Heart of a Chef Festival 2009, held April 19 in Jungle Island’s Treetop Ballroom, featured heart-healthy foods. Thirty-one organizations had booths at the event and/or helped to sponsor it.
Local executive chefs participated in two cook-off competitions. Sandra Birdsong of Tantra Restaurant and Lounge competed against Kira Volz of Creek 28 in the Indian Creek Hotel, while Jeff McInnis of The Ritz-Carlton, South Beach competed against Sean Bernal of The Oceanaire Seafood Room.
Master of ceremonies for the competitions was Chef Ralph Pagano, a TV chef who appears on Pressure Cook on MOJO and the Kitchensynx Web site.
Guest speakers also addressed a variety of food and health topics, including brown-bag lunches, budget menus, fruit desserts, and Italian salads.
The name’s the same
The Heart of a Chef Festival benefited the Florida Heart Research Institute, formerly the Miami Heart Institute, founded in 1944 on Miami Beach. When the Institute sold its hospital in 1993, it kept its name and mission.
“The building is now owned by Mount Sinai Medical Center, which uses it for orthopedic rehabilitation, but it still has our name on it,” says Sallie Byrd, senior vice president-development at Florida Heart Research Institute. “Our mission is to stop heart disease through research, education, and prevention. We are the first heart-related organization to have a specialty car license plate to help raise funds.”
Participating vendors
Most of the festival participants offered truly healthy foods, though some were overly sweet. A few were little better than the old-fashioned Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound, which was about 18 percent alcohol and promised a lot to its largely female audience. Of all these old nostrums, Lydia Pinkham’s may be the only one still available.
Among the participating vendors were:
• Shenandoah Middle School students and their teacher, Esther Kirby. She oversees Miami-Dade County’s only middle-school teaching restaurant, known as Le Café. For this event the Shenandoah students and their parents demonstrated their ability to decorate fruits and vegetables.
• Barnard Nut Company, which sells the Nuts about Florida brand and gave out samples of its roasted cashews. Many South Florida health-food stores and even some mainstream grocery stores sell packages of its nuts.
• Branfords Originals, a local hot-sauce company. Its products range from tangy to fiery.
• Brimstone Originals, owned by Rick and Eileen O'Hara. They have made hot pepper jellies since December of 2002 and offered samples. Their jellies are hot because they use hot peppers. In my favorite pepper jelly recipe, the heat comes from a mixture of sugar and vinegar. It’s in The Forgotten Art of Making Old-Fashioned Jellies, Jams, Preserves, Conserves, Marmalades, Butters, Honeys and Leathers, published in 1977 by Yankee, Inc., and edited by Clarissa M. Silitch. That recipe makes a lot of jelly.
Cheese, sprouts, and olive oil
• Cabot Creamery, a Vermont company owned by local dairy farmers since 1919. It makes good cheese. These are good cheese products to know if you try to follow the South Beach Diet, keeping in mind that the 75 percent fat cheese is more tasty than the 50 percent fat cheese.
• Chef Pascal Corp. Born in Chartres, a small town just south of Paris, Chef Pascal Georget started cooking for his family when he was a child. At the festival, he prepared and offered samples of dishes using his marinades.
Fuelli Fresh, a Miami-based company owned by Manny and Silvia Wong. Manny spent much of his day grinding fresh wheat-grass samples for guests. Read more about their sprouts.
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i heart Olive Oil, a Miami-based on-line retailer of olive-oil products. Its table presented 30 different extra virgin olive oils, and offered tastes of several from various parts of the world.
• Jennifer’s Homemade, which makes and sells five kinds of biscotti, three kinds of breadsticks, and three kinds of flatbreads.
• Kopali Organics, based in Miami and Costa Rica. This company’s Web site makes extensive use of videos posted to YouTube. Bambi Liss offered tastes of three products – dried pineapple from 300 one-acre organic farms in Uganda, fair-trade organic chocolate-covered bananas, and dried mango that is Rainforest Alliance certified.
Rice and beer
• Two mainstream rice companies, Mahatma Rice and Success Rice. Both are found in grocery stores. In the past, they have included the food additive monosodium glutamate (MSG) in their product mixes. Employees at their festival booths didn’t know whether the mixes they were cooking contained MSG. Both companies have jumped on the healthy bandwagon by offering conventional brown rice and jasmine white rice.
• Native Brewing Company. Begun in 1999 in Fort Lauderdale as Fresh Beer, Inc., it offered beer samples in little cups.
• Town Kitchen & Bar.This South Miami restaurant distributed samples of its chicken Caesar salad.
• We Take the Cake. Founded in 1997 as a mail-order cake business, We Take the Cake is now owned by Lori Karmel. Her cakes were very sweet, and very good. She offered samples of red velvet mini bundt cake, key lime mini bundt cake, coconut cake, carrot cake with walnuts, chocolate cake, and golden butter cake with caramel drizzle. “We provide custom-designed special-event cakes,” Karmel says. “We still have a large mail-order business, and a storefront at 1021 N. Federal Hwy., Fort Lauderdale FL 33304.
• Whole Foods Market. Although still relatively new to South Florida, Whole Foods has become a valued place to shop. It distributed samples of fresh blueberries, sliced heritage tomatoes, and other fresh produce.
Wine was fine
Event organizer Randal Rubin of Management Concepts International even included wine-tasting tables and oenology lectures, on the balcony just outside the ballroom.
“The wine at one table came from Viansa Winery and Marketplace in Sonoma, CA,which sponsored Chef Ralph Pagano, our event’s master of ceremonies,” Rubin says. “The wines poured at the second table came from Metro Wine Florida, LLC, a local wholesale wine and distilled beverages distributor.”
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For more info: Florida Heart Research Institute
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