This weekend Chicago hosts one of my favorite conventions, the International Home and Housewares Show at McCormick Place! This convention is the place to be to view all the new innovations in kitchen wares, laundry aids, pots, pans, measuring tools, shopping carts, storage solutions, packaging, cooking demonstrations, baking ideas, decorating tools, gardening new products, and just about anything that you would need to use around the house.
This annual show runs from 3/5/16 to 3/8/16 it hosts over 2,000 exhibitors with everything from Contact Paper to kitchen knives and cutting boards. I will be broadcasting from the show floor on Saturday and Sunday afternoon on our podcast: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/giantforkandspoon so tune in and hear from our C-CAP team members and students. If you can, come on down and meet us in person. Here's the ticket information: https://www.housewares.org/show/register-plan.
This event helps to support our educational culinary program, Careers through Culinary Arts Program, http://www.ccapinc.org/, we will be working the booth, along with their fabulous team at Harold Import Company, http://www.hickitchen.com/. The support that comes from Harold Import Company make our teaching efforts possible so we invite some of our students to work the show and help to feed the clients that stop-by the booth.
Also, there will be a fundraiser event on 3/6/16 where our students from several of the CPS high school's culinary programs will be serving up their unique food fare for our guests. https://www.ccapinc.org/locations/chicagobenefit2016/.
These efforts help to endow our students with the skills and knowledge that will take them into their professional chef careers. C-CAP conducts an annual student cooking competition and awards the winners with scholarship money to attend culinary school.
I can't wait to share all of this from the floor of McCormick Place. Hopefully, I won't have any signal issues and will be able to go live on the air, if not, I will tape and broadcast a bit later on. It's going to be a long week but the excitement of all that is shinny, new, and inciting to chef's everywhere will be at my fingertips to explore.
Oh boy!
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Showing posts with label Blogtalk Radio. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blogtalk Radio. Show all posts
Thursday, March 3, 2016
Saturday, February 27, 2016
Geeked Podcaster
It has been about a month since I launched this blog project and it's companion podcast http://www.blogtalkradio.com/giantforkandspoon and I'm loving it. Today's broadcast was made extra special since we had our first live caller!
Speaking with all of these food lovers can reinvigorate my spirit and ignite a new spark because sometimes chefs can get a bit burned out and needing something to get you motivated. Educating the kids that I serve gives me much more than I give out and in many ways they have all become my kids from other mothers.
With today's guest, Chef Teoskii Washington, I am proud to see him utilize some of the advice he sought from me in the past and how well it is being put to use. I am also glad that I was careful when I did give other's advice because positive results are not guaranteed.
Our caller asked for advice about entering the industry and we suggested a couple of books to read in preparation:
The Mind of a Chef, by Breville, there is a video series as well:
http://www.amazon.com/Breville-presents-Inside-Minds-Behind-ebook/dp/B00IN36GEK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1456601844&sr=8-1&keywords=mind+of+a+chef+book
Professional Cooking by W. Gisslen
http://www.amazon.com/Professional-Cooking-College-Version-Gisslen/dp/0471663743/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1456601929&sr=1-5&keywords=professional+cooking+book
There are many more offerings that can point young aspiring chefs in the right direction. So glad we could help.
Speaking with all of these food lovers can reinvigorate my spirit and ignite a new spark because sometimes chefs can get a bit burned out and needing something to get you motivated. Educating the kids that I serve gives me much more than I give out and in many ways they have all become my kids from other mothers.
With today's guest, Chef Teoskii Washington, I am proud to see him utilize some of the advice he sought from me in the past and how well it is being put to use. I am also glad that I was careful when I did give other's advice because positive results are not guaranteed.
Our caller asked for advice about entering the industry and we suggested a couple of books to read in preparation:
The Mind of a Chef, by Breville, there is a video series as well:
http://www.amazon.com/Breville-presents-Inside-Minds-Behind-ebook/dp/B00IN36GEK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1456601844&sr=8-1&keywords=mind+of+a+chef+book
Professional Cooking by W. Gisslen
http://www.amazon.com/Professional-Cooking-College-Version-Gisslen/dp/0471663743/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1456601929&sr=1-5&keywords=professional+cooking+book
There are many more offerings that can point young aspiring chefs in the right direction. So glad we could help.
Sunday, January 31, 2016
Finding Your Roots
If any of you actually know me in person, you may already know that I have somewhat of an obsession about genealogy. Tracing my origins back through time, generation after generation, isn't an easy task, and often the discoveries made lead to more questions than answers.
When I entered culinary training, a good amount of the work would follow along either a technique, building skills, or it would be a grouping of dishes from one country and then another. I was surprised to learn that several of the dishes I grew up eating were cultural invites into other worlds that my family were not apart of to my knowledge. I remember learning that the oxtails my Grandmother cooked were not like the ones other blacks cooked that had come to Chicago from the Southern states, but much more in the style of Italian migrants, for example. We ate smoked sausages with sauerkraut, and I haven't found much in the way of German ancestry. As neighbors tend to do, Grandmother shared recipes with neighbors and friends.
Sharing food culture with others and the history of foods, their origins, and development, became a fascination for me. I once took a class at Roosevelt University all about the history of food. In that exploration, we ventured back in time to the cavemen days, and viewed history and archaeology of food, how food procurement is at the very beginnings of civilization itself. Farming changed us from strictly hunter-gatherers of nomadic origins to settlers and villagers. Yogurt changed trade routes and therefore economy. I will share more of this in later posts.
Even before Henry Louis Gates Jr. began televising episodes of his award winning show, I had a curiosity for this type of exploration. My companion podcast is a type of this kind of exploration as they are conversations with people about their relationships with food and by extension culture.
Chefs, foodies, critics, writers, culinarians, educators, artist, and any sort of people who eat have some type of connection with food. I am loving talking with my guests about the subject. Just in the first few broadcast, we have seen how the conversations have taken us into conversations about social unrest, cultural and religious rebirths, and dietary changes for religious and health reasons. These are all just breadcrumbs along the pathways of creation and generational growth.
I have a small collection of older cookbooks because I like to compare what was popular 20,40,60 years ago to what is consumed now. The techniques used, the flavor pallet, the available food stuffs, and the changes in the social norms of dinning etiquette and social graces, all change and as they change so does the preferred foods. The modern mothers of today, often can't imagine hosting a dinner party that consist of 9 or 10 courses of foods, let alone design, produce, and prepare such an culinary experience but it isn't so unusual for the cultured society women of the turn of the century.
No matter the era of your birth, your place in society, your ethic makeup, for country of origin, your immigrated home, your racial background, your chosen profession, your political background, or any other thing in which we classify ourselves, we all eat and we all have a love/hate/health relationship with food.
If you are interested in taking part in our weekly discussions, please leave me a comment with your contact information, and I will love to schedule a broadcast to explore your food history.
Listen in to our discussions both live and archived: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/giantforkandspoon
If you like us, please Follow! I will be soon making this available on iTunes and other search engines such as IHeart Radio in short order.
When I entered culinary training, a good amount of the work would follow along either a technique, building skills, or it would be a grouping of dishes from one country and then another. I was surprised to learn that several of the dishes I grew up eating were cultural invites into other worlds that my family were not apart of to my knowledge. I remember learning that the oxtails my Grandmother cooked were not like the ones other blacks cooked that had come to Chicago from the Southern states, but much more in the style of Italian migrants, for example. We ate smoked sausages with sauerkraut, and I haven't found much in the way of German ancestry. As neighbors tend to do, Grandmother shared recipes with neighbors and friends.
Sharing food culture with others and the history of foods, their origins, and development, became a fascination for me. I once took a class at Roosevelt University all about the history of food. In that exploration, we ventured back in time to the cavemen days, and viewed history and archaeology of food, how food procurement is at the very beginnings of civilization itself. Farming changed us from strictly hunter-gatherers of nomadic origins to settlers and villagers. Yogurt changed trade routes and therefore economy. I will share more of this in later posts.
Even before Henry Louis Gates Jr. began televising episodes of his award winning show, I had a curiosity for this type of exploration. My companion podcast is a type of this kind of exploration as they are conversations with people about their relationships with food and by extension culture.
Chefs, foodies, critics, writers, culinarians, educators, artist, and any sort of people who eat have some type of connection with food. I am loving talking with my guests about the subject. Just in the first few broadcast, we have seen how the conversations have taken us into conversations about social unrest, cultural and religious rebirths, and dietary changes for religious and health reasons. These are all just breadcrumbs along the pathways of creation and generational growth.
I have a small collection of older cookbooks because I like to compare what was popular 20,40,60 years ago to what is consumed now. The techniques used, the flavor pallet, the available food stuffs, and the changes in the social norms of dinning etiquette and social graces, all change and as they change so does the preferred foods. The modern mothers of today, often can't imagine hosting a dinner party that consist of 9 or 10 courses of foods, let alone design, produce, and prepare such an culinary experience but it isn't so unusual for the cultured society women of the turn of the century.
No matter the era of your birth, your place in society, your ethic makeup, for country of origin, your immigrated home, your racial background, your chosen profession, your political background, or any other thing in which we classify ourselves, we all eat and we all have a love/hate/health relationship with food.
If you are interested in taking part in our weekly discussions, please leave me a comment with your contact information, and I will love to schedule a broadcast to explore your food history.
Listen in to our discussions both live and archived: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/giantforkandspoon
If you like us, please Follow! I will be soon making this available on iTunes and other search engines such as IHeart Radio in short order.
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