It’s been a little more than a month since we converged on the city of Charleston, South Carolina, for our very first LC gathering. By “we,” I mean a couple dozen devoted LC recipe testers, Beth Price, our director of recipe testing, and Renee Schettler Rossi, our editor-in-chief, and me. We’d dubbed the weekend Gritsapalooza, figuring it only fitting given the locale. (We’re actually thinking of ‘palooza-izing all of our future meetups. Boston: Chowdapalooza; New Orleans: Beignetapalooza; Kansas City: Barbecueapalooza. You get the idea.)
But I gotta be honest. In all the months we spent planning this par-tay in response to testers’ requests for some face time with Fatty Daddy, I had no inkling how it would go. I mean, it was tantamount to a big blind date. We were inviting strangers—people who knew one another only via the comments they’d shared on our recipes and via social media—to come hang with us for three days and asking them to play nicely. And that’s exactly what they did. Well, for the most part. Thanks to sufficient liquor flowing to lube the wheels of social interaction, things remained quite civil, despite a couple of teensy skirmishes. (You know who you are—and so do I. Fatty Daddy sees all, knows all. Don’t you forget it.) Read more »
