An amazing weekend. Portland is a cool city — I always have a great time when I visit, and it was the perfect venue for the 300+ foodies that descended upon it. To be surrounded by all the talented bloggers, food writers, cookbook authors, publishers, agents, editors, industry types and PR professionals was an awesome experience. I met many interesting people, and everyone was extremely eager to share their wealth of knowledge. I learned a lot — immersion is a powerful teacher. The food blogging community is a passionate, fun-loving and caring group, and it was an honor to mingle in their midst. Thank you for welcoming me into the club.

Thanks also to Foodista.com and Zephyr Adventures for organizing a fantastic conference. And…thank you to all the sponsors for their generous support of the food blogging family — great swag — who knew a carry-on bag could weigh 60 pounds!

To close the conference, Chef John conducted a cooking demonstration as part of a food photography workshop led by Andrew Scrivani, food photographer for the New York Times. It’s all about eating with your eyes, right? This photograph is my image — not Andrew’s — of Chef’s sautéed shrimp dish. Andrew’s shot would be better, of course…

 

 

OK…so you’re wondering why there is a (mediocre) photograph of sautéed shrimp in The Bacon Hunter’s blog post. Come on, everyone knows that it’s not really shrimp… it’s…bacon-of-the-sea!