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I wonder if anyone at the New York Botanical Garden could tell that I had never done a live cooking demo before?

The week leading up to the point where I would take the stage as part of the Edible Garden series went by like a blur – five days that were filled with a sense of excitement tinged with a moderate degree of anxiety.  Was I excited to have the opportunity to cook in front of a live audience?  Absolutely.  Did I have any notion of how one goes about preparing for a live demo?  Not really.  My greatest fear was that of the unknown – I had never been to the New York Botanical Garden before, had never seen the Kitchen Conservatory Stage, and could not, therefore, envision any of the setup in my head.

My wife encouraged me to practice, and I’m glad that she did.  I ran through the recipes at home, having selected a roasted garlic soup for one dish, and a caramelized onion bread pudding for the other.  Both were easy to prepare in a home kitchen, and readily lent themselves to being a showcase starter or accompaniment for a dinner party.  Each preparation contained steps that could be performed ahead of time, which was critical to a successful demo, and steps that could be shown to an audience to teach technique.  The only missing components were the words that were supposed to come out of my mouth while I was doing the cooking.  The cooking would be the easiest part.

I tried to do a dry run at home, recording myself with a camcorder.  It went fairly well, but  too much of it felt forced – I just can’t have a conversation with thin air, and the notion of practicing in front of friends and neighbors gave me more anxiety than the thought of doing it in front of strangers.  I came up with a basic outline of what I wanted to say, but I knew that at least half of my presentation was going to be extemporaneous.  Again, that darkness of the unknown reared its head, and I was stuck in limbo – both prepared and unprepared at the same time.

We stayed in a hotel the evening before the demo, just to minimize the potential for traffic delays.  Having reviewed the route to the New York Botanical Garden, and in consideration of the ingredients and equipment that I had brought with me, I decided that it would be quicker and less unwieldy if we drove from the hotel to the site instead of taking the subway or a cab.  Since we were staying in Jersey City, it looked like a quick hop up Interstate 95, a crossing of the George Washington Bridge, a twist here, a turn there, and we’re at the Garden.

As it turns out, it really, really, really isn’t that simple.

Checking out of the hotel reasonably on schedule, we packed up the car and headed out with plenty of time before the first demo was to start at 1pm.  New Jersey Turnpike traffic was light on Saturday morning, and we were cruising along.  I had already expected to hit a slowdown on the George Washington Bridge, but how bad could it be at 10am on a Saturday?

Would you believe incredibly, stupendously, horrifically BAD?

Four lanes shrank to two lanes in concurrent merges on the left and right, cramming the scrum of hot metal together into a soup of exhaust and frustration, with mere inches separating bumpers.  We crawled through the tolls at a pace that was so slow, I could have paid the $6.00 in pennies, with change to spare.  Our Civic fought its way through the traffic, inching along the upper deck as the minutes ticked away.  Thankfully, our GPS instructed us to take the exit immediately following the bridge crossing…right into the heart of the Bronx.

As anyone with a GPS can attest, the device has no independent judgment of its own.  It operates purely on logic and algorithms and programming routines that dictate that the best route is always the shortest, even if it’s only shorter by an eighth or quarter of a mile.  So, instead of channeling us to the New York Botanical Garden via the Henry Hudson Parkway, a pretty drive accentuated by views of the river and trees and a speed limit of 50 MPH, the GPS took us through the Bronx, which features traffic lights every quarter mile, double-parked cars, jaywalking pedestrians, and trucks in assorted states of loading and unloading.  And time continued to drip away from us.

We finally arrived at the New York Botanical Garden shortly after 11am.  I rushed to the stage, carrying my canvas bag filled with garlic and onions that I had prepared previously, my Santoku knife, and my mandoline.  As we approached the stage, the magnitude of the afternoon’s events started to dawn on me as I saw, for the first time, row after row of empty chairs, arranged in front of an elevated stage.  There was no time to let it sink in – I had to start my prep work immediately if I was to be ready for a 1pm showtime.

After a few minutes, my nerves settled and my heart rate eased.  I familiarized myself with the location and operation of the stove, the oven, and the sink, and took inventory of the four large bags of ingredients provided to me by Whole Foods.  I checked my watch, took out a cutting board, removed my knife from its holder, and started cooking with an hour and fifteen minutes to prepare.

To Be Continued…

Honestly, I have no idea how this happened, and in many ways it still feels like an odd dream that I will wake up from at any given moment.  Until that time comes, I suppose I can reveal to you that, on July 31, I will be giving a cooking demonstration on stage at the New York Botanical Garden, as part of their Edible Garden exhibit that runs from now through October 17.

As the driving force behind The Best Food Blog Ever, I receive a lot of food-related emails throughout the week.  Many are from marketers and public relations folks, letting me know about the opening of a new restaurant or the availability of a new product that would be of interest to my readership.  So, when I received an email from the New York Botanical Garden telling me about their Edible Garden series, I initially thought it was just an announcement, and that I was one of hundreds of others on an email distribution list.  As I read through the rest of the email, though, which talked about how chefs like Rick Bayless and Mario Batali and Sara Moulton would be taking to the stage to give cooking demonstrations, I reached the final paragraph, which began with this sentence:

“We hope that you will be interested in doing a cooking demonstration this summer or fall.”

I admit, I had been skimming up to that point.  Reading that made me rewind to the beginning to review the entire message more carefully.  Martha Stewart.  Lidia Bastianich. Rick Bayless.  Dan Barber.  Mario Batali.  Me.  Something doesn’t quite fit here, and here’s a hint – it’s not Rick Bayless.  And yet, there is no mistake – the New York Botanical Garden is extending the invitations to a handful of food bloggers in this, the second year of the Edible Garden series, and I’m one of them.

Saying yes to this wonderful opportunity has kicked off a series of weird-to-me-ness that won’t stop until it culminates in my cooking demonstration on July 31.  The New York Botanical Garden needed a headshot, which I had to scramble to produce, considering the only profile photos that I have here are blurry (and I am drunk in all of them).  They asked if I wanted to promote my book, which I would love to, but I don’t have one.  They even asked me if I needed a prep chef, which is so many kinds of awesome that it almost makes me want to make something uber-complicated just to have someone chop stuff for me.  I get to play on stage with a Viking range, Anolon pots and pans, and an entire pantry of ingredients provided by Whole Foods.  It’s like Top Chef, only I get more than five minutes to come up with what I’m making.

I’m beginning recipe testing this week, and the good news is that I only need to come up with two or three dishes that are appropriate for the stage and which will provide samples for the audience.  Soup is one of them, I know for sure.

For those of you who want to come out and meet up, my stage times are at 1pm and 3pm, and July 31 is a Saturday.

It’s funny to think that I’ve been writing The Best Food Blog Ever for over two years and I’ve never actually talked about my most exciting food experience.

Well, that changes today.

A couple of weeks ago, I was invited by Foodspring.com to compete in a contest describing my most exciting food experience, and it’s currently live and ongoing, with voting lasting until Sunday, June 6th.  I’m competing against seven other stellar food bloggers, and as a result I need your help to win all of the food blogging marbles.

The experience that I chose to represent The Best Food Blog Ever is one that I’ve never alluded to on this site, primarily because it happened years before I even started writing about food.  The setting was the Isle of Capri, a sun-kissed dot of land in the Mediterranean Sea, off of the coast of Naples.  The meal that I speak of happened almost fourteen years ago, but I can still taste every nuance of the dishes and smell the breeze coming off of the ocean as if it were yesterday.

Click here to jump to the contest entries, and thanks for your vote.

While I was a longtime subscriber to food magazines through my early cooking years, after a while I began to realize that I was seeing the same recipes year after year.  Every May, for instance, brought the secrets of the perfect burger.  Every fall, I saw the same recipes for squash soup and roasted turkey.  This would have been tolerable, if not for the fact that, other than the recipes and advertisements, there was often very little else to read in each issue.  Once Epicurious.com launched, providing me with free access to all of the same recipes that were contained in the magazines, there was little reason to continue paying for my subscriptions.

I can’t say the same, though, for Saveur magazine.  For close to fifteen years, I’ve been diligently picking up Saveur each month, and the back issues take up the bottom shelf of the bookcase that holds my cookbook library.  Saveur has always provided well-written content that provided a foundation and background information for the recipes that accompanied each article – while the other magazines eventually made their way to the recycling bin, my Saveur issues were digested from cover to cover, then carefully archived.  In fact, when it comes time to decide what to serve for a dinner party, I pull out all of the current and prior months’ issues of Saveur from the stacks, yielding a pile of around 30 issues that serve as source material for my menu.  My collection used to be in chronological order, but has since evolved to be organized by season.

Because Saveur became the only food magazine that I read, it also happens to have become a major influence in my style of writing.  With food blogs quickly approaching a market rate of a dime per three dozen, I knew that I wanted to create a website that was more than just a collection of recipes or overviews of what I ate for lunch.  I wanted a site that reveled in writing about food as an experience, one that was a barometer of culinary culture, whether I was writing about an eight course tasting menu or a cheesesteak from down the block.  I respected and admired the writing style in Saveur and purposefully set out to emulate it, and sometimes I hit that sweet spot and sometimes I don’t.  It largely depends on how much coffee I’ve had.

When Saveur announced that they were soliciting reader submissions for their Top 100 list, I figured it would be fun to submit something.  I clicked over to their website, pulled up the form, and gave them a paragraph on the farmhouse table dinner at Talula’s Table.  Having written longer pieces on the topic once or twice before, it was fairly easy to dash together something quick and concise.  I hit ‘Submit’ and promptly forgot all about it.

One afternoon in October, I picked up my phone to see that I had one missed call and one voicemail.  The missed call was from the 212 area code, and I presumed it to be a misdial, as I don’t know anyone in Manhattan who would be calling my cell phone.

Listening to the voicemail revealed that the call was no mistake.  An editor at Saveur wanted to let me know that they were going to use my Talula’s Table entry in their Top 100 issue. I can count on one hand the number of times I have literally jumped for joy, and this was one of them.  But this was back in October, and the issue wouldn’t be arriving on newsstands until some time in January, long after Halloween, Thanksgiving, and the mad rush through the holidays.  Just as I had forgotten about submitting my entry in the first place, I tried very hard to put the notion of appearing in a national publication out of my mind.  It could have been, after all, cut due to space reasons.  The editors could change their minds.  The Large Hadron Collider could have spawned a black hole and ended the planet before it was published.  Until I held the hardcopy issue in my hands, it would not be real for me.

About two weeks ago, the current Saveur issue featuring the Top 100 became available in digital format.  I pulled it up on my browser, and while I saw my words laid out on the screen, part of me still couldn’t accept the reality of the situation.  But, there it was.

As it turns out, the world of magazine editing is a strange and wondrous place.  On the submission form, I had initially given them a single paragraph, knowing from previous Top 100 lists that each entry is allotted a very limited amount of space.  Saveur came back and asked me for more details, so I gladly wrote a longer piece, about four paragraphs.  Ultimately, the final copy that appeared in the issue had been edited – back down to one paragraph.  It still contains the major points of my original work, so I can’t help but be pleased with it.

It was only last week, when I spied the issue on the magazine rack at the supermarket, that it really felt real for me.  I grabbed a copy and flipped to the center of the issue to find my Talula’s Table entry staring back at me.  My name, my photo, and my words have been published in Saveur, the magazine that has propelled my food writing endeavors from the very beginning of this site.  It’s a small paragraph, to be sure, but it’s a start.  It’s not a feature article by any stretch of the imagination.  Still, the piece, #52, occupies the entire center of a spread that spans both pages, accompanied by a photo of a party enjoying the farmhouse table dinner.

It was a wonderful way to begin the new year.

Long before I became a food blogger, I was an avid food blog reader, and for the past few years I’ve sat back and watched in awe and admiration as the Menu for Hope campaign brought food blogs together to raise money for charity.  Created by Pim Techamuanvivit of Chez Pim five years ago as a way to help the victims of the tsunami in Southeast Asia, Menu for Hope has become an annual affair which today benefits the United Nations World Food Programme, which helps to feed hungry folks the world over, assisting them to become self reliant.

I am proud to be able to say that, this year, The Best Food Blog Ever is going to be a part of Menu for Hope for the first time.

Today, December 14, sees the launch of the 6th edition of Menu for Hope.  Over the past three years, Menu for Hope has raised almost a quarter of a million dollars for the UN World Food Programme.  But here’s the kicker – the majority of that money came from donations between $10 and $50.

Here’s how it works: the fundraising is performed by raffle for several glorious bid items.  Every tax-deductible contribution of US$10 buys you one ticket to win one of the items contributed by myself and other participating food bloggers – each bid item on each blog has a code that you specify as part of your contribution, and you can buy more than one ticket for the same bid item to increase your chances.

The campaign ends on Christmas, and the results of the raffle will be announced on Chez Pim on Monday, January 18, 2010.  I’ll arrange to have my bid items sent to the winners, and the funds raised will go to the United Nations World Food Programme.  All of the donations are processed by FirstGiving, an online fundraising company that has handled all of the monies for Menu for Hope since the campaign’s inception.

Here’s the fun part – the items!  Please note the shipping restrictions on each bid item when placing your donation.  The Best Food Blog Ever is offering the following three bid items this year:

UE20 is a Set of Six Cookbooks that belong on everyone’s ‘active cookbook’ shelf.  It includes copies of The Joy of Cooking, Boy Gets Grill, On Food and Cooking, Bakewise, Elements of Cooking, and Ratio.  With a retail value of nearly $200, this set could be yours for the $10 cost of a single raffle ticket.  Be sure to include the reference to the bid item code UE20 with your donation.  These books were a generous donation by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Please note that shipping for this item is restricted to the United States.

UE21 is an Stainless Kitchen Tool Set by All-Clad.  Check it out, you get a slotted spoon, solid spoon, fork, ladle, and turner, all in a nice matching caddy.  Worth $120 at retail, this will be the absolute last set of tools you’ll ever need, and owning them will make you hate cooking in other peoples’ kitchens.  To get a shot at this item, include the bid item code UE21 with your donation.  Much thanks to our friends at All-Clad for donating this prize!  Please note that shipping for this item is restricted to the United States.

Here’s the biggie.  Bid item UE22 is a bundle package of the Nespresso Le Cube Espresso Machine coupled with the Aeroccino Plus Frother.  I actually own a Nespresso machine, and it makes espresso on par with the best cafes in Europe – it’s that good.  But you know what makes the espresso from my Nespresso even better?  Steamed milk and a dollop of froth straight from my Aeroccino Plus.  It’s an incredible frother that has both hot and cold options, and two little propellers for froth/no-froth.  With a retail value of $349, this prize is worth multiple donation entries because, trust me, you want this bundle on your kitchen counter.  Be sure to reference bid item code UE22 with your donation.  The Le Cube and Aeroccino Plus were donated by our friends at Nespresso.  Please note that shipping for this item is restricted to the United States and Canada.

If you have any questions about Menu for Hope, check out Chez Pim and read her main Menu for Hope post, where you can also find a master list of prizes across all food blogs.  Thank you in advance for your generous participation!

Instructions for Donating:

1. Choose a bid item or several items from the master list.

2. Go to the donation site and make a donation.

3. Each $10 contribution gets you one raffle ticket toward a bid item of your choice. You must specify which bid item you’d like in the ‘Personal Message’ section in the donation form when confirming your donation. If purchasing multiple raffle entries, you must write-in how many tickets per item, referencing the bid item codes. For example, a donation of $50 can be 2 tickets for UE22 (espresso machine), 1 ticket for UE21 (kitchen tools), and 2 tickets for UE20 (cookbooks). If you were doing this, you would write 2xUE22, 1xUE21, 2xUE20.  On the other hand, if you wanted to get 5 chances at the Nespresso bundle, you’d write 5xUE22.

4. If your company matches your charity donation, please check the box and fill in the information so we can claim the corporate match.

5. Please check the box to allow us to see your email address so that we can contact you in case you win. Your email address will not be shared with anyone.

Happy Giving and Good Luck!

The Best Food Blog Ever Screen Saver is now available!

This project started when I came across a software application that let me build screensavers.  I figured it would be nice to market a screensaver that featured the photos that have appeared on The Best Food Blog Ever, especially since most photos are often used only once to accompany an entry and never appear again in any other context.

I fired up iPhoto, scrolled to the very first photo, and started gathering the best food pictures.  As it turns out, I had been taking pictures of my food well before I began writing about the topic, and when I had finally reached the end of our photo collection, I had tagged well over 300 pictures!  You may recognize some of them from The Best Food Blog Ever, but there are also quite a few notable shots from our trips to Paris and Italy, which occurred years before I even had the idea to start this blog.

With that said, you can download a free trial of the screensaver by clicking here, or by clicking on the graphic on the website.  If you enjoy the photos and would like to continue using the screensaver after the trial period ends, the purchase price is $4.99 99 CENTS.  Once you have completed your purchase, I’ll receive an email with your name, and I’ll send out a registration code which unlocks the full version.

As you may have read earlier, we are expecting our first child soon.  Seizing the opportunity to expand the blog empire, and wanting to spare you all the discomfort of reading blog entries that have absolutely nothing to do with food, today I am announcing the launch of The Best Parenting Blog Ever.

While I may occasionally mention the Sprout in these pages, mostly when the worlds of parenting and cooking collide, for the most part all of the news and updates of our new status as parents will be found on the other site.

As with this site, there’s a variety of ways to stay connected with The Best Parenting Blog Ever.  You can follow me on Twitter as @BestParentBlog.  As always, you can add the new site to your RSS reader.  Or you can just drop me an email at ddl[at]bestparentingblogever.com.

Thanks again,

DDL

Today, August 10, is our thirteenth wedding anniversary.  It also happens to be the last anniversary that we will spend as solely husband and wife because, at some point towards the end of September or the beginning of October, we will be assuming the additional titles of mom and dad.  No, we haven’t decided on a name quite yet.

The prospect of raising our daughter is, at any given moment, exciting, petrifying, thrilling, overwhelming, and a big ball of unknown mystery.  As new parents-to-be, we have spent many hours tracking down information that had been all but foreign to us just a year ago, navigating our way through the books and websites of a world that is completely new to us.  Throughout all of this, we’ve tried to maintain a steady grip on reason so as not to give in to the temptations of rampant alarmism, paranoia, and marketing that plague all expectant couples.  I never knew we needed so many things until the helpful magazines told me so.

One thing that I know for certain is that I want to raise a daughter that appreciates food, and the value that cooking and eating together contributes to family unity, and that doing so is going to take time and consistency.  We have an opportunity to shape the blank template of our child’s palate into one that’s open to trying new things, but I also have to realize that there’s some reliable science out there that explains why most kids aren’t adventurous eaters.  I’m perfectly willing to see how much a person’s taste in food is affected by nature versus nurture.  I won’t be able to know for quite a few years whether my efforts were successful.

Do the children of fussy eaters grow up to be fussy eaters themselves?  If I tempt my daughter with the promise of a toy even BETTER than what’s in the Happy Meal, in exchange for eating a home-cooked meal instead, will it work?  Are we doomed to a period of “nothing but” chicken nuggets, fish sticks, or food of a specific color?  I’m curious to find out.

As much as I am apprehensive about these things, there’s an even bigger part of me that’s looking forward to a whole new set of experiences in the kitchen.  I need to learn how to make food that looks like things, for example.  Research into how to unleash my inner Picasso using food coloring and frosting is an absolute must.

I get to introduce my daughter to the joys of picking blueberries on a warm summer day, of knowing just when to flip a pancake, and how to pick the meat out of a crab.  I want her to grow up knowing what real Chinese food tastes like.  I want to involve her in what happens in the kitchen and the garden, so that the concept of cooking is very real for her, and not something that involves opening a package and microwaving its contents, or an activity that requires some artistic level of unique culinary sorcery that only her parents can muster.  I’m sure that there will be some foods and activities that she just won’t take to, but I’ll be proud of her just for trying them once (even though I will secretly hope that she’ll come back to them again when she’s older).

If I can achieve even half of the things on my ever-growing list, I think I could live with that.  All that I know is this – I can’t wait to get started.

I’m going to need a new category tag.  Any suggestions?

Talk about a meta-media whirlwind spanning decades.  First, Julia Child authors a cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which triggers a fundamental shift in the way that Americans view cooking, during an age that celebrated hot dogs and canned soup as viable kitchen ingredients.  Forty-one years later, a young woman named Julie Powell begins a blog, the Julie/Julia Project, which chronicles her journey to create every one of the recipes in Julia Child’s massive tome.  The blog is so successful, it gets converted into a book entitled Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen in 2005.  Four years later, that book has been turned into a film, Julie & Julia, which debuts in theaters on August 7.  And today, I’m happy to report that The Best Food Blog Ever is the featured Blog of the Day on the official Julie & Julia website.  Seriously!  It’s in the lower right hand corner!

So, you got all of that?  A book spawned a food blog which spawned a book which spawned a movie which is featuring a food blog on its website.  As I’ve said, it’s all very meta.  But enough about all of this new media stuff, let’s talk about Julia Child.

Julia Child was quite an inspiration for more than just the obvious reasons.  Yes, she taught generations of people to cook and explore and discover tastes that were beyond the periphery of their experiences, but what many folks may not know is that Julia Child didn’t start cooking until she was 32.  As someone who didn’t start writing about food until the age of 35, that fact commands a certain measure of respect from me.  What Julia Child introduced, and what Julie Powell reinforced with the Julie/Julia Project, was the proposition that everyone can learn to cook at any point in their lives, and that, as intimidating as cooking may be to the uninitiated, you can never fail so spectacularly in the kitchen as to permanently lose your license to turn on your stove.  On a larger scale, the lesson to be taken from Julia Childs’ life is, it’s never too late to start something new.

Above all else, though, Julia Child was a troublemaker, and for all of her troublemaking she has left the world a better place.  Who else would dare, at age 37 in 1950, to be one of the few women to train at the prestigious Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris?  Who else but Julia Child could possibly convey that cooking, even if it involved tackling the most daunting lists of ingredients, the most intimidating processes of classic French cuisine, could be fun, and that you could actually take the time to laugh in the kitchen?  Cooking is not supposed to be some mysterious and somber dark art, and Julia Child went a long way towards promoting the notion that there’s fun to be had in the kitchen.

Troublemaking was an essential ingredient to Child’s career as an author, for even after completing the manuscript for Mastering the Art of French Cooking, she faced a constant struggle to find a publisher.  An editorial panel at Houghton Mifflin, all men, overruled the recommendation of a female editor and rejected the book.  It was their belief that women wanted recipes that were simple, preferably using mixes (and woe be unto all of us that we may be sliding backwards into that era today), so the complex mechanics of the recipes in Child’s manuscript wouldn’t find an audience.  It’s amazing to think how, if Julia Child was not as tenacious a troublemaker as she was, that such a classic may have languished at the bottom of a slush pile forever.  It wasn’t until the draft found its way to Judith Jones at Knopf that fortune finally began to favor it.  Since its first publication, Mastering the Art of French Cooking has seen many printings and been reissued twice.

Even by current standards, Julia Child’s approach to life would have placed her in the minority.  She was an advocate of moderation, a concept that is all but lost today, where everything is deep fried, supersized, and over-the-top.   A quote attributed to her stated that the secrets to happiness and good health were moderation, small helpings, and sampling “a little bit of everything”.  She never endorsed any commercial products, despite several lucrative offers.  She never advocated any kind of diet that required you to eat only this, or everything but that.

Julia Child used cream.

Julia Child used butter.

Julia Child drank gin and wine.

Julia Child lived to be 91 years old.

Thank you, Julia.  You got a lot of people cooking.

Imagine a place where you could sample the best, most perfectly ripened cheese you’ve ever had, followed by a bite of decadently rich chocolate, which is then even further enhanced by a shot of red wine, all finished off with a spoonful of the finest extra virgin olive oil to ever cross your lips.  Now imagine doing that every hundred feet or so, over and over, until even the notion of a single sea-salt encrusted artisanal paper thin wafer seems grossly unappealing to you.  That, in a nutshell, was our weekend at the 55th Summer Fancy Food Show at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City.

To say that it’s possible to tour the entire Fancy Food Show in a single day is much like saying that one could see all of the artwork in the Louvre in an afternoon.  Sure, you could do it, but it would involve a lot of running through crowds, you would only catch a superficial glance of each piece, and you wouldn’t enjoy yourself in the least.  And, in perhaps the greatest of parallels, your feet and legs would hurt for days.

Consider the numbers – 140,000 food products from lands both near and far, large and small.  Two floors of exhibit space, ranging from narrow booths hosted by small producers to immense, towering pavilions representing entire countries.  Over 2,300 exhibitors from 75 countries, all vying for the attention of over 24,000 visitors, each booth with its own selection of samples.  Given those numbers, and the vastness of the Javits Center itself, The Fancy Food Show is at all times exhilarating, exhausting, and overwhelming, yet I find myself already counting the days until its return to the East Coast next year.  The scope of the Fancy Food Show is so gloriously outlandish, I may never want or need to go to any other food convention.  Only next time, I’ll be much better at pacing myself.

This was my first trade show since launching The Best Food Blog Ever, and the difference between industry events such as the Fancy Food Show and public conventions can be summed up in a single word: Power.  At conventions that are open to the public, the audience attends for a leisurely experience, and the vendors pull in customers by selling products, giving away coupons, and increasing recognition of their brand.

At a trade show such as this, though, and especially in New York City, the stakes are exponentially higher.  I glimpsed badges for retail buyers, trade affiliates, manufacturers, and distributors, some of whom had the potential to make purchasing decisions worth millions of dollars.  In some booths, men dressed in somber gray and black business suits sat in plastic folding chairs, hunched over paperwork, hashing out details of deals in progress, the intimacy of their discussions in stark contrast to the cacophony of the crowded exhibit floor.  Whenever we walked up to a vendor, you could catch the subtle downward glance at our badges – are we buyers for a major supermarket chain?  Restaurateurs looking for the next brilliant ingredient?  A guy with one of those whatchamacallits…a “blog”?  Compared to these movers and shakers, I barely registered a quiver.

We arrived at the Javits Center about a half hour after the show opened on Sunday morning.  After receiving our badges, we entered the exhibit hall armed with the same strategy that has consistently worked for us in many other conventions – start at one end of the hall and work our way up and down the aisles.  Only this time, as we neared the end of the third aisle, having tackled Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Germany, Morocco, Turkey, and half of France, we checked the time to discover that nearly two hours had passed, and we still had thirty aisles left to explore on the upper level, representing the remainder of the international vendors.  Seventeen more aisles of domestic products from states such as Texas, Virginia, and New York awaited us on the lower level.  In the hours to come, we would only be able to cover about half of the show floor before the exhibit halls closed for the day.

But, oh, how those hours were filled with decadence.  The best vendors were eager to chat and share the stories behind their products.  Some booths were staffed with representatives who demonstrated a full command of every nuance of their wares, fully capable of explaining the differences between their cheeses, for example, and those of other producers.  Others tempered their enthusiasm when they saw that I was not representing a major buyer.  In any case, we were able to sample chocolates, baked goods, jams, cheeses, and all other manner of edible nirvana.  Whenever we came across a particularly outstanding product, we’d take some literature, or ask for a press kit.  As the afternoon wore on, our plastic handbag grew portly and strained against our fingers.

In all, we spent about nine hours over the course of two days at the Fancy Food Show, and boy, do we have stories to tell.  For now, those stories have yet to be written, and you’ll just have to be a patient for a little while longer – I expect to spend at least two weeks, if not more, on the New York Stories, recounting both the Fancy Food Show as well as other food adventures.  Just as the Fancy Food Show can’t be experienced in a single day, I can’t possibly do justice to the weekend in a single entry.

I can tell you this – I ate the world’s hottest chile pepper at the Fancy Food Show, and we caught the whole thing on video.  Maybe I’ll tell you that story first.

In site news, The Best Food Blog Ever has been selected as the Blog of the Day for July 6 on the official website for the Julia & Julia movie.  I’ll be interrupting the New York Stories series for an entry about Julia Child on that day.