Girls on Film

Though this meditation has nothing to do with the Duran Duran song, it is now annoyingly stuck in my head.  I had to get that off my chest.

And though it is a bit surreal to do so, I am absolutely delighted to announce that we are soon making our U.S. television debut.  A funny thing happened a few months ago, when I received an e-mail from GoDaddy.com, my web host, asking if I would be interested in appearing in an upcoming television commercial.  I believe “Hell, yes!” was my answer.

This offered two intriguing opportunities: one was to get our message out to a vast audience, and the other was to finally meet Donna Marie Zotter in the flesh.  You see, four years ago Donna signed up for the Ecole des Chefs program I ran for Relais & Chateaux — in fact, she was one of my first clients.  Her passion and enthusiasm was magnetic, and we forged a rapid friendship. Since then, we have shared our culinary passions by phone and e-mail, and in spite of being miles apart, we have felt a wonderful synergy in our creative efforts.  Now I had the chance to meet her at last, and give her a giant hug.

Let me say that the lady, in person, is stunning — in beauty, in spirit, and in generosity.  To see her in a Gastronomic Meditations chef jacket was one of the most striking visions I have seen in a long while.  What we have created here was suddenly concrete, and even more exciting than it was before.

Once we got over the strange feeling of matching voices with gestures, and grinning at each other like Cheshire cats, off we went to various locales in the Hudson Valley to show the camera what we were about.  My dear friend Joseph Cimino of Park Place Restaurant lent us his sunlit dining room for the interview, and his spacious kitchen for some action shots.  Thanks to my friends at the Valley Table magazine, we also discovered the gorgeous environs of Rogowski Farm and the Warwick Valley Winery.

We had such fun, in fact, that we decided to devote some of September’s issue to this glorious area of New York.  It is an agricultural oasis, and the land of my childhood, so the chance to explore it with eyes anew was a treat I hadn’t anticipated.  We will feature pieces about our new friends in the weeks to come, so you can experience the journey along with us.