BlogHer Food in Seattle

BlogHer Food 2012 was in the wonderful, cloudy city of Seattle this year, and I was so thrilled to finally visit the Pacific Northwest. This was my second time attending BlogHer Food, and my first time speaking.

Talk about being nervous. The heart-pounding-in-your-throat kind of nervous that makes you sick to your stomach.

The panel that I had the honor of speaking on was the Food Bloggers as Storytellers session with Rebekah Denn (as moderator) as Tori Avey, Beth Lee, and Molly Wizenberg. If you don’t know who these ladies are, click over to their blogs and you’ll know why I was a nervous wreck.

Our session was in this beautiful (enormous) room at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel. Here is the room, before people packed in:

And my view of the room, once people started coming in:

The session itself seemed like a whirlwind to me, as all public speaking engagements tend to be.

One moment that I do remember is while I was giving my introduction, I happened to look up at the audience and noticed Todd & Diane in the audience. Immediately my stomach turned into mush and I have no idea how I managed my way through the rest of my presentation.

How often does that happen? When you look up at your first speaking engagement and see a couple of your heroes in the audience? Needless to say, the rest of the session was a blur. Thank goodness for Rebekah, who did an incredible job moderating our panel.

And luckily for all of us, BlogHer had a liveblogger in each session. Here is the link to BlogHer’s live blog post from the Food Bloggers as Storytellers session.

(L to R: Me, Molly Wizenberg, Beth Lee, Tori Avey, Rebekah Denn)

After our panel, my stomach finally settled and I realized that I was starving!

So, I met up with Paul at our hotel and we headed down to Pike Place Market, a quick half mile walk from the conference hotel.

The market was exactly what I imagined it to be: Eclectic, noisy and crowded. Filled with energy and mouthwatering food. (For those of you who are observant and notice the 4:30pm time on the clock… this photo wasn’t from this specific market lunch excursion.)

We quickly picked out our lunch at Beecher’s Handmade Cheese, how could one resist the artisan cheese that you can watch being made in a huge vat right in the store? If the views and the smells don’t indicate how yummy the food is, then the huge line of hungry customers wrapped around the building would.

We then meandered down to the end of the market and found a spot in the park in front of the water to relax and enjoy our lunch.

Ooey, gooey grilled cheese sandwiches just seem to taste that much better while watching boats sail by with great company: Paul (the hubby), Samantha and Beth – among other food bloggers who later joined us (forgive me for not catching all of your blogs and names!).

Lesson learned: If you’re in Seattle, you must brave the long line at Beecher’s and pick up a tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwich. I also hear their mac n’ cheese is quite the amazing thing.

Thanks for a wonderful time Seattle and thank you BlogHer for an epic conference.

More write-ups from BlogHer Food ’12:
Beth at OMG! Yummy
Branny at Branny Boils Over
Farihah at Spice’s Bites
Kelly at Just a Taste
Monica at Run Eat Repeat
The Rowdy Chowgirl

If you were at the conference and wrote a post about it, please please do leave a comment below with the link so that I can add a list of blog posts from BlogHer Food to this post. I neglected to photograph the amazing food that the sponsors provided for us during the conference, and I’m sure many of you took lots of pictures! And I would love to read about your experiences from the conference and Seattle.