Foodzie along with the other nine TechStars teams were featured in the Boulder County Business Report today, check it out here.

Food shows are a great way for us to discover new products and the NY Fancy Food Show is just about the king of all food shows. There are so many producers that attend and there is what seems to be endless rows of booths with a total of 180,000 products to taste. It usually takes about a week post-show to start feeling hungry again. It’s a tough job, I know.

Many of the producers that attend this show are much bigger than what we’re looking for because of the $10-15k producers have to fork over to attend. The little artisanal gems we find at these shows are usually the ones that have doubled up on the smallest booth space and lack any fancy, attention-grabbing signage. This year we didn’t attend because we are up to our ears just trying to get the Foodzie marketplace ready to launch. But that didn’t stop me from seeking out the best-of-the-best lists from some of the foodies that attended.

Here are a few products that sounded interesting:

Das Foods - French Salted Caramels

Frankenstein Mills - Pancake Mix

Cypress Grove - Truffle Tremor Goat Cheese

Whitson’s - Chili Seasoning

Check out the full list on AOL that combines both Slashfood and Epicurious editors top picks. The runners-up can be found at slashfood.com.

What a magical evening we had last night at Frog Belly Farm. For weeks we were eagerly anticipating the day we’d get the chance to enjoy a fresh, local meal prepared by Veronica, China, Nate and Aaron of Meadow Lark Farm Dinners.

Meadow Lark Farm Dinners are a celebration of Colorado’s farmers and food artisans. Our menus, inspired by the morning’s harvest, are prepared on-site. Dinners unfold at a long table set between the rows, or in a prairie meadow, or by a field of rustling wheat. Every evening is an occasion to taste the local flavors of our brief yet bountiful growing season.

The table setting was stunning with the mountains serving as a breathtaking backdrop. A few of my favorite courses were the fennel, kohlrabi and beet salad topped with chevre from Frog Belly Farm, a chocolate mint tea served just before dessert and of course my absolute favorite the goats milk panna cotta with a sour cherry compote - yum!

We also enjoyed a nice stroll through the farm getting a tour of where they biodynamically grow their veggies, milk the goats and keep their piggies. If you can get a reservation for one of their farm dinners (they run until November), or a farm dinner in your town, I’d absolutely recommend it. Dining right on the farm has such a serene ambiance that allowed us to slow down for 3-4 hours, something we rarely do in the fast-paced lives we live as entrepreneurs. We owe many thanks to Howard and Elizabeth for inviting us out to the dinner and enjoyed sharing their company over such a wonderful meal.

Check out some of the highlights from the evening (food, scenery & piggies!) in a short video we put together below.

Farm Dinner - Frog Belly Farms from Foodzie on Vimeo.

As I’ve mentioned before, it seems as though almost everyone we meet has some artisan food product that they’ve discovered and love. We thought we’d make it easy for food-lovers to share their favorite artisan products with the food community online, so we started @foodtweets on Twitter (inspired by @winetweets!).

Just send a tweet to @foodtweets with the name of your favorite product, the producer and where you can find it. Thanks to a little help from Rick at www.feed.us, foodtweets takes care of including “via @yourname” so we know who tweeted the recommendation. The Foodzie crew will be sharing our favorites, so I hope you’ll share yours too!

I love the farmers market and lucky for me, in Boulder, I get a double-dose each week - once on Saturday and once on Wednesday.

One of my favorite finds so far at the Boulder market is Ela Family Farms variety-specific applesauce. Most applesauce brands you find are just blah and don’t come close to that robust apple flavor you get from making it fresh on the stovetop. Not to mention, 50% of the apple crop that supplies commercial apple sauce comes from China - yucko. Ela’s applesauce starts with apples from Colorado and is packed when the air is crisp and the apples are at their peak flavor.

It was interesting, as we sampled the whole line-up at their booth (Jonathan, Gala, Fuji and Braeburn) I found my tongue most happy with the Jonathan sauce, which also happens to be one of my favorite apples to eat in-hand. Jonathan’s are slightly sweet and moderately tangy. Each sauce closely mirrored their respective apple in flavor and for good reason - Ela’s doesn’t add any sugar or extra ingredients. They keep it simple - just one kind of apple - served straight up. And it’s delicious.

More and more, I’ve asked myself the questions, “What does it take to think outside the box?” and “How can you create innovation?”

Bill Taylor wrote a recent post on his blog, “Game Changer” a Harvard Business Blog about What George Carlin Taught Innovators—The Virtues of Vuja Dé.

The term he coined was “vuja dé”—and it’s become a battle cry of sorts for innovators who aspire to make big change by identifying opportunities that others don’t see. We all know déjà vu—looking at an unfamiliar situation and feeling like you’ve been there before. But what’s valuable to innovation is vuja dé—looking at a familiar situation with fresh eyes, as if you’ve never seen it before, and with those fresh eyes developing a new line of sight into the future.

One of my most influential professors, Mike Blackwell, taught me to “take a different way home” to allow me to see new things and spark new ideas. Scott Jones - the craziest (and richest) inventor is constantly putting himself in new situations to think differently.

To get his creative juices flowing, Jones often engages in bizarre behavior: eating without utensils, watching TV a foot away from the screen. “Anything I normally do, I’ll do it differently just to see what happens,” he says.

As an entrepreneur, I have the cool job of innovating. For me, it’s about figuring out how we can revolutionize the way people buy and sell artisan food online. So if you catch me walking backwards, slurping soup out of my bare hands or taking the long, round-about way home, just know that entrepreneurship hasn’t driven me to being crazy - but driven me to innovate.

I chatted with a fellow foodie, Laurie Aaronson yesterday and in our discussions, she shared with me one of her favorite food sites I Dream of Cake. I Dream of Cake is a cake shop in San Francisco, where they produce the most unbelievable cakes I have honestly ever seen (I probably spent a half an hour completely in awe, browsing around the site).

Each team member at the shop is accomplished in areas of painting, sculpting, illustration, graphic design or textile design, which allows them to create masterpieces you’ve never seen in the form of cake. There’s not much left to say but check out these pictures and remember that all of these are EDIBLE CAKES and from what I’ve heard taste incredible. Check out the works of art below and visit their website idreamofcakes.com where there are plenty more cakes that will make you double-take.

Photos courtesy of idreamofcake.com

The Foodzie team had a chance to sit down with Andrew Hyde, the community director here at TechStars, and talk a little bit about our experience so far in TechStars and how we are enjoying Boulder.

Check out the podcast, Interview with Foodzie

When we walked into Seth Ellis Chocolatier for our photo shoot with the Rocky Mountain News and realized hairnets were mandatory, we knew we had reason to be worried. And then we were fed chocolate, lots and lots of chocolate and we were so happy, we pretty much let the photographer do anything. The end result is a pretty hilarious picture of the Foodzie team (see left), with iPhones in hand and me reaching for another truffle (okay maybe that part IS accurate :). I should note that the melted chocolate in corner of my mouth and Nik’s (Rob totally copped out and licked his off before the shot) was strategically placed by the photographer. Just want to be clear that when I enjoy fine truffles, all the chocolate makes it into my mouth.

Anyway, the silly photo accompanies a nice article they wrote about TechStars and young entrepreneurs. Two TechStars alums, Brightkite and EventVue (both doing pretty amazing stuff, go check them out!) are included in the article along with us newbies. Check out the article in the business section of the Rocky Mountain News or online.

Photo Credit: LINDA MCCONNELL

Making it onto a scrabble board is just…well…cool. Thanks Boulder Women Engaging Tech (BWET) for thinking of Foodzie and ignoring the scrabble rules to get us on the board!