Eat Here St. Louis

Doin’ the Caprese!

andyrdls — Thu, 03 May 2012 19:40:52 +0000

Let’s do the Caprese the first week of May! Here is the season-defying reality: I have fragrant, fresh Basil skillfully produced in a greenhouse by a talented Mennonite grower in Southern Illinois. I have unbelievably tasty Homegrown Tomatoes that were started in mid-winter under glass with heat from a Rube Goldberg-like oak chip-fired boiler run by a well-seasoned nurseryman at his place just south of the Missouri and a tad west of the Gasconade. And I have pure, rich Fresh Mozzarella Cheese from a seventh generation Bond County, Illinois Jersey creamery. All produced within 100 miles of our home town.

These are the ingredients for the classic Caprese Salad, named for the Isle of Capri in the Gulf of Naples. The genius who created this enduring culinary delight must have been a Capresian chef working with the pristinely fresh food being produced by his or her friends and neighbors in the countryside right near his kitchen. Can you visualize this chef, experimenting with sympathetic flavors, hitting on a very simple combination of fresh ingredients that rings on the palate like a bell even after these many years?

So here is my suggestion: in homage to the great culinary traditions that inform our palates today, let’s serve (and eat!) that prototypical Caprese Salad starting now and track the Homegrown Tomato season right through to its sublime apogee in July and August. Furthermore, let us proceed just as that apocryphal Capresian chef, by first procuring the freshest and best ingredients being produced right outside our kitchen doors AND THEN let those ingredients inspire our menus rather than the other way around.

Crimson Loveberries

andyrdls — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 12:30:04 +0000

We have had ripe, homegrown Strawberries for almost 2 weeks, way early this year and the berries will be even sweeter this week.

I have long held that we should consider abandoning the word “strawberry” to the Driscoll folks and the Green Giant people because they have ruined that word in the course of ruining the fruit itself. If they insist that the hard, dry things they sell by the little air-tight plastic coffin-full 12 months a year are actually “strawberries” then we need a different word altogether so as to avoid confusion with the succulent, aromatic, springtime specific, juice-heavy, locally raised, small farm version of the Fruit Formally Known as Strawberry. The berries that I am offering for sale now, I have suggested, we should switch to calling “Fantasberry” or maybe “Flavafruit”. I am now leaning towards “Crimson Loveberry”.

The point is that Agri-Business has taken the fabulous, fragile Strawberry and re-engineered it for their own purposes: maximum, year-‘round production somewhere on the planet, tough enough to withstand machine handling, harvest 12 or 15 days prior to retail sales, trans-, even inter-continental shipping. They look great but, darn, they are practically flavor free.

For a few weeks (beginning blessedly early this year) we have real, old-fashioned Strawberries with the intoxicating aroma, run-down-your-chin juiciness and breathtakingly deep but delicate flavor that some of us old folks remember from childhood as a springtime-only treat. While these delectable, short-season palate-caressers are ripening within mere miles of your kitchen door it is practically criminal for a responsible chef to ignore them.

Late Winter?

andyrdls — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 15:07:54 +0000

it doesn’t seem like “late winter” does it? The unseasonably warm February weather is raising concerns that an early bud-break in the Peach orchards will be nipped by a late frost. Still fresh in everybody’s memory is the great “Easter Freeze” in 2007 when exactly this kind of weather pattern got the trees all exciting about an early spring only to have three successive nights of temps in the low 20’s over Easter weekend decimate the hopeful blossoms and ruin a large percentage of the eventual Peach harvest. You will rarely hear a farmer say “I’m not a gambling man” because, in fact, the whole enterprise is a gamble.

Winter Blahs vs. Local Foods

andyrdls — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 14:59:22 +0000

Mid-February in the Midwest has to be the seasonal nadir for fans of fresh, local foods. Even expensive green- and hoop house production has slowed to a crawl because those structures can capture the sun’s heat only as long as it’s shining; the short days of winter, many overcast like today, just make it hard to grow anything around here. Historically folks have depended on food that is dried, preserved or stored in a cool cellar or larder to make it through until springtime relief starts the life-giving cycle of photosynthesis over again.

It requires a little more ingenuity and determination to keep local production well represented on your menu at this time of year but it’s a challenge that has been met by many generations of people who have preceded us right here at the confluence of the great rivers. That long tradition has bequeathed us a repertoire of excellent preparations with ingredients like nuts and squash, cornmeal and rice. Today we can expand that basic cuisine exponentially by supplementing our local products with the judicious use of trade goods sourced from all over the world, but it is important and proper to plan menus around a foundation of the kind of local products that I stock at Eat Here St. Louis.

Call me. I’ll bring some right over.

Grits!

andyrdls — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 04:08:55 +0000

It’s all because I wanted grits. I didn’t grow up eating grits and, in fact, my experience with truck-stop grits had led me to believe they just weren’t very good. But during a visit to the Low Country of coastal Carolina I discovered careful, small production, stone-ground grits that are delicious, versatile, intriguing. I looked but I couldn’t find anybody in my usual haunts of Missouri or southern Illinois producing grits like the ones I had on the islands south of Charleston Bay.

So I went a little further afield than my arbitrary 150 mile radius of St. Louis. Tuesday morning I drove to Kentucky (which IS a contiguous state to Missouri!) to shake hands and visit with Mac and Phillip Weisenberger, the 5th and 6th generations to operate a grist mill hard on the banks of South Elkhorn Creek since August Weisenberger, late of Baden, Germany, started milling grains right there in Scott County, Kentucky in 1865.

Bottom line: you can mill wheat on an industrial scale with huge, fast metal burr grinders and it doesn’t do the wheat flour all that much harm. But the heat generated by metal-on-metal milling just burns the soul right out of corn and kills the flavor. The old style, slow style, stone against stone hand milling of maize that was invented in pre-Columbian Mexico loses nothing when scaled up to the stately tempo of an 8 foot cold granite water-driven mill stone – but you ruin the grits if you try to grind much bigger and faster than that.

So I brought back a Prius-load of Stone Ground Yellow Corn Grits as well as Plain Bolted Yellow Cornmeal and I recommend them both highly to you.

Organic All-Missouri Tempeh

andyrdls — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 14:11:35 +0000

Tempeh is made as a process of natural culturing and controlled fermentation binds whole, cooked soybeans into a solid, compact, white cake with dense protein comparable to meat or dairy products but no saturated fat or cholesterol. Common to Javanese cuisine, Tempeh offers more protein, fiber and vitamins than tofu but is just as flexible with a complex, subtle nutty, smoky, mushroom-like flavor of its own and the ability to absorb and reflect the flavors around it. It has a firm, tender-chewy, nougat-like texture that dices large or small, slices thick or thin without crumbling and grates like semi-soft cheese. It is made by hand in small batches in a certified kitchen in Columbia, Missouri entirely from organic, non-GMO soybeans grown in Boone County, MO. You can steam, fry, grill, poach or bake this versatile stuff and menu your creation as organic, vegan or vegetarian and, of course, very local.