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biscuits and other heavenly pursuits

blogher food 2014 and other miami shenanigans

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penguin hotelSo! I’m assuming that the vast majority of you all know (from our incessant updates) that we recently decided to assert our status as true food-bloggers by attending the annual BlogHer food conference! It seemed pretty great in my mind… a congregation of people dedicated to the art of food-writing! We’d be surrounded by famous food bloggers and walk out changed forever by the insurmountable amount of knowledge we’d gained! How could anything go wrong!?

(…also the conference just so happened to be in Miami this year which wasn’t sounding too bad when we booked this trip aka in the dead of nyc winter)

Well. . . I’ll start with PART I of our saga: flight gets cancelled by rampant tornado!

It all began on Thursday-

I’d successfully survived my World History AP test at school and returned home feeling pretty triumphant. Sure… I might’ve written that the Dutch were the first to land on the Cape of Good Hope instead of the Portuguese but… whatever. I made it out alive! Things were looking up! We were scheduled to board our flight to Miami at like 6 that night and arrive at 9, just in time for the first day of the conference on Friday.

So we left the house around 4 something, after checking to make sure our flight was on time and all that, but were shocked to find out once we reached LaGuardia airport that… our flight had been cancelled due to a TORNADO in Miami.

ummm what. I thought it was a joke or something because like… how did a tornado suddenly materialize in the 30 minutes it took for us to get to the airport?? I honestly don’t know. But basically we both went into panic mode and my mom furiously hunted the web for any flights that would get us to the conference in time…. TO NO AVAIL. It was pretty obvious that we were gonna have to miss the first half of the friday conference (sigh) and probably end up flying through Ft. Lauderdale instead of directly to Miami (gah). So we just went home and I ate a box of mochi.

So the next morning we got up at like 5 am and drove to JFK where our flight ended up being delayed for like an hour (what the frick) but after we landed in Ft. Lauderdale and drove to Miami and picked up our business cards… we FINALLY got to the conference around like 1:30. Woo!! We waltzed into the conference ready to be thoroughly amazed and after 0.5 seconds I’d already been thrilled beyond my wildest dreams. Because…

iced coffee standLOOK AT THIS ICED COFFEE STAND. Basically they gave you this awesome free reusable cup thing and you filled it up with iced coffee and any creamer you want (out of like 5 flavors). It doesn’t sound as cool now that I think about it (??) and I honestly don’t even love coffee… maybe I was just slightly deranged from the plane ride? But at the time I thought it was the COOLEST THING EVER !!

swag bagswe also got these swag bags!! which consisted of multiple large grapefruits and a book about lentils I think

biscuitwallah pinlook at this professional tag we got yoo

blue cowI also met this slightly terrifying blue cow

there were tons of other cool sponsor stands too like…..

jamba juice THIS! this was basically a stand handing out free jamba juice I was so happy I think I took like 10

farmvillehaha this was the strangest thing because first of all it was a FARMVILLE stand (does anyone even play farmville honestly) but they were handing out like chocolate chip cookie jars and to this day I still don’t understand the correlation between the two

gluten free there was also an entire room devoted to some new line of gluten free snacks at CVS (we filled up like 2 bags of samples for our gluten-intolerant uncle)

so after the first thrilling 20 minutes of looking at all the free stuff, reality kind of set in and I began to realize where I actually was: a 16 year old indian girl amidst a conglomeration of middle-aged suburban women who run food blogs (who were most definitely not indian). But hey… not like I have a problem with that. But yeah the sponsor food wasn’t very substantial so we went to explore the mediocre hotel and eat some real food.

But we came back to the conference later because there was a special guest speaker…….

SONY DSCDAVID LEBOVITZ!!! He’s actually 100% the coolest person ever and runs a killer blog. He was on a book tour for his newest book– My Paris Kitchen, but we ended up buying one of his older books (Ready for Dessert) because… dessert. But yeah he was way funnier than I expected (??) and it was super cool to see him in real life!

Sadly we missed all the morning workshops because of Tornado Miami.  And it took a while to get our bearings with all this free food being thrown at us at all times.  So highlights of Day 1 #BlogherFood was David Leobovitz and a useful trick which we learned at the Pie Lady workshop (which we will share with you at a later date) (and of course free stuff !!!)

SONY DSCafterwards they had all these cute desserts set up!!

SONY DSCand also some pastries I think

SONY DSCsome shrimp things??

SONY DSCmy mom posing with some chicken skewers   (nycmom edit: I don’t usually pose like that but since nyckid always does I thought I give it a try.  Think it works better on 16 year olds.)

SONY DSCtiny tabasco bottle !!!

vegana vegan setup (which consisted of basically tomatoes and cucumbers)

photo 1so later that night we decided to go to W Hotel which houses the Dutch Miami which is a really cute restaurant with awesome art including these fountains (!!!)

(sorry for my twerpy pose)

SONY DSCdinner was really good (I forgot to photograph it whoops but I got some pasta dish with homemade ragu which was A+) and then we got these caramel beignets afterwards which were good but not GREAT but still good !

so yeah that was the end of day 1

Stay tuned for Part Deux and the South Beach Food Tour!

Coming soon!!!

 

 

Author: nyckid

funnel cake is my one true love

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