Foodbuzz Blogger Festival 2012: Weekend Highlights

In late October, I attended my first FoodBuzz Blogger Festival in San Francisco.  It was my official coming out as a food blogger.  I wasn't quite sure how a born again Slovenka with a passion for vintage cookbooks would fit in. But my husband and I had a fine time.

Here are a few highlights.

Saturday morning:  We boarded the train and headed across the Bay to downtown San Francisco.  At the Sir Francis Drake Hotel, I signed us in and donned my official DailyBuzz Food name tag.  Next stop: the Taste Pavilion, at the nearby Metreon.

The Taste Pavilion featured local and sustainable products from Northern California.  There were vendors to meet and products to sample.  These tiny cupcakes were quite a hit.

After we had sampled our way around the Taste Pavilion, we headed across town to our cool Art Deco motel in the Outer Sunset. The Ocean Park Motel, the oldest in San Francisco, was built in the 1930s.  It is right by the zoo and the beach. 

We had time to explore the neighborhood before we changed into our evening finery for the Festive Gala.  Right around the corner from the motel, we discovered San Francisco's Irish Cultural Center.  It was a good old-fashioned ethnic hall, complete with a restaurant and bar.  I was excited to learn that they served a traditional Irish Breakfast for Sunday brunch.  An ethnic dining adventure would be the perfect finale to the weekend, before we returned home tomorrow.

At just before seven on Saturday night, we arrived at the Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park. As we entered, we were greeted by a phalanx of waiters offering drinks and elegant appetizers. Then we stepped into a magical undersea world of shimmering fish, bridges over waterways lit from below, coral reefs, and exotic creatures I had never seen before.

There was plenty of food and drink as we wandered among the sea life.  Open bars and strategically placed appetizer stations, with a delicious assortment of local California cheeses, nuts, and preserves.

Finally, it was time for the main event.  Back upstairs for an elegant sit down dinner. Just reading the menu was overwhelming.   My favorite dish the from the Small Plates Action Station was described like this: "Housemade Artichoke Ravioli with Arugula and Shaved Asiago, with Grissini and Carrot-Ginger Soup." The fancy cousin of Slovenian zlikrofi!

One of the best parts of the Festive Gala was getting to meet some of my fellow bloggers.  We had a delightful group of dining companions at our table: Kristianne from My San Francisco Kitchen, Sam from All You Eat is Vegetables, Danica from Danica's Daily, and Kate from Something We Dreamed. After dinner, while we were waiting outside for the taxi that never arrived, I met one more blogger: Annelies, The Food Poet.  Such lovely, intelligent women, all different, but joined by our common passion.

We slept well that night.  We didn't even hear the fellow who was banging on the door to the motel at three in the morning with a garbage can lid.

On Sunday morning, after coffee and croissants at the Java Beach Cafe, we enjoyed a bracing beach walk along the Pacific Ocean.

By the time we met my brother for brunch at the Irish Cultural Center, we had worked up an appetite again.  They had a nice, woody, old-fashioned bar. Great Guinness on tap, I hear.

Their traditional Irish breakfast was something a Slovenian would love!  Irish bacon, sausage, black and white pudding. All pork, of course. Fried eggs, grilled tomatoes, home fries, and eggs any style. With two kinds of soda bread on the side.  

When we returned home late on Sunday afternoon, it felt as though we had been away for more than a day and a half.  It was quite an adventure, with warm memories and a whole bag of foodie souvenirs. 

Big thanks to the folks at DailyBuzz Food who organized this festive event!

Slovenian Dinner Week 41, a Healthy Makeover: Stuffed Peppers with Turkey-Kasha Filling

Menu
Stuffed Peppers with Turkey-Kasha Filling
Fresh Cranberry Beans
Green Salad
Lost Kosovo Kugel


After my recent excursion to the FoodBuzz Blogger Festival, it was a relief to get back to the simpler, down-to-earth cooking traditions of my Slovenian American forbears.

But that foodie festival did strengthen my resolve to continue working on healthier versions of the traditional recipes I had been making.

Stuffed peppers, one of my early dishes, was a prime candidate for an overhaul. Although it was a successful Week 7 entree, those peppers had been a little too firm. I had already resolved to parboil them, and probably to leave them whole, the next time around.

Now, with an eye to a healthy makeover, I made a few more changes.  For starters, I would make an all-turkey filling, instead of the beef-pork-turkey mixture I had used before. That meant increasing the spices, as I had done in my recent attempt at healthy turkey cevapcici.  And why not substitute high-protein, flavorful kasha for the white rice?  It might not be traditional, but it would be in the Slovenian spirit.

Otherwise, I followed my original recipe, although I did add a little wine to the tomato sauce.

When I went to the market in the morning, I found a surprise: fresh cranberry beans, otherwise known as Roman or borlotti beans.  By now, the dried version had become a staple in my Slovenian kitchen.  I couldn't resist buying these tasty beans fresh, although I wasn't quite sure how to prepare them.

And for dessert, I invented something new: Lost Kosovo Kugel.  But that's a story in itself.

Stuffed Peppers with Turkey-Kasha Filling

About 8 fresh peppers, assorted colors (I used half green and half red)

1.5 lb. ground turkey
1 large onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 t. smoked paprika
1 c. cooked kasha (buckwheat groats)
¼ c. fresh parsley, minced
1 t. salt
1 t. pepper
1 egg, beaten

For the sauce:

14 oz. can organic Italian peeled tomatoes
14 oz. can organic diced fire-roasted tomatoes
7 oz. strained Italian tomatoes
¼ c. reserved browned onion-garlic mixture
2 oz. red wine
1 t. paprika
2 t. brown sugar
1 t. salt

To prepare the peppers: Remove stem ends carefully and set aside to use as lids.  Clean out the inside of each pepper.  Parboil for 10 minutes in boiling salted water.  Drain and cool.

To cook kasha: Bring 2 cups salted water to boil.  Add 1 cup uncooked kasha.  Let simmer 10 minutes, covered.  Measure out 1 cup and save the rest.  Let cool.

To make filling: Brown onion and garlic well in olive oil.   Set ¼ cup aside to use in sauce. Mix the remaining onion-garlic mixture with the rest of filling ingredients.

To make sauce: Mix all ingredients together and simmer for about fifteen minutes. Taste and adjust seasonings.

To assemble: Put a little tomato sauce in the bottom of a Dutch oven or other large casserole dish.  Arrange peppers inside.  Divide filling among them. (You may have some filling left over.) If you like, add the previously removed  “lid” on top of each pepper. Add more sauce, almost to cover.  Bake at 350 degrees, for 1 hour or more.  Add more sauce if needed.

stuffed peppers, before adding sauce

stuffed peppers, after baking

Fresh Cranberry Beans

Shell the beans.  Rinse and drain in a colander.  Admire the pretty pink mottling, because it will disappear once the beans are cooked!   Simmer in a pot of boiling salted water for 10-20 minutes, until tender.  Drain.  Toss with a dressing of olive oil, lemon juice, parsley, garlic, salt and pepper.

The verdict?  The stuffed peppers were delicious!  The peppers themselves benefited from parboiling and then a longer time in the oven.  We didn't miss the beef and pork in the filling at all.  The addition of kasha worked well.  It created the same dense texture as the traditional rice-meat mix, but with an intriguing hearty, smoked buckwheat flavor.

The beans were a nice, mild complement.  The flavor was even better the next day, after they had marinated in the dressing.

As for that  Kosovo Kugel, I think perhaps it should remain lost.  To learn the full story, read on!

Back Home after the FoodBuzz Blogger Festival

I guess I have arrived.

The weekend before last, I attended my first FoodBuzz Blogger Festival in San Francisco.

In the photo above you can see some of the spoils, after my husband and I spent an afternoon grazing our way around the Taste Pavilion.  Fresh endive, salted caramels, healthy fruit-and-nut mixes, wines, and many other goodies to sample.  Wholesome and indulgent all jumbled together, with the focus on local products from Northern California.

We live in nearby Berkeley, so most of this was familiar to us.  But to have it all gathered together in one place was quite something.   Trick or treat for the adult foodie.  Much better than Halloween.

Later, we savored an elegant cocktail hour and then dinner, in the beautiful coral reef exhibit at the San Francisco Academy of Sciences, with a few hundred other attendees.

It was an exotic outing.  A treat for the senses.  Food as an art form.  And everyone snapping photos. Constantly.  Including me.  (The cameras drove my husband a little crazy!)

But did I really belong there, among the foodies?    It seemed far removed from my passion for resurrecting the cooking of an Eastern European immigrant community from the last century.

In some ways, I did feel like the proverbial fish out of water. But I'm glad I went.

To read more about the Festival, you can take a look at my blog on Red Room, here.  More thoughts and reactions will follow!

Update:  I have posted more thoughts and photos on my December 5 blog entry, here.