June 20
A Foodie Poem To Start Your Weekend

I was speaking on a panel recently for the Publicity Club of Chicago, and a woman named Cynthia Gallaher (http://journaltips.blogspot.com/) introduced herself to me afterward.  She said she wrote poems about food, and after sending me a few of them, thought I'd share one of my favorites here:
     

• Mushroom Has Landed
• Expressionless visitor who appears overnight,
• seamless as a spaceship,
• neither animal nor vegetable,
• your unearthly flesh-like flesh, rooted nowhere.
• Despite your independence,
• proliferating in our wastes and rot,
• playing temporary citadel among shadows,
• you still submit to our sauté pans,
• And can bathe just as easily in butter
• as in moonlight, if given the opportunity,
• donning your hat for every culinary occasion,
• formal or otherwise.
• Depending on the generation or hemisphere,
• you might become the handpicked delicacy,
• the fodder for foody gossips,
• as you sneak unobtrusively with flavor among wild rice,
• Accept the crown as the cream of soups,
• or stuff yourself endlessly with an entourage of
• high-priced hangers-on
• lying on a tray of luxuriant hors d'oeuvres.
• And just as you're about to achieve superfood status,
• you might blanche at the thought  of mistaken identity,
• of taking blame when your poisonous cousins
• the toadstools mimic you,
• forcing you to return to the woods for a respite,
• until you pop into fashion again,
• but for now, you poise with head skyward, shoulders low,
• hoping to be beamed up,
• before a farmer's foot crushes you in the glade.

June 17

Aspen Food & Wine Classic  

I just returned home from this year’s annual Food & Wine Magazine Classic in Aspen, the summer camp for hardcore foodies, set in one of the most breathtaking backdrops.  My role – as it is every year – is to moderate a series of panels held exclusively for the restaurant trade.  Normally, I host a couple of these in-depth conversations at the Hotel Jerome; this year, the organizers asked me to run all five of the panels, which had me fairly nervous, faced with the prospect of not sounding like an idiot in front of the big brass of the food world.  Some panels were simple, such as “Meet the Masters: How I Became Me,” which offered insights from Bobby Flay (Mesa Grill), Barbara Lynch (No. 9 Park in Boston), David Chang (Momofuku) and Marcus Samuelsson (Aquavit).  Others proved to be more challenging, such as moderating a panel on how to protect your brand in the digital era, and featured the Editor of Eater.com (Ben Leventhal) as well as chefs Michael Symon and Wylie Dufresne, plus Chuck Porter, of Ad Agency Crispin, Porter & Bogusky.  

One of the most interesting panels of the weekend was about maintaining your brand in multiple locations. This panel's members: the clothing designer Marc Ecko, Best Cellars' founder Joshua Wesson, Roy Yamaguchi of Roy's restaurants and Tom Colicchio of Craft and Top Chef, had some interesting perspectives on how to manage, maintain and extend your brand beyond one location.  That big grin on my face (above, right) isn't because I'm hanging with Tom Colicchio, but rather, that I got through the panel discussion and I have - at that point - just three panels to go.

The real attraction was – as always – the food.  The great thing about this annual gathering is that with so many culinary VIPs in town, there is increased pressure to make every meal a great one.  On Friday night, the AmEx Publisher’s Party is thrown at the top of Aspen Mountain (this year’s theme: Morocco).  Here's a pre-party pic, below right:

We munched on chicken tagine, fluffy hummus and garlicky eggplant stuffed into griddled pitas, plus a raisin and olive couscous and seriously good mint tea. Then on Saturday, the organizers throw a late-night down-home cookout at the Hickory House in town.  Last year it was American barbeque all the way, but this year, New York chef David Chang brought some of his Momofuku-isms with him, and we stuffed our faces with his popular pork buns, a riff on Peking duck: soft, bao-like buns are filled with pickled cucumbers and scallions, plus a little bit of roasted pork belly and slathered with hoisin sauce.  The highlight though, was his Bo Ssam, now made famous as his other NYC restaurant, Momofuku Ssam Bar. These classic Korean wraps begin with lettuce leaves.  Chang had slow-roasted a few pork shoulders, which I was able to pull apart with ease, using a flimsy pair of tongs, and then place the shredded pork into the lettuce; on top go some freshly-shucked oysters, and then a choice of fiery kimchi as well as a sauce of pureed kimchi.  I literally ate five of these beauties.  Out back, Wylie Dufresne (wd-50) was presiding over some roasted pork shoulder and slicing some of the other tasty bits of pig – skin, belly, loin – into self-serve foil containers.  They also had some whole crabs in silver buckets for the taking, along with boiled potatoes and corn, but the wooden mallets provided to smash open the crabs didn’t quite do the trick. 

Earlier in the evening, we went to the magnificent Aspen Meadows (left) -

think Bill Gates/Warren Buffet-caliber corporate retreat center – and previewed the magazine’s assembly of “Best New Chefs” for 2008.  We briefly interviewed the two Chicago reps: Koren Grieveson of Avec and Giuseppe Tentori of Boka, plus Food & Wine Editor-in-Chief Dana Cowin (above, right) which you can hear on my podcast page.  All in all, another great Aspen weekend: perfect weather, lots of great food and wine, and some new faces who I will ultimately get to hang out with next time I’m in New York.  Here are some more pictures from the "Best New Chef" event:

Guiseppe Tentori (Boka)                Koren Grieveson's sausage               Koren Grieveson (Avec) 

June 3

Would You Like Some Strudel With Your Stereo? 

Anytime I go to Abt in North Suburban Glenview - and by the way, it's not pronounced "a-b-t" but rather, as one word, it's a family name, afterall - I invariably do too much shopping (oh yeah, that's right, I DO need a 32" TV for my bathroom) and of course, while you shop, you tend to get a little hungry.  Fortunately, the Abts have considered this, and just a few months ago, opened up a little cafe called Jolane's.  It's just South of the mammoth retail store, in a new design center (read: fancy North Shore repository for disposable cash).  The cafe is an homage to the founder of the company, and today, third generation boys Jon and Michael Abt (Jolane's grandsons) showed me around a bit.

At first glance, you'd think you stumbled into Julius Meinl North.  Since Jolane was of Hungarian descent, they approached Austrian-based Meinl (close enough, I guess), which already has stores in Lake View and now in Lincoln Square, to set up the cafe service.  All of the pastries are shipped up from the commissary in the city, and there are row upon row of Meinl coffee, tea, jams and other goodies for sale in the masculine, dark wood-paneled cabinets that line the front cafe counter.  But the staff also spent some time downtown at the Meinl Mothership, learning how to make traditional savory items such as crepes and goulash, and those dishes are recreated here in the Northern satellite with fairly good results.  Our goulash was rich and satisfying, mounded over toothsome spaetzle, and our crepes - stuffed with veggies and cheese - were thin yet satisfying.    The coffee is unparalleled (save for hard-core Metropolis fans) and their assortment of pastries is mighty tempting.  Although two noticeable absences: the Kaiserschmarren (savory pancakes with raisins and cinnamon plus powdered sugar and plum compote) as well as the Mohr Im Hemd, a crack-like addictive mound of warm chocolate cake with even more ooziness inside.  We popped in two doors down to check out the new Viking Cooking School, which is also immaculate, massive and well-appointed with the namesake knives, appliances and cooking gadgets, but we really just wanted to go back to Jolane's for some apple strudel.