At the Key West Food & Wine Festival

It's the first annual Key West Food & Wine Festival, and I arrived on the second day. I've already missed yesterday's events, but there's plenty to come.

There's a $100 pass that gives you access to many of the events and most of the seminars over the four-day period. We wanted to get here in time for a 1:00 seminar on Friday. First, we went to lunch, at Dante's.

Here's my operating philosophy about eating local food when traveling around. Unless you're living somewhere for a month, don't be on a diet. Key West is the Conch Republic. There aren't that many ways to prepare conch, and the one I picked is very decadent. It's called cracked conch (pronounced CONK, never con-ch), and I assume that the cracking has to do with breaking the shell. So I think of it as conked conch.

Conch is the perfect example of a food to let someone else prepare. I'm not too good at peeling away the skin and keeping the good part of the meat. By the time I get the animal from whole to peeled, it goes from the size of a banana to the size of a peanut.

Cracked conch reminds me that I could eat a rubber band if you battered it and then deep-fried it. In fact, it kind of tastes like a fried rubber band. Not fine cuisine. Fun cuisine.