This incredible two-day food festival, the first of its kind held at the Strathmore in North Bethesda, showcased headliners Giada De Laurentiis and Andrew Zimmern along with many other food experts.

This two-day event offered food trucks, a beer garden, live music, live cooking demonstrations, tastings, and more.

Friday’s half day event started off with a 2-hour happy hour with food fare for sale by the Strathmore Restaurant Associates followed by Giada De Laurentiis on the main stage.

Giada De Laurentiis

Giada’s  charming persona makes you feel like you’ve just been welcomed right into her home much like her Food Network show, Giada at Home.  She two separate volunteer groups up to help her cook two Italian dishes.  The first dish was a muffaletta which is a popular Italian sandwich filled with meats, olive tapenade and roasted peppers in a large thick sourdough bread.  The second dish was a tortellini in a creamy peas-based sauce with prociutto.

While her volunteers cooked the dishes she talked about her personal life at home, life as a food network star, and took several questions from the audience including taking a couple of selfies with fans in the audience.

Day 2 offered a day of cooking workshops and demonstrations from executive chefs, local food trucks and the evening headliner Andrew Zimmern, star of Travel Channel’s “Bizarre Food.”  Besides the headliner, my favorite of the day was the Peruvian street fare from Mitsitam Café with guest chef Jerome Grant heading up the grill.  Their offering of Anticuchos Asados (cow heart) was seasoned and cooked to perfection.  As a big fan of animal innards, I was very excited and pleased to see this offering at the festival.  Like most innards, if not cooked properly, your experience can be very unappetizing.  Overcooked, it can taste putrid and under cooked it can be chewy or gamey, but cooked to perfection it can give you a burst of flavor which is exactly what Chef Grant provided with this dish.  I’m sure that chicken-eaters have had some form of Peruvian chicken in their lifetime but you’ve missed out if you didn’t get a chance to have the one at Mitsitam Café.  This generous portion of chicken was mouthwatering, fall off the bone, and spiced to perfection so that it didn’t even need the side of sauce to go with it  ̶  definitely the highlight of the day.

Andrew Zimmern

In the evening , Andrew Zimmern spoke about breaking through the typical American mindset and opening up your food palette to experience new things even if it means eating a few rodents and bugs along the way.  Zimmern is one of my favorite television personalities as I like to watch “Bizarre Foods” and comment, “That’s not weird.  I eat that stuff all of the time,” but he still finds ways to amaze me with bizarre foods that I never would’ve imagined to eat.

Because he doesn’t cook on his show, many don’t realize that he’s actually a chef himself.  And he demonstrated in his own way three different dishes that had people squirming in their seats.  His first dish was California Squirrel as he encouraged the audience to consider local game as normal protein.  His next dish was live crickets.  Yes, you heard right, he had a jar of live crickets which he stir fried and accidentally knocked half of the jar on the floor.  His final dish contained duck testicles.  His takeaway at the end of the night was to challenge yourself to try new things and to see food as the cultural foundation for bringing people together.

To learn more about the Appetite Festival and to get more information about next year’s event visit their website at www.strathmore.org/appetite.

-ADT (Angie)