Playing With Food

Agri-Entertainment is using agriculture for fun, education and profits.

Bees produce honey. It’s a simple process, yet infinitely complex! And it’s certainly fascinating! This is a look into the world of honey production…which includes a lot about bees.

Asparagus is grown right here on the Central Coast in Gonzales. A trip to an asparagus farm was an enlightening and delicious way to discover more about that which Louis VIX called the King of All Vegetables.

We use vanilla all the time in all sorts of cooking, especially baking and in ice cream. Vanilla comes from exotic places, but a major national brand is produced in Paso Robles. The Playing With Food team took a journey to explore just how exotic this ordinary, standard foodstuff is.

We get to enjoy spices from all of the continents right in our homes. And the Central Coast has its very own spice trader, a purveyor of origin-sourced, high-quality spices, based in Paso Robles.

Pretzels are a snack that comes in a wide variety of forms. We are all familiar with soft pretzels, hard pretzels, pretzel sticks and more recently pretzel buns. Here on the Central Coast, a bakery makes a traditional Bavarian soft pretzel from scratch.

Eight thousand miles from the Central Coast of California is Cambodia. While the Central Coast doesn’t have a thriving Cambodian population or even a Cambodian restaurant. But we are familiar with some of the ingredients of their cuisine, and Playing With Food found someone to make that cuisine while sharing her story.

Restorative Partners has been transforming lives in San Luis Obispo County for about a decade. Now they have started a new kind of cafe. The Bridge Cafe in SLO is new social enterprise that is giving skills and opportunities to justice-involved individuals, and giving the SLO community delicious food.

Did you believe, like Fr. Ian did, that produce boxes are just fruits and vegetables just left over from mass-farming destined for the supermarket shelves? Well, the Playing With Food Team went directly to the farm and found out that this is not the model for your local produce box.

A Central Coast hobby farm is raising sheep and goats for high quality meat. Just south of Salinas, part way up a hill overlooking America’s Salad Bowl sits Turning Leaf Ranch. The Playing With Food Team was very interested in this small-scale animal husbandry and the flavors that result from it.