Team Ella at Heritage Fire

Last weekend was another fantastic meat fest at the annual Heritage Fire event at the beautiful Charles Krug Winery. With over 3,500 pounds of meat and 950 guests, Cochon555’s Heritage Fire made its yearly stop in Napa Valley a hugely successful outing. Over $6,000 was raised for the Piggy Bank farm-in-the-making charity,

Piggy Bank is a pig farming sanctuary. Harboring a Noah’s Ark-worthy selection of heritage breeds, it provides free genetics and business plans to emerging family farms. Piggy Bank aims to change the future of food by creating a community in which small farmers can come to learn about safer, more responsible practices, and can benefit from the sharing of genetics, livestock, and the very information needed to not just survive, but to thrive as small businesses.

While the charity might be pig focused, Heritage Fire is not. If you can roast it, you can find it here. There were dishes with pork, beef, chicken, goat, guinea hen, duck, oysters, shrimp, and more.

Team Ella - courtesy of Jane Anderson

Representing Sacramento this year was Team Ella who were assigned Goat. The goat came from Michael Passmore of Passmore Ranch. They made a paella that featured goat.

Ravin Patel & Rob Lind of Ella

There is usually a fair number of offal dishes at a meat fest like this. Two standouts were the tongue porchetta and this gem....

Yes, that's a deep fried duck embryo. Think Filipino balut — out of the shell. For a person who has never had the guts to eat balut, I did manage to eat this. It was soft and tasted like deep fried anything.

There was plenty more, of course. I want to give a particular shout out to Dry Sparkling sodas. For years all I had was water because everyone else was drinking wine and they never cared about us non-drinkers. So kudos to Dry Sparking for making my day so much better with their amazing sodas.