stlbites.com - st. louis food blog of bill burge

Open House at 222 Artisan Bakery

Nov 2, 2007 Illinois, events, restaurants

Not to quickly follow up one post about something with an immediate post about the exact same thing, but I just noticed I forgot to mention that 222 Artisan Bakery is having an open house tomorrow evening from 6-9PM. As I believe Matt explained it to me, they’ll be showing off some of their new items as well as taking holiday orders.

Tags: 222 Artisan Bakery

Maplewood Farmers’ Market Finale

Oct 31, 2007 events, farmers' markets, sustainable agriculture

Don’t forget today is the last day of the Maplewood Farmers’ Market.  It’s been a great year, and while I know all the vendors are looking forward to next year, get out there and send them off with a bang by stocking up your larder.

Tags: Maplewood Farmers Market

King Corn at the Tivoli

Oct 19, 2007 events, farming

I was excited to see St. Louis pulled through as documentary King Corn opens December 7 at the Tivoli.

Here’s the New York Times Review

And here’s what they say it’s about:

America’s fast-food empire is fueled by a secret ingredient: corn. High fructose corn syrup makes the sodas sweet, corn-fed beef makes the burgers fat, and corn oil crisps the fries. As college buddies Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis find out, their junk food generation has grown up eating so much corn that if you test their hair-it’s actually made of the stuff. In a tiny town in the middle of Iowa, Ian and Curt plant and grow an acre of America’s most powerful crop, and attempt to follow its fate as food. What they find is alternately hilarious and horrifying: genetically modified seeds and home-brewed corn syrup, a bumper crop of obesity and diabetes, and a government paying farmers to grow what’s making us sick.

Bell’s Beer Dinner at Mangia Italiano

Oct 17, 2007 beer, events, restaurants

To say I was just a little excited when Ian posted yesterday about the Bell’s Brewery beer dinner at Mangia next Thursday (2007.10.26) would be a bit of an understatement.

I picked up the phone immediately and made a reservation for four. Hours later it was a reservation for six.

And I have high hopes that we’re not going to have someone slinging the typical pretzels and beer mustard fare at us because Mangia is obviously an Italian restaurant. I’m tired of watching people pair beer with things like pot roasts, meat loafs, and other heavy foods almost as much as I’m tired of it being the only choice for spicier ethnic cuisine.

You see, the beer snobs of the world are consistently talking about how because beer is food it can be better paired with food than wine. Yet each time you see a beer dinner it’s the kind of stuff I mentioned above.

What I’ve been hoping for is a beer dinner with lighter food to show me that it can be done. While I don’t think I’ll prefer it to wine, at the end of the day I just like food, so I couldn’t be more curious to see what someone will do –so interested in fact, that I’ve spoken to some people about doing a beer dinner myself.

It will be nice to see what someone else does so that we can either have witnessed a successful attempt at what I will refer to as a Better Beer Dinner, or a massive failure showing us where we don’t want to go wrong with ours or maybe for me, that it just can’t be done.

Best of all, however, is the brewery they’re doing it with. Bell’s is hands down my favorite brewery. That picture above — it’s mine. Out of KZOO, MI, it’s the brewery we took a severe detour for in route to Traverse City, MI earlier in the year just so I could experience the Bell’s Eclectic Cafe and all it’s wonderful draft beer for about two hours.

Add to that the fact that it’s the day after my birthday and I just have to say: thank you Mangia, I didn’t know you cared.

So, if you don’t have plans for next Thursday, come down and watch me happily make a fool of myself and all those with me including local beer dork geek Mike.

And here’s what Ian had to say for the record. He finds all the good stuff.

Just learned that Mangia Italiano (3145 South Grand Boulevard) is holding a six-course dinner paired with beer from Bell’s Brewery on Thursday, October 25, at 7 p.m. The cost is $50 per person. Call 314-664-8585 to make (required) reservations.

Harvest Fest 2007

Oct 17, 2007 beer, events, farmers' markets, farming, restaurants, reviews

Arriving at 2:00PM, solidly in the middle of Harvest Festival running from 11-5, we were shown what happens when restaurants don’t believe that a festival will, in fact, be crowded.

Lots more pics after the jump… 

Read the rest of this entry »

Harvest Festival Tomorrow

Oct 13, 2007 beer, events, farmers' markets, general food, restaurants, sustainable agriculture

• WHAT: Sixth Annual Harvest Festival
• WHEN: Sunday, Oct. 14, 2007, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
• WHERE: Shaw Nature Reserve in Gray Summit, Mo. (just off I-44 at exit #253)
• COST: $5 adults, $4 seniors 65 and older; $3 for Garden members
• SPONSORS: Presented by Sauce Magazine and Schlafly Beer. Sponsors are the Shaw Nature, Reserve, Bank of Washington, Washington Missourian, Mount Pleasant Winery, KDHX 88.1 FM, and KWMU 90.7 FM.
• INFO: (636) 451-3512; www.harvestfeststl.com

And as for the why, sure Mike tried to entice you with beer, but there are other reasons to go to the Harvest Festival tomorrow, and I didn’t even have to come up with my own list:

Tags: Sauce Magazine

Fall Fantasyland @ Centennial Farms

Oct 11, 2007 events, farming, sustainable agriculture

You should go see beautiful Augusta.

Our Fall Fantasy land and Farm Fun Playground is now open. See our
website at http://www.centennialfarms.biz for more details.

Our October hours are 10-5 Thursday through Saturday and 12-5 on
Sunday.

Bob and Ellen Knoernschild

Centennial Farms and Orchard

Slow Food Feast

Oct 4, 2007 events, general food, slow food

Over the weekend at the Slow Food Kitchen Clutter Pot-Luck in Kirkwood Park I had the pleasure to unexpectedly meet Alanna. It was only two weeks prior that we had introduced ourselves online having exchanged a couple emails regarding her trip to the Niman pig farm in Iowa. If you’ve ever read her blog, A Veggie Venture , it’s obvious she is a great cook, so I was excited to try one of her creations. She brought mac ‘n’ cheese and challenged us to guess it’s secret ingredient.

I was puzzled. It had a sweetness not typical to mac ‘n’ cheese that I wasn’t able to place. I tasted nutmeg, and I couldn’t shake the thought of what other mysterious spices I might be tasting. Kimberly on the other hand was sporting her super palette, guessing right that it was butternut squash. High five — butternut squash indeed! It wasn’t grated cheese on top, it was grated butternut, and it was spectacular.

Had I not forgotten my camera I would show you a picture of the event. There was plenty of great food on hand, including a Hinkebein pork butt and hamburger graciously donated by American Grass Fed Beef , and although it was small, it was a great evening spent in the company of people who have all had their souls touched by food.

People need food not just for the nutritional content, but for the pleasures and companionship sharing a meal brings. It’s no fluke that a holiday celebration’s climax is centered around a meal, just as it’s no wonder Slow Food adopted the Latin word convivium, meaning feast, to refer to their chapters.

Eating is something you do to survive. Feasting on the other hand: it’s eating with joy and companionship — eating to touch your soul.

Tags: American Grass Fed Beef, Hinkebein Hills Farm

Taste of St. Louis 2007

Sep 25, 2007 events, general food, restaurants

It’s an interesting question, Jenny Vergara raised recently on Chowhound when she wondered whether “Taste of” events truly give you a taste of what a city has to offer. My personal opinion –no great shock I’m sure– is that they do not. Still, I can’t help being curious about what the more upscale restaurants will bring each year to entice us to visit their actual locations. Sometimes floundering, sometimes hitting the mark, Ellie and I look forward to going each year. At the very least, we know we’ll always get some Harvest bread pudding out of the deal and any day with that is a success.

The first Taste of St. Louis I am aware of was held during the Final Four in 2005. Few restaurants of quality were involved, and of those that were, some of the choices they made seemed especially strange. The one that sticks out most was Arthur Clay’s decision to serve pork steaks. As good as they were –and they were great– it was an odd decision considering what you would have found visiting their restaurant. A second Taste occurred in the late summer that year, so I will consider that the true first, and the 2007 Taste of St. Louis to be the third annual.

This year they moved the bulk of the action over to the Market Street side of the Gateway Mall. I’m not sure if they really wanted to do so, or if construction downtown forced them to, but it threw us when we didn’t see the restaurant row on Chestnut Street. Showing up around four, our initial reaction was that it seemed a lot smaller than the first two years. I’m not sure if this was a result of the time of day, or an actual truth, but we came to this decision non-scientifically by noticing the lack of port-a-potties compared to years past.

Although I never sit to eat, one thing I preferred to this years setups was the placement of park benches on 10th Street. This helped keep congestion down as they had been alongside Chestnut last year which had caused problems with the restaurant row foot traffic.

My approach to these events is to always take an initial pass to see who is there and what they’ve brought. On this pass I can determine my must-have items. Although I can eat a fairly impressive amount of food for my size, pacing is key, and I’d hate to waste room on something less then worthy.

Right or wrong, you can find our decisions after the jump…

Monarch On the first pass I spotted arancini at the Monarch booth. If you’ve never had one, an arancini, in its simplest form, is typically risotto that once cooled is rolled into a ball; stuffed with some kind of meat, cheese, or vegetable mixture; breaded with breadcrumbs; and fried to a golden brown. They get their name because the Italians say they look like “little oranges”. Arancini, as I understand it, is close to the Italian word for “orange”. They are one of my favorite Italian foods, so I was excited as I don’t often see them in St. Louis. Unfortunately, these weren’t very good. The filling in most I’ve had has always been relatively stodgy with rice that, while perhaps not al dente (do to the traditional usage of using leftover risotto) still had a touch of bite to it. The filling in these was very thin and coupled with the rice, which was overcooked, they had a porridge like quality that I found unappealing. note: I have noticed that one traditional version calls for making a ragu for the stuffing. It is entirely possible that this is what they were going for, and it was just a personal bias based upon what I like about arancini. We also had the empanadas at Monarch. Unremarkable, they were a bit doughy, and merely ok. They were filled with braised beef that the menu said was tenderloin. It was a waste if it in fact was, because they would have had a more meaty flavor if they’d used a tougher more flavorful cut of beef or even oxtail. They were also missing the aioli mentioned on the menu. I’ve only ever had lunch at Monarch, but if these are truly items they would serve, I’m even more baffled that people flock there than I was before. Neither of these items was worth the five dollars they charged.

Everest Café Everest Café is a restaurant I’ve never been to. At their booth I sampled Gorkali Chicken with Basmatti Rice. Wisely serving some dark meat, the chicken was moist, and for someone who loves it (like myself) the heavy hand of curry was wonderful. If unfamiliar, Everest is a Nepalese restaurant. Two of the dishes they served –gorkali and vegetable samosa- are both common Indian dishes. While I understand the food of Nepal has roots in the various cultures in their region (like India) I found the decision to serve only Indian influenced dishes perplexing. When an ethnic restaurant goes to an event like this, they are there, at least on some level, acting as culinary ambassadors for the nation whose cuisine they serve. Knowing as little as I do about Nepalese cuisine, I have to believe that the general public knows even less. Why then, would they not throw in something like a more Tibetan influenced dish to showcase another angle of what Nepalese cuisine has to offer? I just don’t get it.

LoRusso’s Cucina LoRusso’s pulled through for me by proving another one of my culinary theories: everything tastes better fried. Frying, it seemed, was the order of the day so far - and what could be better than friend dough? Just about every culture has some sort of fried dough in their arsenal and for the Italians, apparently it is sfinges. I’d never heard of this, and wanting to make sure they weren’t just making something up, I did a little digging when I got home and found that they are also often referred to as zeppole. Basically like a sweet fritter, these had ricotta in them and tasted similar to a funnel cake do to the liberal dusting of powdered sugar. The ricotta gave them an appreciated lightness as they were our third fried food of the day.

Lumiere Place If you hadn’t noticed by now, the Taste of St. Louis palette is decisively beige; the scent of fried foods lingering in the air. With a great deal of money riding on their success, Lumiere Place did their utmost to pull all the stops for this event striding in with a refreshing dash of color. Their tent was two to three times larger than everyone else’s, and I have to admit, the presentation of everything was amazing for an event of this size. They were well organized, and I knew I had to try them all.

Tropical shrimp and scallop ceviche with cilantro-chili oil I love ceviche so I approached this with an extreme bias. Often, ceviche suffers from people being afraid to use too much citrus. Citrus, however is the point of ceviche. It’s the acidity that “cooks” the fish and gives it bite while imparting flavor. I’m not sure what tropical shrimp are, but these appeared to be rock shrimp. I prefer the choice of rock shrimp in ceviche as, at least in the times I’ve had it, they tend to stand up to the “cooking” better than traditional. I don’t know if this is a true benefit to using them, or if it’s just a matter of better cooks choosing them in my past experiences. Regardless, theirs was well done. It had enough citrus tang to set the rock shrimp and scallops off nicely. It was also the first thing I’d had that was properly seasoned with salt and pepper. If I had one complaint, it would be that the chili oil could have had more kick to it. That, or something like a little jalapeño or other pepper, would have given it a little more heat and rounded it out nicely.

Heirloom tomato gazpacho and Goatsbeard Farms raw milk goat cheese crostini Last year someone (I forget who) served scallop soup. I learned two things from that experience: 1) it’s a pain to eating soup in a crowd of people and 2) eating hot soup in the summertime temperatures of St. Louis is not the swiftest idea anyone ever had. This on the other hand, was great. I’m not generally a huge gazpacho fan. More often than not, it tastes like someone through a bunch of vegetables and cilantro into V8. That’s obviously not what it should be, and although I was geared up to hate this, because I hate the whole “shooter” style concept, it was a great idea to puree it and serve it this way. It seemed to be almost completely tomato, and again, where others had failed, it was well seasoned. It was refreshing with just the right amount of acidity to bring out the ripe tomato flavor, and the classic goat cheese combo set it off nicely. Although, Goatsbeard Farms does not make a raw chevre to my knowledge.

White port marinated Tuscan melon shaved Danielle prosciutto and micro arugula Excellent prosciutto; wickedly underipe melon! This is one of those integrity of the ingredient dishes. Without the melon to back it up, you’re left with nothing more than a plate of meat. The melon was so underipe in fact it had the texture of apples, and a little fancy pants micro arugula isn’t going to cover that up.

Lemon honey poached sekel pear with dark chocolate and toasted almonds This looks beautiful doesn’t it? It’s the first thing I saw when we walked by the Lumiere booth on the initial pass. It was second only to the arancini on my list of must haves. It was terrible. The pear, hardly poached, made it impossible to cut with the little fork/spoons they provided. I was forced to pick it up by the stem to take bites, and even then it wasn’t worth eating the whole thing. The lemon flavor was completely absent, and if you’ve ever poached a pear before, you always do so with several spices in the poaching liquid to add a depth of flavor. Either the spices were absent, or the fact that it was so undercooked made it impossible for the pear to take on the fragrance. Prior to the event, Lumiere Place had stated that they would be showcasing three of their dining establishments at the event. However, not one of these dishes gave you any indication as to which they would represent. Still, I have to hand it to them though. Even though I didn’t care for two of the four, the pricing on what they brought was a better representation of what you should expect at these events. It’s not a way for restaurants to make money, it’s a way for them to showcase their offerings and get you to make an actual trip to their location.

Harvest Knowing we could guarantee leaving on a high note, we saved Harvest for last. In my opinion, the best constant on menu dessert in St. Louis, is the Harvest bread pudding. There is nothing I would dream of changing as it has never been anything but perfect. I ate more then I’d ever care to admit in the year I worked at Harvest, and unlike most things in life, it’s never grown old. The strong egg flavor of the brioche custard pudding in tandem with the warm buttery sweetness of the bourbon currant sauce makes it tough to beat. This year it was served with raisins instead of currants, and although the currants are certainly a better mix as they are a touch sweeter, even this could not hold the dessert back. I can only assume they were left scrambling to make enough bourbon sauce for the weekend, and didn’t have time to get in the truckload of currants needed for three days worth of bread pudding. So if this was the first time you’d ever had a taste, definitely make a trip to Harvest to have the real deal - with currants.. Aside from some Schlafly Oktoberfest (which they sadly ran out of after one), that was our day. We rolled home for a nap a little fatter than before. view the complete photo set

Tags: Everest Café, Harvest, LoRusso's Cucina, Lumière Place, Monarch

Slow Food Meeting Tomorrow Followed by SLOWednesday

Sep 11, 2007 events, farmers' markets, farming, general food, restaurants, slow food

Don’t forget the St. Louis convivium of Slow Food ’s monthly meeting is tomorrow. You don’t have to be a member to attend. Though, if you really loved food, you would be!

Each month there’s also a special menu made with foods from whatever producer is speaking at SlowWednesday. Last month there was a spectacular goat cheese ravioli with sage brown butter sauce made with Goatsbeard Farm’s fantastically addictive cheese!

Tomorrow they say they’ll have these, and I’ll definitely be having one of each if the menu holds true.

Soup: roasted butternut squash bisque with candied northern Missouri pecans
Entree: grilled rosemary rack of lamb (from Prairie Grass Farms) with Kennebec and sweet potato au gratin with roasted brown sugar spaghetti squash

I’m thinking it might taste mighty fine with a Schlafly Pumpkin Ale at it’s side.

More about Bellews Creek Farm can be found at localharvest.org

…and a bio lifted from Schlafly where you can also find more info about SLOWednesday and the wonderful Maplewood Farmer’s Marke t… Forty-seven year old Paul Krautmann is the son of a veterinarian father and botanist mother, and grew up on a farm in Chillicothe, MO. Following a career in woodworking after college, Paul and his wife Nancy started Bellews Creek Farm in 1992, growing and marketing organic vegetables. Today, they grow sweet potatoes, Irish potatoes, onions, garlic, tomatoes, sweet peppers, chipotle peppers, and popcorn. In addition, they are the only growers of local organic Midnight black turtle beans and Redhawk kidney beans. They also raise a limited number eggs, and this year will offer a few free range turkeys and pigs.