Le Cordon Bleu

Chef phoned the other day asking if I might like to join him Sunday at the Le Cordon Bleu Culinary Institute for a day of chef demos and an outdoor market. I would set up a booth and sell my art along side of farmers, cattle farmers, cheese makers and others in the food industry. Hell yea, count me in, I love events like this.

From what I learned after participating in the event was this. The Atlanta chapter of Slow Food has teamed up with Le Cordon Bleu and formed a “club” at the schools campus. I believe this was their first effort together and it was a fund raiser for Slow Foods. Whole Foods was one of the sponsors. Whole Foods Market also employees Chef as the Southeast prepared food manager and soon to be the face of their “VALUE GURU” campaign. Click on all three of these to learn more about each. They are all three really good institutes, doing good for the benefit of all, weather “all” know about them or not.

I got to say I really love working with folks in the food industry, especially the likes of those who practice a smart and sustainable way of doing business. I met a fellow named Will Harris and he raises cattle. His farm has been in his family for 141 years and in 1995 they decided to take a more pure attitude to producing beef. Today the cows are grass fed, they are given no antibiotics and no hormones are used to speed up growth. I tasted his ground beef at the market, really, really good. Lean and clean. He gave us a small pack to take home and we had burgers on the grill.

I talked to lot’s of chefs from around town and was happy to learn lot’s of them were familiar with my art. More then one of them introduce themselves as “fans”, that was real cool. One chef show me a tattoo he had of a pig and told me one of my paintings had inspired it. Hell to the yea!

Other vendors there were, Sweet Grass Dairy with their award winning cheese. Antico mercante, they import some of the best cured meats and cheeses from Italy. Whippoorwill farm selling organic produce and some top named chefs did cooking demos. Pure Vida, Woodfire Grill, Rathbuns, Dynamic Dish were some restaurants doing demos.

I hope they do more events like this, it was great success.