Atlanta Wine & Food Festival

The weekend after we moved, we volunteered at the Atlanta Food & Wine Festival. We had committed to it months before, and it was perhaps the worst timing. The festival runs three days, Friday through Sunday with some special AFWF dinners on Thursday night. We volunteered starting on Friday on through Sunday.

My first day was out on the terrace, and it was a gorgeous day to be outside. The first session was with Delia Champion, original founder of the Flying Biscuit and the chef and owner of Delia's Chicken Sausage stand. They had pretty awesome shirts! They came very self-sufficient, so really, all I did was hang around and then eat. They brought chicken sausage links frozen and then grilled them up. They also prepped the chicken chili and served it with coleslaw and a tasty cupcake. This was definitely a nice lunch because I was totally starving.

The second session on the terrace was some grilled head-on shrimp with pineapple and some other stuff. The hordes totally descended down on the food, but I was able to score a couple shrimp, and then later a whole lot of pineapple and shrimp heads. SCORE!

On the second day, they decided to give me my own room. How stressful. It was the "panel" room and happily, it was the same group for two sessions. The first session had this plated food and the second was talk only. This was a lot of food to plate for 50. I had a helper -- a culinary student -- for plating and he was the slowest I have ever seen. Actually many of the culinary students I saw were very very slow at their tasks, though I did see some that were very capable. Anyway. I thought the best thing on the plate by far was in the upper left, a duck pate with a sweet jelly on top. I probably had ten of these at least.

My last day, they gave me an even bigger room to manage on my own! When I went in to clean up the room and set it up for my first class, Brian Landry from Borgne Restaurant was there at the stove, talking with someone as he continued to mix what was left in the pan. It ended up that he had made oyster spaghetti which sounds pretty odd, but he gave me a sample, which seemed like a cross between oyster stew and pasta. With the most delicious oyster... When I asked for a recipe, he gave me his card and asked me to email him. I did, and he sent me the recipe! The first session was with Kevin Gillespie, who made some recipes from his new book. I'm sure he has to deal with fanboys all the time, but he obliged me with this picture. He was super easy to work with. The second session was the Rathbun brothers who were also very easy to work with. They competed against each other making breakfast foods. Yum! All in all, the AFWF was a ton of work and I was exhausted when we were done. But I had a great time and ate some great food!