Will Blog for Food: Tweeting and Eating My Way Through the Seattle Food and Wine Experience with No Cell Phone or Appetite. Awesome.

​The first thing I ate Sunday was a maple bacon bar from FROST doughnuts. I'd like to brag that I drove all the way to Mill Creek to satisfy some sort of sugary pork craving, but I was fortunate enough to score a free ticket to Sunday's Seattle Food and Wine Experience.

I was invited to "Tweet and Eat" (#sfwe) my way though the more than 20 local restaurants and 100 wineries that participated in the event at Seattle Center Exhibition Hall. The location was moved from Quest Field Event Center to Seattle Center this year to make the experience more intimate (if you consider more than a thousand people intimate). To be honest, I was sleep deprived and totally hungover when I arrived around 12:30 p.m. I'm talking the kind of hungover where I had to wake up early to make the noon roll call. And I was late. And I wasn't hungry. Not a good time to lose your appetite.

Artisinal's Roquefort Parfait

​After a couple of mini doughnuts from FROST (because I can't resist sugar), I ventured out to the other booths to see what all of the fuss was about. I sampled the wares of about a dozen vendors including: TASTE, Tulalip's Blackish Grill, Andaluca, Salty's on Alki, Cicchetti, Artisinal and Campagne. My favorites, by the way, were the doughnuts, Andaluca's North African risotto, Tulalip's Dungeness crab cake with lemon aioli and lotus root and Earth & Ocean's housemade charcuterie plate. Everything looked so good. I really wish my hunger level matched the amount of food available. I missed taste-testing most of the dishes being served.

Blackfish Grill's Dungeness Crab Cake

​As I made my way to the Tweet Lounge (read as: a place to sit) and the only working laptop in the building (because my cell phone sucks and it's not connected to Twitter so I had to Tweet from a computer), I looked up to see throngs of people and lines forming and voices raising. People, and lots of them, were suddenly surrounding me. After posting some photos and doing diligence to my required Twitter duties, I spent the next hour meeting wine makers, saying hello to some familiar faces and even winning a prize-closet reject at the Dine Around Seattle booth (sponsored by Seattle Weekly) -- a North by Northwest DVD (it was better than the Smokin' Aces water bottle my buddy won). What's worse is that the woman from Seattle Weekly working the booth didn't recognize my name and asked that I sign up for the Weekly's dining newsletter before handing over my highly coveted winnings. I'm pretty sure I'm already on that email list.