Taste of Temescal 2010

phil September 17, 2010

This year’s Taste of Temescal was Tuesday, September 14th.  For $30 (proceeds went to the Women’s Cancer Resource Center, Good Cents for Oakland, Lion’s Center for the Blind, Emerson Elementary School, Claremont Middle School and the Oakland Tech PTO) you got about 20 tastings of enough tasty food to get painfully full – if you chose to eat it all yourself.  (Note to self:  split the ticket next year)

Los Malcriados, playing in front of Aunt Mary’s Cafe:

“Texas Caviar” (black-eyed peas), salpicon (shredded beef? pork?), and a sweet potato bar from Aunt Mary’s Cafe:

Remedy, serving scones, some of Ritual‘s La Folie drip coffee, and artful barista poses:

Chioke from The Dime

DJ Crimson and The Dime in front of Kasper’s Hot Dogs on 46th:

Raciel from Tara’s Organic Ice Cream serving a variety of flavors – vanilla bean, chocolate, lemon verbena, turkish coffee, blueberry mint, and strawberry and mango sorbets.  Blueberry mint’s my favorite, but I went with the sorbet this time.

Barlata had paella again..

The akido institute was not serving food.

Scream Sorbet, who are opening their store “soon”.  (it’s all good, they’re still at the farmers markets)  I had a delicious citrus fennel sorbet.

Bakesale Betty.  I had their chicken pot pie and banana bread, but only ended up with a picture of coffee cups.  they are so damned nice.

Eat Real Fest 2010 Part 2

phil September 11, 2010

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:

Mogo BBQ:


 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

phil August 29, 2010

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.