Entries tagged with 'events'
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Photograph from The Ginger Gourmand on Flickr The Big Lunch is a lunch party held throughout the United Kingdom that took place on July 19 as a way for people to slow down and come together build their communities. About two million people participated in street parties and picnics in this event proposed by Eden Project founder Tim Smit and Paul Twivy. Aside from rain hindering a few parties, the event seemed to be successful in getting people out of their homes and talking to their neighbors over food. Jay Rayner shares his Big Lunch experience at Guardian's food blog Word of Mouth. You can view more photos in the Big Lunch Flickr group....
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While I dutifully made my way through the original Star Wars franchise during my preteen years and I managed a few rounds of Dungeons & Dragons before adolescence got in the way, I’ve never gotten very deep into comic books, hobbits, or many of the other things that many folks of my generation have embraced at a level that is, dare I say it, geekish. But as Derek Brown wrote recently on the Atlantic Food Channel, cocktails are an aspect of the culinary world that not only inspire their own level of geekery but even have their own equivalent of a Star Trek convention: Tales of the Cocktail. Now in its seventh year, Tales of the Cocktail attracts thousands of...
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"This has been my dream for nearly two decades, I still believe in that dream. And the image I had in mind wasn't what took place yesterday." First off, straight up: Our humblest apologies go out to the many serious eaters who came out to Shoreline yesterday, particularly those who came between the hours of noon and four. My 17-year dream became a humbling reality in those first few hours. We were so focused on getting the talent and purveyors together that we didn't realize how at risk we were logistically because more than 8,000 tickets were sold in the last week. Frankly, people were so excited about the fest that they all showed up early, which doesn't normally happen...
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"It's impossible to glean by looking and tasting whether a dish was created by a man or a woman." Photographs by Belathée Photography On Monday night I was one of two sacrificial guys (Alinea's Grant Achatz was the other) on a panel discussion titled Gender Confusion: Unraveling the Myths of Gender in the Restaurant Kitchen. We delved into the following fascinating, potentially freighted, and cosmic question: Do women working in restaurant kitchens have discernibly different cooking styles than their male counterparts? And, can supposedly sensitive palates tell the difference? Food & Wine editor-in-chief Dana Cowin and thoughtful writer–food philosopher Gwen Hyman, co-author of Urban Italian (written with her chef husband Andrew Carmellini), were the women Achatz and I got to...
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It would be difficult to overstate the joy I got from attending the All Candy Expo, the annual meeting/celebration put on in Chicago by the National Confectioners Association. The two-and-a-half-day spectacle gives candy companies a chance to introduce new products and tap into new markets; retailers a chance to discover products they have not sold before; distributors a chance to find new clients; and, most important, everyone a chance to try more different kinds of candy in three days than most people do in their lives. There were so many great things to try at the Candy Expo, and I feel the need to share a lot of it with the Serious Eats community. As a result, this is...
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Cochon 555 is a traveling series of food events featuring a competition of acclaimed local chefs cooking with heritage pigs. On Sunday night, the eighth in the 11-city tour was held in Chicago (the New York event was reviewed here on Serious Eats). Put on by Taste Network, an Atlanta-based company that does marketing and promotion for the artisan wine and cheese industries, the events serve three purposes. First, they increase awareness of heritage pigs and the food politics that go along with them. Second, they raise the profile of Taste Network. And third, the events serve as a fundraiser for charities related to the concept of eating locally produced, artisan-crafted foods. The Chicago event benefited Farms for City...
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Photograph from cheese-rolling.co.uk I'm not the most outdoorsy person, but this is a competition I can get behind. Every year on Cooper's Hill in Gloucester, England, a cheese-rolling race is held. No, it isn't a race between different rounds of cheese—it is something much better: One round of cheese is rolled down the hill and participants chase after it. Last year our cheese correspondent Jamie Forest wrote about 2008's winner and the cheese used in the race. You can see photos from this year's race, which took place on May 25, in today's post at The Big Picture from The Boston Globe. The tradition has been going for for at least 200 years and is always growing in popularity....
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I learned two lessons at the 90th National Restaurant Association Restaurant, Hotel-Motel Show, which was in Chicago from May 16 to 19. First, I got to physically see just how huge the restaurant industry is. Conceptually, of course, the size of the industry is fairly obvious, but knowing it and trying to take in the scope of products being sold at the thousands of booths at the NRA Show are two very different things. Second, food quality lags far, far behind profit as the primary concern of most in the industry. Again, probably a lesson most of us intuitively understand, but one that was really slammed home as I spent about five hours making my way around the NRA...
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If you think of rice cakes as only being round or block-shaped, you're...right about most of them. But at the 7th International Tteok Fair in Seoul, South Korea, there were more! So many more! For the rice cake competition, contestants made elaborate dishes that, unfortunately, only the judges could eat, but they provided plenty of eye-candy for the rest of us. Since there were too many for me to include in my overview of the fair, I separated my favorites into this gallery. Many of the tteok dishes were make to look like other things. This South Korean flag, for one....
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On May 8 and 9, the Institute of Traditional Korean Food converted the massive aT Center in Seoul into Rice Cake Central for the 7th International Tteok (Rice Cake) Fair. While a sea of chefs competed to make the best tteok dish, hoards of kids made sweet red bean-filled tteok and watched rice pounding demonstrations. Down one side of the hall, companies for tteok manufacturing equipment put their gleaming wares on display; on the other side, vendors gave out fresh samples of tteok and sold their products. Hands-on activities included learning how to make tteok and tasting different rice wines. For the non-interactive part, there were displays featuring tteok-related relics, examples of rice cakes from around the world, and...
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