Show Me Eats moving

I have moved the blog over to WordPress, which will be easier to update, customize and read. Punching in ShowMeEats.com will now redirect you to a new destination, ShowMeEats.wordpress.com. See you over there.

Scott

RFT's Best of St. Louis

The Riverfront Times has released another installment of its staggeringly expansive "Best of St. Louis" listing. What surprises you? And who knew Soulard Farmer's Market wasn't the best in town?

Charcuterie

A new cookbook - can you ever have too many? - has got me ordering obscure salts online and curing obscure pig parts in the extra fridge. It's Charcuterie by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn and it's pure, food-worshiping joy. Plainly put, charcuterie is a French term for meat preservation and this tome has it all. I've started with another pork belly (for bacon) and also had the Crockers cut a jowl for me. Pork jowls usually go into sausage, part of the reason why sausage is so damned tasty. But cured and dried on its own, the lowly, disrespected jowl becomes the great Italian cured meat, guanciale (gwahnchee-AH-lay).

Easy to execute and with in-depth reportage of the origins and geographic rationales behind all of the recipes, Charcuterie is part cookbook, part historical guide. It's also been a best selling food book for several years now so I know there have got to be people in Columbia doing this stuff. I only know of one other guy right now, surely there are more. It's just too easy, too affordable and too much fun for there not to be.

So c'mon, anyone else curing meats in town?

Tapas dinner, revisited

There is a certain joy to be had in properly cooking and serving good food and wine. And then there is the joy of properly cooking and serving good food and wine to seven accomplished and beautiful women. They're too different things entirely, I'm just sayin'.

The turnout to our big tapas dinner Thursday night was a few heads shy of the ten I expected, but the ladies laughing and drinking and slurping gazpacho and wine in our dining room didn't seem to mind. In fact, they got seconds on several of the courses, so that worked out in their favor anyway.

I find I get limited feedback on what worked and what didn't when attempting a Big Deal dinner. Everyone's being polite and is half-lit and is generally disinclined to foist suggestions on the person delivering course after course of good food and wine. I get that, but wish people they'd be a little harder on the food. I don't know if it was starting out Catholic, but when everyone's singing praises, I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. Anyway, the food.

Sliced vegetables went out with a mellow garlic dip that looked distressingly like potato salad but was actually extremely tasty. Hummus from World Harvest was a dud, again. Feta-stuffed peppers were as easy to pull off as they were wonderful to eat. Here I also shoehorned in an unscheduled salad of lardons (slim pieces of homemade bacon) and tat choi I picked up in a last-second and life-saving visit to Eric Reuter and Chert Hollow Farm (good Missourian write-up, by the way, Eric) for mizuna and other greens Thursday morning.

Some people loved the goat cheese truffles, others thought they were so-so. Depends how much you like goat cheese and prickly dried herbs. Meh. Gazpacho was good, but tasted like it'd been frozen (it had, a fact I readily admitted) to me. The girls liked it well enough that several asked for seconds.

The bruschetti were good. The favorite seemed to be the ones smeared with a little lard and topped with sauteed garlic and Eric's mustard greens. Go figure.

And then the one nerve-wracking moment: deep-fried pork belly. The 1'x2' pieces were dropped into the Fry Daddy for 2-3 minutes and pulled when they looked appropriately crispy/melty. Served with horseradish beer mustard and some of my (very easy) pickles, the bellies were a hit. Not nearly the best thing ever - I'll work on that next time - but they were, no doubt, very good. Meaty and juicy and salty, they were also less greasy than you would expect. The wife had been skeptical of serving these workout-oriented ladies unreconstructed pork fat, but it turned out very well. Leftovers disappeared quickly.

Lamb koftas were well-recieved but I'd probably left them on the grill a minute too long. Still, served alongside jury-rigged tzatziki sauce (again, another prepared-food letdown with World Harvest...what's the deal? Everything else there is great.), the lamb balls disappeared instantly.

Sidebar: The wine, beginning to take hold, also may have prompted the gals to notice (and make much light of the fact) that half of what I was serving was coming out in ball form. Oh the jokes these lady professors and teachers and doctors and engineers made. School bus/locker room material folks, and very, very funny overheard from the kitchen.

The skirt steak turned out very bland to me but the ladies devoured it. This was due, perhaps, to they no longer possessing fully functional taste buds. Or maybe it could have been the impossibly decadent potatoes au gratin served alongside. Originally based on a recipe in Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," this dish has become a bit of a personal calling card. I made them for my wife during her first pregnancy maybe a hundred times. So easy, so good. But I've never made it with $16 a pound Swiss Gruyere and Weiler Dairy cream (to say nothing of finely chopped chilis scattered throughout to make it more summery). A splurge, and worth it.

The chocolate ganaches were ringers as well. Made with Alan McClure's otherworldly Patric Chocolate and more Weiler cream, they were the cause of much groaning and eye-rolling. If I had closed my eyes I could have fooled myself into thinking I was blindfolded on the set of a bad (or good?) porno flick. I, being a gentleman, did not do this. But to quote the late, great Chris Farley, you can imagine what it would have had been like.

The real standout of the meal wine-wise was the 2006 Byron Pinot Noir. Lush, layered and deeply grapey, this was another splurge worth the investment ($25 at Patricia's).

Mashed potatoes, without all the hassle

Me, I've always thought mashed potatoes a pretty hassle-free side item. But leave it up to the geniuses at Ore-Ida to make it even easier for us to "cook" dinner in 15 minutes so we can get back to watching Hole in the Wall or whatever it is they think everybody's too busy doing to cook a real meal. Apparently they didn't get the memo about Americans cooking more.

Introducing everyone, peeled, diced potatoes in a microwaveable bag.

And then this.

To complement the introduction of Steam n' Mash products, the Ore-Ida brand has launched www.ilovemashedpotatoes.com, a new Web site for moms who love to mash!

Barf.



(Hat tip: RFT's Gut Check blog)

Americans abandoning the diet (and eating food)

After decades of absurd diet regimes (that means you, Atkins), hundreds of billions spent on ineffective weight-loss products and the untold misery of fatless pork, it seems American's are putting aside the diet and - at long last - rediscovering food. One study shows

The percentage of those consumers who are on a diet is lower than at any time since information on dieting was first collected in 1985.

Another found that people are even cooking more:

53 percent of consumers say they are cooking from scratch more than they did just six months ago, in part, no doubt, because of the rising cost of prepared foods.

Assuming people treat this as a lifestyle change rather than just another fad, we would be looking at the biggest change in eating habits in at least a couple of generations. Hooray for that.

11(ish) Course Tapas Dinner

My wife belongs to a wine club. They meet once a month and go the the Vu and out to dinner and drink vodka tonics and make merry and take cabs home and whatnot. Most are professionals and moms and don't get out as much as they used to; so they make it count. And once in a blue moon their activities even involve wine. This month's installment also involves me slaving away in the kitchen but hey, that's usually a pretty good time.

So what's on tap is this, an 11-or-so course small plates menu with paired wines. I've picked most of the courses for ability to make ahead or quickly. I'm thinking there'll be about ten gals. Here's what I have as of now, with paired wines in italics. Some things may be added or subbed out based on what we get Thursday from the CSA.

antipasti
Roederer A/V Estate Brut
Mumm Napa Cuvee
sliced fresh vegetables with three dipping sauces
goat cheese-stuffed piquante peppers
olives and parmigiano-reggiano

Chateau Souverain Sauvignon Blanc
goat cheese truffles with herbes de provence
gazpacho

three bruschetti
Da Vinci Chianti
caprese
lardo
salt and olive oil

the rest
Riesling
deep fried pork belly with pickles and horseradish mustard

Byron Pinot Noir
Firesteed Pinot Noir
lamb koftas with tzatziki sauce

Shotfire Ridge Barossa
grilled marinated skirt steak with mizuna and parmigiano
served with summer potatoes au gratin

Warre's tawny port
chocolate ganache (truffles)

communal passed wines as needed:
Martin Codax Albarino
Alta Vista Torrontes
Gabbiano Chianti
Francis Coppolla Rosso Shiraz

Sources are as follows:
World Harvest: olives, hummus, all cheese, piquante peppers, tzatziki, balsamic
Hy-Vee: watercress, radicchio
Root Cellar/local farmers: all vegetables and fruits
Hoss': prosciutto
Cream: Weiler Dairy
Pork belly: Crocker Farms
Skirt steak: Mizzou Meats
Lamb: Suzie's Grassfed Meats
Chocolate: Patric Chocolate
Lard: homemade, from Newman Farms pig
Wines: Floyd at Patricia's

The food courses were selected on a pretty much whatever-sounded-good-and-quick basis, without any real eye to wine pairing. That part's been the toughest element, putting the right wine with the right dish. At the same time, if you're drinking good wine and eating good food with good people, you can't go wrong no matter what the pairing.

Still, comments and suggestions please! Especially regarding a good cab and a pairing for the pork belly. I probably also need to sack up and throw together some shrimp and grits just to get some seafood on there.

Paw paw update

For pawpaw lovers that missed out on the delicious, suspiciously tropical fruit at the farmer's market and want to give them a shot without foraging in the countryside, Heritage Foods USA has come to the rescue. Pawpaws for sale.

Late Summer Minestrone

I went on a bit of a preservation kick last week. Canned four quarts of applesauce. Made and froze fruit smoothies with the peaches and (yes) a cucumber on the far side of prime. Four quarts of quick, refrigerator pickles followed. Even pickled some beets. But the piece de resistance was the enormous batch of minestrone I made Friday night. I did a double batch and actually had to switch to the lobster pot to fit everything (twelve cups of water and all). The end result was the best vegetable soup I can remember making, though the lard I added probably didn't hurt. So here it is. Simple and remarkably tasty.

Late Summer Minestrone

1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil (and two tablespoons rendered lard, if you want to go from good to oh my)
1 medium onion, chopped
2 carrots, cut into 1/2-inch dice
2 zucchini, cut into 1/2-inch dice
1 cup fresh corn (about two ears)
1 cup fresh green beans, trimmed and cut into 1-inch pieces
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 cup cored, chopped tomato (canned is fine; include juice)
1/2 cup chopped basil leaves, more for garnish
Freshly grated Parmesan cheese for serving, optional.

1. Put 3 tablespoons oil in a large, deep saucepan or casserole over medium-high heat. When hot, add onion, carrots and zucchini. Cook, stirring, until onion softens and vegetables begin to caramelize, 10 minutes or so.

2. Add corn and beans; sprinkle with salt and pepper. Cook, stirring, for a minute or two, then add 6 cups water and tomato; bring to a boil, then adjust heat so mixture bubbles gently. Cook, stirring every now and then, until vegetables are fairly soft and tomatoes broken up, about 15 minutes.

3. Add 1/2 cup basil and adjust heat once again so mixture simmers. Cook until all vegetables are very tender, 5 to 15 minutes longer. Taste and adjust seasoning, drizzle with remaining olive oil, and serve, passing basil and cheese at table.

Yield: 4 to 6 servings.

Recipe courtesy of the New York Times.

I've already frozen a few quarts of this...may have more to do tomorrow.

Big Corn strikes back

Ezra Klein over at The American Prospect takes on big corn's $30 million p.r. pushback. Seems the anti-high fructose corn syrup campaigns are hitting them in the pocketbook. But beyond the $50 billion in subsidies we've turned over to the corn companies over the past ten years, there's the issue of how it contributes to obesity in America, and particularly among the poor.

That's the primary way the syrup contributes to obesity: Not by being more fattening, but by being so heavily subsidized that it makes it far cheaper to sustain yourself on sweetened carbohydrates than on nutritious food.

At some point during my stint as a flack for an anti-hunger group in Washington, D.C. some K Street think tank came out bashing poor people for being, in general, big boned. There can't be a hunger problem in America because all the poor people are fat, so the thinking went. I got tons of media calls following that one but it was probably the easiest spin-job I ever had to pull. I couldn't believe it but most of the reporters had never in their lives considered the shocking cheapness of unhealthy, processed foods versus vegetables, meats, etc. The calls went something like this:

Reporter: You're saying 42 million Americans don't always know where their next meal is coming from.
Me: Right.
Reporter: But they're fat. How can they be hungry?
Me: People will do whatever it takes to feed their families. If that means 39-cent mac and cheese every other night, so be it. It gets the kids fed.
Reporter: So, that's good, right?
Me: In the short term. But their bodies turn the stuff into fat more than if they'd had, say, veggies, a chicken breast and some beans for dinner.
Reporter: Okaaay.
Me: So what's the most expensive thing in the grocery store? Meats, fresh vegetables, stuff that's good for you.
Reporter: Oh.
Me: Yeah, they're not eating spinach and salad and whole grains and meat. They're eating McDonalds and Rice a Roni and Hamburger Helper. It gets you fed but it's nothing but cheap calories and salt.
Reporter: Jeez, I've never really thought of it like that.

I was never really sure why the interaction was quite the epiphany it was, but it was. And corn syrup is part of the problem. Think about it. What if we eliminated corn subsidies and spent that $5 billion a year making sure low-income people had better access to fresh food?

Newman Farm University

Everybody, this is where food-lovers go when they die. Wonder if we could get a discount for not needing the travel from and to Memphis? I need to start saving up for next year...goodness.

Paw paw update

The Tribune's food editor Marcia Vanderlip has a wonderful paw paw write-up in today's food section. Great timing, eh? Apparently they were being sold at the farmer's market last Saturday. We missed out, big time.

Update to the update:

Heritage Foods USA works with a paw paw producer in Maryland.

Our Heritage pawpaws come from the rolling hills of Carroll county Maryland at the Deep Run Pawpaw Orchard in Westminister where Jim Davis has been raising these fruits for almost 10 years! There are seven named varieties of pawpaw he produces including the Shenandoah, Susquehanna, Pennsylvania Golden and the Allegheny, which is great in ice-cream. Each fruit will be marked so that you know what you are eating.

Apollo gives way

The rows of Apollonian tidiness of our garden have given way to a shocking tangle of tapped out zucchini and cucumber plants, gnarly tomatoes and a smattering of various tired-looking herbs. Still, between the garden and our CSA we've got way more produce than we can hope to use. Eric Reuter of Chert Hollow Farm comes to the rescue today with a great way to use up the most-populous offenders, green peppers, tomatoes and cukes. And it looks great too.

Now, where to get a good Greek salad for lunch?

In dinners shared is the preservation of the world

If I've come across another blog post that proved so mouthwatering and restorative of my faith in humanity I can't remember it. FXcuisine.com goes to Turkey and enjoys a splendid meal following nightfall on the first night of Ramadan. The photographs are haunting, delirious.

Like Adam Gopnik's line about how everyone the world over starts dinner by chopping an onion, this captures the unifying power of food. Read it and try not to get hungry. Try not to feel a little better about the world.

Native Eats: The Paw paw

A friend at work who hails from Indiana and Ohio (where these things are a bigger deal) spotted a paw paw tree on the way out to Cooper's Landing over the weekend. He stopped the car and knocked one of the little fruits out a high branch, catching it before it hit the ground. He brought it into work for us to try today.

To me, it looked a little like a small, ovular pear. Or like a huge peapod. It was soft, clearly ripe and peeled effortlessly. Inside was a creamy white mass with a few black seeds. My friend sliced a bit of the flesh and handed it to me. It was lightly squishy, similar to a ripe banana. It's taste reminded me more of mango but it was clearly distinct. Delicious. For something growing on a tree in Boone County it was remarkably tropical. I couldn't help but think, "Mmm, paw paw coladas."



Why is it that I've never had one of these before? The answer has to do with its poor reaction to transport, the tree's deep taproot (making transplanting difficult) and the fact that its flowers are self-incompatible (which, Wikipedia told me, means two different varieties of the plant are required to achieve pollination). We're also close to the westernmost reach of the plant.

Still, this seems like a pretty poor excuse. The paw paw is a big deal in Ohio and Indiana, and seems at least relatively widespread in Missouri. It has a long history in the state as well. From a camp where the Chariton River meets the Missouri (near Keytesville, about ten miles northwest of Glasgow) Clark of the Lewis and Clark expedition wrote:

we saw very little appearance of deer, Saw one bear at a distance and 3 turkeys only to day. our party entirely out of provisions Subsisting on poppaws. we divide the buiskit which amount to nearly one buisket per man, this in addition to the poppaws is to last is down to the Settlement's which is 150 miles. the party appear perfectly contented and tell us that they can live very well on the pappaws.

Five days later the Corps of Discovery would lumber, after an absence of nearly three years, into St. Louis, their journey completed. And what carried them those remaining days was an underappreciated, tropical-tasting fruit called the paw paw.

And now you know...the rest of the story.