This is the assignment: follow one food editor around the Newspaper Food Editors and Writers Conference, held last week in Chicago, and get her reactions to all the good, hearty Midwest food that was planned for conference participants.
Or, to put it more bluntly-track the caloric intake of a food person eating her way through a food-laden conference.
Would she succumb to every last sweet morsel of bread pudding sitting in a puddle of warm caramel? Would she think about the high fat content of red meat before cutting into a 14-ounce hunk of prime rib? How much deep dish pizza could she eat?
Would she still be able to bend over to put on her shoes at the end of the four days?
We asked Mary Alice Powell, food editor of the Toledo Blade, to be our subject. We picked her for simple reasons; she loves food and we knew she would speak her mind.
”You want to do WHAT?” she says a little loudly when we mention reporting her pre-conference and post-conference weights.
All right, all right, not the actual weight, but just any difference the scale might record.
We`re sitting at breakfast in the dining room of Le Meridien Chicago, the hotel where the conference is being held. She`s eating oatmeal that looks suspiciously like creme brulee; the healthy stuff is hidden beneath a wonderful glaze of caramel calories. (You want to know what the reporter is eating? Forget it. Let`s just say it was slathered with butter and drenched in syrup.)
She`s talking about the jump start she got on the conference.
She and three other food editors (from Salt Lake City, Memphis and Nashville) drove from Toledo to Chicago through Indiana Amish country, sampling the food as they traveled.
”My three friends arrived in Toledo Sunday,” she said. ”I met them at the airport in a limousine with a bottle of wine…I mean, it`s not easy to get to Toledo, this was special.”
They first went to a Hungarian restaurant for lunch (chili, Hungarian hot dog, pickles, cabbage rolls, apple strudel), and then to Powell`s home for dinner (pate, squash soup with fresh sage, spinach salad, tomato pudding, baked chicken rolls, white chocolate mousse with raspberry sauce).
The serious eating continued until they reached Chicago on Tuesday night, when it really got serious.
”Actually, we arrived with food,” she said. ”We stopped at one of those roadside tables (the Amish) set up and bought some cinnamon rolls, whoopie pies-that`s very Amish-and a chocolate cake sandwich sort of affair.
”It`s going to be hopeless this week.”
Fast forward from Wednesday breakfast at the Meridien to that night`s reception, called ”A Taste of Chicago Street Classics.” There was food inbetween (as well as meetings), but in the interest of space, we need to skip to the chicken Vesuvio, turtle soup, deep-dish pizza, Italian beef sandwiches, Chicago hot dogs and Berghoff beer.
”I tried everything, yes, I have to say, I did. And I finished it all off with a Dove bar,” she said.
”And then, you know what I found when I got to my room?”
Oh no.
”Yes, two chocolate truffles on my pillow. Quite wonderful. Well, of course I ate both of them, no one was watching. Two truffles on my pillow is not an every night occurrence.”
Thursday dinner is one of the times the conference attendees are on their own for a meal. ”Try ethnic restaurants or new hot spots,” says the schedule; but first is the ”Best of the Midwest: Sausage, Cheese and Wine”
reception. Just a few hundred calories, if you`re careful-and these aren`t complex carbohydrates we`re talking about.
”I love cheese, there`s nothing like the cheese in a Greek salad. . . You know, we go to these meetings, we hear all this low-fat talk, all the latest in nutrition news, and then we go load our plates with all this stuff. This is our lifestyle,” Powell says.
Did they go out to an ethnic restaurant after the sausage, cheese and wine?
”No, my little group just went to the dining room here in the hotel. I had a bowl of soup and some beer, it was just enough.”
Truffles on the pillow?
”Yes.”
Friday evening.
”I`m gaining weight,” she says, ”I know I am. I lost six pounds before I came here and I can feel it coming back.”
Friday had started with a heartland breakfast (pancakes, ham, scrambled eggs, rolls and scones) and progressed through a tour in Chicago`s Polish neighborhood (the North Milwaukee Avenue area), ending with lunch prepared by the women of St. Hyacinth`s Church.
”That Polish food is pretty heavy. And you feel like you have to clean your plate. Borscht, pigs in a blanket, hunters stew and they had five different kinds of pastries. Then, when we left, they gave us all two candybars to take with us. In case we got hungry before dinner.”
Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba! was the site for dinner Friday night. ”We tried 15 different appetizers-well, there were six of us-and some desserts. Then the chef came out to meet us and decided we didn`t have enough desserts, and sent us three more!”
It`s now Saturday, and it`s almost as though the first three days of the conference have been just a buildup to the real eating marathon. Saturday is the real thing.
This has been an intense conference. Meetings and seminars back-to-back, stories that have to be filed and a serious calorie overdose. It all climaxes in one culinary binge on this last day.
A climax that goes under the innocent-sounding title of a panel discussion called ”Going Small in a Big-Business Atmosphere” held at the Goose Island Brewery.
”We had about five beers to taste, and there was this wonderful appetizer, shredded red beets that had been deep fried. It like a little haystack, a beet-stack. Then they served this wonderful corn chowder, it was very good.
”Then they brought out the meat. I just stared at it when they put it down. I couldn`t believe it, it was so enormous. I asked the waiter, he said it was 14 ounces. No bone, a 14-ounce slab of boneless prime rib. Everyone kept staring at their plates, I mean, we were in awe of this portion. It would have been marvelous for a cowboy or lumberjack. . . I did keep thinking about the waste, not many of us could finish it.
”After that, they brought out the pastries. Beautiful pastries. And chocolate dipped strawberries.
”You know, sometimes when you start eating so much, it`s like you can`t stop. You get on a roll.”
That was Saturday lunch. Saturday dinner, a few hours later, brought more.
It was the ”Best of the New Midwest Dinner,” with five local chefs doing their finest, including appetizers of corn pancakes with bacon and squash and pheasant tempura.
”The entree was done by The Cottage (in Calumet City), and it was beautiful. Pork loin, big thick pieces, stuffed with a walnut filled prune. And with a sauce that had a lot of bourbon, it really jolted you.
”The dessert. I`ve never had bread pudding like that. It was the most marvelous bread pudding in the world. There it was, sitting in a puddle of caramel sauce. I said, `good grief, this is too much,` and then, of course, I lapped it all up. I ate the whole thing. I`m not sorry.
”Then I went to bed and there were those two damn truffles sitting there on the pillow. I looked at them, and thought, well, they won`t be good tomorrow, so I ate them.”
Monday morning.
Mary Alice Powell is back at work in Toledo. She describes what she`s wearing: a beige, Ultrasuede skirt and black sweater. More to the point, the skirt is elasticized.
Her own personal summary of the conference?
”A lot of serious discussion, a lot of laughs, a lot of good eating. I know I`ve come home feeling that it was very worthwhile. And I`m on a diet.
”I think the conference is typical of the way people think and eat. We`re careful and sensible part of the time, and then we splurge. Like that bread pudding, we springboarded right from a talk on nutrition and low fat into that bread pudding.”
And the scale said…??????
”You know, you can never trust a scale. I weighed in on three different ones, my own, at a friend`s and at work. They said I had gained either three or four pounds, so I`m saying three.”
Has she eaten since her return?
”Well, I have a friend who invited me over for dinner the night I got back, and it was fettuccine. But I just couldn`t do it.
”Enough is enough.”
The following dish is one example of what was served during the food editors conference:
CORN CAKES WITH BUTTERNUT SQUASH AND APPLEWOOD BACON
Preparation time: 30 minutes
Cooking time: 10 minutes
Yield: 12 appetizer servings
This recipe was created by Lorin Adolph, chef at Jim Guth`s The Chicago Caterers.
5 ears sweet corn, shucked
2 whole eggs
2 egg yolks
1/2 cup milk
1/3 cup each: flour, yellow cornmeal
1/4 cup melted butter plus additional butter for cooking
Salt, pepper to taste
6 slices applewood smoked bacon
1 cup peeled, finely diced butternut squash
Vegetable oil for cooking
About 1/4 cup creme fraiche or sour cream
1. Cut kernels from corn cobs. Put corn kernels, eggs and egg yolks into food processor. Process until corn is chopped but not pureed. Add milk, flour, cornmeal, 1/4 cup melted butter, salt and pepper; process just until combined.
2. Cook bacon in large skillet until crisp; remove from pan; cut into fine dice. Discard all but 1 tablespoon bacon fat from pan. Add squash, salt and pepper. Cook and stir over high heat just until tender, 4 to 5 minutes. Keep warm while cooking pancakes.
3. Heat 2 teaspoons each butter and oil in large nonstick skillet. For pancakes, spoon about 1 tablespoon corn mixture into skillet for each pancake. Cook, turning once, until pancakes are set and just beginning to brown at the edges. Add additional butter and oil to skillet as needed while cooking remaining pancakes.
4. To serve, spoon a small dollop of creme fraiche onto each pancake. Top with a little of the bacon and squash.
