Summer Fancy Food Show

Today was day one of the Summer Fancy Food Show in New York City. I wish I'd have taken pictures yesterday when our sales manager Joanne and I were there to set up and hand out ad boards -- it's like being backstage at a musical or play. You walk the aisles (very carefully! You don't want to get run over by a an electronic cart or cherry-picker!) and see booths in every stage of set-up. As of 12:30, there were booths complete with product displayed, counters draped and ready for the show opening, and there were booths that were still empty, except for a few boxes and crates marked with the company name. Boxes and storage crates of every size and shape were piled around the show floor -- I think it takes seeing the show in that stage to really get an appreciation of what goes into each and every booth on the floor.

Anyway, the first day of the show was great! I made the mistake of starting out up on the first floor, just like everybody else and their mothers. I wandered the 400-1000 aisles for a bit before heading downstairs. Here's a few of the companies I came across today:

The Cooperstown Cookie Company offers baseball-shaped shortbread cookies in officially licensed Major League Baseball packaging. New this year are the Baseball Hall of Fame vintage tins and classic Stadium Tins, including a favorite from my hometown, Wrigley Field. Now baseball fans can hang in through the seventh inning stretch with the Tube of Bunts, a cylindrical tin featuring logos from teams such as the Boston Red Sox, the New York Yankees and of course, the Chicago Cubs. More info at www.cooperstowncookie.com.

New to the Fancy Food Show, Somebody's Mother's Chocolate Sauce (www.somebodysmothers.com) was sampling their Chocolate Sauce, Caramel Sauce (nominated for a 2009 Sofi award) and White Chocolate with Pear William Sauce, which they sampled drizzled over some vanilla ice cream -- delish! Lynn Lasher and her three children, Reese, William and Hayden, were were manning the booth and dishing out samples of all three sauces. Good luck on the nomination, Lasher family!

Local brownie bakers, Mari's of New York (www.marisny.com) was also at the show, featuring "simply marvelous" brownies. These moist little bites come packaged in a coral gift box that you might just see in an upcoming Fancy Food gift guide. The company offers seasonal brownie offers, such as Holiday Cheer and L'Orange.

Tune in tomorrow for more updates from the 2009 Summer Fancy Food Show!

Squash - less is more.

Friday night I made Baked Squash with Parmesan. The squash itself wasn't convincing as an immediate favorite. To be fair, it wasn't bad, but the recipe featured it as a main course (two servings from a medium-sized squash) and it would have been much more enjoyable in smaller portion as a side dish. I will have to say though, that the herb butter was a-MA-zing.

Presentation was quite nice though.

If you want the recipe, leave me a post.

Hi friends.

Hi friends,

I hope you don't take my recent 2 1/2 weeks of inactivity as a sign of this becoming one of those blogs that people start, all gung-ho, and then leave hanging, never to post again!

Two weeks ago, we left off with me jetting out of town for the weekend (ok, driving). Well, the weekend went fine, but starting Sunday night it was all down hill. An emergency room visit, a doctors office visit, and a week's worth of sick days later finds me at my parents' home in the burbs, recovering. I had absolutely no interest in eating food that week, much less experimenting with it and writing about it. The week following the plague found me catching up/staying late at work with my roommate out of town. Hence, the 'eat to get by' mode set in. No motivation to make a big mess in the kitchen, nobody to cook for... Gosh those leftovers Mom sent back with me looked yummy... You get the picture.

But now, despite the Halloween madness gearing up this week, I am back in action! Thursday is the last farmer's market day of the year, and I will be there with bells on. I acquired a new cookbook last week too, so stay tuned for more to come!

PS - Tonight I ate ostrich fillet! It would have been cooler if I could taste it behind all the blue cheese they paired with it...

Experiment No. 1: Not-so-hippie vegetarian food

Today was farmer's market day again, and while they didn't have the cheese curds I love so much, I did get one of those beautiful, succulent, delicious caramel apples this week! (It was amazing. It made my whole afternoon.) I also got some supplies for the first experiment in my vegetarian adventure. (I would like to stress that I am not becoming a vegetarian - I am simply making peace with the vegetable, so that I can continue on this journey of food knowledge refinement.) I picked out some lovely oyster mushrooms, a couple of good shallots, and some cherry tomatoes. The cherry tomatoes are the only item that I can describe the taste of. Shallots and oyster mushrooms are two completely new elements for me. The mushrooms are a particularly ambitious first meal ingredient for me too because in my history of trying to like mushrooms (and for some reason, I really do try), I just couldn't bring myself to enjoy them. Every time I popped a fried mushroom into my mouth, I wish I hadn't. I don't know if it's the unusual earthy taste or the spongy texture that I dislike the most. It could very well be that the mushrooms I try are all either part of something processed, like canned soup, or are deep fried.

The first meal idea came from a friend, chef and a sort of involuntary personal food advisor. It is what he calls "not-so-hippie vegetarian food." My first "vegetarian meal" is the frittata. Here's what I added: oyster mushroom, cherry tomatoes, bell pepper, shallot (supplemented with a bit of onion), fresh basil and fresh dill. Then I topped it all off with cheddar cheese. Probably a bit too much cheddar cheese. (A small but insistent voice inside of me is saying, 'Too much cheese? Impossible! There's no such thing!) Once I realized that this was not much more than really fancy scrambled eggs, my anxiety over getting it all just right lessened enough for me to get through all the steps and it actually turned out to be quite a tasty meal! I've got some for lunch tomorrow and, if it's still good, some for my roomie on Sunday night when she gets home.

It's past my bedtime and tomorrow I'm heading out of town for the weekend, so I'm going to bid you all goodnight and wish you all a very happy weekend!

Strategy!

It's almost midnight, I still can't breathe without my mouth open (no matter which meds I take), and all I want to do before I go to bed is get some of my article written. Deadline on said article: tomorrow. Or rather, the day that begins in four minutes. So what am I doing? Surfing the web, of course! (A habit I somehow managed to pick up in college, where else?)

I've been thinking about this personal mission/job requirement I have of becoming a foodie. It's not that I don't appreciate fine food - I do! I love making it, eating it, reading about it and, up until the day before deadline I even enjoy writing about it. It's just that I still feel as if I am a small child wandering through a parent's cocktail party and catching snippets of grown up conversation. I am reading Best Food Writing of 2006 right now, for example, which is having some calming effect on me, since I realize that the people published in that wonderful collection weren't born foodies either, well, not most of them anyways. But then tonight I came across a Forbes list of best food blogs (Ok, ok, I Google searched it), chose the least intimidating blog and began reading. Began to realize at once how much I did not know I did not know. Feeling slightly overwhelmed, I looked up absently from the laptop screen to digest (no pun intended), and came face to face with a row of my roomies vegetarian cookbooks. Vegetables. More intimidation. I chose one at random (Vegetarian: Over 300 healthy and wholesome recipes chosen from around the world, consultant editor Nicola Graimes), flipped through it, taking in a couple of random recipes and then quickly shut it. Talk about overwhelmed!

Now, admittedly, I am not a fan of vegetables. The cooked carrots of my childhood invoke my gag reflex (sorry Mom, it's not your cooking - it's the carrots, I swear) and the best part of my salad is usually the dressing. In fact, I can count on my fingers the number of vegetables I enjoy eating. However, I don't think that I have given veggies a fair chance. There's a very large group of people out there (one living right under my very roof) who live on the stuff, so what am I missing? (Interesting, slightly funny sidenote - if you take apart the word vegetarian, the suffix "-arian" means, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, "believer in, advocate of." Haha! An advocate of vegetables. A believer in vegetables... This is a bit ironic too, since the last vegetarian I met told me that she was a vegetarian not because she really liked animals, it's just that she really hated vegetables. Think about it. It's funny.)

So my first plan of action in becoming a foodie, then, is to conquer the vegetable. Or at least have a working respect for veggies. This large Vegetarian cookbook open on the couch next to me contains nine chapters: Breakfasts and Brunches, Soups and Appetizers, Light Meals, Main Courses, Special Occasions, Tarts, Pies and Pizzas, Salads, Side Dishes, and Deserts, Cakes and Baked Goods. At more than 300 recipes, with nine chapters, I figure that if I can work my way through a third of them, about 10 recipes per chapter, by the end of the book I will not only have a working knowledge of my least favorite section of the food pyramid, but I will also be able to cook something that my roommate can eat!

I know that this concept has been done for a blog - Julie and Julia comes to mind, but it's a good idea. It makes sense, and besides, this isn't really a gimick to get people to read my blog... it's more of a structural learning program - kind of a personal thing - and if my trial and error can entertain here and there, then we all benefit. I'll share the recipes I like and if you, wonderful reader, have any you'd like to suggest along the way, it would thrill me not only to get a posted response to my blog entry, but I'd be interested in trying those as well.

So for tonight, this is good night. Stay tuned for the first of my Vegetarian recipe attempts. Tomorrow night I'm headed home for a family dinner night - I think some sort of Mexican fajita lasagna is on the menu. Delightfully non-vegetarian. Yum. Can't wait!

Lost half of my tasting ability

Sorry I haven't posted anything so far this week. I've been so sick that I haven't really been able to taste anything. (Except for Healthy Choice Minestrone - which, by the way, is still gross.)

More soon, I promise!

Shoulda Been a Sushi Chef

sushi (SOO-shee) 1. A Japanese dish of cooked seasoned rice (zushi) garnished with a variety of cooked or raw ingredients such as fish, shellfish and vegetables; there are four principal types of sushi: chirashi-zushi (cooked or raw fish, shellfish and sometimes veggies on loosely packed zushi, usually served in a bowl), maki-zushi (made by rolling zushi and other ingredients in nori – thin sheets of dried seaweed), nigiri-zushi (made by placing tane, or topping, over a bed of pressed zushi) and oshi-zushi (sushi pressed into a wooden box mold, covered with toppings, then unmolded and cut into squares). 2. An imprecisely used term for nigiri-zushi. 3. An incorrectly used term for sashimi. (The Prentice Hall Dictionary of Culinary Arts, Second Edition)

Shoulda been a sushi chef (yeah, say that five times fast). I've had a few pleasant experiences with sushi, but always in a restaurant (or a very exotic jungle-themed Russian nightclub). Never had I actually considered making the neat little spirals. My roommate however, consulted with her half-German, half-Chinese friend (who is presently in Hong Kong) and the most on-hand expert we had.

They weren't artisan by any means, but they still looked nice when we chopped them up. We took some rice - it wasn't even cooked very well! (I've gotta be honest, for some reason I just cannot master light fluffy rice.) But anyways, we took very sticky rice, spread it out on some thin seaweed paper and lined up skinny strips of carrot, cucumber, hot pepper (yes, one of the mystery peppers from the other night), avocado and "crab meat" to our liking. Rolled it up in a tight little roll, slice into little pucks and voila! Sushi! It was quite good, and SO easy. I didn't realize how versatile and easy it was to make - I'd love to experiment with some smoked salmon (I don't trust myself to prepare edible raw meat just yet).