Food Festival, Part 2

Welcome to the second section of the report on our adventures at the San Francisco Street Food Festival (version 2012). We have an abundance of food porn to share with you, so let's get going on the rest of this epic day of eating!

This Pickled Cucumber Salad comes courtesy of Nojo. We have eaten at Nojo restaurant several times (see blog post Domo Arigoto Mr. Nojo). This cucumber salad with seaweed dusted on it was umami all over. It also helped to balance all the fried and fatty foods we consumed throughout the day.

Even though Angela can only think of that Cracker song whenever someone mentions Eurotrash, the Prawn Baguette was a nice blend of crispy shrimps, tasty bread and a veggie slaw.

Zella's Soulful Kitchen Jacked Up these Hush Puppies with corn, hot peppers and aioli.

Rice Paper Scissors  were a winner of the Food Fest Local Foragers contest and were able to get a *free* booth to help them tout their wares. None of us had eaten fried daikon cake before so it was a delicious adventure. We have eaten their Bahn Mi when they've hosted their pop-ups. Both J.K. and Angela voted for them.

Nombe Izakaya brought their A-game with Takoyaki!! Yay! (octopus, ginger and  scallions with bonito flakes) Angela always tries to get her fix in Japantown, but these guys were piping hot with the cripsy outside and the wonderful soft inside she loves (mmmm, mayonnaise--more for me J.K. since you don't like it.)

Sadly their drink choice did not hit a home run, in fact, it struck out!

We got 4 drink tickets with our passport. This one was a 'free' drink in our book. (We didn't want to pretend we paid for it!) The words Virgin Hibiscus Sangria sound very appealing. The actual taste was Lipton's iced tea+lime juice+steeped in hibiscus. Why is anyone serving Lipton's at a food show in this day and age??  We all agreed this drink would have been helped immensely by a non-citrus juice as the lime and hibiscus combined sour forces. The pucker of this drink was mitigated somewhat by a couple shots of the raspberry syrup that accompanied our next choice, the fried caramel pop from Claire's Squares.

Uh-oh! You'll have to tune in for the next installment of SF Street Food Festival (version 2012) in order to see the Claire's Squares treat we tried. Thanks again to La Cocina for sponsoring the festival and helping people with food dreams get their start in the business world!