Tanaka Farms Cookout Tour: Learn to Eat Your Veggies

The Tanaka Farms Cookout Tour was my first blogger event as part of my gig as Play Mom blogger over at OCFamily.com. My family experienced a complimentary cookout tour and now I can share the experience with you firsthand.

I’m getting very familiar with produce fresh from the farm since we joined our CSA in April. In fact, Tanaka offers their own CSA program which they use as a fundraiser for schools, churches, and other businesses. The Cookout Tour brings the whole farm experience to a new level.

Location: Tanaka Farms in Irvine — right off Interstate 405 at the University/Jeffrey exit. Scroll to the bottom of the Tanaka Farms home page for detailed directions and maps.

Highlights:

The best part, by far, was the educational aspect of getting out in the fields and learning what it takes to grow food organically. I asked lots of questions about fertilizers and E. coli — and found out no animal products are used.
On a more basic level, the kids learned about chard, squash, tomatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, and strawberries. They learned how it tastes raw, what it looks like in the field, how to pick it, how to know it’s ripe, and how it tastes when it’s cooked. They learned how much better produce tastes when it’s fresh.
Although it’s mostly a walking tour, we got to go on a tractor ride on the way to the field and the way back.
After picking the veggies and learning about corn on the way to the cookout tent, we washed our veggies at a huge counter of mist faucets. Then we moved inside, cut up our veggies with plastic knives, sprinkled on some oil and seasonings, then wrapped them in foil for the grill. While they cooked we enjoyed fresh salad appetizer.
We sat at communal tables and visited with our tour mates. Then we dined on our bounty.
After lunch, we walked around the corner to the strawberry field for dessert. We had 15 minutes to pick all the strawberries we could to fill our plastic containers. If we filled our container in 10 minutes, we could spend the last 5 eating strawberries straight from the field. Delicious!

Be Aware:

It’s a long tour – over 2 hours in the fields. If it’s hot, it seems longer!
I think it’s pricey. It’s $24 for adults and $20 for kids ages 3-10. So it would have cost our family of four $88. HOWEVER, I think it was worth it. You get to take home 4 heaping containers of strawberries — probably costing $8 each at the store. You get to dine on fresh organic veggies — probably costing at least $30 for a family of four at a true organic restaurant. Bottled water is ridiculously expensive at most tourist spots – it’s included in the price here. Plus there’s the educational and entertainment value. It was truly unforgettable. The lessons we learned will stick with us forever! The kids understand how their food grows and feel inspired to garden.
Bring WATER. They do provide water at the cookout tent – but we were thirsty before that. I might even dare to bring my own salad dressing or favorite veggie condiment (if I did it again).
Prepare for the heat (hats, sunscreen, even an umbrella). We weren’t even out there in the heat of the summer and it was pretty hot. Very nice once we got to our eating spot, though. They warned us to wear long pants, but if you don’t mind brushing up against the plants — then wear shorts.

Checklist:

Make reservations for the 10am or 12pm tour. Call 949-653-2100 x 204.
$24 per adult. Children 10 and under $20. Ages 2 and under FREE.
Prepare for the heat.
Bring extra water.
Watermelon Tours start July 3rd and are a less costly alternative with many of the same benefits. It’s only $13/per person with ages 2 and under FREE (so our family would be $52).
There’s a video of the tour on the Tanaka home page and some of the other bloggers wrote their own (and slightly different) take on the tour. Suzanne has a slideshow. Marcy put her humorous spin on the whole thing.

*As mentioned, we received free admission while researching this post. Link here to full disclosure policy.