2019 Disney DCA Food and Wine Festival

Welcome to the 2019 Disney California Adventure Food and Wine Festival!
Starting back in 2006, the Food and Wine festival offers guests the chance to sample all sorts of different foods. The kids are excited. We're excited! Let's go!

I love getting to break out these Chef hats. The Ratatouille ones are definite attention grabbers.

Okay, time for the hat breakdown. My hat is originally from Disneyland Paris. I picked it up there on my first visit back in 2008. Ian's hat looks almost identical to mine, but it's from the Walt Disney World Epcot Food and Wine Festival. Quite a few people were asking about these today.
Alli is wearing a chef hat and apron from Ratatouille. Theresa has a Chef Mickey hat from the WDW Contemporary Hotel Chef Mickey restaurant. Interesting fact, Theresa and I wore a couple of these hats back in 2009 for the Disneyland Half Marathon.

A comparison of the tags of my hat and Ian's hat.

The rides were quite busy today. At 10am, the line for Mater was 25 minutes and 50 for Luigis. Mater is usually what I use to judge how busy the park is. The Little Mermaid is good at moving through lots of people, so we headed there. While waiting in line, we checked out the menu for the different food booths.

It's always fun.

Alli is enthralled.

After the ride, it was nearing 10:30am, which is when all the food booths opened up.
Got your Festival Sip and Savor Pass? For $49, you get 8 coupons good for any item (non-alcoholic) at the booth. Each coupon is worth $6.13, so we'll be sure to use them on items that cost more than that.

One nice feature of the festival is that you can order any item from whatever booth you want. Super huge line at the Garlic Kissed booth?

Go to Off The Cob right next door where the line is pretty short. There you can order that Creamy Mac & Cheese with Garlic Bread Crumble without having to wait. They'll give you a receipt and you can take that directly to the Garlic Kissed booth window to get your food.

That's a $7.75 container of Mac and Cheese. It's was garlicy and a bit salty. Definitely creamy. I liked it, as did everyone who had a bite. Even the kids.

Jacob wanted to try the Petite Impossible Burger ($8.00). A hamburger made without any meat? How would it taste?

Interesting the way it has been colored. Browned on the outside. On a done-ness scale, by my eye, I'd say that's Rare.

Despite knowing that it was totally vegetable based, I tried it.
And... the guac and pepper-jack cheese certainly are the dominant flavors. The whole thing was very juicy. Eating some of the "burger" by itself, it certainly wasn't bad. I just wouldn't prefer it over regular meat.

At the Paradise Garden Grill, Theresa got a Large Pretzel with Beer Cheese Dipping Sauce ($7.99).

The cheese sauce was spicy and had the most faint beer flavor.

The pretzel was super salty, but that was easy enough to deal with.

Most items can be ordered from every booth, but the Cluck-A-Doodle-Moo booth was unique. You had to be there in person to order, but luckily it was a line only a couple people long.

Here I got the Beef Tenderloin Slider ($8.50).
Jacob cut it into thirds for everyone to try. You can tell it was cooked well. I was told when I ordered it that it would come out medium rare. I was happy when they told me that, and even happier when they followed through. Flavor-wise it was delicious. The problem though with putting a steak on a bun is that not all steaks break apart that easily. It's easy enough to separate with a knife and fork, but with your teeth it's not so easy.

After hearing the different options for food, nothing stuck out for the kids. But when we started mentioning the tasty drinks, that's when they started getting interested.
Alli went for the pink Strawberry Float with Vanilla Ice Cream and cereal garnish, Captain Crunch ($6.50). It's definitely delicious.

When Ian heard there was a Mickey Mouse Cotton Candy soda ($7.00) he said "Oh yes. That's what I want."
Watching them make it, it's straight up Sprite with a few pumps of Monin syrup. There's supposed to be Mickey confetti on the side, but they were out of it. They still left a streak of butter-cream on the side for some reason. On top was a Pineapple Cotton Candy garnish.

A special selling point was that if you mixed yellow pineapple cotton candy into the blue soda, it turns...

Green! Wow!

The other special activity I wanted to get the kids into today is the Jr Chef experience. It starts today at 12:05pm and from what I read ahead of time, it suggested lining up 30 minutes prior. Always one to be prepared, we arrived 45 minutes prior. Here's the line.

Jr Chef cast member Shane was walking the line letting everyone know what was going on. He asked each group if they had any allergies and Ian quickly piped up "I'm allergic to grass!" Shane assured him that we wouldn't be using any grass in our recipe today.

Someone has been missing A Bug's Land ever since it closed. Waiting in lines over there, Ian was always quick to find a roly-poly.

So... what are you going to do when you have a lot of time on your hands while you're waiting to go in? Collect roly-polies of course.

And in short order, he had assembled a roly-poly army.

Sharing is caring.
Before we got up on stage and made food though, we cleaned our hands. And the first task on stage was washing our hands too.

At 15 minutes to show-time, I dropped both kids off with cast member Savannah who was in charge of them for the next 35 minutes. I loved how Ian's chef hat was on top of the paper hat they gave him.

Too bad someone changed it before showtime.
Right around noon, the kids are all walked in.

I recorded the whole thing! A few pictures and more commentary below.

And there's our special guest! Chef Goofy!

Hi Chef Goofy!

Oh wow, so we really are mixing up ingredients huh?
We're making Magical Oatmeal Almond Cookies!
Alli got to use the bowl to mix together the softened butter and brown sugar.

Ian then added some egg whites and water and continued mixing.

After the bowl made it all the way around the table, Alli would add in oatmeal, and Ian added in Golden Raisins. Lastly, a cast member walked by the table and got a single dollop of dough from the batch. Once combined, they were placed in Goofy's magic oven and when it came out, it was a giant cookie shaped like Mickey Mouse!

And Chef Goofy has Magical Oatmeal Almond Cookies for everyone! Yay!

Bye Chef Goofy!

Kids were then led back to the staging area where parent could collect them.

Great job guys! I asked them at the end of the day what their favorite part of the day was and both said it was the Jr Chef show.

Let's venture back out into the rest of the park. Yep, still crowded.

Thankfully we'd procured fastpasses for Toy Story Midway Mania earlier in the day and could walk right up.

Nice score Theresa! And the best of the hour too!

Time to head home. For those keeping track, that's only 2 rides today. Ariel and Toy Story.

We're headed out through the Grand Californian and while we were walking we thought about the different amazing cake displays we've seen there. With Easter coming up, we'd thought maybe there'd be an Easter cake for the first time ever. Alli suggested a cake made out of cardboard eggs. Then perhaps a bunny cake.

Imagine our delight when we rounded the corner and saw that there was indeed a cake in the lobby! It's celebrating Mickey's 90th Birthday and it just showed up 3 days ago on March 21st! That's good timing on our part. Wow. 90 hidden Mickeys. I'll go into much greater depth on this one in another article.
But look at that, it's made with rice krispy treats.

Hmm, birthday rice krispy treats? Theresa had some waiting us! Hard to believe she didn't know about that cake.

Our last few relaxing minutes at the resort are at the gazebo. I say relaxing, but the kids usually have races. It's usually just the two of them, but today, I got the invitation to participate.
Possible answers - (No thanks, not today) / (Bring it on! Let's race!)
Ian, you're going down! Let's race!

Alli would get involved too. Lots of fun races today.

It was a really fun day today. Despite the busy park, we had a blast.