Don Gregory holds some fresh Montmorency cherries
Last week, the Cherry Marketing Board invited me and several other food bloggers to Traverse City, Michigan to attend a “Cherry Immersion Trip.” The purpose: to learn all about cherries and have fun doing it!
They took us on a tour of a cherry grove where we got to eat cherries right off the tree and watch the cherries get harvested, then we went to the Cherry Republic and ate cherry pie, had pulled pork with cherry BBQ sauce, drank cherry sodas and tasted cherry wine. We also attended the National Cherry Festival. It was a lot of fun and I enjoyed meeting the other food bloggers.
Continue reading ‘A Tour of Cherries in Traverse City’
This is a story from about five years ago, but I was telling some friends about it the other night and thought I’d write it up here. It’s definitely one for the files of “Misadventures of a Deafie in a Hearing World.” It’s one of my most embarrassing moments ever, but also pretty damn funny.
I was on an airplane flying cross-country and watching a movie on my laptop, a DVD I’d gotten from Netflix that I had not seen before. It was the Todd Solondz film Storytelling, with Selma Blair. Anyway, unbeknownst to me, there’s a scene in the film where the Selma Blair character is having sex with a large black man, repeatedly chanting the whole time, “Fuck me, n***er. Fuck me, n***er.”
A few moments later, the flight attendant came to my seat, looking rather pissed.
Her: “Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to turn that down.”
Me: *turning red* “THE SOUND WAS ON?!”
Her: “What is the matter with you!?”
Me: “Um, I’m deaf.”
Her: “Ohhhhh!”
Needless to say, I didn’t dare look the other passengers in the eye for the rest of the flight. When the plane landed and we disembarked, the people behind me were giving me the stinkeye. They had kids with them. Ooops.
To this day, I religiously make sure the volume on my laptop is off!!
My collection of Gourmet cookbooks
Wow, I am really bummed about the news of Gourmet Magazine shutting down. My mother was a subscriber in the 70′s & 80′s and archived every single copy. I spent many rainy days sitting in the den reading them as a child, along with my father’s National Geographics. And my parents wonder how I grew up to be a foodie and a traveler. Duh.
At some point, the magazines got tossed out. I managed to inherit four of her Gourmet cookbooks, which I use.
Gourmet was a big influence on me in finding the path to cooking, traveling, and Francophilia. In the older versions of the magazine, the photographs were simple, used natural light, and showed off the food and locations beautifully.
I have vivid memories of flipping through photographs of wicker baskets of radishes, wooden boxes of wine grapes, live Toulouse geese, and women shopping with wicker baskets at open-air markets in France. And other simple images that just captured France beautifully – a woman walking down the street with a baguette tucked under her arm, two men sitting at a cafe table, drinking wine and laughing, and a man wearing a beret and sniffing a truffle.
When I started traveling to France in the late 80′s I happily found the France that I had read about in Gourmet. My timing was auspicious; nowadays most of those charming wood and wicker baskets have been replaced with ugly plastic bins and the wicker shopping baskets are now plastic bags. France has changed before my eyes in the last two decades; since that initial trip in 1989, I’ve returned almost annually. But if you know where to look, you can still see the same timeless images that Gourmet printed forty or fifty years ago.
Thanks for all the gifts you gave me, Gourmet.
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