After a fabulous trip to Alaska in 2006, I worked diligently on what I hoped was a perfectly-crafted query to Cooking Light for the magazine’s Enlightened Traveler feature about some surprisingly fabulous restaurants and indigenous foods from the 49th state. I didn’t get the assignment (yet) but the query began some good communication with the folks in Birmingham, where Cooking Light is located.
At the time, the magazine was celebrating its 20th anniversary and chose to focus on the top 20 healthiest cities in the country as a part of the year-long celebration. They needed someone to cover Tucson, Arizona. That was my first assignment with Cooking Light, which ran in the March 2007 issue.
As often happens, I gathered enough information, photos and other ideas to develop several stories. While visiting a farmer’s market, a requirement for the CL story, I came across a guy selling Kansas City style barbeque. His name was Rodney George, a native of Wyandotte County, and just too much of a fun guy not to necessitate a story.
That’s the story that ran March 23 in The Kansas City Star. http://www.kansascity.com/270/story/539937.html This link only stays live for a week.
But back to Alaska: Cooking Light is soon going to start an on-line survey of its readers’ favorite vacation destinations, which will be the basis of some future assignments. So if you want to see what I had originally pitched, if you want to see my by-line again in Cooking Light, keep an eye out for this survey to start at www.cookinglight.com.
Remember to vote Alaska, not Arizona. Already been there, done that.
