22709779717
Cool. More photos of the butchery competition to come in the next post.
Cantillon
Gueuze and Kreik sitting on a barrel at Cantillon (or Brasserie Cantillon Brouwerij if you want to be specific) in Brussels:
I didn’t have time to take a tour this time, but it was a nice little stopover.
2010 World Footbag Championship Photos
I went to the Oakland Convention Center to check out the 31st international world footbag championships put on with the help of local footbag (aka hackey sack) crew chaos footbag. I got there just as the women’s doubles finals were finishing up. Julie Symons and Jody Welch won the title after a spirited match.
The actual setup was pretty interesting to me. A bunch of different footbag courts with hard puzzle-piece flooring and all were set up for competition on one side, while some plastic turf was set up on the other side of the rented space for freestyle purposes. Bleachers were set up around the main court and the convention center’s own lone caterer (no BYOB allowed, apparently) served beers and wine to those looking for a little buzz.
Some of the open doubles finalists warmed up while other people juggled and performed some freestyle footbag routines in between the women’s doubles and open doubles finals.
One of the eventual champions, Florian Goetze from Germany sets up for a spike:
Florian spikes once again:
The spikes are pretty incredible. It’s a 5-foot tall net, and it looks pretty tough to be able to have the flexibility, coordination, and the vertical to be able to kick the bag downwards.
The competition got started a little late, but was worth the wait. Florian Goetze and Patrick Schrikel were in black, competing against Gilles Demers and Francois Pelletier from Canada. I hadn’t watched much footbag prior to watching this event, but seeing the guys attempt to block was pretty incredible.
Seriously. Look at this dude’s face:
And that dude’s. Acrobatic.
The finals were played to 15 points with sideout scoring per game. The match was decided by the first team to win two games. I had expected a 45 minute match or so but the competition was fierce and both teams stayed close throughout.
and the blocks:
I love looking at the expressions of the people sitting in the crowd in this photo:
In the end, the match lasted almost two and a half hours. The highlight for me was when, while in midair, one of the Canadians realized he couldn’t kick the bag with his intended foot. He was able to move that foot out of the way and switch feet to kick the bag over the net. Like a double-pump in basketball.
best of the east bay party 2010
Went to the 2010 Best of the East Bay party at Jack London Square put on by the East Bay Express on Saturday. There was a good mix if people, food, art, merchandise and music. Here are some photos. Good times.
I watched the skateboarders for a bit. This is Lem:
Ferry terminal, Jack London Square:
Lead singer for Everything Must Go! Wild set.
Gift of Gab and Lateef the Truth Speaker + Headnodic from the Crown City Rockers = The Mighty Underdogs. They put on a damn fine show. Gift of Gab shredding the mic:
Lateef the Truth speaker:
Freestyle:
lateef: freeze!
Eating About Beer 2010
this past weekend, about 32 of us were treated to an eight-course beer-paired culinary adventure: eating about beer 2010. More extensive descriptions of the event will be written by the makers in the near future, so for now just I’ll share a few pictures:
- homemade sopressata
sopressata, cured at home
- pickled veggies
“a selection of seasonal pickled vegetables” arranged symmetrically
- homebrews
homebrews in fancy packaging
- soba-to-be
buckwheat soba noodle making
- avacado cutting
- beer
homebrews on ice
- soba
soba going through the pasta maker
- for the fritters
topping for the sicilian chickpea fritters
- pickled veggies
pickled vegetables cut up for serving
- beer model
marzen model
- soba
soba with cale, shredded daikon and dipping broth
- empties
- ceviche
peruvian ceviche
- ratatouille
ratatoullie with cheese scraping
- pork
pork chop
- prost
prost!
- salad
adding wheatberries to the salad
- mustard
mustard, in nugget dipping containers
- nuggets
nuggets, with dipping containers, in serving boxes
- silverware
fancy napkins for the nuggets
- dessert
tapioca with a hazelnut and coffee shortbread cookie
- the eab crew
the eab crew at the end of the night
temescal street fair 2010
Today was the 7th annual Temescal street fair along Telegraph ave in Oakland between 45th and 51st avenues.
Berta Olivia y su mariachi performed an impressive set near 51st ave:
there was a train (with a horn) for the kiddies:
oakland recycles and composts:
I couldn’t resist stopping by the East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse. I’d sadly never been in there. There is so much awesome junk just begging to reused (or “upcycled” if you will):
awesome drawers of markers and pencils with scribble marks everywhere (of course!)
Raciel and Tara (and sorry, I don’t know your name) from Tara’s Organic Ice Cream at their tent:
Bartender at Barlata:
