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Tuesday
Mar182014

Miele Appliances - It's Really All About The Food

Last fall I attended a press event in Seattle with representatives from Miele, in part, to be up close and personal with Miele appliances via an extended and relaxed cooking session, the focus of the 2 day event.

What I didn't expect was that the entirety of the event would be one soulful experience after another which blew my mind, and I'm very serious, so this post may be a little emotional, expressive, and whatever else comes out into text.

I'm here to tell you that Miele, that precision engineered, sleek, elegant, highly designed, upscale brand, has a whole lot of soul not so far underneath its sleek and buttoned up exterior.

And, that's nice to see.

FYI-do not miss the slideshow of my images below!

As mentioned, the centerpiece of the event in Seattle was to cook with Miele appliances, particularly with their new Combisteam oven, a very versatile appliance that cooks foods to their optimum level of taste. Of course, taste is subjective, but Miele has the foundation built into the Combisteam oven to allow you to follow their lead or to use the oven controls as a take off point toward your own adventurous cooking path. Cooking with moist and dry heat in different combinations, to me, provides nothing less than a creative cooking experience - a little bit of soul purposely built in, I'd say.

There will be another post on the lengthy cooking session that we had at the Miele Seattle Center, but first, a little about the activities before we began cooking.

The first evening was a wonderful dinner at Altura, Seattle's famed open kitchen restaurant. So, right from the start of the event, the cooking process was there for us to witness in all its chaos, tastes, textures, creativity and always, the extremes of the cooks - uber patience mixed with that crazy/breakneck speed/pressure cooker factor which is so entertaining!

The next day started with a tour with a guide who was the essence of cool, hippie, hipster and comedian all rolled into one. The vibe was perfect - the tour was relaxed and focused around Seattle's Public Market, which, if you have not been to it before, it is an indoor farmer's market times a million.

We stopped at quite a few small markets, sampling teas, meats, baked goods and moremoremore. We had mini lessons with purveyors of the shops in how and where their food items are grown, insight on sustainable growing methods and small batch distribution of their food products.

We walked through the entirety of the market. Here's the thing - for these several hours of the tour (it was a long tour) we were happily assaulted with wonderful visual stimulation, often based on plain and simple values where many shops' handwritten signs told a story of what items were in season, just arrived, unique, on sale or another such message. It gave me a feeling that there was no compromise or substitute for the honest, hard working and passionate commitments of the shop owners.

Other visual stimulation was clutter, but an organized clutter (sometimes) and lots of it! An abundance of colors, textures, sounds, tastes and well, this place not only touched all of the senses, but attacked them in the most pleasurable way!

So, we shopped for our food we were to cook later, we quickly got to know one another in this invigorating atmosphere, and I, for one, could not help being "all in" as I took one step after another on this tour. After the tour, there was even time for us to go out on our own before we were to head to the Miele Center.

Note: Please click on the full screen icon - the difference in the slideshow from small to large is incredible!!

Miele put an enormous importance on this part of the event. The proof is in the pudding - we spent more time outside of Miele's showroom throughout the entire event than we did in it, quite a bit more. That surprised me, which speaks to a stunning commitment by Miele to the global experience of the process of food preparation.

Next post will be on the cooking session at the Miele Center. Can you visualize it? After this very soulful day, going on to work with these beautiful ingredients, socializing, and creating delicious foods was multi dimensional - soul, creativity and science colliding in a big way!

 

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