This is a blog about a blog. Actually, it’s a post that is teaser. And it’s going to make you hungry.

I am director of a wonderful wine and food festival in Miami called VeritageMiami that, in addition to raising a lot of money each year for United Way of Miami-Dade, features great chefs contributing their time and talent for a greater good. This week on my blog on the VeritageMiami website, I continued a 15-part series tracing the history of the festival from its beginnings in 1996 to its 25th anniversary this year (and yes, it sure looks different thanks to the pandemic).

The post this week on the anniversary timeline recalls some of the chefs I’ve worked with over my 25 years with the festival - it’s a chance to share some behind the scenes story, like Dean Fearing getting everyone to drink tequila before cooking and Jonathan Waxman making a foie gras taco that dripped down everyone’s sleeve.

The signature event of the festival is called the Interactive Dinner in which guests cook alongside a great chef, literally. The chef is on a stage with a single-burner cooktop and the guests, at tables of eight, also have the same setup as the chef - cooktop, pans, utensils and mis en place, the all-essential ingredients. The chef guides them along in them process of cooking three courses, so basically you have people spending a lot of money to make their own dinner, and they have such a good time (we do supply wine) that they then spend more money bidding on wonderful auction items, all in support of United Way.

Beginning in 2005 we shifted from showcasing a group of chefs at each of these dinners to focusing on a single celebrity chef, and that it the core of this week’s blog post: six chefs over five years who each showed us how to cook a great meal and, not incidentally, shared some amazing recipes in the process. I share all of those recipes as well in my blog post, so may I suggest you head over to the VeritageMiami website and think about what you would like to cook from our archives?

You can go directly to the blog post by clicking here

And you might consider cooking with us this year, virtually or in-person, when our guest chef is Adrianne Calvo (who also just did a great video with Pit Bull!) Bon appetit!