Anyone can buy ground beef and frozen French fries, but as I detailed in yesterday's Chef Choice's profile, Chuck Friedhoff of Persimmon Woods Golf Club
wants to make these American classics transcend the manufactured version
that's taken over in food service. It takes a lot of extra work to
hand-grind burger meat, and there was much trial and error in finding a
French-fry technique that pleased Friedhoff and his clientele, but it
was worth it.
"Putting the extra work in is one thing, but putting the extra work in
and having people appreciate it and realize you're doing something else
is completely different and completely satisfying," says Friedhoff.
"And it was an instant hit. Something I could change instantly and
everyone was like, whoa, something's changed. What can I do to make the
most impact, and be consistent on that impact?"
Chuck Friedhoff, Director of Food and Beverage at Persimmon Woods Golf Club
"I never realized that hot dogs and golfers are such a big thing," says chef Chuck Friedhoff, Director of Food and Beverage at Persimmon Woods Golf Club. "I've been told it's because it's an easy thing to eat. It's somewhat clean. I said to myself early on that we should make bratwurst. We did that this summer, and it was a huge success. So we now have our house-made bratwurst. We grind our own sausage."
Since joining the staff of Persimmon Woods last May, Friedhoff has worked to change the nature of club cuisine as the nature of the clubs themselves continue to evolve.
What I mean is this: Don't put artificial, industrial food products into your body. Rather, eat real food whenever possible. It will taste better, and you will feel better. It builds community and supports small businesses.
Who did Weight Watchers in the 1980s? I did, in 1985, when I was 13 years old. Yes, that's insane. I was a little chubby, but I probably would have run it off while playing softball.
I did lose weight. It lasted until about a week after I stopped the program. Having read 1977's 400-page hardcover tome, Weight Watchers International Recipes, I've gained an understanding of why the weight came back: When you eat nothing but horrible shit for a year, you go a little nuts when real food comes back.
Just as Companion founder Josh Allen's career has focused on bread, so does his family's diet: "We mainly eat a Mediterranean diet with lots of spreads like tapenade."
Even pesto, traditionally relegated to pasta, turns into a fine spread when paired with crostini. To overcome the seasonality of fresh basil, Allen uses spinach instead, which gives the spread a tangy bite instead of basil's sweetness.
It doesn't take much to change the face of baking in a city. For Companion founder Josh Allen, it started with a few watts. "I have a fond memory of stealing my sister's Easy-Bake oven, so I was pretty good at baking brownies by the heat of a light bulb."
Growing up surrounded by his family's food distribution business, Allen Foods (now a part of U.S. Foodservice), he knew he'd be in the food business as an adult. He also knew he didn't want to wear a tie. After attending Stanford University, he cooked three meals a day for a family living in the largest estate on Lake Tahoe. From there, he started baking at Whole Foods in Palo Alto, where he was approached by the owner of Oakville Grocery. After Allen spent months designing a bakery and distribution system for the company's then-expanding chain of stores, the owner decided baking wasn't feasible.
Sweet potatoes: Try not to eat them all before you're done.
As a compulsive cooking overachiever, I have a tendency to see pot lucks as a challenge: How can I make something totally novel and awesome...yet avoid shopping? It's like Iron Chef: College Ingenuity.
So when I was invited to a pot luck by a school friend with whom I'd never hung out off-campus, the stakes were raised. I don't want to be the person who brings a bag of tortilla chips -- I mean, really, people -- but I also didn't want to sacrifice the loaf of bread I'd baked that day.
I want to make a halfway decent impression on new people.
When I was a kid, my dad often drank soda and iced tea from a big avocado-green tiki mug. That thing scared the hell out of me. I'd seen those Hawaii episodes of The Brady Bunch enough times during after-school reruns to know that idols = increased odds of getting whacked on the head with a surfboard or taken hostage in a cave by Vincent Price.
I was afraid of a lot of things back then. Like the Hamm's Beer cartoon bear mascot.
During my interview with Steven Caravelli of Sleek, he emphasized that combining gnocchi with bacon and truffles isn't an original idea. Ever-deprecating of his own creativity, Caravelli sees himself as more of a craftsman than an artist with food, perfecting techniques and flavor combinations until something unique emerges. Such is the case with his classic Potato Gnocchi with Truffled Bacon Jus. "It's bacon and truffles. How can that ever go wrong?" he asks.
When Steven Caravelli taught at L'École Culinaire, students always asked him when they would be chefs. They could do it the way Caravelli himself did.
First, earn a degree in journalism at the University of Missouri - Columbia while working in a gourmet shop. Over the course of the next six years, work days as a bank teller and nights in the kitchen at Chez Leon while writing the occasional article for Sauce Magazine until there's a full-time position available at the restaurant. Make a stop at a local culinary school for one semester.
Despite riding my bike in shorts on Monday -- shorts! in November! -- there is something about the trees losing their leaves and three straight weeks of rain that begs for hoodies and comfort food.
Since I care about your colon, I'm not going to pass along a bunch of bacon recipes today. However, I will pass along that Greenwood Farms bacon is delightful, and I ate a bunch of it this week on Companion Bavarian Pretzels, the last of my garden tomatoes and the first of the fall mixed greens.
You see, the other nice thing about fall is that it means a comeback for all of the early spring vegetables, along with the slow-growing hearty root vegetables. This means that there are lots of dark leafy things in the markets. These are packed with iron, calcium and folic acid -- great for the ladies, in particular, but I do like my men not-anemic, so try it out, dudes.
When considering Throwback recipes, I try to be fair to foreign cuisines. Just because a culture's eating habits are different from our own doesn't automatically make it a target for mean-spirited pithiness. Sometimes, though, it's hard -- especially when it comes to Scandinavian cuisine.
I have three Scandinavian cookbooks from the mid-1960s. In all of them, I've found recipes so dire that I thought surely they were jokes.
Nope. That's just Scandinavian cuisine. It's bland, pale and, for me, a little scary.
Vince Valenza of Blues City Deli shows off his muffuletta sandwich.
The signature item on the menu at Blues City Deli, this giant sandwich is named for the round Italian bread used since New Orleans' Central Grocery invented the sandwich in 1908.
"Back in the mid-80s we didn't know what a muffuletta was," Blues City Deli owner Vince Valenza told me when I interviewed him for today's profile. "In the downtown St. Louis Italian neighborhood -- Sicilians -- we did muffulettas, but we called them muffulettas [Italian pronounciation]. It was a round bread sliced in half just like a muffuletta, but then it was olive oil, strong cheese like Romano, anchovy and some spices like salt, pepper and oregano. We'd put it in the oven and melt it. That's what I knew as a muffuletta."
Vince Valenza has traveled a long journey from his childhood in downtown St. Louis' Sicilian neighborhood to celebrating five years of owning Blues City Deli in Benton Park. Through it all, he's had his family, good food and a lot of soulful music to keep him going.
As the youngest child in his family, he learned about cooking from his mother's Italian kitchen and his father's barbecue pit while getting a musical education from his older sisters.
This week I bought a $6 head of cauliflower. It was purple -- which was novel -- and it was locally grown, which is obviously what this blog is all about. But, ultimately, it was a single head of cauliflower that cost $6.
Can I get political for a moment?
This past spring, Alice Waters -- the proprietor of the venerable Chez Panisse restaurant and the mother of the Slow Food movement in America -- raised a ton of backlash among the food blog world when she made an appearance on 60 Minutes. (Google it if you want to know more and see the video itself.) In short, she suggested that low-income households were choosing Nikes over eating sustainable, organic, local foods. The problem with Waters' comments was not that she wanted people to eat healthy, but that she implied everyone has the option to eat the same food that she does.
Even when I was a kid, I wasn't much of a fan of Jell-O. The only Jell-O-related food I really liked was poke cake. Make a white cake from a mix, poke holes in the top, pour ungelled Jell-O -- I preferred orange since I like that baby aspirin taste -- cover the cake and chill. The results were an extra, unjiggly burst of flavor in the cake, with a thin layer of Jell-O skin on top. All the flavor of Jell-O with none of the creepy, clammy jiggle.
I have lots of poke cake recipes in my collection, but I never think to make them for Throwback because I have fond memories of them.
In the summer of 2005, Monarch executive chef Josh Galliano was working at New York's Restaurant Daniel when his girlfriend, Audra, paid him a visit. She wasn't happy with what she saw.
"She said, 'Okay, A, you look anorexic. You're working too much and not eating anything. B, you're broke. I can't believe you're paying for this apartment. C, your subletter just bailed on you.' August 17th, she said to pack my bags, we were going back. Got back to New Orleans and started working at Restaurant August."
A native of Laplace, Louisiana, which is 30 miles from New Orleans and sandwiched between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, Galliano wasn't fazed by the hurricane warnings for the weekend of August 26th. Audra talked him into leaving with their two dogs and a full laundry basket shortly before Hurricane Katrina struck.
Last week, while browsing the wares at Local Harvest Grocery, I encountered the biggest beets I'd ever seen. They were like cow hearts. I considered staging the Harrison Ford sacrifice scene from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, just for dramatic effect. Then I saw a sweet potato that was the size of a head, which would have served the role of monkey-head soup tureen. How can you pass up produce like that?
According to proprietor Maddie Earnest, these monstrous root vegetables come from Edwards Farm in Illinois. The farm is owned by a sweet couple in their 80s, who have charmed Earnest to no end. And who can blame her? They're fantastic!
I don't have a problem with occasional soda-based cooking. My mom's made beans with Dr Pepper for years, and I don't think I've found a chocolate cake better than Coca-Cola
Cake. So when Kelly gave me a copy of 1965's Cookin' with Dr Pepper, I didn't think I'd find anything Throwback-worthy. Sweet potatoes glazed in Dr Pepper? I'd eat that.
Actually, in looking through the book, that might be the only decent recipe. I was distracted from the awfulness of Bean Dip à la Dr Pepper when presented with recipes using Diet Dr Pepper, which was introduced in 1962 to sluggish sales. People thought Dietetic Dr Pepper was intended for diabetics, not people who want delicious Strawberry Bavarian with about 20 calories.
During my visit with Jeffrey Constance of Hanley Grille and Tap, he prepared a meatloaf unlike any mama's meatloaf. With influences from both his classic French and Italian background, this dish has all the surprising, complex flavors of upscale cuisine without sacrificing the comforts of home cooking.
What do you mean, you haven't heard of Hanley's Grille and Tap? Chef Jeff Constance took over the former J.Buck's locations at St. Clair Square in Fairview Heights, Illinois, and West County Center in Des Peres a few months ago. Though brand new, Hanely's is already providing Euro-inspired comfort food and excellent service like an old pro. For the 42-year-old Belleville, Illinois, native, it's the culmination of many years in the kitchen.
"I started cooking as a kid with my dad," says Constance. "He'd just had a heart attack and had been trying to change his diet. He was home a lot because he couldn't work. I was always close with my dad so that was an opportunity to spend time with him."
A few years ago, local chefs started hopping on the sunchoke bandwagon. Suddenly you had sunchoke purées and soups and risottos popping up like mushrooms after a week of fall rain. This happened to correspond to my first farm-share experience. As it turns out, Biver Farms is quite the purveyor of sunchokes. Every week for about a month, I would find myself with about two pounds of the little guys. I got sunchoke fatigue, to be honest.
But like all things there is a season (turn, turn). The fall is prime root vegetable season in general, so it's no surprise that sunchokes have started working their way into the markets again. They're homely -- they look a lot like stubby little ginger roots -- and their irregular shapes can make them a pain to deal with. But bear with me here, since they're surprisingly versatile.
So sue me. I'm not a baseball fan, so the irony of making a dish called Triple Play Warmer after the Cardinals lost their second game to the Dodgers was lost on me. All I knew was it was a cold and rainy night and I could use some warming.
The master of all advertising cookbooks, A Campbell's Cookbook: Cooking with Soup, spawned this recipe. I have the 1976 edition, the thirteenth printing. That's a hell of a lot of recipes with canned soup, and they can't all be winners like tuna casserole. The Triple Play Warmer, like 98% of the recipes in the book, wasn't created because it tasted good. It was created to sell as many cans of soup as possible.
As I wrote in my profile of Vito Racanelli, the chef's food passion lies in the home cooking of his 71-year-old mother, who still cans her own tomatoes every summer. Don't skimp on the fresh flat-leaf parsley. The herb's the predominant seasoning in the Calabria region of Italy, where Racanelli's mother is from. If tomatoes aren't in season, opt for a high-quality canned version, like San Remo.
Vito Racanelli, owner and chef of Onesto Pizza and Trattoria (website), comes by his food roots honestly. Born in New York City to parents from Bari and Calabria, he moved with his family to St. Louis when he was thirteen years old.
The Racanellis brought a lot of Old World ways with them: "I didn't have peanut butter and jelly and things like that. Breakfast at my house was a couple of raw egg yolks beat with sugar. More of a European fare, and that's what we were raised on. Most kids' lunch bags were Oscar Meyer bologna and cheese. Mine was olives and eggplant Parmigiana. I was the kid who had the brown lunch bag that was stained with olive oil."
Life isn't all sunshine and rainbows in this food blogger's kitchen. I was seriously tempted to just link to the New York Times recipe for Ratatouille Pot Pie and call it a day. (It was really excellent, by the way.) Then I made a meal that resulted in the exclamation, "What the fuck, persimmons?" Then I had to send my laptop for repairs. Believe it or not, I still haven't seen Julie and Julia, so I have no idea how this lives up. But she just had to cook, not think stuff up, so please call my wahmbulance, stat.
I also wanted to make note of October, which in the food blogging world is Vegan Mofo, the vegan month of food. I'm not vegan, but I do enjoy being able to eat cookie batter without fear of infectious disease. Also, I like having recipe suggestions to send over to my vegan dad, at least in part because I enjoy hearing my mom discussing what she found on Fat Free Vegan [link: http://www.fatfreevegan.com/ or Post Punk Kitchen. And I like being all-inclusive, which means that everybody can enjoy the food I cook. Unless they're jerks.
A few months ago, I introduced you to one of my favorite people in the world, my British pal Sally. This week, I got a care package from the U.K.: two cookbooks from Sally's mom's collection, copyright 1962. They're weathered with use, which I love, and full of notes from Sally about which recipes her mom used to make. She even left some clipped magazine recipes hidden among the pages.
Sally's mom, Gill, was classmates with Mick Jagger at the London School of Economics. There's much debate on the nature of their relationship. Gill claims they lunched regularly. Sally and her sister think Gill's not telling the whole story.
Yes, I'm giddy to own cookbooks that nourished one of my favorite people with recipes cooked by someone who shared sandwiches with Sir Mick.
Anthony Devoti of Five and Newstead Tower Public House
My visit with chef Anthony Devoti focused on the abundance of local ingredients and how he's using them at Five and Newstead Tower Public House. When using fresh,
high-quality ingredients, the food doesn't require difficult preparation. This isn't so much a recipe as a flexible guideline for preparing a simple, delicious roasted poultry dish with
vegetables that can be altered based on ingredient availability and the number of servings desired. Devoti refered to this single-serving preparation as "Bachelor Chow."
Devoti used a poulet, a young chicken that weighs a pound or less, from Farrar Out Farms. Chicken can be substituted, but it should be cut in half vertically. For vegetables, use what's in season and available. Devoti used tomato, onion, garlic, turnip, potatoes and summer squash, all from Albert Rissi Farm.
Anthony Devoti of Five and Newstead Tower Public House
"I think that every food writer should be forced to put their credentials on their write-ups every single week. I don't understand how you can write about what goes on in a kitchen if you haven't worked in a kitchen," Chef Anthony Devoti tells me as I tear into the roasted poulet he's set before me at Five, his restaurant on the Hill. "You can't write about food if you don't understand flavors and if you don't know where things come from."
Despite being an avowedly city-livin', farmers' market-shoppin', Fair Trade coffee-sippin' -- did I mention self-loathin'? -- walking cliché, I need to clear out my mind and lungs periodically.
Believe it or not, I actually grew up 45 minutes from the nearest city, where I was surrounded by pick-your-own options. The first warm days of spring were inevitably marked by my family squatting in the middle of a strawberry field, sneaking occasional berries while filling up a cardboard flat in the May sunshine. Summers were all about blueberries, massive quantities that would make your head spin.
Then when the weather got crisp, we would make a trek on narrow winding New England farm roads to one of the old orchards. If I was really lucky -- like, really REALLY lucky -- I would even get a caramel apple.
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