One of the highlights of summer for me is an annual trek to New York City for the Fancy Food Show!! It’s where we find out about new flavour trends, check in on new offerings from many of our suppliers and where we can take the pulse of the specialty food industry and of course, we get a dose of New York City in all its amazing busy, bustling glory!! I love New York.
Fancy Food. I love that show. Three days of sampling, greeting, eating, meeting, and celebrating food. And it’s only for the trades. You have to qualify to attend and you get to talk ingredients, supply chains, trends, flavours; you get to try new foods, experience new tastes, explore the foods of many nations. It’s an amazing experience.
We love connecting with the people who supply some of our most precious ingredients. Like Vanilla. Oh! Vanilla! So precious, elusive and expensive. Vanilla is worthy of its very own post and we’ll have one for you soon. In New York, we connect with the family that owns and operates Nielsen Massey Vanilla. We bring them cookies made with their ingredients. They share the latest news from the vanilla world. They give us new samples to try. They’ve been running this company for 100 years. They work directly with farmers. They bring us what is probably the very best vanilla in the world and they do it responsibly, sustainably and with care and attention.
Or maybe it’s the all-natural sprinkles we use. We meet up with the woman who founded the company that brings us all the brightly coloured sugar we use to top our cookies. And now we have their all-natural jimmies, too! We can ask questions about their supply chain. They share info about certifications that show that they use sustainable sources for their ingredients. They show us what’s new. We get to touch and taste and see. I could go on and on about our suppliers and our ingredients and I will in a later post …. but now let’s move on to ….
.. all the sights and sounds of New York. Pastrami. Cheesecake. Black and White Cookies. Magnolia Bakery. Serendipity. Central Park. Times Square. Broadway. Empire State Building. St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Little Italy. Rockefeller Plaza. Fifth Avenue. Statue of Liberty. Ellis Island. I could go on and on.
The Fancy Food Show is back this year, but we’ve given it a miss because, well Covid. Not quite ready to travel. Covid has destroyed our finances. Covid has stolen market share from our business. Covid has made us more cautious. Covid has taken away some of the joy of life. But here’s the thing – next year – next year we go – and we’ll be there and report back to you on everything New York.
For today, though, we have a New York treat for you. Frozen Hot Chocolate. Serendipity Style. The chef at Serendipity in New York created Frozen Hot Chocolate some years ago and he has graciously shared the recipe so we can offer you New York Frozen Hot Chocolate right here in Kentville. And it’s freakin’ amazing!! We’ll be whirring up authentic New York Frozen Hot Chocolate all summer. So maybe traveling to New York is a little ambitious for 2022; however, here’s a little bit of New York we can all share in.