MONTEREY, CA – A working and walking lunch allowed participants in a day of sessions at the Produce Marketing Association Foodservice Conference & Expo, in Monterey, CA, to dine on tasty new dishes created by innovative chefs.
At the July 29 Chef Talks: A Strolling Lunch, participants tasted new flavors in produce-centric dishes. The event was sponsored by Guadalupe, CA-based Apio Inc., Carpinteria, Calif.-based Hollandia Produce, and Tauranga, New Zealand-based Zespri International.
Chef Domenica Catelli of Catellis Restaurant in Sonoma County, CA, was the first-place winner of the interactive lunch, where show attendees sampled chef creations and voted on their favorites. She won by two votes. Catelli, who represented Zespri International, prepared pulled pork sliders with SunGold-branded kiwifruit. The kiwifruit was baked into the pulled pork.
Other stations featured dishes prepared by Apio, which served grilled avocados with superfood toppings including the Eat Smart-branded Strawberry Harvest Vegetable salad kit. Long lines of people waited to dine on Hollandia Produce’s Pete’s Living Greens’ grilled skirt steak with upland cress chimichurri, served on tortillas.
Michael Hendrickson, sous chef with the Miami Marriott Biscayne Bay, learned much from the sessions and the working lunch. “It’s fun,” he says. “I get a lot of catering ideas from attendees wanting to try something new. This show gives them a lot of new ideas.”
Karen Caplan, president and chief executive officer of Frieda’s Inc., in Los Alamitos, CA, enjoyed the food. “They did a nice job,” she says. “Everything is really fresh. It’s nice to have chefs available to answer questions and tell us how they prepped things. Every year they change it up.”
Source: PerishableNews.com
