They say that the two things people fear most are death and public speaking. I wasn't exactly looking forward to this, but when the time came I was reasonably calm. I was glad to have a tangible activity--cooking--as my focus.
I demonstrated a recipe for Gold Beets with Leeks and Chives. My biggest concern was that there wouldn't be enough time to cook and peel the beets during a 40 minute presentation, so I got there early and had them mostly cooked by the time I was supposed to go onstage. I was supposed to make enough to hand out 100- 1 oz. samples, so I cooked 6 pounds of beets. That's a lot of beets to peel, so most of what I was doing during the demo was peeling and chopping beets, and talking about winter produce. In that sense it probably wasn't the best recipe choice, but the show coordinator had suggested that I do something low fat and wheat free, so I went with the beets.
I learned that, in order to do a presentation on seasonal produce in a city that's not my own, I should have researched the options that were available locally. I talked a lot about Seattle farmers' markets, but I didn't know anything about Vancouver farmers' markets, and that would have been a lot more relevant. I also should have known something about their grocery and natural foods' stores, because people were asking me where they could find gold beets, and I didn't know.
I'm not that good at doing cooking demos, but I think I could learn to be a lot better. I could even learn to enjoy myself doing it. I have a few more demos scheduled over the next few months, and it'll be good to get some practice. In the meantime, I've got some DVD's of Julia Child's older shows on the way from Netflix.
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