Cupcakes, SugarMamas and Nene Takes The Cake

So, I recently had an article published on FabulousFoods.com.  Here’s an excerpt:

Everyone’s caught cupcake fever. So if you’re looking for new and fun cupcake ideas from the pros for your next delicious cupcake adventure, read on.

Big things come in small packages. Small, individually wrapped packages and topped with delicious frosting, fun shapes, and sometimes even sprinkles.  Yes, right now there is no bigger dessert craze than cupcakes.

Over the past few years they’ve gone from homeroom snack to gourmet staple, with cupcake stores appearing on every street corner, master bakers producing volumes of cupcake recipes and designs, and cupcakes have even found their own show on the Food Network, “Cupcake Wars.”

Read the rest on FabulousFoods.com!

In that article, I talk about two great Kansas City cupcake places: SugarMama’s, which has a storefront in old Overland Park, and Nene Takes The Cake, which features @Ms_Nene delivering amazing cupcakes.

Even cooler, Ms_Nene is working on a project to start a mobile cupcake truck which will drive around the city, delivering sugary goodness to all who desire it.  Click on the link to donate to her Kickstarter project and get free stuff, plus your name on the truck.  (Or else!)

And in general, eat more cupcakes!

(Oh, and if you want to see one of Ms_Nene’s cupcake recipes, check out my Examiner.com article.)

Image duly stolen from FabulousFoods.com.

The Tasteful Olive

Gourmet Olive Oils and Vinegars

So, by now, you may have heard me mention The Tasteful Olive and you may have noticed that I have been cooking with a lot of fancy balsamic vinegars and olive oils.  Well, that is because I met some tremendous foodies here in Overland Park, KS who run The Tasteful Olive, a gourmet olive oil and balsamic vinegar store.

Basically, the tasteful olive features rows upon rows of containers, each holding a different flavored oil (mostly olive, but some truffle) or 12-18 year old balsamic vinegar with flavors ranging from lemon to black currant to fig to chocolate to vanilla.  Oh, and did I mention, samples are completely free!

The thing to do is give yourself an hour to just go in and try each one separately.  Then go back and mix and match (my personal favorite is still the Persian lime olive oil with the lemon balsamic, but you come up with your favorite.)  Then buy them and cook with them.  You’ll find recipes on their site and this one!

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The Health Benefits of Olive Oil

Unsurprisingly, they are big advocates of consuming olive oil at The Tasteful Olive.  Jeanne and her husband both espouse it’s health benefits on a regular basis.  You can read more about it on Jeanne’s blog.

Baking with Olive Oil

They also want everyone to try baking with olive oil instead of butter because its healthier (and if you use a flavored olive oil, it’s tastier, too.)  As such, they hand out helpful charts to anyone considering baking with olive oil that tell you how much olive you need to replace an amount of butter.  I have typed the chart in below.

They recommend you use a lighter olive oil (*cough* Hojiblanca from Australia *cough*) but use what you have.  Do be careful, though.  I have found that olive oil cakes can dry faster than cakes that use butter.

By my calculation that means I need 2 1/4 cups of olive oil to make Ina Garten’s pound cake.  God bless that woman!

What Are You Waiting For?

You know where to get good olive oil and balsamic (at least in KC, but look for The Tasteful Olive online), now get to cooking!

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Picture taken from http://www.thetastefulolive.com.

Oh, and as I’ve noted before, The Tasteful Olive has given me free and discounted bottles of both their gourmet olive oils and gourmet balsamic vinegars so that I could create recipes.

For the first time since my childhood, last Friday night I experienced a sugar high.  A full-on, all-is-right-with-the-world, drunk-like-shots-of-whiskey sugar high.

Thanks Amore Chocolate Pizzas.  The 10 pounds I put on was totally worth it.  And I totally mean that.

Chocolate Fondue Is Awesome

It all started with a fairly innocent email.  Amore was having an exhibit of photographs from a local gallery and then the email urged me to join them for Saturday night fondue.

“You like fondue don’t you, Mrs. WellDone?” I asked Mrs. WellDone.

And that pretty much sealed our fate for what we did last Saturday.  And perhaps for many, many Saturdays (and Fridays) to come.  Why you may ask?  You see that big long long line of things in the picture over there?  That’s two types of cookies, graham crackers, pound cake, angel food cake, black berries, pineapple, strawberries, pretzels, cornflakes, and probably one or two things that have been lost in a sugar induced haze.  Next to all that are four types of chocolate: milk, dark, spicy, and white.  And the price is ridiculous.

And it’s all you can eat.  See that plate over there (the one without fruit?  That’s my fourth plate.)

All I can say is thank God I only put on 10 pounds.  It could have been much, much worse.

Oh, and like I said, all of this can be yours every Friday and Saturday night.  Friday night, apparently, is board game night.  They have lots of games in-house (including Family Guy Monopoly…Giggity! and a very nice wooden chess set.)  Saturday night is live music.  Last Saturday featured a good dulcimer player who managed to do a very serviceable tribute to modern pop.

Or you can do that what we did and cheat.  They have the board games out on Saturdays so you can listen to live music and teach your son how to play chess.  It’s like combining say milk chocolate and white chocolate together, except this is combining two special nights at Amore.  Still with me?

Oh, off to the right is the fruit plate I assembled when I decided I have some vitamins with my sugar.  Make no mistake about it, there’s still plenty of chocolate to go along with the fruit, but at least I got some nutritional value.

Did I mention that we hadn’t had dinner before we went?

More Than Fondue: More About Amore

Amore is more than just killer fondue on Fridays and Saturdays.  They also sell a variety of chocolate dishes including mochas, hot chocolates, chocolate spoons, chocolate covered strawberries, chocolate pretzels, and everything you see in the sampler platter over there which owner Chris Cook graciously gave me.  (That would be chocolate nachos, gingerbread and chocolate stackers, chocolate pie with coconut crust, and German chocolate cake. 

Yes, that’s right, chocolate nachos.  That would be nacho chips with chocolate sauce, peanut butter, candied fruit, and homemade whipped cream. 

No, I didn’t think I’d like them either.

Yes, I ate them all.)

Still, what Amore is really famous for is their chocolate pizzas which bare absolutely no relationship to the dessert pizzas you get at some pizza buffets (that’s what I thought at first.)  Chocolate pizzas are basically layers of chocolate that have been tempered like a candy bar to form a pizza crust and then the pizza is topped with various gourmet toppings like peanut butter, coconut, marshmallows, toffee, etc.  (See the full list on the Amore product page.)

If you want an idea of what they taste like, take a chocolate bar, throw some marshmallows and chocolate sauce on it and eat it.  That’s a good start, but the stuff at Amore probably is better that that.  They use really good chocolate.  Seriously.

In summary, if you are in the KC area, go to Amore for dessert, fondue, or a chocolate-pick-me-up.  If you are out of town…inquire about shipping!

Have your own sugar high.  Then call your trainer.  You’re going to need him/her very, quickly.

Fruit Tarts at Skies on Mother’s Day

On Mother’s Day, I took the special mother in my life and our son to Skies’ Restaurant in Kansas City.  For those not hip to the Kansas City culinary scene, Skies is the tallest restaurant in the area.  It sits proudly atop the Hyatt Regency hotel (one of Kansas City’s snootier fancier hotels) and spins contentedly all day, every day.

Yes, not only is it a very tall restaurant, it’s a revolving restaurant.

Which is pretty cool when you hear about.  If you’ve never eaten in a restaurant that spins (and frankly, I don’t think there are many left), I recommend doing it at least once.  Just try to keep your bearings so you can remember where the bathroom is.

Anyway, I digress.  Upon making my reservations to Skies, I had a certain level of trepidation.  I have had some of the most expensive meals in my life at Skies.  I just didn’t enjoy them very much.  Except for the spinning thing, which really does lose it’s appeal when you decide that you kind of like being about to look out the window and know what you’re going to see.

(The other exception is the Mile High Sky Pie, an eighteen inch high dessert that my wife and I have gone to Skies to order on more than one occasion.  I enjoyed those times very much.)  So, you may be wondering why I picked Skies as our Mother’s Day restaurant.  Honestly, because Caenen Castle and the American were full.

Lucky for me they were full. Let me say in no uncertain terms, the meal I had at Skies was the best Mother’s Day meal I can remember.

Skies was divided into two sections: lunch and breakfast.  The breakfast section had omelets to order, French toast, smoothies, breakfast meats, fruit, and other delicacies.  The lunch section (where I met chefs John and Nathan and forced them to cook a truly heroic quantity of tenderloin for me) was also excellent.  My favorite tenderloin had a nice dijon demi that perfectly accented the meat and went nicely with the pasta made to order.  There was also baked chicken in a nice orzo, roasted pork in cranberry sauce, and desserts.  Lots of desserts.

However, the highlight of the meal were these little fruit tarts they served.  They were just strips of puff pastry with fresh fruit (mango, strawberries, black berries, and blueberries) with a little glaze to hold it all together and to add sweetness.  Had I known Tina would like them so much, I would have made something very similar years ago.  Because I love them, too.

Here is the recipe if you want to make them.

Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday, I was invited to a United Way dinner at Benton’s Prime Steakhouse.  I met some very nice people there who are doing some wonderful things to make the world a better place.  This food blogger salutes all of you.

The dinner was also the first time I have been back to Benton’s in, well, longer than I can remember.  Not that I had a bad meal, but I’ve been trying to explore other culinary destinations in Kansas City.  Monday night reminded me that sometimes it’s good to go back again.

The event featured several stations including: a sirloin station with a morel sauce, a seafood/salad station, a lobster bisque station, a carvery station featuring four different types of meat, and the night’s crowning achievement: a banana’s foster station.  The contents of the sirloin station are fairly obvious (sirloin with morel sauce), the seafood had king crab legs and oysters while the accompanying salad station contained a delicious mozzarella salad (I’d like to call it a caprese, but it was more flavorful), and strawberry salad in parmesan baskets. 

The morel sauce was delicious and the oysters were surprisingly nice for being in the middle of Kansas.  The mozzarella salad was also very good and rumor has it the strawberry salad was nice.

The rubber really started to hit the road with at the carvery station.  There were several meats including a smoked bison, a lamb rib roast, and some of the juiciest, most tender prime rib I’ve had the privilege of eating.

It was so good I hunted down Chef Nicholas Boucher to ask how I could make it at home and despite the fact I forgot to introduce myself as a food blogger and started writing down his every word as he spoke, he was pretty forthcoming about how to reproduce the prime rib at home.

First thing’s first: you’ll need some good prime rib.  Can’t do this without good prime rib.  (That’s my addition.)

Then:

1.  Preheat your oven to 500.  “I prefer a hot oven,” explained Chef Boucher.
2.  Put the prime rib in the oven.  Do not season with anything but a little salt.  (Chef Boucher explains that herbs or pepper will burn.)
3.  Sear the prime rib.  You are not looking for time, but for an appearance.  (You want a nice caramel color says Chef Boucher.)
4.  When the prime rib has reached that color, remove the prime rib and set the oven to 185.
5.  Put the prime rib back into the oven and cook for another 1-2 hours or until the meat has reached an internal temperature of about 135.

Let the meat rest for about 10 minutes and then serve with sides including mushroom medleys, asparagus, au gratin potoates (like Benton’s) or your own favorite sites.

Then, you know what to do!  Enjoy!

Last week, Chef Jasper Mirabile had a great Limoncello Experience where he and Suzanne Frisse of Meadowlark Acres served us course after course after course of delicious breads, pastas, chicken, and desserts featuring limoncello.

He was gracious enough to share his recipes, which I have included unmodified below.  If you like how this sounds, he will have another Experience in June!

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Grazie mille mille Chef!

Okay, more details to follow, but tonight I got to eat at Jasper’s Restaurant of Kansas City and in attendence selling his new cookbook (a work of both food porn and some awesome recipes) was none other the Next Iron Chef competitor and all around awesome guy Chef John Besh.

Pictures and recipes and reviews to come!

Chris

Broccoli and Eggplant

Okay, it’s #meatlessmonday again, which means it’s time to do right by yourself and the earth by going twenty-four short hours without meat.  Sound tough?  Not when you have

Eggplant Rollitini

I just love eggplant and I swear after this, so will you!

Also, you may have noticed, this is another fantasic 2009 Nude & Eco-Cheap Cooking Initiative recipe, wherein I take the delicious vegetables that Shawna Coronado has grown and make them into dinner for family of four for less than $11.50.  Sadly, because winter is here (feels like it never left did it??? ) the growing season is almost over, so there won’t be many more of these in 2009.  But fear not, while the veggies keep coming, so will delicious, healthy dinners for less than $11.50.

With that being said, this particular recipe was inspired by Jasper’s here in Kansas City.  It was one of the dishes Chef fixed during the Best Meal I Ever Ate.   It was wonderful then and I just hope I can do it justice for less than $11.50!

Read the rest of this entry »

Eating with Chef Jasper Mirabile

Those of you who follow me on Twitter may have seen me mentioning a meal I recently had at Jasper’s in Kansas City, MO.  Some of you may have even gotten the chance to see the picture I took of some of the amazing food Chef Jasper made for us.  Others probably saw the repeated comments that at any moment, I was sure I was going to burst.  Despite the worries about my own mortality, that meal was sooooo worth it.

Jasper – The Tradition

To set the stage for this meal, I should let you know that the Mirabile family has been serving up outstanding Italian food to hungry Kansas Citians for over fifty years.  It all began in 1954 when Leonard Mirabile opened Jasper’s with his son Jasper.  According to their website, back then you could get a three course meal for seventy-nine cents.  (I can only imagine how fat I’d be if I could still get Chef Jasper to cook for me for seventy-nine cents…  Yikes.)

Since 1954, Jasper’s has seen a lot of change.  For instance, they moved from their original location on Wornall to Watt’s Mill on 103rd and State Line.  They have also gone from a neighborhood restaurant to one of the most decorated restaurants in the country, earning a Mobil Four Stars for dining excellence, the AAA Four Diamonds and DIRONA award (among others).  The restaurant has also seen a third generation of Mirabile, Jasper’s sons Leonard and Jasper, Jr., enter the restaurant business.

Chef Jasper – The Culinary Icon

However, Jasper’s is more than a restaurant.  If there is a food event in Kansas City, Chef Jasper is probably there.  He teaches numerous classes all over the Kansas City area, on such varied topics as making mozzarella to teaching kids the joy of cooking.  He has cookbooks.  He has a radio show on AM 710.  His smiling face can be found in any Hen House market.  He works with cheese producers to evangelize good, artisan cheeses.  He helps local food producers.  He knows everyone.

In other words, there may be no single name more synonymous with food in Kansas City (which is saying a lot, since Kansas City is starting to establish itself on the culinary map.)

Jasper’s – The Menu

And there I was with Mrs. WellDone at Chef Jasper’s invitation eating the best (and by several pounds of food the largest) meal I have ever eaten.

For reference, here’s the menu:

1. Lobster cappuccino with pancetta and foam
2. Shrimp Scampi alla Livornese Over Polenta
3. An “Appetizer” of Eggplant Othello and Lobster Ravioli
4. Half a loaf of good Italian bread
5. Caprese Salad with Mozzarella Made Tableside, Heirloom Tomatos Chef’s Wife Grew, Basil, and a Homemade Balsamic Reduction
6. A Pasta “Tasting” Consisting Of
   • Pasta Nanni with Prosciutto, peas, romano, mushrooms, and tomato sauce
   • Gagootsa sauce (Italian gourd) sauce over ditali pasta
   • Rigatoni with a Melon cream sauce
7. For our entrees:
   • Five hour slow roasted pork shank
   • Chicken Saltimbucco
8. For dessert:
   • Peach Napolean with Chef’s mama’s pastry cream
   • Death by Chocolate
9. After Dinner Drink:
   • Homemade Amaretto
   • Homemade Limoncello
   • Homemade Anisette
10. House Wine

With a menu like that, I don’t even know where to start describing everything.  It was all amazing.  However, in the interest of space, I will limit this article to the two times in the meal when the food was so good I lost the ability to speak English.  (Later, I’ll talk about more of the food and maybe sniff out a recipe or two.)
 

Pasta Nanni – The First Moment of Silence

The first time I lost the ability to speak was when I took the first bite of the pasta nanni.  It came served on a long plate with three individual sections, one for each of the pastas on the tasting menu.  I didn’t know what it was, and frankly, I was far more excited about the gagootsa sauce.  However, I think the nanni was closest to me, so I started with it.

Mere words defy the flavor of the pasta.  I can tell you there was salty Prosciutto, earthy tomato, sweet peas, savory mushrooms, and rich cream.  But those are just words.  They cannot convey how perfectly those ingredients worked together.  The saltiness of the Prosciutto was perhaps the lead flavor, but the tomato sauce and the peas wouldn’t let that flavor dominate.  Then there was the touch of cream, giving the dish just enough richness to take it from great pasta to something magical.

As a side note, I have two regrets from the evening at Jasper’s.  The first was that I shared any of that pasta with my wife and the second was that I saved some it for later.  See, our entrees arrived with the pasta course, so there was other pasta, pork osso buco and my wife’s chicken to eat.  All the while, the pasta nanni got cold and while it was good when I got back to it, it was nothing compared to when they first brought it out.  Plus, I think my wife ate all the Prosciutto.  Which is a crime in some places I think.

To this day, I still want more.  I will not consider my life complete unless I can go back to Jasper’s and eat that pasta again. 

Chef Jasper’s Chicken – Pure Bliss

The second moment of bliss so intense words failed me was when I ate my wife’s chicken dish.  When she ordered chicken Saltimbocco, I laughed. 

When I saw it on the menu, I didn’t think it was anything special.  It’s a Roman dish of chicken breast, ham, a little cheese, and some tomato sauce.  Traditionally, it’s rolled, but Chef Jasper says that it dries out the chicken too much so he left it unrolled.  There’s also a sauce made from lemon, stock, white wine, butter, and sage.  But still, when I saw it on the menu, I wasn’t excited.  I came for the big, the fancy, and the impressive dishes with hard names to say (ie osso bucco.) 

Don’t get me wrong, the pork was fantastic, but the chicken Saltimbocco was unreal.  It just worked.  The chicken was moist and the ham was perfect for adding a bit of salt, a bit of pork fat, and a bit of flavor.  The tomato sauce was gently nestled on to the chicken and added a nice bit of earthy tomato taste.  Then there was just enough cheese to top the dish to add a bit of extra saltiness and keep the dish together. 

Then there was the sauce.  That slightly citrusy, slightly tangy, slightly sagey butter-lemon-sage sauce.  To be honest, I shouldn’t like the sauce.  Citrus and wine together are about my least favorite sauce pairings, but there was I soaking it up with a piece of bread.

More than the ingredients, that dish worked because of the artistry.  You can probably find a frozen dinner with the same ingredients as that chicken Saltimbocco, but you probably can’t find a hundred chefs in the world who could make them absolutely sing like Chef Jasper.  I just can’t get over how there should be nothing special about an unrolled rolled chicken dish, but in a master’s hands, it was simply sublime.

Like the pasta, I would say that I wouldn’t consider my life complete unless I went back and had that dish it again, but I took care of it already.  So that part of my life is complete.  Though I am kinda jonsing for it again.

Chef Jasper Mentioned Melon Pasta Special

Also, I should mention the Rigatoni melon, which was the completely odd, but absolutely fantastic pasta dish with a sauce of melon, parmesan cream, and a little bacon.  If that sounds familiar, you might have seen Rachel Ray make it in her magazine, though Chef Jasper assures me his was the better version because of the bacon.  I refuse to argue against either Chef Jasper or bacon.

What amazed me was that dish its utter potential for chaos.  When you mix sour/salty parmesan cream with sweet melon and salty/fatty bacon, you should have a mess on your hands.  However, in the hands of a master, that combination was something both my wife and I loved.

And so that just part my meal with Chef Jasper.  I plan to talk about so many other parts of that dish and everything I learned from talking with him.  But for now, I need to go.  I hear some pasta nanni calling my name.

The logo was taken from Jasper’s website.

Fine dining is very much alive in Kansas City, MO at The American Restaurant.  Located right next to Crown Center, The American is making a name for Kansas City upscale/fine dining cuisine and serves wonderful contemporary American food.

The American and Chef Debbie Gold

Returning to helm the kitchen at The American is Chef Debbie Gold, an easy going, likeable chef who was more than happy to talk cooking.  I got to talk to Chef for a few minutes about her career, the restaurant and all topics food.  Like all of the KC chefs I’ve talked to, I was very impressed with Chef Gold’s passion for food.  For instance, the question “What’s your favorite Spring vegetable?” could not be answered with a single vegetable.

Chef Gold on Molecular Gastronomy

On the topic of trends, she mentioned molecular gastronomy at which point she made a statement I found deeply profound.  It seems Chef Gold is not a huge proponent of molecular gastronomy because, as she put it “We’ve worked so hard to get the chemicals out of our food when we grow it, why would we put it in in the end when we cook it?”  As much of a fan of Chef Richard Blais, the gastronomic wizard from Top Chef, I found myself suddenly calling into question the whole practice.

Why’s She Not Yelling?

Still, what stands out most to me about Chef Gold, other than her food, which we’ll get to in a moment, was just how happy her brigade seemed to be.  I live and die on Gordon Ramsey reruns so I am used to the idea of the chef as screaming slave driver.  A Gordon Ramsey kitchen seems devoid of humor and fun.  From the moment I walked into the kitchen, I could tell her staff was having a good time.  Yes, there was dinner going on, but everyone was all smiles and there was a enthusiasm  in everyone’s work.

Strangely enough, there was no fear Chef Gold was going to break into a tirade of F bombs and screaming.  By the end of the tour, i wanted to work for her.

Lamb Belly and Duck Breast

So, the thing that stands out most about Chef Gold including her food was her food.  She treated me to some of her roast lamb belly (the meat near the stomach, not the stomach itself!) served on top of a green peas with a little splash of what I think was a tomato ginger relish.  This dish reflects both the high and the low point of the meal.

That lamb belly was… supercalifragilisticexpedaladocious.  I seriously can’t think of another word for it.  Granted, I don’t eat a lot of lamb, but the lamb belly I had there was unbelievable.  The best I ever had.  I could cut it with my fork.  It was flavorful, perfectly seasoned with simple salt and pepper, and cooked, I think, just on it’s own fat.  Amazing.  The tomato relish was also wonderful.  It was strong, so there wasn’t much, but it mixed with the lamb and the peas.

Which brings us to the low point.  The peas.  I was not a fan of the peas.  They were a little too al dente for my taste and could have used a little…something else.  It wasn’t bad enough to detract from the lamb, but not perfect.

I also had the La Belle duck breast served on a sunchoke puree with ramps.  The sauce was a Grand Marnier gastrique.  This dish was a total success.  The duck was rich, but tender.  The sunchokes were mild, but worked perfectly with the duck and the broad beans were terrific.  Had I only had this meal, I would have been very happy.  However, after the lamb… well… I can say the duck’s major failing was that it wasn’t a second plate of lamb belly.

All in all, I had a great talk with Chef and a great meal.  The next time you are looking for a fine meal, a place for an anniversary, or just a tremendous view of the city, stop by The American Restaurant.  Ask for the lamb and tell them BlogWellDone sent you.  Enjoy!!

Thanks to the Kansas City Star for the picture.