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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http://commons.wikimedia.org

​Update: A Norwegian blogger named Tommy recently posted a vlog where he expressed disgust at Americans who've been taking the crisis lightly. We're also pretty sure he calls us fat, and he mentions something about Norwegians eating cats. Check out the video after the jump.

Norway done goofed this year, hopping on the Atkins diet craze about 10 years late and depleting a lot of the available butter in the area. Low-carb, high-fat diets throughout the year paired with a rainy summer that affected livestock feed and milk production has left Nordic grocery stores looking like Paula Deen's worst nightmare. This is a problem, because, well, Norwegians want cookies on Christmas, too.

Butter is so scarce that online auctions are selling it at five times the usual amount, the equivalent of almost $12 for a single stick. A Russian smuggler was also caught last week with 200 pounds of butter in the trunk of his car as he passed into Norway.

Given the current butter crisis (tragedy, catastrophe, disaster, etc.) in Norway, Gut Check has compiled a list of our favorite buttery treats to pack up and ship over to all our Norwegian friends this holiday season.

6. Orange Cream Sugar Cookies
We found this recipe from an online contest seeking recipes that portray a "successful use of butter as a main ingredient." This recipe certainly does just that, with a cookie consisting of a ratio of one cup butter to three cups flour, and a similar icing that calls for one cup butter to three cups powered sugar. That's two cups of butter total, the same as four whole sticks.

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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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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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Recipe Records

Maggie McHugh and Lanea Stagg, co-authors of Recipe Records, in the kitchen.

​Music and food make a wonderful pair, and so do Maggie McHugh and Lanea Stagg, co-authors of Recipe Records, a locally released rock & roll themed cookbook featuring easy and tasty recipes inspired by some of the writers' favorite songs and home-cooked recipes. Gut Check met with McHugh to discuss their book, which was released in August 2010. Look after the jump for the authors' recipe for "Once Bitten Twice Baked Potatoes."

Mabel Suen: What inspired you to write Recipe Records?

Maggie McHugh: Lanea and I are best friends, and we bonded over music. We became friends through going to concerts, and then we started sharing recipes together. We always joked about finding something to do to quit our day jobs that combined our favorite two things. One day we were sitting around listening to "Yellow Submarine" by the Beatles and joked that a yellow submarine sandwich would be a fun idea. I thought of many more song titles that related to food and had the idea of making a song-and-food cookbook. The ideas started coming forward, and we thought we might have to go ahead and make it into a real thing. It took us a couple of years, but we finally got it together.

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Kholood Eid

​In honor of Vincentennial, the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of the actor Vincent Price, Gut Check decided to honor Price by cooking something.

Price, you see, was a noted gourmand. In 1965, he and his second wife Mary collaborated on a cookbook, A Treasury of Great Recipes, which collected recipes wheedled from the chefs at some of the world's most notable restaurants. It's a pretty good time capsule of what foodies were eating in the mid-60s -- and it's also a bit shocking to realize that back then, you could get a three-pound lobster for less than ten bucks. This from a fine restaurant mind you, not some random food-poisoning palace.

Aimee Levitt

Gut Check's new Price...er, prize acquisition.

​Gut Check got our hands on A Treasury of Great Recipes and also Cooking Price-Wise, the companion volume to the cooking show Price hosted on British TV in 1971. (Alas, clips from it are hard to come by, but Price got to demonstrate some of his kitchen skills in the 1972 movie Theatre of Blood. He cracked an egg one-handed, and then beat it in a bowl tucked under his arm. Well, Gut Check was impressed.)

But something about the recipes in those books didn't sit right with us. It's true St. Louis has never been known as a foodie mecca, but would it have killed Price to include one homegrown recipe? Fortunately, over at the Ladue campus of St. Louis Country Day, Price's alma mater, there's a stack of scrapbooks assembled by a former headmaster, Robert H. B. Thompson, and inside one of them is a newspaper clipping from the Globe-Democrat from sometime in the 1940s or 50s that bears the headline "Big Crowd at Finale of Cooking School: 12,000 See Vincent Price, Screen Star, in Frilly Apron and a Chef's Cap." Below it was the subhead "Price's Concoction" and a recipe.

Immediately, we knew this was exactly what we had been looking for.

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​No question about it: Squid and octopus are in. On a whirlwind visit to New York late last year, Gut Check partook of octopus dishes at four different restaurants on four consecutive nights. Last week, right here in blogland, our featured chef of the week Grace Dinsmoor of Modesto shared her recipe for pulpo a la gallega.

Last week we bought a new book called Kraken: The Curious, Exciting, and Slightly Disturbing Science of Squid, by Wendy Williams, and this morning we saw a television commercial that just might have rocked our personal boat right on past the tipping point:

Are we picking up what this bazillion-dollar ad campaign is putting down?

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How early is too early for beer?

One could choose to hold off until after sunrise. Fortunately, crumb toppings are the great equalizer: Is it breakfast? Brunch? Dessert? Who cares! It's beer! Here's to you, patron saint of unnaturally colored alcoholic beverages!

These cupcakes have an exceptionally tender crumb and intense chocolate flavor. They're also extra beery -- double the amount listed in the original published recipe...

Alissa Nelson

You know you want them -- so go bake them!

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