Aloha Friday Farmers' Market Dinner in Orlando, FL

I received a media invitation to the Aloha Friday Farmers' Market Dinner hosted by Slow Food Orlando at Loews Royal Pacific Resort at Universal Studios Orlando and went to check out the event.

Before taking a look at the food, here's a bit of background about Slow Food Orlando:
Slow Food envisions a future food system that is based on the principles of high quality and taste, environmental sustainability, and social justice. We are working for food that is Good, Clean and Fair. We work with producers and co-producers: farmers, chefs, citizens, educators and other activists to ensure that the food shed of Orlando and beyond is safe, healthy and delicious! Please visit www.slowfoodorlando.org for more information.

 Music was provided by Volcano Joe and the Hot Lava Band.

 Orlando Brewing and 4 Orange Vodka served alcoholic beverages for the event.

 Starting off the food for the evening, I had a salad from the 'Create your own salad station' provided by Hearts of Christmas Farms. It was set up like a typical salad bar until the salad bowl was handed to an attendant who tossed the salad with dressing.

 My salad consisted of a nice variety of lettuces, cucumbers, carrots, red onion, sun-dried cherries, sunflower seeds, parmesan cheese, and was tossed with ginger soy dressing. The ginger soy dressing was really tasty!

 The bread that accompanied the salad came from Olde Hearth Bread Company in Casselberry. Olde Hearth definitely has some of the best bread in the area, including this swirly, two foot long bread stick.

Deep Creek Ranch Livestock served All Natural Roast Beef Sandwiches. These sandwiches consisted of Italian style roast beef with fresh mozzarella, giardiniera, and sweet peppers on semolina bread.

Emeril's Tchoup Chop was also serving food at the event. I'm not entirely sure if Tchoup Chop was serving local food, or if they were just there since the restaurant shares the Royal Pacific Hotel. Tchoup Chop provided two different sushi rolls. Each plate had a spicy tuna roll and a salmon roll with cream cheese and vegetables which were topped with a spicy sauce.

Palmetto Creek Farms from Avon Park set up a Pork Taco Station. These freshly made corn tacos were filled with roast pork carnitas, shredded lettuce, guacamole, tomato salsa, and chipotle sour cream.

Wild Ocean Seafood Market had this wonderful display of fresh fish set up, but more importantly, they were also serving Port Canaveral Shrimp Dumplings.

These Ruby Red Shrimp Dumplings were served with bean sprouts, cilantro, and basil, all in a red curry broth. Out of the evening's food choices, these dumplings were my overall favorite!

Finally, after all of that food, there was still dessert! From what I could gather, the dessert was made by the Royal Pacific Hotel itself.

The Blueberry Upside down Cake consisted of layers of cake and blueberry, with chocolate at the bottom and topped with whipped cream and chocolate.

I really liked the Florida Peach Cobbler, with it's peach filling and edible printed decorations on top.

Fresh ice cream was also being made using huge canisters of nitrogen. I've never seen a setup like this before, but it was really interesting to watch. Fog from the super-cold nitrogen surrounded the ice cream mixer until it was ready. They had both caramel and mango flavors. Both were very tasty...

I definitely enjoyed the Aloha Friday Farmer's Market Dinner! It was humongous amount of food, all of which was really good. Even better, the majority (if not all) of the food came from local sources and everything seemed to be really good quality. I need to check out more of Slow Food Orlando's events in the future!