San Diego: A Trip to Remember, Part 1

In case y’all missed my Instagram feed, this past weekend I spent an amazing few days in San Diego, California, courtesy of Bumble Bee Foods as part of my Bee Squad membership. I’ve been part of a fantastic group of bloggers working with Bumble Bee’s line of delicious gourmet flavors and quality tuna, and this weekend housed a really great event that pulled us all together from across the country.

(Up there you see me with Dorothy and Ali – such wonderful gals!)

I have so much more to tell y’all and show you from my trip, but first and foremost I HAVE to share with y’all how much fun I had with the group from Bumble Bee. First of all they set us up with fantastic travel and hotel arrangements, which made it easy to really enjoy the time in California.

 

Second, we had this incredible lunch filled with fun and delicious food overlooking PetCo Park – the three of us bloggers, the team at Bumble Bee and Chef Scott Leibfried. Y’all, I’m going to be honest in that I had almost no experience with canned tuna going into this partnership, but if you think you can’t do anything besides tuna salad with it you’re wrong. Lunch with Scott and the team really solidified that, and I am so excited to jump in the kitchen to make some amazing creations!

As we were all eating lunch we got to know one another better, but I think collectively we got to have some really great conversation around the food. I love Chef Scott’s style of food – simple, approachable, uncomplicated and DELICIOUS. Seriously. My mouth is watering right now and I’ve already had breakfast!

 

We started off with a terrific selection of cheeses, fruit, nuts, crackers and preserves, hummus with sundried tomato tuna on top, chipotle tuna samosas and potstickers that I really can’t get out of my head. Y’all. So good.

 

Lunch was a fantastic Asian chopped salad, sundried tomato tuna calzones, a fun play on the tuna melt served atop naan bread with a lemon mayonnaise, and wine – yummy wine!

 

The great thing about all of the recipes Scott used and shared with us, though, is that the ingredients are whole and wholesome, unpretentious and inexpensive. They have the kind of fancy-party-food clout without the fancy-party-food price, something I can totally get behind. Good food is usually a bunch of simple ingredients and a little imagination!

There’s really nothing like hanging out with people you’ve fostered relationships with over a lot of time and distance. Finally putting faces to the voices and emails we’ve been sharing the past year was awesome, and it just put the frosting on the cake of a fabulous trip. I promise to have the other posts up for y’all soon – get ready for lots of sunsets and waves and sand. Kind of my favorite things 😉