Featured Forkfuls

The Big Show

Our feet are sore,  our calves are sore, our press kit-carrying arms are sore, but we had a fantastic Sunday at the 2010 Home and Housewares Show!  We got up early,  left the baby with his grandparents, and headed down to the McCormick center in Chicago early on Sunday to see all there was to see.  And did we ever see alot!  We met a ton of cool people, some of them big company reps and some product inventors and entrepreneurs, and have several dozen items we want to tell you all about, so we’re planning on posting about one product a day until we cover all the good stuff.

Besides the hundreds of vendors showcasing their goods, the other cool thing about the Show is the presence of all the celebrity chefs.  We practically ran into Mario Batali while walking down one aisle (ps – he’s kinda short!), where he was saying his hellos to Art Smith (Oprah’s former personal chef and on Top Chef Masters) and Ingrid Hoffman (Food Network’s Simply Delicioso), while Cat Cora (Iron Chef) did her cooking demo 20 feet away.

We also happened upon Curtis Stone (TLC’s Take Home Chef) making a business deal, and Guy Fieri (Food Network) chatting and showing off his new line of knives at a booth.  And just about every other celebrity chef you’ve heard of was doing a cooking demo, including all of the Iron Chefs except Bobby Flay.  But…. we only had so many hours in the day, so we decided we needed to focus and spend our time checking out products instead of eyeballing the chefs.  Maybe next year we’ll be able to attend for more than one day and make more time for that.

A tasting for you of what we’ll be profiling – a handheld expresso maker, a flexible grilling skewer cord, a cookbook with over 300 recipes based on one short grocery list, a wine traveling bag that will absorb an entire bottle’s worth of wine if the bottle breaks in transit, and much much more.  Plus – we’re working on getting extras of some of these products for giveaways to our readers!

© 2009 The Foodie Forkful.