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Internet food fans log off, chow down
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By JON HAHN
The weekend party ended for me somewhere between the chile verde pozole and the Grand Marnier chocolate truffles, but 50 other folks were still grazing at the groaning board when I snuck away.
And they were only into the first day of a two-day cook-in and eat-a-thon.
Three days before my appointment with the cardiologist who wants my cholesterol and weight both below 200, and there I am for the first time at a cook-in put together by the Internet news group rec.food. It's an epicurean overload of drastic gastric proportion.
I couldn't buy my way into one of these functions, but a friend said I could come as her guest "if you bring something good to eat." I snuck in on the strength of another friend's recipe for scones with ersatz Devonshire cream.
Lest you assume the cook-in is an out-of-proportion indulgence, the group's sale of special-edition aprons and a raffle of food-related and novelty items raised several hundred dollars for Northwest Harvest. I might've bid $20 for the Jesse Ventura doll if the items had been auctioned, but a friend has promised to pick me up a T-shirt that boasts: "I'm From Minnesota -- Mess With Me, Mess With My Governor!"
The classy lady from Minneapolis brought not only a case of her State Fair First Prize Peach Melba and some fabulous honey mustard, but she also shlepped two huge Great Lakes whitefish in her carry-on so the Finnish hostess could make a pot of slurping-good Finnish fish soup.
Charlie, the retired San Diego zoo keeper, must've been popular on his flight, with his carry-on full of salamis.
And the Sicilian green tomato pistachio torte by the guy from The Seattle Times was good enough to entice you into a trial subscription -- but only if they threw in some of his killer habanero pork kabobs and promised to keep publishing in the afternoon.
These friendly folks were cooking and eating simultaneously in the condo-confines of Alan Zelt and his Finnish bride, Kaari Jarvinen, of Kenmore, which is to say, within a 3-iron shot of the Inglewood Country Club course. An abiding interest in good food was the thread that brought these people from Poland, Boston, Calgary, West L.A., Minneapolis, even Renton.
There are an estimated 7,000 subscribers to the news group rec.food, which you can get to through the news-reader function that's usually part of an e-mail program. Rec.food, I discovered, is one of the more conservative computerized bulletin boards in a cyberspace that includes a group that likes to display pictures of naked women covered with vegetables.
By comparison, rec.food folks like to get together all over the world to cook and eat things such as Jamie Utter's Torske Hover Suppe (Norwegian fish soup) and Ardi Butler's strawberry mousse and host Alan Zelt's pulled pork sandwiches.
Alan is understandably enthusiastic about finding other food fans on the Internet because that's how he found Kaari, his new Finnish wife. After "chatting" back and forth on rec.food, for a while, they seemed to hit it off, the marine software salesman said. "She didn't know about bagels and lox, so I had some shipped to her.
"One thing led to another, and then in the middle of the night -- she wasn't thinking of the time differences -- she phoned me and said maybe we should meet."
Zelt was more than a little sleepless until he could fly to Europe and meet the Finnish lady whose e-mail oozed interest in him as well as good food. When you've got e-mail about food, there's no telling where it might lead.
These are not food snobs. True, they are gourmets at stove-top perspective, but they are eager to share their skills, recipes and resources and get your -- pardon the expression -- feedback.
"What! You never had blintz?" said the lady, who had ridden 27 hours on a bus, to the San Diego guy who shlepped the salamis. "I'll send you my grandmother's recipe. Once you get the hang of it, you can make two at a time."
Harry Demidavicius, a financial planner, and his wife, Samantha, came all the way from Calgary for her first and his fourth cook-in. "This could be anywhere and it'd be a great gathering because they're all nice people," he said enthusiastically.
Some are full-time foodies. Mimi Hiller runs a top cooking Web page from West Los Angeles -- www.cyber-kitchen.com -- that lists more than 5,000 links to good sites and some 14,000 recipes. "With about 300 e-mails a day, I need help from two teams of assistants to maintain archives," she said. And she's not afraid to admit that there are foods at this cook-in she's never before tried. "Have you tried Kaari's mustard herring? Or the sautéed fiddlehead ferns? They're great!
Barbara Schaller, the Minnesota State Fair jam and jelly queen whose smile is even sweeter than her prize-winning peach melba, affirms that the Internet is a wonderful place to make good food friends. "I'm staying with a friend here I've never actually met until now, but I taught her how to make jam and jelly over the Internet four years ago."
So the way I figure, those Internet news group folks who spend all their time looking at pictures of women covered with fresh produce are missing the boat. They should e-mail the models with notes such as:
"I've got a great recipe for minestrone if you've got the veggies."
Jon Hahn is an overweight staff columnist who eats more than three times a day and writes three times a week in the P-I. He can be reached at 206-448-8317 or e-mail him at
jonhahn@seattle-pi.com
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