Fire and Ice Festival comes back to Oceanside
The Qualicum Beach Fire and Ice Festival has a very warm place in my heart (no heart-burn pun intended) as it was the first Vancouver Island festival that we attended after making this area our new home. And it’s back tomorrow, May 1st – 11 am to 3pm, rain or shine, bringing chili and ice carving to the streets of Qualicum’s adorable and quaint downtown.
Celebrating their 18th year in 2010, festival goers gorge on the chili offerings of local businesses and restaurants for the bargain one-time price of $3 for a sampling cup and spoon.
I participated in the festival in 2008 when working at a local resort and loved getting a behind the scenes look at the careful calculations behind how each chili comes together. Many businesses have their own internal chili competitions to determine the recipe they bring to Fire and Ice, and there are some good-natured rivalries between competing businesses (the on-going Oceanside Star vs. Parksville Qualicum News is always a great showdown). Each booth’s chili has the chance to win ‘best amature’, ‘best professional’, ‘judge’s choice’ and the much desired ‘People’s Choice Award’ based on votes from the sampling public.
The chili booths will once again be interspersed with ice carving stations, where amature and professional ice carvers work blocks of ice based on the theme of the year. There’s also live entertainment (primarily local) spread throughout the streets, which are closed to traffic during the festival.
Looking forward to seeing if there’s a chili that can beat my current all-time favorite Thai Lemongrass Chili that I sampled at Fire and Ice in 2007.
Learn more about the Qualicum Beach Fire and Ice Festival.
Update: Post Event
It was a beautiful day, with the odd drop of rain. Lots of people flocked to Qualicum and there were some great ice sculptures. A LOT of chili booths ran out quickly this year, but the ones who came prepared were still dishing out samples past 2 pm.
My favourite chili, without a doubt, was Geeks on the Beach Open Source Chili made with shredded Chuck Roast. Best of them all, hands down (and bonus marks for the large quantity of ale in the recipe!). Jonathan from Geeks on the Beach Website Design, who I have had the pleasure of working with in the past, has been kind enough to share his secret recipe here. I’ll be making this very soon, thanks Jonathan!
This entry was posted on Friday, April 30th, 2010 at 4:13 pm and is filed under Food, Travel, Vancouver Island. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Sylvia Says: