Be Our Guest: Disney Dispatch Serves Up Food and Wine Festival Series

One of my favorite bloggers, Bob from the Disney Dispatch has been writing a series on the Food and Wine Festival that I wish I had read last year as a Food and Wine newbie: Country Cuisine Confidential, where he is literally reviewing each country participating in the festival, and offering descriptions of the food and drink available at each country.

Yes, an explanation of “What IS it” for each country’s food. 🙂

As Bob himself describes the series:

The three most common words spoken by guests at Epcot’s annual Food & Wine Festival aren’t “that’s so good!” but “what is this?”. Unless you’re a serious foodie, you’re going to be flummoxed by flavors untasted and dishes undreamed. Luckily, it isn’t a big deal since the folks serving the food love to talk about it and will answer all your questions.

But wouldn’t it be nice knowing a bit about each cuisine before you belly up to the booth?

….. I’m offering a crash course in demystifying the dishes served. Country by country, we’ll look together at the menu items and do some detective work to discover how each dish fits into the national cuisine, which ingredients are used in its preparation, and what it (should) taste like.

Nothing, of course, beats actually tasting the food, but on the assumption that your mind gets it before your stomach, let’s bib up the brain and see what’s on the menu.

Here is an excerpt for his entry on Mexico:

Mexico made its first appearance at the Food & Wine Festival in 1996, the same year that the Festival itself began. This year, the Mexican booth is in front of the Mexico Pavilion, where it belongs.

Let’s look at our menu:

Tamal de Pollo

Mexico is serving simple dishes with exotic names. A tamal de pollo is a chicken tamale. To make a tamale, meat- or vegetable-filled masa is wrapped in corn husks and then boiled or steamed. You unwrap it from the husk to eat it. Unlike a taco or a burrito, which you can eat by hand, a tamale is typically a plated dish that you eat with a fork.

Masa (Spanish for ‘dough’) is made from whole corn, not wheat. At the Festival, the masa will be filled with seasoned chicken, probably not too spicy, and not slathered with sauce, either. Tamales lack the universal appeal of easily eaten tacos and aren’t available at chains like Taco Bell. They’re also time-consuming to cook at home and require special ingredients like corn husks. That’s your cue to eat lots of them here!

You can read the rest of this post here: Country Cuisine Confidential 2010, Part 14: Mexico

And find a link to descriptions to all of the countries right here: Country Cuisine Confidential 2010: All You Need to Know About All There Is to Eat and Drink at the Food & Wine Festival

Bon Apetit!

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Wordless Wednesday: Welcome to the Food and Wine Festival

In less than a week, this year’s International Food and Wine Festival will begin at Epcot. We had the pleasure….and I do mean pleasure….of attending last year, and it was a fantastic 4 days of eating and drinking around the World! To those of you who are going this year….enjoy! Bon apetite!

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Wordless Wednesday: JAMMin’ Along at the Epcot Food and Wine Festival

As August winds down and September gets ready to make an appearance, within a few weeks the Epcot Food and Wine Festival will be starting. For those of you who are lucky enough to be planning a trip during this especially delicious time of year, don’t overlook the entertainment that is available as well! Sometimes folks will just pop up right beside you as you are walking along, and before you know it, you are clapping, singing, and laughing along. Take these energetic fellows for example: they are the JAMMin’ Chefs, and if you see them setting up their impromptu kitchen, be sure to take a minute to check them out….But I warn you now, watch out or you will find yourself part of the show! 🙂

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Four Days of Eating Around the World

Well we are back from Walt Disney World and Epcot’s International Food and Wine Festival, and boy did we have a blast! I will say that, experienced Disney vacationers that we are, as Food and Wine newbies, we found the Festival awesome….and just a little overwhelming! But it was all good, and we are looking forward to returning again!

With only 4 days, we had to plan our strategy carefully…or rather I did, lol! My main thing, before we got to Disney World, was to be able to take advantage, as much as possible, of the many offerings of the Festival…and still have time to visit our favorite attractions too. We were successful for the most part, despite having a little monkey-wrench thrown into things….the monkey-wrench being central Florida experiencing record heat (think mid-August).

Once I realized that we were going to be doing the parks in “summer mode”…well it did kind of put a different spin on things.

“Summer mode” at Disney World, for us, means being at the parks first thing, eat an early (11-11:30) lunch, hit maybe a couple of the cooler attractions after lunch…when the heat really starts to build…and be on our way back to the resort for an afternoon at the pool. Back to the parks then in the evening.

But since we were on the Disney Dining Plan, we had already made dinner reservations for each night, and so our plan was to experience the Food and Wine Festival primarily for lunch on a couple of days. Now, being in “summer mode”, the challenge was how to do this and actually enjoy ourselves.

The solution meant that at 11 a.m. on the dot, we were at World Showcase, waiting for our chosen food kiosks to open. Why? Well, do you know how HOT World Showcase can get when the heat index is close to 100? Yeah. That’s why. =)

So our Food and Wine strategy then became: how to sample from each kiosk, while staying as cool as possible. And…how to also do it somewhat affordably, and not completely stuff ourselves in the process.

Here is how we did it.

For our first luncheon excursion, DH, college-age DD, and yours truly decided to each visit a different kiosk. DD was to use the snack credits from our Dining Plan, while I and DH each used a Food and Wine card that we pre-loaded with $25 each. We figured that was plenty to start. We split up and hit 3 different food vendors, each of us choosing one item from the menu, and then we met (in the nearest shady spot), sampled from each other, “rated” our favorites, and then moved on to do another 3. In about 30-40 minutes we were half way around World Showcase, full (but not too much), and pretty much done for that day. We hopped on the boat to go across World Showcase lagoon (seriously NOT walking the rest of the way around at this point), and headed back to the resort.

On our second day of Festival lunches, we repeated the process going in the other direction, and within another 30 minutes we had succeeded in completing our circuit around the world, having truly sampled something from every food kiosk. It was so much fun, and we had a wonderful time sampling things we probably would have never tried otherwise.

Best of all, we completed day 2 with the remainder of our snack credits and 2 original Festival cards, without having added additional dollars to either card. So we did truly eat our way around the World and managed to not break the bank in the process.

What did we NOT do? We did not do any of the additional paid programs, and I have to say that it was just too overwhelming to have even considered anything beyond the basics this year. We did attend a great free program outside Italy, about making pasta and a simple Italian meal. It was fascinating, and we learned alot.

We also truthfully did not do alot of drinking. It was just too hot to even think about it during the day…we just wanted water…and the two evenings that we were there, the lines were very long, and we were frankly quite full from dinner. I will say that the beer and wine tastings looked pretty awesome, and I would love to explore those more another time.

What would I do differently? Well our strategy actually worked well, and I am pleased that we did not eat ourselves sick, nor did we spend as much money as one probably could spend. I think the main thing I would do next time, would be to either not do the Dining Plan, or plan one evening where we did not have a table service dinner, and do some samplings in the evening as well.

And of course, hope for cooler weather. 🙂

With that in mind, I am, of course, already dreaming of our next visit!

Have a magical day!

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Four Days of Food, Family, Fun….and a Little Pixie Dust: I am off to Disney World!

The Affordable Mouse is heading to Walt Disney World this afternoon, for a few days of Disney fun!. I am especially excited to be visiting for the first time during the Food and Wine Festival at Epcot, so expect to be doing more than my fair share of eating my way around the World! =D

One of the things I will be looking carefully at on this trip, will be additional ways to save money, and will of course be passing on any new ideas or strategies to you. As I have studied the Food and Wine Festival offerings, I can see that this is potentially a budget-buster if one is not careful: each of the food samplings comes with a corresponding cost, so it is definitely possible to spend many American dollars on this!

Here is the strategy we plan to use going into it, and I will let you know how well it works. We are on the Disney Dining Plan, so have dinner ADRs (Advanced Dining Reservations) already planned for our 3 nights there. We love having table service meals at Disney so were unwilling to give up on this, despite the many food offerings at Food and Wine Fest. Instead, we plan to “lunch” our way around World Showcase a couple of days, and will be using snack credits to do so….at least at the start. We will use our counter service credits on these days for a more substantial breakfast.

It is evident that our snack credits will only be a start, so we plan to get one of the Food and Wine reloadable cards, and use it to swipe at the various kiosks where we eat. Gonna try really hard not to reload it though, for the sake of my wallet as well as my jean size lol.

One thing I also suspect will play a role, is the fact that central Florida is currently experiencing record-setting heat, so we will definitely be heading to the parks early, having an early lunch, and returning to the hotel for a pool break. When we get too hot, we will stop eating…and that is probably a good thing!

In any event, I will share our experiences, and hopefully some new ways to plan affordable Disney family vacations when we return. =)

Have a magical day!

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