Chicago Marathon Val

Hi friends! How have you been?  Last time we spoke I left you with my vegan snickerdoodles and vegan chocolate chip brownie cake recipes…. hope you liked them! If you get a chance to make either recipe, I’d love to hear about it!

Today, however, I don’t have any new recipes for you (that will come in my next post) but instead wanted to talk about my night as a food blog panelist!

A few weeks ago, I received an email from Brittany, the Marketing and Community Relations Specialist at Chicago’s South Loops Whole Foods, inviting me to be on the food blogger panel at their “Cook, Eat, Blog” event. I, of course, said yes – Whole Foods and blogging, two of my favorite things – what’s not to love?!?

I was a bit nervous for the event since I’m not a very confident public speaker (apparently my talented trial lawyer husband has not rubbed off on me at ALL), and I’ve never spoken about blogging in front of an audience before! But, my awkwardness aside, it was a lot of fun and it was a great experience!

Mike was in charge of photography for the night, so if they stink it’s his fault so I can’t take credit for the great quality of the photos   Here I am when I first arrived talking to Brittany and Natalie, one of the other panelists from her Bake and Destroy blog, in the room in Whole Foods where the cooking classes are held.

Here’s where I sat – we were given these recyclable Whole Food lunch bags stocked with lots of great goodies! I thought it was hilarious that this was the picture of me that they chose to use – it’s of me in front of the oh-so-classy plastic Merry Christmas sign that I blogged about before!

I had never taken a cooking class at Whole Foods before, but I think I may need to do so in the future!  It was a beautiful, well-lit room.

Talking to Natalie before we got started – to my right is Kristin from The Kitchen Sink and Nick and Blake from The Paupered Chef. It was great to chat with fellow Chicago food bloggers!

The panel moderator gave us some prompts to talk about, such as why we became food bloggers, what we have gotten out of it, what our favorite Chicago restaurants are, etc.!  They were really great questions, and I’m going to do a post soon with my responses.  Here I am mid-speaking:

After we were done answering the questions, there was a Q & A session where we took some questions from the audience, which was comprised of bloggers and non-bloggers. I was excited to see Alice and Jared from Eat A Duck I Must – I haven’t seen them since the Foodbuzz event at Tru over the summer.  If you haven’t been to their blog, I always rave about their excellent photography so check it out!

Aside from giving us such a great opportunity to speak on the panel, Whole Foods also gave the panelists a goodie bag filled with lots of great products, many of which are local.

This Jokerz candy bar is very new to stores, so you may not have seen it on the shelves yet – not only is it vegan, but it was PHENOMENAL!! Ok, I know I say that about a lot of vegan treats, but as I described it to Alice, this tastes like a cross between a Snickers bar, a Three Musketeers bar, and a piece of heaven! Not a bad combo, eh?

Thank you again to Brittany and to the South Loop Whole Foods for giving me this opportunity!

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Post to come soon with a very festive (read: red and green) holiday cookie recipe!  In the meantime, happy weekend to you all!

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 12th, 2009 at 6:06 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.