Restaurateurs Colby and Megan Garrelts of Bluestem in Kansas City recently recently released a cookbook outlining their signature seasonally-focused Midwestern dishes. Chef Gerard Craft hosts a special five-course dinner at Niche on Friday, January 20, to properly introduce Bluestem to St. Louis. Gut Check spoke with chef Megan Garrelts to get a glimpse into Bluestem's inner workings.

Courtesy of Estes Public Relations

Chefs Megan and Colby Garrelts of progressive fine dining establishment Bluestem in Kansas City, Missouri

Chefs Megan and Colby Garrelts, a repeated James Beard Foundation award nominee, came a long way before opening their nationally-renowned fine-dining operation Bluestem in Colby's hometown of Kansas City, Missouri. The couple met while employed at TRU in Chicago under chefs Rick Tramonto and Gale Gand and went on to share their mutual passion for food working everywhere from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. Today, the restaurant offers prix-fixe courses for dinner in addition to a more casual lounge side with its own menu.

Partnering with freelance photographer, food writer and friend Bonjwing Lee (a.k.a. the "Ulterior Epicure"), the Garrelts composed Bluestem: The Cookbook to tell an intimate story of Bluestem, featuring more than 100 contemporary American recipes that highlight the region's seasons and its culinary possibilities in both fine-dining and the home kitchen. Read on to learn more about the Garrelts and their endeavors.

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Bonjwing Lee

​Tonight, Niche (1831 Sidney Street; 314-773-7755) presents the Bluestem Cookbook Dinner, featuring dishes from chefs Megan and Colby Garrelts of Bluestem, a progressive fine-dining establishment in Kansas City, Missouri, that features reinvented regional flavors from the other side of the state.

The five-course meal will be comprised of dishes from the cookbook as well as dishes created by chef Gerard Craft includes courses such as crispy sweetbreads with roasted radicchio, pickled apple, buttermilk and bourbon pecan molasses; Kansas City strip and short rib with puffed barley, Mienke grits, Thane's kale, pumpernickel and horseradish; and graham cracker pound cake with chocolate-poached pears and tangerine sherbet.

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You Are My Little Cupcake by Amy Sklansky

​Today is National Cupcake Day! To celebrate, Pudd'nHead Books (8157 Big Bend Boulevard, Webster Groves; 314-918-1069) will host local author Amy E. Sklansky on Saturday to sell her sixth children's book, You Are My Little Cupcake, and, of course, will offer free mini-cupcakes! The rhyme-filled baby board book held the No. 1 spot on the RFT's Bestsellers List for two weeks last spring.

"It's a lovey book that really celebrates the special relationship between parent and child," says Sklansky, who wrote it for her own little cupcakes, Phoebe and Owen. Sklansky will present her list of book picks for the season and will sign copies of her book at 2 p.m. as one of Puddn'Head's celebrity booksellers.

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Mabel Suen

Copies of Stirring It Up with Molly Ivins now available at Left Bank Books.

​Last week, Gut Check spoke with St. Louis native Ellen Sweets about her new book, Stirring it Up with Molly Ivins. The memoir celebrates Ivins' life by taking a deep look into her joyous domestic side. As a true testament to the fact that food brings people together, Sweets documents the details of how her friendship with Ivins formed over both sharing and creating fond memories in the kitchen. Recounting some pleasant plates from her own family's dinner table, Sweets shares a recipe for her mother's unique take on baked pork chops.

"Before we had them for dinner, I hadn't seen them anywhere else before. She said she just kind of made it up," says Sweets, explaining in the book that her daughter, a chef, had great success with the pork chops on her menu while in charge of her first commercial kitchen. Read on for the skinny on how to make this wholesome, comforting dish that gets layered for a tasty and impressive meal, and pick up a copy of Stirring it Up with Molly Ivins this Tuesday, Dec. 13 at Left Bank Books (399 Euclid Avenue; 314-367-6731) during a reading and signing by Sweets at 7 p.m.

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Courtesy of Ellen Sweets and UT Press

Ellen Sweets, author of Stirring it Up with Molly Ivins, with the late, great Ms. Ivins herself.

​Reporting and food go hand-in-hand, as Gut Check (especially our waistline) knows all too well. However, for Ellen Sweets, a St. Louis native and award-winning journalist who has contributed content everywhere from the Post-Dispatch and her father's paper, the St. Louis American, to publications in Colorado and Texas, it's a way to form lifetime friendships.

Sweets met well-known political columnist Molly Ivins at an American Civil Liberties Union meeting while living and working in Texas. The two hit it off immediately through their mutual passions for progressive politics and food. They soon embarked on a number of at-home kitchen adventures in Ivins' Austin home. In Stirring It Up with Molly Ivins, Sweets provides insight into the Francophile-foodie and fun-loving side of Ivins that wasn't as well known to the public eye, demonstrating how Ivin's aptitude for creating in the kitchen with and for others was therapeutic before and especially during her battle with cancer.

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​Elaine Abramson of Hazelwood believes she has stumbled onto the world's latest, greatest miracle diet and the salvation of the restaurant industry. Over the course of a year, Abramson dropped 50 pounds and ten dress sizes, all by eating only at restaurants! She describes it all in her new self-published book, From Fat to Fabulous: A Restaurant Lover's Guide, and adds that if everybody followed her example, we'd all be thin and fewer restaurants would close.

If only we could be so lucky!

The noble experiment began, Abramson tells Gut Check in a phone interview, when she started having problems with her knees, due to her excessive weight. "I couldn't stand long enough to cook," she says. "My husband started taking me out to restaurants. He's a very wonderful man."

It must be noted that Abramson was never much of a cook to begin with -- the introduction to her book lists, in loving detail, several of her worst culinary catastrophes -- so this may have been an act of self-preservation on Dan Abramson's part. Nonetheless...

After a few weeks of exclusive restaurant dining, Abramson noticed that her clothes were becoming loose on her.

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Gut Check spoke with St. Louis native and co-author Jon Harris about his new book, The WiseJack Man's Cookbook. Here is a sample recipe from his book.

Billy Brady Photography

​When Jon Harris and long-time friend Ari Axelbaum both left St. Louis to go to college in New York, they realized that their bookshelf was lacking a major component that would've been most helpful to them: a cookbook made for the beginning home cook by the beginning home cook in simple, decipherable layman's terms. Their new cookbook does just that, offering simple, quick and easy recipes useful for everyday preparation and self-instruction.

"The best way to learn in the kitchen is simply by trying, and the cool thing about cooking is that you get immediate feedback," says Harris. "We'd really like to build a brand around helping men and anyone else who doesn't want to spend a lot of time learning how to create good food."

Read on for a sample recipe from the cookbook. Visit The WiseJack Man's Cookbook website for more sample pages from the text. Harris, an advocate for cooking faster with less preparation, says this dish is a "nice, not so well known 'manly' recipe. I've made this many times for breakfast."

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Bill Brady Photography

Jon Harris and Ari Axelbaum, authors of The WiseJack Man's Cookbook.

​The Christmas shopping season is coming, and St. Louis natives Jon Harris and Ari Axelbaum have just the thing for the potential male foodie in your life -- The WiseJack Man's Cookbook. Although the book is geared toward men, it proves useful to any beginning home cook with its straightforward recipes and no-nonsense directions that include all the in-between knowledge that's often missing from the everyday cookbook.

"I never really felt comfortable using a book from my mom's kitchen. They're typically hard to approach, and we thought there was a need for a book that tailored to people like us who didn't have all the experience and knowledge," says co-author Harris.

The book, written from the perspective of fledgling cooks, addresses plenty of basics to begin with and then delves into more specific sections for every occasion including "power breakfasts," "how to pull off a holiday dinner," "energizing snacks" and more. Other chapters like "best meals to surprise your wife or girlfriend" and "how to survive as a bachelor" come directly from the male perspective.

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Mabel Suen

In warmer seasons, Rue Lafayette offers toy sailboats that children can take across the street to Lafayette Park.

​Yesterday we introduced Amanda Doyle's new book, Finally, A Locally Produced Guidebook to St. Louis By and For St. Louisans, Neighborhood by Neighborhood.

We sat down with Doyle at Rue Lafayette to discuss her favorite restaurants and what makes St. Louis special.

Mabel Suen: How long have you been living in St. Louis?

Amanda Doyle: I've lived in St. Louis since 1997, so right around 14 years. When I moved to St. Louis, we lived in Lafayette Square for a year. I've lived in Tower Grove Heights/Tower Grove South ever since with my husband, a menagerie of cats and dogs, and my three-and-a-half-year-old son.

What do you think makes St. Louis so great?

I like how easy life is here. I have a lot of friends from high school and past lives that live in a lot of great places like Los Angeles, New York and Austin. I go to visit them and I think it's hard as a daily life. I like that St. Louis is kind of a lazy city. You can get anywhere easily and gain access to things easily.

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Mabel Suen

Amanda Doyle with a croissant and cappuccino from Rue Lafayette, a destination in her guidebook.

​Sometimes it's fun to be a tourist in your own town. And now local writer Amanda Doyle makes it easier than ever to enjoy all the sights, sounds and tastes of St. Louis with her brand-new book, Finally, A Locally Produced Guidebook to St. Louis By and For St. Louisans, Neighborhood by Neighborhood. As the title implies, the thoroughly thought-out mental map to everyone's favorite Midwest city (OK, so Gut Check is a bit biased) intuitively outlines the best stops in town in a way that makes sense for long-time residents and newcomers alike.

Having worked for the past eleven years as associate editor of Where Magazine-St. Louis, a monthly publication distributed to guests at area hotels, Doyle has amassed quite a knowledge base.

"I find St. Louis to be very friendly. It's maybe a little sleepy in some ways, but I think if you make a little bit of an effort, you will find it easy to love and it will love you back," says Doyle. "It's not a place where all the great things about it are completely obvious, but there's a lot worth knowing that takes a little bit of digging, and I like that."

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