The 53rd Summer Fancy Food Show

It's very difficult not to drown in the sea of cheese, olive oil, packaged pasta and chocolate that is the Fancy Food Show. After a couple of hours of walking around the Javits Center, the products tend to blur together. Nevertheless, I did come away strongly impressed by a few items today:

• La Rustichella Black Truffle Pate was a knockout. The company also makes white truffle pate, Pecorino with ribbons of black truffle, arugula cream with white truffle, truffled olive oil, and even truffle vinegar.


• Black truffles also found their way into Divine Pasta's truffled Pizza Romana. Also of note was Divine's new Cube line of "artisan foods" such as four-cheese macaroni and kabocha soup.


• Chalmers Ganache. This wonderfully versatile, gooey dark chocolate ganache is completely devoid of high fructose corn syrup, and can be used in everything from chocolatinis to cake to fondue. In flavors like luxe dark, ultra mint and "Mucho Mayan."


• Trois Petit Cochons, which bills itself as the first domestic producer of artisanal charcuterie in the U.S., had a great selection of pates, terrines, and sausages.


• Baldor's "Tondo" Balsamic Vinegar, aged for 12 years, is great on strawberries.


• La Paila, from Argentina, makes a to-die-for dulce de leche. At the Fancy Food Show, they were spooning it onto hot waffles. Mmm...


• New York's own Sarabeth Levine, (who baked my wedding cake), is branching out into Parisian-style hot chocolate! Each tin contains 16 oz. of pure Dutch cocoa.


• Cruscana makes great seafood spreads, and Chilean Geomar produces surprisingly tasty tinned sea conch.


• Bel Gioioso, the Wisconsin purveyor of ciliegini and other Italian-style cheeses, now offers wonderfully spreadable stracchino. (I first sampled this rich treat at Quartino and was instantly hooked.)


• I'd never seen these flowery French macarons before: Mag'M bakes them up in lilac, rose, poppy and jasmine flavors!


• Chalet des Fromages, based out of Boulder (303-494-8000), is an importer of fine French cheese. I couldn't get enough of their garlic fondue "Cancoillotte." Also, I loved the Rocamadour... a simply delicious, pungent goat cheese.


• This year, there was an intriguing selection of African products. Home Food Ghana offered grated, fried cassava root, palm oil, and sweet pepper jelly. There were breadfruit chips, and baobab juice from Mon Petit Benin, wild red hibiscus flower juice from Malian Mam's Cocktail Juices, and of course swoon-worthy chocolate from Divine Chocolate, a pioneering fair trade chocolate company owned in part by Ghanaian farmers.


• I washed all of this down with Ito En's latest offering, an extremely refreshing cold mint green tea.

(I guess I won't be eating dinner tonight.)