Every fall, Buddy and I love to take our RV to the Destin, Florida area, where we enjoy the less-crowded beach and take in a few of their fall festivals. One of our favorite festivals is Destin’s Bloody Mary Festival at the Market Shops in Miramar Beach. This year was their 7th annual festival and was voted best event on the Emerald Coast by readers of Emerald Coast Magazine.
At the Bloody Mary Festival, you get to enjoy three whole hours of unlimited tastings of creative bloody marys made from restaurants and bars in the Emerald Coast area. Some of the Market Shops also serve samples of their food that you can try alongside the cocktails.
This year, we tried Jon Smith Subs, which of course had small portions of their great subs. The Tuscany Bistro also served up wonderful Italian sausage and meatballs. They even had a cup of ice cream from Ben and Jerry’s or a box of doughnut holes from Parlor Doughnuts! There were so many good food options to choose from.
The Bloody Mary Festival is always a sold out event, so we had to make sure to get tickets as soon as they went on sale so we wouldn’t miss it this fall. The variety of bloody marys to sample had nothing on the food–it was impossible to taste all of them, although we gave it our best!
From the ones we tried, we had a couple favorites…
One of our favorite bloody marys was very unique–it was made with truffles and was very rich. Who would have thought to put truffles in a bloody mary! But it was delicious.
However, our absolute favorite was Camille’s by the Sea, which won 2nd place at the festival. Not only was it a great bloody mary, but the garnish was “out of bounds” as Guy Fieri would say. The garnish was a peppadew stuffed with bacon jam and goat cheese–absolutely to die for!
Inspired by the event (and a little encouragement from a friend), Buddy decided to develop his own bloody mary mix from scratch with healthy ingredients (HA!).
While we tried to find peppadews so that we could try to create our own recipe that was similar to Camille’s by the Sea, we couldn’t find them anywhere. Instead, we decided to use blue cheese-stuffed olives. Whenever we do manage to find the peppadews, we will repost because they were that good!
