Happy Thanksgiving!

Grand Prize Winning Recipe!

Happy Thanksgiving! What a crazy, wild weekend it's been. The 20th annual Mountain Mandarin Festival happened this weekend and mother nature showed up for the party and brought the crowds with her. Mason cooked on television twice promoting the festival and his demo and at the last minute, channel 3 called and wanted to cover his story, too! Not only did they do two live spots on Sunday morning, they also did a full segment on his school kitchen project that ran at 5 PM yesterday! It was really well done and you can see it here.

The lovely fall weather brought record breaking crowds to the festival and our school had the opportunity to raise money for the new kitchen in two ways, we got to work the entrance gates for a percentage of the ticket sales, and we sold mandarin marmalades. We darn near sold out of all of the preserves before the end of the first day! That is good news, but even better is that rumor has it that Saturday attendance alone broke festival records for any previous years all three days! We worked our tails off but I think we made some good money!

November 23, 2013

Add to all that busy-ness, my dear friend Rod got married on Saturday. We traveled to San Francisco Friday night and had a lovely night out on the town with David and Lisa Anderson and were honored to be at Rod and Cathleens wedding. We were on the 32nd floor of the St. Francis in Union Square taking in awe inspiring views of the bay, the Golden Gate bridge, Union Square and more! Simply spectacular to be there for such a special day. Congratulations Rod and Cathleen and thank you for sharing your day with us!

2np Place - $50

As we always do, all us Partaks entered the recipe contest at the festival and I won 2nd place for my explosive mandarin pound cake but the big winner in the family this year was Dave. Dave won the grand prize of a set of Kitchencraft waterless cookware - a nearly $2000 value! How cool is that?

While we were in the bay area, we picked up Dave's mom and she came to see Mason cook on Sunday. What a treat for all of us! Now it's time to get her home and start preparing for Thanksgiving. I hope you have a lovely holiday as I know we will, we all have so much to be thankful for!