Urban Farm Eats -- 2014 Flower & Garden Festival Booth

*This review took place in March 2014.Please note that the Flower & Garden Festival booths have increased risks of cross contamination.     The booth I was looking forward to the most at this year’s Flower & Garden Festival was the Urban Farm Eats booth. When I first read the food offerings, I had a suspicion that this booth would be gluten free friendly. So I wasn’t surprised when I read that all of the food offerings at Urban Farms Eats were gluten free. Yippee! This meant less chance of cross contamination. The options served at the booth also sounded really intriguing, so I was looking forward to finding out if at least one of these was dairy free too.When I got to the booth, I noticed a chef was on hand (and I went early, close to the both openings at 11 a.m.). The cast member at the cash register referred me to Chef Scott who helped me out. He said the only dish that contained dairy was the beet salad. This made me even happier about this booth. That meant that I could eat two of the three dishes (and technically, I could probably order the salad without the goat cheese cream).I decided to go for it and try both dishes – the Land grown eggplant "scallop" with romesco sauce and spaghetti squash and the Ghost pepper dusted tilapia with winter melon slaw and mint oil. First up is the land grown eggplant "scallop." So, yeah. The name. I get it's a play on words and food making the eggplant look like scallop. But honestly, I don't think we need this gimmick at the festival. How about some really fabulous grilled eggplant cooked and seasoned really well? This, I'm sad to say was not really great.I liked the romesco sauce well enough - I like roasted red peppers. The sauce wasn't super flavorful though. And the spaghetti squash? Um...bland bland and bland. And don't get me wrong. I know spaghetti squash can be a bit blah-zo when it comes to flavor but salt would have helped. And I LOVE spaghetti squash by the way! Both of those accompaniments were fine relatively speaking but it was the eggplant "scallop" that really ruined it for me. The texture was the eggplant was so mushy and off (I believe one family member said it had the texture of oysters...um, YUCK). Again, I like this vegetable, I just thinking it could have been better highlighted by a different cooking preparation. If your family is already on the fence about eggplant, this really is not the dish to try!The ghost pepper dusted tilapia fared better in my mind. I will say that if you are scared of spicy food this actually isn't as bad as it sounds (ghost pepper is one of the hottest peppers in the world). They definitely used the pepper sparingly. But it is spicy (have some water handy). I thought the curry I had last year at the Singapore booth at Food & Wine was infinitely spicier!I think my favorite thing was the winter melon slaw. It had fresh ginger in it and was super fresh and light. The mint oil seemed like a nice accompaniment...if I could have tasted it! Is it weird I want to go back and just get the winter melon slaw?!The booth also features Redbridge gluten free beer (not really my favorite but glad it's an option) and several vegan wines.I would say overall, I'm glad that this booth is there, and that they had some different gluten free & dairy free offerings. I also felt a lot more comfortable consuming something from this booth.For more Flower & Garden Festival info, check out my main festival page, as well as the reviews found on Gluten Free in Orlando's website. Alexis visits the festivals regularly and offers terrific updates.