Sky Full of Bacon


Sky Full of Bacon 16: Night of the Sfingi

Go behind the scenes of one of the midwest’s liveliest and tastiest ethnic food festivals.

Melrose Park, Illinois has been a traditionally Italian-American suburb since the end of World War II, and though it’s starting to change, every year the old neighborhood gets back together for the Labor Day weekend festival Taste of Melrose Park. My friend David Hammond has covered this festival, with some 70 mostly amateur, mostly Italian-American vendors serving up family recipes for three days straight, for several years, so he was a natural guide for this journey behind the scenes. Every dish here has a story about the family who makes it, and we talk to ten of those families about their recipe and why it’s important to them to share it with others. It runs about 19 minutes, but it’s a party, so you won’t notice the time!

Here’s my post about my first visit to the Taste of Melrose Park last year. Here’s David’s very first LTHForum post about it, a post about this year, a Tribune piece, and a WBEZ radio piece about it.

Alternate ways of viewing this video: see it or subscribe to Sky Full of Bacon at iTunes here, or view it at Vimeo here. There is also a family-friendly version (which deletes one off-color bit of humor) here, for institutional or other use. To embed either version, go to that Vimeo page and click on the Embed button to acquire the code to place on your own site or blog.

To see previous Sky Full of Bacon videos, click here.

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Come See Me Do a Talk Show in a Bar!

I’ll be a guest on You Me Them Everybody, taped for audio podcast at The Hungry Brain, 2319 W. Belmont, Monday night at 9 pm., Oct. 4. And I’ll be giving out weird foods to try. Be there!

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