Playing With Food

Accomplished cookbook author for Williams-Sonoma and other publishers, Brigit Binns, lives right here on the Central Coast. After a career of writing recipes, she has now written a memoir of growing up in Hollywood as daughter of actor Ed Binns. Brigit invited the Playing With Food Team into her kitchen to cook, chat and eat, our favorite pastime.

First it was the pandemic in 2020 when supply chains were closed off. Then it was avian flu in 2022 when flocks were being destroyed. People bought chickens! The average American eats about 275 eggs each year. So, if they are in short supply or really expensive, someone with a decent backyard may want to build a hen house. Among those in the know, they are referred to as “backyard chickens”, but Playing With Food is focusing specifically on Urban Chickens…ones that live in the city where they might annoy neighbors or be involved in cock fights.

EVERYONE loves pasta! The Playing With Food Team met up with two Central Coast pasta makers: one commercial, and one in-house restaurant. And we made some delicious discoveries!

Olives are a delicious snack, and the come in so many varieties. But olives are inedible straight off the tree. But curing olives does not have to be that difficult, and Playing With Food learned how.

One would be forgiven for not thinking that Peruvian cuisine was popular on the Central Coast. But San Luis Obispo has TWO Peruvian Restaurants. And the next closest Peruvian Restaurant appears to be all the way in Thousand Oaks! The Playing With Food Team visited a small one-woman operation to explore Peruvian ingredients and flavors.

The craft cider movement on the Central Coast is producing cider where every barrel is unique in flavor and character. I just had to explore more, and I started in the orchard, and went all the way to bottle.

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.

Hard candy…it’s just sugar, water and flavors, right? Yes, it is…but…it takes some technique to turn it into what you want. But what if you want words inside your candy? It’s pretty simple, apparently. Craig Montgomery of Sticky Candy how simple playing with candy is.

This episode feature a celebrity on Playing With Food! PBS broadcast a new cooking show called Great American Recipe. 10 home cooks shared themselves, their recipes and their families with all of America for the judges. One of those contestants just happened to be from the Central Coast: Silvia Martinez from Morro Bay.

In the shadow of the iconic volcanic plug rising from the middle of Morro Bay, Lisamu or Morro Rock, are some farms hidden in plain sight. The Playing With Food Team visited the Grassy Bar Oyster Company’s farm, watched an oyster planting and tasted some of the produce.

The Peace Academy of the Sciences and Artssummer camp included preparing and sharing food. Having the kids playing with food was a small part of their week-long program. But like all the other elements of the program, the Peace Academy leadership knew that preparing and sharing food is a vital element in achieving their pillars and values.