View of the Bay Bridge from our hotel room.
Like Michael Jackson’s movie currently in theaters, the recent First Annual Foodbuzz Blogger Festival proved to be the can’t-miss event of the year! From our mouths to your ears (or eyes), we’re moving to San Francisco! Well, not really, but one can dream. The best part of the whole event was its location in the beautiful Bay city. We love this place! It is a much needed departure from LA where the air is crispier, the buildings taller and the sky may be a brighter blue. San Fran = Joy. And we want more of it in our lives!
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Categories: Beef · Bevvies · Breads, Muffins and Rolls · Breakfast · Cakes, Pies and Tarts · Chicken and Poultry · Cookies and Bars · Dips, Dressings and Sauces · Events · Main Dishes · Nibbly Bits · Nuts · Pork · Sandwiches · Seafood · Side Dishes · Sweet Treats · Vegetarian · Veggies
Tagged: Bertolli, cocktails, dim sum, First Annual Food Blogger Festival, Foodbuzz, happy hour, Hotel Vitale, Nature's Pride, Ogilvy PR, Pie Truck, San Francisco, Skyy, street food, Yank Sing
We’re back from an absolutely great weekend at the Foodbuzz Blogger Festival. So many people, so much food, so little time. Three days in one of California’s best cities, and the chance to work side-by-side with the great people of Bertolli. Plus, we had the opportunity to meet everybody behind Foodbuzz, which was a treat. We have a lot of pictures to go through and to share, but that will take a little time. While you wait, here’s a dessert to wet your appetite!
Have you ever had desserts that were just two sweet? Almost two sweet to eat? If you think back to your golden years–let’s say, the ages of five to ten–there was almost no such thing as ‘too sweet’. Cotton candy, bubble gum, chocolate bars, sour gummies, jelly beans and the like could be eaten with wild abandon without a care in the world. There may have been a a blaring sugar high followed by a roaring tummy ache, but who even remembers those things? Now, most of us have perhaps developed palettes that cannot handle too much sugar. We are the same way when it comes to certain foods, especially dishes that feature fruit. The best part of the dish is the fruit, so make sure everyone knows it. Fall’s apples are great right now, and they will continue to pop up all over the place through the season. Leave out just a bit of the extra sugar, and they will show you who’s the boss.
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Categories: Cakes, Pies and Tarts
Tagged: allspice, apple, blogoversary, cardamom, dough, Frangelico, giveaway, Kitchen 24, lemon, maple syrup, pastry, POM Wonderful, POMx
We’re in San Fran right now as you’re reading this, but we had to put a post in queue in our absence. This is a dip made not too long ago that was a bit of an experiment, as some of our recipes are from time to time. Have you ever felt nervous that one of your brilliant food ideas would not translate to the plate? Perhaps you were hit with an epiphany the night before, and when you’re actually putting the elements together, you begin to feel tiny twinges of doubt. No matter how much of a cook you are, there is no guarantee that each dish will be a success. Following a sun-dried tomato and basil dip that disappeared faster than you can say “Sally sold seashells by the seashore”, there was the need for another quick appetizer idea. We decided to move ahead with this shaky idea and just see what would happen.
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Categories: Breads, Muffins and Rolls · Dips, Dressings and Sauces
Tagged: apple cider vinegar, caramelized, dip, giveaway, Kitchen 24, pear, red onion, rosemary, Spice Girls, yeast
We promise that this is the last birthday cake you will see here for a while. Maybe. We’ll see who else chooses to celebrate with cake before the year is over. Until then, let’s all have a slice of this 1-2-3-4 cake! A good friend who just recently got engaged gets to round out October with her golden birthday! This cake was a little piece of the party. We’ve had a few opportunities to work on decorating cakes and cookies this month, but practice is still in order. This cake was a test in writing, which is no easy feat. The letters are royal icing. The pink things are the bottom are supposed to be balloons, and they are glacé icing with royal icing strings. No one’s quitting their day job to take up the pastry chef life, but one day we’ll get it perfect! Oh, and we have things to celebrate too. Wanna hear all about it?
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Categories: Announcements · Cakes, Pies and Tarts · Sweet Treats
Tagged: birthday, bittersweet chocolate, blogoversary, cinnamon, cream cheese, Frangelico, giveaway, happy hour, Kitchen 24, Los Angeles, sour cream
Maybe you noticed that we some how skipped over the Guest Test Kitchen for September. Our fault completely! It’s been a little crazy for both of us, and September just slipped our minds. The most exciting opportunity at the moment is a chance to do a live demonstration with the Bertolli Sauce team for Foodbuzzers at the Tasting Pavillion during the San Francisco festival next weekend. Here’s hoping you’ve voted? If not, here’s the link! October has been a doozy, but it’s the best month of the year, so we have to go out with a bang, plus tease a little something special coming up next week! It’s officially Halloween today, and the frenzy of holiday baking will truly begin now. Remember when we told you that a good friend of ours left LA? Well, this same friend has adjusted well to NY, and it appears he has been baking up new dishes for friends. Here’s one that you may want to add to your holiday repertoire. We’ll let Bobby show you how it goes.
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Categories: Breads, Muffins and Rolls · Guest Test Kitchen · Nuts
Tagged: bread, cinnamon, cranberry, Halloween, holiday, loaf, New York, October, pumpkin, tangerine, walnut
Empanadas, empanadas, empanadas. Just saying the word makes the mouth water, no? The stuffed bread pastries have a long cultural history across the world, and you’ll find variations in the name and fillings in Latin, Asian and Caribbean countries everywhere. They can be savory and spicy, sweet and flakey, baked or fried, square or crescent-shaped. Although there are similarities in their basic construction, the differences between each one make them stand out as all their own. After reading a NY Times article about Chilean style empanadas, it was clear that we had to give this version a try.
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Categories: Beef · Dips, Dressings and Sauces · Nibbly Bits
Tagged: apple cider vinegar, Beef, Chile, crema mexicana, empanada, olive, oregano, raisin, serrano
Another birthday, another dessert! The month of October is flying by, which is not a good thing in our eyes. Whenever you have a favorite something, it always seems to disappear before you know it, right? Even though it’s not quite over yet, our favorite birthday month is slipping away, and the tail end is chockful of bday babies. One of our best friends would unfortunately be across the country on the day of his birth, but we didn’t want to miss his golden celebration (25 years old on the 25th!), so we did it early of course. This guy really loves cookies. If you leave him a few cookies of any kind after a baking fest, he’s happy. A few weeks before his birthday, he offhandedly mentioned that he wanted a big cookie pie for his birthday treat. We kept that in mind and surprised him with an oversized dessert to start off his week long party.
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Categories: Cookies and Bars · Sweet Treats
Tagged: birthday, bittersweet chocolate, cinnamon, cookie, oats, October, pizza, walnuts
All we’ve done this month is go on and on about how we love October. Hopefully you are not sick of hearing this, but we have to say it again: We love October! It’s the fall time, and leaves are falling. The air is crispy and there are orange pumpkins sitting on many steps. Oh, and yesterday was Amir’s birthday! When we received the call for submissions for Foodbuzz’s monthly 24, 24, 24 event, to be held on October 24, we had to give it a shot. Once the proposal was submitted, it was time to plan another birthday party to finish off the month of babies being born! Amir wanted pumpkins in his menu, and that’s how the pumpkin blowout came into existence. Every part of the evening’s meal–from starting nibbles to the final cocktail–would contain pumpkin in some form or fashion. If there’s ever a time to go overboard with the fruity gourd, it would be now!
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Categories: Bevvies · Cakes, Pies and Tarts · Dips, Dressings and Sauces · Main Dishes · Nibbly Bits · Nuts · Salads · Side Dishes · Soup, Stews and Brews · Sweet Treats · Vegetarian · Veggies
Tagged: apricots, bay leaf, beets, brittle, butternut squash, citrus, cloves, cream, cumin, dijon mustard, duck, ginger, goat cheese, Halloween, hummus, ice cream, kabocha, maple syrup, mascarpone, parsley, pepita, popcorn, puff pastry, pumpkin, pumpkin seed, sugar pie, Tabasco, tahini, tangerine, vodka
A couple of days ago, we announced the fact that we made it into the Top 10 as a Menu Item for the Bertolli Sauce team! It’s going to be so much fun to meet all of the other food bloggers we have interacted with mostly in the virtual world. Although, we’ve made it to the Top 10, there is another pinnacle we’re reaching for right now. The Foodbuzz community will be able to vote for three bloggers to present a live demo in the Bertolli Sauce Kitchen at the Tasting Pavillion. Here’s hoping we’ll get the chance to work with the Bertolli Sauce team and present our Menu Item to all of you! Voting opened yesterday to all Foodbuzzers, and we hope you’ve extended a little helping hand. Just think…after early November, you will get a break from all of the Duo Dishes voting pleas. Until then, please exercise your right and vote, vote, vote!
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Categories: Announcements · Main Dishes · Pork
Tagged: arugula, asiago, basil, Bertolli, Foodbuzz, marinara, pancetta, pizza, polenta crust
Normally we don’t post twice in a day, but there’s been a lot of exciting commotion in the last couple of hours, so we just had to interrupt today’s normal programming for this announcement! When Foodbuzz announced the possibility of sponsor-donated scholarships for the November festival in San Francisco, we jumped at the chance to enter recipe submissions based on their respective products. One of the sponsors was Bertolli, and we figured we could come up with something awesome for the Bertolli Sauce team. Our submission was one of those go-with-the-flow creations where we brainstormed a lot of ingredients we like individually and tried to see how they would work in combination. The final announcements were made today, and we made it into the Top Ten! We’ll be On the Menu for the Foodbuzz Blogger Festival. There are no words for how excited and grateful we are right now! No words! We pulled together a few of the words we have left just for this post.
Baby Portobello Stuffed Mushrooms is the way we went with our appetizer. We figured sautéed zucchini, spicy Italian sausage and Pecorino Romano would pair well with a meaty baby bello. Over the mushrooms, we’d top it with a drizzle of jazzed up Bertolli Garlic Alfredo with Aged-Parmesan Cream Sauce. We’ve been asking for votes for the Foodbuzz Blog Awards, but now we need more votes for this one. We want to be in the Bertolli Sauce Top 3! Voting for the Top 3 begins tomorrow, so please vote, vote, vote!!!
Categories: Announcements · Chicken and Poultry · Main Dishes · Pork · Veggies
Tagged: appetizers, arugula, asiago, Bertolli Sauce team, entree, Foodbuzz, marinara, Menu Item, mushrooms, Nature's Pride, pancetta, parmesan, polenta, sun dried tomato, wine, zucchini
