I’d like to PERSONALLY invite you to a super fun event I’m hosting the evening of November 10th at Cornish Playhouse at Seattle Center!
This story is adapted from The Nosh with Rachel Belle newsletter. If you’re not a subscriber, you can sign up here.
🍕 Food Trivia! We use an app that allows everyone to play individually, so you don’t need a team (but you should definitely bring your buddies!).
🍜 Silly games! A handful of audience members will be welcomed on stage to compete in a few food-themed games I’ve cooked up. For example, at our first Food Fight, we blindfolded folks, set a timer & had them guess spices by smell alone.
🍩 Prizes! You gotta play to win!
🍣 Special Guests! Get to know legendary DJ Marco Collins (the first person in the world to play bands like Nirvana, Garbage & Weezer on the radio), Seattle Times food writer Jackie Varriano and chef and cookbook author Matt Broussard (@acooknamedmatt). Their professions inspire the trivia questions!
Get your tickets! Last time we did Food Fight, it sold out!
On August 9th, 2016 I aired the very first episode of my podcast, Your Last Meal, featuring Seattle chef Tom Douglas, which means YLM is TEN YEARS OLD!
*Confetti falls from the ceiling!*
It’s no exaggeration that the podcast changed my life. When the show launched, I’d been a broadcast journalist for nearly 15 years, a reporter and personality on news radio, and a freelance writer, paid peanuts to write about food and culture. It was an interesting, and often fun, career, but I’d always dreamed of making my living in food media. Hundreds of celebrity interviews later, I am extremely grateful to say it is now my full-time job!
Here are just a few highlights from the past decade:
I tried to get humor writer David Sedaris on the show for years, and a few months ago it finally happened! At the end of the interview, he asked for my address and I said, “I’m not going to ask what this is about because I want to be surprised!” A couple weeks later, having forgotten all about this exchange, I was surprised to find this perfect postcard from him in my mailbox (you’re going to want to zoom in)!
People often ask me who has the BEST last meal, and my favorites have very little to do with the actual food – I love the stories! I love that singer-songwriter Jack Johnson chose the sauteed vegetables he often cooked in 1997, when he was broke and in love, rambling around Europe in a campervan with his now-wife. And I love that quirky filmmaker John Waters wants a single leaf of arugula for his last meal because he aspires to be a “tidy corpse.”
When I invited exoneree and best-selling Seattle-area author Amanda Knox to record a live episode of YLM in front of an audience, the show sold out. I knew a lot of people bought tickets because Amanda’s story is salacious — she spent nearly four years in an Italian prison and eight years on trial for a murder she didn’t commit. But I had a goal: for people to leave the interview feeling differently about Amanda; to see her as a real person and to listen to her tell her own story, which is different than the twisted truths smeared across the tabloids. Amanda speaks so intelligently and so thoughtfully (not to mention, she has a great sense of humor), I know a lot of people left the venue with new insight.
If you’ve never listened to Your Last Meal, it’s available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube and everywhere else podcasts are heard.
For newsletter-exclusive content, like my Taste of the Town Q&A with a notable Pacific Northwest person (this week it's board game developer Jessica Aceti), subscribe below!
Have a food- or drink-related question? (Need a restaurant rec? Have a mystery that needs solving?) Send me a note: rachel.belle@cascadepbs.org
XO
Rachel Belle
