Penny Candy With The
Surreal Gourmet by Maryedith Burrell (for BizTravel.com)

I just wanted to meet the guy. I'd heard a lot about him from friends. I have his first cookbook. I even have some of his CDs. I knew he spent lots of time traveling. I figured Bob Blumer a.k.a. The Surreal Gourmet would make a great story. What I didn't expect was his offer to feed me.

Yes. The Surreal Gourmet cooked dinner for me. Just me. Well, him too, and he packed up the leftovers to eat on the plane the next day because he refuses to eat airline food. "They make a fluffy omelet 14 hours into the flight. I ask you, how is that possible?"

I suggested aerosol as Bob chopped, grated, sauteed, and tossed for my benefit, letting slip comments like, " I know a lot of girls take cookbooks to bed," and my personal favorite, " I have a problem with people who don't eat garlic." Bob advises guys who don't know what to do with the woman of their dreams to cook with her. " All that slicing, dicing, laughing, and spilling everything is the perfect first date."

Forget the fact that I find men who cook incredibly sexy. Forget the fact that I brought the Tallus Cabernet, so I have no one to blame but myself for arriving home and passing out on the carpet.  (Okay, so Bob did make me a killer dessert martini, but that's because we were discussing the glasses he built for the Salvador Dali Museum. How could I refuse such a pretty raspberry cocktail served in a hot rod?) You see my problem. There I was, all alone in the aerie of The Surreal Gourmet, literally perched on the precipice of the cutting edge, eye candy everywhere - the avocado mandolin, the flying chef's hat, the surreal martini glasses on display in the living room - forced to breathe the savory aroma of the "Spontaneous Pasta" he was making, and somehow I was supposed to conduct an intelligent interview. It wasn't going to be easy, but I was determined. If Magritte could make it rain men in bowlers, I could capture a bit of Bob Blumer in print.

Thank god we spent a previous half-hour wherein many details were covered: his years managing singer-songwriters (including Jane Siberry,) his TV shows for VH-1, the Food Channel, his third book "The Surreal Gourmet: Adventures in Entertaining (Chronicle Books,) his online features for Salon, his knack for scoring incredibly low air fares. Bob spends at least three months a year on the road, so cheap flights are a must. Unless, of course, Austrian TV is flying him to Vienna to prepare one of his famous surreal dinners for a documentary.

His mantra is "The first taste is with the eye" so you can imagine the results when Bob tosses a party. He once flew in for a soiree, and talked the airline out of some of their set-ups. When his guests arrived that evening, he asked straight-faced who wanted the left-over chicken and three Salisbury steaks from the plane. He then served his own Santa Fe Chicken, salad, and dessert on airline trays, each dish in the appropriate compartment. To quote Bob, it was " the perfect combination of travel and food."

The night of our meal together he was flying to New York the next morning to do a TV spot with several Playboy Bunnies, so he tried out a few "Bunny Food" ideas on me. I wonder if he ended up using "The Pasta Bed?" The concept of ravioli pillows made me giggle. Dessert was a tough one. He finally decided on a union of two aphrodisiacs: chocolate and oysters. Picture dollops of chocolate mousse and white chocolate pearls served in oyster shells on a bed of ice with candied lemon and parsley garni. Kind of makes you envy Miss November doesn't it? Speaking of beauty queens, Bob created "The RuPaul Supermodel Diet" for the RuPaul Show (i.e. food that is nutritious but not filling.) The single green pea on the white dinner plate went over big. "But, what if it's a dinner party for you and all your supermodel friends?" RuPaul queried. Not missing a beat, Bob whipped the dome off a plate and voila! --- an open pea pod with an entire row of little peas. Humor, like running shoes, makes the man.

International chef, artist, TV host, music manager, author, entrepreneur, Bob does it all. With sterling travel karma ( "Couches Are Us" he calls it) and a can-do business approach (he didn't even own a cookbook when he wrote The Surreal Gourmet: Real Food For Pretend Chefs, and sold it to the first publisher he met,) this dual citizen from Toronto goes non-stop. A self-confessed member of the Un-Moneyed Elite, he likes having many jobs. Illustrate an entire issue of Los Angeles Magazine, or produce the Musical Meals CD series for Sony, it all pays the mortgage. For someone whose self-portrait is a broccoli head in the clouds, Bob Blumer is remarkably pragmatic. Even when he poaches a salmon in the dishwasher, it isn't merely a stunt. According to Bob, "You cook salmon, wash the dishes, and have your plates warmed all at the same time."

The prime directive of The Surreal Gourmet is "To make ordinary people heroes to their friends when they cook." And, as I dove into my pasta served with fresh parmesan, a vertical sprig of lemon thyme, and ground black pepper on the rim, Bob Blumer was definitely my hero. The arugula salad was perfect, the baguette and rosemary olive oil just right, and yes, my dessert martini put me over the top. Driving down the canyon completely out of my mind (kids, don't even think of trying this at home!) I munched on the pocketful of penny candy my host had given me for the road, and a line from John Guare's play Six Degrees of Separation popped into my head: "Every person we meet is a key to a whole, new world."

People as travel. There's a concept. Maybe that's what Rene Magritte was after in his painting, "The Dress of Adventure." Maybe that's why I didn't need a raspberry martini to warm to Bob Blumer, the international cooking personality who craves a bike ride through New Zealand and doesn't own a suit. In the words of one of his favorite recording artists, Fiona Apple, Bob doesn't "sleep to dream." His dreams are hanging in the living room, simmering on the stove, packed in the snare drum case he uses when he travels. They live in his studio, in the lithos he sells on his web site: http://surrealgourmet.com, and in the installation he created for the opening of the Magritte exhibit at the Armand Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. The Surreal Gourmet may not be for everyone, but, then again, I've always like a riddle with a cherry on top.