Well, I didn’t win the Good Food Pie Contest, but Sunday was a lot of fun just the same. The husband and I did a babysitting trade with friends and had the entire day to spend together.
We started out at the LA Times Food and Wine Festival at Paramount Studios and watched a panel with The Pioneer Woman Ree Drummond and Aarti Sequeira (Aarti Paarti), a food blogger and this season’s winner of The Next Food Network Star. They were lovely and interesting and shared a lot of great stories about their early days of blogging.
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| LA Times Assistant Food Editor Rene Lynch, Ree, and Aarti |
We hung around the festival for a couple of hours and ate scrumptious tacos from the Bool food truck and sampled a couple of different wines. Our favorites, Sin Zin and Cyrus, were from Alexander Valley Vineyards. Our favorite cocktail was the PB & J from Alie & Georgia , pictured below. It had peanut butter around the rim and a handful of fresh raspberries in the cup.
After a couple of hours at the festival we were hot and tired, but we managed to make it to Beverly Hills for the KCRW pie contest. There was an apron fashion show and 120 pies to taste. The grand prize winner, Yuichiro Sato, made a savory meat pie and it was beautiful. Here are photos of some of the amazing and tasty pies.
After the contest was over we jumped in the car and headed back to Paramount to see the band She & Him perform. Zooey Deschanel’s voice is beautiful and I’m a big fan of the band. It wasn’t what I would call an exciting performance, but it was a nice way to end the festival.
Speaking of the festival. I had mixed feelings about it. It should have been called the LA Times Food Trucks and Some Wine Festival. We had general admission tickets (which we got half price), but I think our experience would have been completely different if we’d bought the VIP tickets (they were sold out), which included food tasting as well as wine. There was hardly any food for tasting, or even purchase, other than the food trucks, and by early afternoon the lines for nearly everything were very long. Here is my husband’s review of the festival. “After all was said and done, it was a nice chance to try some wine, but I don’t feel like we got any understanding or appreciation for food, especially with the diversity that should be available from Los Angeles’s restaurants.” From what I read, the VIP section had a lot of local restaurants, but not the case for the rest of the festival.
The panels were fun, though, and it was interesting being on the Paramount lot.
Our adventure didn’t end there. We took full advantage of having a babysitter and ended our very long day at the Landmark Theatre where we saw a movie snuggled up on a couch in the screening lounge. The pie, the wine, the food, and the movie were all great, but the best part of the day was that I got to spend it with my husband.