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The scene on the great lawn.

You might or might not noticed that, oh, the past half-dozen posts on here were contributed by the eminently talented Bridget Houlihan and Tammy Green of the Chicago Bites podcast, who put on their MenuPages hats to cover this past weekend's Chicago Gourmet event.

The ladies return to their home medium with a wrap-up podcast, delivering their ex post facto survey of the food and wine festival that, as it turned out, was woefully short on food. Tammy put it best right around 5:25 when, comparing Chicago Gourmet to the Taste of Chicago, she said "I wanted the Rick Bayless version of a turkey leg!"

You can check out the full podcast here, with additional explication of the faint-praise overall judgment of Chicago Gourmet as an event that rates a mere 5/10 — as Bridget says, a good freshman effort.

Tammy's exceptional photographs of the weekend event — including those that appeared here on MP over the course of the past few days — are on her Flickr, with a final gallery of Chicago Gourmet highlights after the jump right here!

Rick Bayless grins while prepping his demo.

The radiant Alpana Singh, wine director for Lettuce Entertain You restaurants.

A fancy bread display at Fox & Obel.

Tuna kampache from Roy's.

A sample of crab from Aria.