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:

Amazing. The guy was incredibly fast. One second there was a lump of dough, the next second, hundreds of noodles.

Aerial view of part of Jack London Square. Crowded.

Dave the Butcher. Butching. Has a website – will link later.

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:

sopressata, cured at home

“a selection of seasonal pickled vegetables” arranged symmetrically

homebrews in fancy packaging

buckwheat soba noodle making

homebrews on ice

soba going through the pasta maker

topping for the sicilian chickpea fritters

pickled vegetables cut up for serving

marzen model

soba with cale, shredded daikon and dipping broth

peruvian ceviche

ratatoullie with cheese scraping

pork chop

prost!

adding wheatberries to the salad

mustard, in nugget dipping containers

nuggets, with dipping containers, in serving boxes

fancy napkins for the nuggets

tapioca with a hazelnut and coffee shortbread cookie

the eab crew at the end of the night

we decided to try the kfc doubledown today.

We went to the KFC on 45th and San Pablo in Oakland:

kentucky fried chicken@45th+san pablo

We ordered our sandwiches and inspected them.  Mine didn’t look as “disgusting” to me as some reviewers (also check out a little side story here) have described:

kfc double down

but it didn’t look too good either.  It tasted super salty, and the flavoring on the chicken totally overwhelmed everything else in the “sandwich” (rox informs me that according to MW, it’s not a sandwich, but a “sandwich” because there is no bread to be found).   you could make out a little bit of the cheese via texture and if you tried, you could taste the “colonel’s sauce”.  It didn’t taste horrible though.  The bacon probably wasn’t necessary – I could hardly tell it was there.  I was scared that I’d get sick.  but I didn’t.

My friend Israel didn’t have much to say.  He just shook his head.

We also got 2 biscuits for 99 cents.  Israel got honey and butter to put on the biscuits, but it was actually “buttery spread” and “honey sauce”.  11% real honey!

biscuits with butter and honey?

no! buttery spread and honey sauce!

I saw these three guys walk in.

3 hipsters walk into a kfc

(note: Israel made the astute observation that their menu is basically only combos – no individual sandwiches.  Perhaps the margins are just that much higher on the combo meals?)

They were definitely getting double downs – you could tell by their pants and their fixed gear bikes.

fixies three. no brakes = combo meal.

and they did.  I can’t blame them though because they were there for the same reason that we were.

We went to Brenda’s French Soul Food in SF for brunch on Saturday.   We got some coffee at Philz on Van Ness while waiting.

eggs benedict at brenda's: with fried catfish, on a biscuit with creole hollandaise sauce. yum!

And we also shared a flight of beignets:

beignet flight at brenda's: crawfish with cayenne, scallions and cheddar, granny smith apple with cinnamon honey butter, ghiradelli chocolate, and plain.

My friend Bill hosted a paired pig and beer dinner that I was fortunate enough to enjoy and photograph.  Here are a few pictures of the madness.  For a full, super-detailed description and many more photos, check out his post: http://billievethat.wordpress.com/2010/02/28/foodbuzz-24-24-24-snout-to-tail-stout-to-pale/

ears for the salad.

ears in the salad.

homemade sausage and homemade pretzels featuring eric's sauerkraut.

for more on the sauerkraut: http://www.awesomepickle.com

and of course, the rest of the head.

Once again, see Bill’s post for more: http://billievethat.wordpress.com/2010/02/28/foodbuzz-24-24-24-snout-to-tail-stout-to-pale/