While everyone else at the resort was out enjoying the afternoon weather doing silly things like golfing or fishing, we stuck to the various indoor activities. First up was a pastry demonstration. Madden's pastry chef of 16 years showed us how she prepared various desserts we were going to have for dinner. (and then we sampled some!)
I left that presentation early to head over to the home beer brewing demonstration. Oddly enough, the night before I met Dan, the executive chef of RJ's American Grill. Just so happens Dan is heavy into home brewing. He quickly schooled me on the primary difference between All-Grain brewing and extract brewing. Basically it amounts to the difference between baking a cake from scratch or making it from a mix you buy at the store. "Serious" home brewers do all-grain brewing. Is this a new hobby I'd like to explore? Yes... at this point in my life? No. But I can clearly see sometime in the near future investing in the space and equipment for some all-grain home brewing. In the meantime, I think I might ask for a cheap intro-starter extract brewing kit for Christmas, and try to brew up some beers that would be ready by spring or early summer time.
After downing a few beer samples, we headed over to the next presentation, hand crafted chocolates! They were totally awesome, although the guy doing the presentation was a bit eccentric. We had to take our chocolate and bolt mid way through, because next up was the serious event of the day: Wine tasting!
The wine tasting was a very elaborate setup, with a large projector presentation and everything. I learned more about wine in that 2 hours than I ever knew my whole life. The wine tasting itself was 10 different wines, 5 white, 5 red. It was called a "tier" tasting, because you started out with the cheap wines and worked up to the grand finale expensive wine. And that last one was damn good, and noticeably different. There were only two samples where I drank the whole sample, and that was one of them.
After that all that wine, we both needed a little break so we napped (passed out?) for about an hour before dinner. Dinner ended up being a choose-your-own-adventure, with all the chefs lined up around the edges of a large meeting room. Each one was preparing their dish, and you could just pick whatever you wanted. In between the chefs was even more wine and champagne, although by this time we had both had enough. Here were some of my favorite dishes of the night:
Left: Scallops with coleslaw. Right: Sea bass with brussel sprouts (awesome!)
Left: Dan's crab cakes (best dish of the night) Right: Grouper fish (10 min wait!)
The dessert display and a picture of us prior to dinner.
Some dishes not pictured included goat, Asian salad with duck, veal, lamb chops, and prime rib. After dinner, we headed back to the room, full, exhausted, and ready to relax the rest of the night. The next morning I woke up at 5:30am for my big 18 mile run, which was the perfect cap to the weekend. We had one last big brunch where some of the chefs were back preparing even more exotic breakfast items. I stuck to some basics, although I did get a cup of a very tasty chia tea.
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