ReMARKable Palate #202: 2009 Summer Fancy Food Show

Show 202 is an audio recap of some of the people I met at the 55th Annual Summer Fancy Food Show in NY. I’ve been releasing my Quick Picks videos throughout the show, so be sure to look for them on the website at www.culinarymedianetwork.com, but this gave me a chance to speak with some people in depth. I learn about new European yogurt from Conrad Lowell, Portuguese influenced Indian food from Sharon Fernandez of Stonehouse 27 Spice Company, and dried mushrooms & chiles from Angie Padgett of Earthy Delights.

www.lowelldairy.com
www.stonehouse27.com
www.earthy.com

Theme Song: “Go Fish”, by Big Money Grip, from the Podsafe Music Network.

ReMARKable Palate is a production of The Culinary Media Network. www.culinarymedianetwork.com

I continue my exploration around The NASFT Fancy Food Show on the 2nd day of the show. Sometimes you find yourself pulled in a certain direction without intending it, and today it seems my eye was drawn to many people featuring products from Latin America. In this first video, we see Chef Rick Bayless, who was one of the first guests on our video podcast when we started doing video. He’s debuting a new line of Mexican Gourmet skillet sauces at the show, and I speak with him while he serves up some tacos to hungry crowds. I then speak with Isela Hernandez of Kekua Mexican Drinking Chocolate, who whips up some chocolate like abuelita with her Molinillo!

As you know, we’ve been having a love affair with the Flavors of Chile here at Culinary Media Network. We couldn’t resist visiting our Chilean friends at their pavilion to see what was cooking. Chef Pilar Rodriguez spent the day whipping up a variety of dishes for the eager crowds who gathered, and she used all of the products from the various exhibitors. I then visited with Paulina Peñaloza of Chilean Gourmet, who showed me their new Quinoa Pop product, an air-puffed quinoa that’s ready to eat, which can be used in a breakfast cereal, mixed with yogurt, or as a creative topping on a number of dishes.

My last stop in my Latin American journey today was Peru. I spoke with Betsy Roger of the Culinary Collective, who are debuting a bunch of products from Peru this year. The one that most caught my eye is the Kañiwa flour, a high protein flour made form a native Peruvian plant.

As always I’ll have more videos to share as well as audio for my ReMARKable Palate Podcast, with more in depth interviews of some of the people and food stories that I find fascinating.

In addition to discovering new products each year at the Fancy Food Show, we get an opportunity to catch up with old friends and folks we’ve had on the podcast before. Nicolas Mazard is a fascinating character whom I’ve interviewed 2 years ago on ReMARKable Palate. He grows microgreens in his greenhouse, which are beautiful as garnishes, but which also pack amazing flavors and sensations. I ran into Nicolas again this year, and he introduced me to some of his new tastes:

Watch for more videos from the Fancy Food Show throughout the week!

It’s one of the events that I look forward to every year, like Memorial Day or the first week of my CSA, The NASFT Fancy Food Show is one of the highlights of the summer in New York. This is the 55th Annual Summer Fancy Food Show, and despite the downturn in the economy, this is the second largest show ever. It’s the food world’s debutante ball, as thousands of specialty food companies show off their newest products as well as their old favorites, to retailers and restaurateurs from around the country. Luckily, they do allow people from the food press to attend as well, and I get some of my best content there every year.

Since I’ve been bringing you my “Quick Bites” lately, short videos shot with my handheld Creative Vado camera, I figured I would do a post each day of the show to share with you my “Quick Picks”, those products or people that I find interesting. This is by no means exhaustive, nor representative of the thousands of exhibitors at the show, just a few of the standouts that caught my eye and my camera, and those that are short enough to include in a quick show.

This the 5th year that I’ve been coming to the show, and while there are many faces, products, and countries that are familiar by now, there are always surprises, and discoveries to be found, even from the old standbys.

As always I’ll have more videos to share as well as audio for my ReMARKable Palate Podcast, with more in depth interviews of some of the people and food stories that I find fascinating.

CMN Video: Flavors of Chile at Centrico

Chef Mark and Jennifer attend a luncheon at Chef Aaron Sanchez’ Centrico Restaurant made with products from Chile: Merken spice, carica, myrtlyberries, avocado oil, pisco, and more.

A production of The Culinary Media Network. www.culinarymedianetwork.com

Here’s this week’s CSA Newsletter, which I write for Hawthorne Valley Farm. They supply my Inwood CSA here in Upper Manhattan, as well as the Riverdale, Bronx CSA. I’m posting these newsletters which I create for my local group here because I’m participating in “Cooking Away my CSA” a group where we all post what we’re doing with our CSA shares to help inspire others to find new ways of cooking up their veggies!

This week I include more recipes for garlic scapes, red beets, snap peas, and rainbow chard.

Download the PDF here or click the images below: June 25th Newsletter

ReMARKable Palate #201: Sommelier Chuck Furuya

I sit down with Master Sommelier Chuck Furuya at Hiroshi, one of his many restaurants in Honolulu, to talk about his love of wine, and of Hawaii, and how to approach pairing wines with the Asian and Pacific-Rim influenced foods of the Aloha state. Chuck also shares some great stories and his no-nonsense approach to wine, which you know we share here at CMN! We just let the recorder run as we had a hell of a conversation!

DKRestaurants.com

Theme Song: “Go Fish”, by Big Money Grip, from the Podsafe Music Network.

ReMARKable Palate is a production of The Culinary Media Network. www.culinarymedianetwork.com

Subscribe to Chef Mark’s Daily Cooking Tips Podcast in iTunes

Subscribe to Chef Mark’s Daily Cooking Tips Podcast in iTunes

You know the saying, “You have to get up PRETTY early in the morning to pull one over on me”?? Well, We DID get up at 4 AM to make it to the Honolulu Fish Auction before it started! And there was no way anyone was going to pull one over on Brooks Takenaka, the manager of the fish auction!

This is one of the most unique experiences I had in Hawaii, while on the “So Much More Hawaii” tour sponsored by the Hawaii HTA. Most people know that you can enjoy beaches, luaus and mai tais in Hawaii, but they may not know about this aspect of Honolulu which makes alot of the rest of the party possible.

This is where the boats come into port and unload their catch every day, and starting a 5:30 AM, the buyers for all the restaurants in the city as well as wholesalers and reps from restaurants on the mainland and Asian countries put in their bids. Some days there are as many as 100 boats coming to port. On this morning, we had fish from just one boat, so it was clear that the prices would be dear for what fish they brought in.

In this first Quick Bite, Fish Auction Manager Brooks Takenaka gives us an exclusive sneak peek behind the scenes before they let in the buyers. Brooks explains how the process has gone from a simple one to a highly technical and computerized one. That said, the basic process works the same as it always has. His staff unloads the boat and lays out all the fish according to species. For the Tuna, they cut a few core samples and lay them out so the buyers can see the color, fattiness, and general quality of each fish before bidding:

After we get an exclusive sneak peek, the bell rings and they let in the buyers to do their work. We’re lucky to be there, and get to watch the action.

Special thanks to Melissa Chang, our local Honolulu friend, who was the brave soul who got up even earlier than us to drive us out to the Pier for the auction! She’s an amazing person, and writes a great food blog about the many cuisines of Honolulu, The Urban Mix Plate, and she led us on an amazing eating tour all around the city, which I’ll be posting soon!

Here’s this week’s CSA Newsletter, which I write for Hawthorne Valley Farm. They supply my Inwood CSA here in Upper Manhattan, as well as the Riverdale, Bronx CSA. I’m posting these newsletters which I create for my local group here because I’m participating in “Cooking Away my CSA” a group where we all post what we’re doing with our CSA shares to help inspire others to find new ways of cooking up their veggies!

This week I include more recipes for green peas, roasted kale, and this week we get the yummy yummy garlic scapes!!

Download the PDF here or click the images below: June 18th Newsletter

ReMARKable Palate #200: Abalone Farming in Hawaii

If you can believe it, this is my 200th Show! No special programming, just more great talk with amazing people who make food. This week, I speak with Hiroshi Arai, CEO of the Big Island Abalone Corporation on the Big Island of Hawaii, a sustainable farm that cultivates the prized abalone, which has a huge market in Japan, China and Korea, and which is starting to enjoy increased popularity in the US. I posted 2 videos about the process, and here Hiroshi explains a little more about the abalone itself and how they grow it sustainably using deep ocean water.

Theme Song: “Go Fish”, by Big Money Grip, from the Podsafe Music Network.

ReMARKable Palate is a production of The Culinary Media Network. www.culinarymedianetwork.com

Twitter always brings such great surprises and wonderful connections with cool people. My friend Jaden from www.steamykitchen.com tweeted about a new challenge created by her friend Heather, AKA @flourgrrrl, the “Cooking Away My CSA” challenge. she thought it would be good to share the idea with other food bloggers, to see what we all come up with each week. The idea is that lots of folks who get CSA deliveries scratch their heads wondering what to make each week with their prodigious bounty, sometimes of veggies they’ve never cooked before.

I immediately perked up, since as my readers know, I write the newsletter for my Inwood CSA (powered by Hawthorne Valley Farm in Ghent, NY), and despite being a chef and having a recipe website, I find myself struggling each week to come up with new recipes. It gets especially difficult when we’re in the 5th week straight of rainbow chard and kale!

So each week, those people participating will post what they did with their CSA share and @flourgrrrl will do a roundup of everyone’s posts, thus providing us all with new ideas each week. That said, we got our first delivery of the season this week (yeah, we’re late bloomers here in New York, and our growing season is a little bit shorter than everyone else’s, but our produce is great!) Right off the bat, we’re getting the rainbow chard that seems to be the mainstay of our CSA, so I pulled out one of my favorite ways to cook it:

This is my interpretation of an amazingly simple yet ingenious dish I had at El Portal de Echaurren in Rioja a few years ago. Chef Francis Paniego told me that his mother taught him to always use every bit of the food that comes into his kitchen, so he came up with this. When I got a batch of rainbow chard from the CSA this past week, I thought I would pull it out again, since it never fails to please!

It’s pretty simple, just make a standard tempura batter and fry the ribs, which you would normally throw out! In this case, I served them with a simple arugula pesto, also made with produce from the CSA.

And you know me, I’m never content to simply type up a blog post, with me it’s always about doing an audio podcast or a video, so since I started Chef Mark’s Daily Cooking Tip Podcast a couple months ago, I figured that I’ll try to include as many tips for the CSA as possible. It just so happens I recorded this daily tip last week:

Subscribe to Chef Mark’s Daily Cooking Tips Podcast in iTunes

One of the most interesting things I discovered in Hawaii, while on the “So Much More Hawaii” tour sponsored by the Hawaii Tourism Authority, was the Big Island Abalone Farm, an operation on the Kona coast which farms prized abalone using sustainable aquaculture supported by deep sea water from the NELHA project (Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority), a state supported “pipeline” which brings pure cold water from from than 2,000 feet below the surface.

I spent the afternoon at the farm accompanied by Al Salomon, Facility Manager, who gave us a tour around their unique facility. In this video, Al explains the system and gives us insight in the sustainability of the process, which has added benefits in the form of an employee vegetable garden.

I also got to go behind the scenes into the state-of-the-art sorting area where the adult abalone which are large enough for harvesting are sorted by size and weight. This system uses non-toxic CO2 to lull the abalone to sleep long enough to transport them through the sorting process and back into the cold water tanks so that they don’t react negatively and toughen up. The abalone are kept alive throughout this process and even in transport.

I interviewed Hiroshi Arai, CEO of Big Island Abalone, about the project, the process and the tremendous market demand for abalone in Japan and other parts of Asia. I’ll have that audio interview on an upcoming episode of the ReMARKable Palate Podcast, as well as a more in depth “Main Course” video. For now, these are just “Quick Bites”.

It’s been months in the planning, and literally years in creating, well, we’ve finally received the galley proof of our Gilded Fork Cookbook! Here’s the moment of unboxing, the first moment we’re holding the book in our eager little hands!

Now, we’ve looked it over, and found a few teeny tiny things we’d like to fix, so in order to get you all a better product, we’re going to go through one more round of small edits and fixes before we approve it for printing, so it’ll be another week for those of you who’ve already pre-ordered the book, but the wait will be worth it!

If you haven’t yet pre-ordered, now’s your chance! If you pre-order now, your book will be shipped in the first batch we order, so you’ll have it before the end of June!

Here’s this week’s CSA Newsletter, which I write for Hawthorne Valley Farm. They supply my Inwood CSA here in Upper Manhattan, as well as the Riverdale, Bronx CSA. I’m posting these newsletters which I create for my local group here because I’m participating in “Cooking Away my CSA” a group where we all post what we’re doing with our CSA shares to help inspire others to find new ways of cooking up their veggies!

This is the first week of the season for us up here in the Northeast (we get going later than other parts of the country) with some fun recipes for green peas, arugula and Japanese Hakurei turnips.

Download the PDF here or click the images below: June 11th Newsletter

ReMARKable Palate #199: Michael Richmond of Bouchaine Vineyards

I speak with Michael Richmond, winemaker for Bouchaine Vineyards in the Napa Carneros appelation. He led me through a barrel tasting of several of his Pinot Noir samples from the 2008 vintage, and we learned what different oaks and ages of oak barrels can do to the wine, and what drawing from different lots give him to work with. We also talk about Chardonnay, and Michael even manages to get me to give up my membership in the ABC club!

Theme Song: “Go Fish”, by Big Money Grip, from the Podsafe Music Network.

ReMARKable Palate is a production of The Culinary Media Network. www.culinarymedianetwork.com

While visiting Maui on the “So Much More Hawaii” tour, I was given a tour of Kapalua Farms by Gustavo Diaz, Operations Manager. He showed me many aspects of this diversified operation which is dedicated to sustainable growing of vegetables and pineapple. Although the farm is directly adjacent to the Kapalua Resort’s golf course, Gustavo explains how they maintain the integrity of the organic growing space:

Gustavo explained how the farm is overhauling their composting operation to be able to take on green waste from other areas of West Maui and turn it into organic fertilizer to feed their operation.

We ended our tour in the upper pineapple fields, where Kapalua Farms grows the famous “Maui Gold” organic pineapples. Gustavo explains the process, and how it’s a little more involved and labor intensive than so-called “conventionally” grown pineapple.

CMN Video: Chef Eric Lee’s Salmon Potato Canapés

Chef Eric Lee from Onyx Restaurant in Halifax, Nova Scotia shows us how he prepares Salmon Potato Canapes for the Savour Food & Wine Festival.

A production of The Culinary Media Network. www.culinarymedianetwork.com

Well, the tour is over, and we’re all back in our respective homes. I’m back in New York City, and despite a couple days of rain, it’s sunny and spring-like again, and I’m revisiting all my fond memories of Hawaii. I still have quite a bit of material to release, which will be coming in little bits over the next few months. I’ll release more “Quick Bites” videos from my last few days on the Big Island and on Oahu this week, as well.

Our “little bloggers tour that could” has attracted some mainstream press as well! I was quoted as the lead in a story for the June 7th edition of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin:

“Chef Mark Tafoya, a celebrated foodie blogger, had to suffer the discomfort of a 4 a.m. wake-up call to catch a Honolulu sunrise and witness Honolulu’s fish auction.

But his followers could have the pleasure of a near-firsthand experience without the discomfort. They could watch Tafoya peruse fresh catch on his Web site, culinarymedianetwork.com, or at the Hawaii Tourism Authority’s new blog site, www.somuchmorehawaii.com, or follow it in real time on Twitter (a free social media site that lets users post and follow short, 140-word updates). They also could access content on video-sharing networks like YouTube, Revver, Vimeo, Viddler and Facebook.

“It’s hard to say how many people were tuned into my trip to Hawaii because they all share,” said Tafoya, who was one of eight bloggers who were invited to participate in the state’s first all social-media travel tour, which visited major islands from May 27 to Thursday.

While Tafoya has 1,000 followers on Facebook, 4,500 tweeple (Twitter people) and about 100,000 hits a month on his Web site, content sharing gets the message out to many more, he said.

“That’s what makes social media so powerful,” said Christine Lu, who organized the tour for the Hawaii Tourism Authority and is the founder of Cilantro Media, a social-media boutique firm.”

Christine Lu, is the force of nature whose ambition helped to make the tour possible, and who graciously thought to include me! She worked with her contacts at the Hawaii Tourism Authority to pitch the tour and convince the powers that be that the power of new media would be useful to help the HawaiiHTA promote the islands.

We were featured on the front page of the June 5th edition of the Pacific Business News, which quoted Christine and credited her for her work on the tour:

“Along for the ride with Lu were seven full-time bloggers from the Mainland (assisted by local blogger L. P. “Neenz” Faleafine) whose trips to Hawaii were paid for by the Hawaii Tourism Authority and its marketing partners.

The bloggers’ junket was the most ambitious experiment by the HTA to exploit social media. Desperate to drum up new business, Hawaii tourism executives are finding that TV commercials, ads in newspapers and magazines and morning talk show chatter — i.e., old media — are no longer enough.

The HTA sees new media and online social networking as cheap, effective ways to reach a highly desirable market of young, smart, adventurous, and relatively well-off vacationers.”

David Uchiyama, from the Hawaii Tourism Authority, was interviewed on KHON2 News in Honolulu about the tour, as well. The TV station’s website doesn’t offer it’s video player as an embeddable player, but you can see the video HERE, or click the image below.

You can read more coverage of what we did during the week, as well as blog posts from the other participants, at www.somuchmorehawaii.com. My links are all accesible in our HAWAII section in the “Travel & Places” drop down menu at the top of every CMN page.

Here’s all the other folks:

@aricqueen
Aric S. Queen
A new-media producer focused on China who writes about value.
http://current.com/users/aricsqueen.htm

@leahlamb
Leah Lamb
A San Francisco writer and producer at Current.
http://current.com/topics/77529011_leah-lamb

@SheilaS
Sheila Scarborough
Travel writer from Austin, Texas, who specializes in the family market.
http://www.familytravellogue.com

@christinelu
Christine Lu
Founder of Cilantro Media and self-proclaimed “Geek Girl.”
http://blog.christine.lu/about

@blogworld
Rick Calvert, a conference/CEO specialist from Las Vegas, who founded Blog World Expo.
www.blogworldexpo.com

@shiralazar
Shira Lazar, from Los Angeles, pop media star of jaunted.com, who is known for being a “getaway girl.”
www.jaunted.com

@Genuine
Jim Turner, an adventure seeker from Firestone, Colo., who is the social media director of Blog World Expo.
www.onebyonemedia.com

@Neenz
L.P. “Neenz” Faleafine, a local blogger serving as a host and organizer and contributor of Hawaiian culture.
www.ponomedia.com