To Your Heart’s Content

I like buffalo wings. I mean, I’m not a freak about them or anything, but I like the tangy sauce. Funny thing I noticed this year while we were setting up for the Fancy Food Show was that the Wing Time Buffalo Wing Sauce booth kept catching my eye.I remember them from past shows, they’ve got a nice distinct brand. But after a few passes in the aisle, I realized that I actually had a memory in my head of their sauce flavor, and pretty quickly I had some serious cravings for their sauce. Each year at the show, I taste about a zillion things. I love tasting at the FF Show, it’s just one of the most amazing experiences in the world for someone who loves food. I’m never looking for the fanciest items or the most exotic items, I’m usually looking for something that’s just done really really well. Something that I could serve up to friends and have them say “wow, that’s the best XXXXX I ever had!”.The Wing-Time Buffalo Wing Sauce is just such an item. The medium and hot varieties are amazing, but it’s the Garlic one that just blows me away. I can almost smell it while I’m sitting here typing this post. I haven’t figured out where to get some yet in the stores, but I think I will be on a quest in anticipation of Super Bowl Sunday.

I was heartened to come across this blog entry today: MY TOP TEN FAV FANCY FOOD SHOW PRODUCTS on the Tango Diva website. What really made me happy was to see some of my other favorite products from the show on her list too: Poco Dolce and the Sticky Toffee Pudding folks, for instance. I like to write about my favorite products from the show, and will be blogging about a few of them as soon as I can. Anyways, we love our product, and it’s nice when we hear from other people who do to.  

OK, the Fancy Food Show hasn’t started yet, but I want to post about our new favorite pizza - the Roasted Vegetable Pizza from Amy’s Kitchen. No cheese on top of this one, but topped with shiitake mushrooms, roasted red peppers, sweet onions, and marinated artichoke hearts. And I think it’s the artichoke hearts that really put this one over the top for me. I wish we had a bigger freezer to hold more of these. 

It’s that time of year again - well, yes, the holiday season and all… Christmas, Hanukkah, New Years, etc. But the Winter Fancy Food Show comes around in January on the West Coast. Normally it’s held in San Francisco, and later in the month. But this year it will be in lovely San Diego, and a bit earlier in the month, January 13-15th. We love going to the show, we’ve been going for several years and it’s the 3rd Fancy Food Show that we’ve exhibited our products. And if you spend any time at trade shows of any type, I can promise you that gourmet food shows are the Best Trade Shows Ever. I constantly recall my first trip to the Fancy Food Show where I learned that jumping from chocolates to bbq sauce to frozen latte to imported cheese to Australian wines for 8 hours will give you some serious stomach issues. Almost enough to keep you from doing it again a second day. By my second visit, I learned to focus: “Ok, the next 30 minutes I will focus on prosciutto”. Now I’ve learned to pick and choose carefully, and dive into only the really special stuff. Which I like to write up here. [Read more →]

If you’re looking for something fun to do this year with your holiday parties, consider doing a s’mores bar with Plush Puffs! This time of the year we get booked to do party catering with our gourmet s’mores bars. We’ve done everything from black-tie affairs to winery events, a gallery opening, to funky little parties in Silverlake. And at every one of the places, the reaction is the same: people are blown away. And it’s so little effort.

If you want to do one of these, you have a couple of options: [Read more →]

Once in awhile we do charitable fundraisers with our marshmallows - sometimes we just toast them up, sometimes we do full-out s’mores bars. It’s a great way to introduce people to Plush Puffs and raise money for a good cause. We get a lot of requests for straight donations of our product, but we usually don’t do those because, well, people just don’t always “get it” when a bag of marshmallows is just dropped on them. But offer them the chance to make their own s’mores, and you’ll rarely get turned down - last year we catered a black-tie affair where we were mixed with in with caviar and vodka vendors. Anyways, this past weekend we had a lot of fun, met a lot of people, and served up a lot of s’mores at the National Kidney Foundation fundraiser over at the CBS Radford lot in Studio City, hosted by George Lopez and his wife Ana. It was themed “Great Chefs of Los Angeles”, and we were able to sample the fare from dozens of top restaurants in the city while introducing them to our little treat as well. Rain threatened the day, but it held off and much money was raised!   

We got these great pictures from the women at Kickass Cupcakes in Somerville, MA. Look how much fun we are having with your marshmallows!!! We have a S’Mores cupcake as Cupcake of the Day on Fridays…we all fight over who gets the blow torch duty to toast the marshmallows. YUM! We love your marshmallows.  Now that is a toasting torch!     [Read more →]

One year someone tells you gift baskets are out, the next, they’re in and so on. Anyway you slice it, it’s a mulit-milliion dollar biz, so best to conclude, they’re not exactly going away.

So, we did some gift baskets last year. We sold a decent amount to boot. We did them up nice, with hand –written cards and all – only come to find out we barely broke even on the whole thing. HUH?
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Scones are always hit and miss for me. Maybe some people like them dry and crumbly? Hard for me to tell, so I usually avoid them. Even my favorite muffin place doesn’t make scones to my liking. So I pretty much just relegate them to the category of “stuff other people like”. That is, until we met Iveta Gourmet Scones at the Fancy Food Show.These things are amazing. They are so soft and fluffy, I had to stop myself after I had two. Even the next day, they were still soft and light and delicious.

The eggroll is an old idea. Really old. Strangely enough, the most interesting thing that Americans have done to try and spruce it up is the Pizza Roll. Sad but true.But then we found Soul Rolls. [Read more →]