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TASTEBUD Magazine
Table Hopping – August 2010
“New places, new faces, new food.”
FüD
813 W. 17th Street
Kansas City, MO 64108
(816) 785-3454
www.eatfud.com
Chef Heidi VanPelt-Belle had already made a name for herself in the raw food world with her line of cashew cheeses called Playfood. While catering, she began looking for a space to open her own restaurant. Located on the Westside, they could not have picked a better neighborhood to open Kansas City’s first 100% all vegan restaurant. You don’t have to call yourself anything to appreciate the fresh and simple dishes that come from Heidi’s kitchen. Vegetables never tasted so good. At brunch, try the Mushroom Medley for $8. You’ll get sautéed portabella mushrooms, local greens, red peppers and onions. It comes with roasted red potatoes and a homemade biscuit. GET: there early for the largest selection of menu items, as the day wears on, menu items get crossed off, a sign that fresh seasonal food is being used.
Grünauer
101 West 22nd Street
(816) 283-3234
www.grunauerkc.com
After a series of successful Viennese restaurants in New York and Europe, Chef Peter Grunauer has, with the help of his son Nicholas and daughter Elisabeth, opened his next place in the Freight House District. This new restaurant delivers traditional Austrian dishes like Wiener Schnitzel and Hungarian Beef Goulash. Try the Schweinbraten featuring thick slices of fork tender roasted pork and bread dumplings only $18. Don’t miss sampling their wonderful selection of handmade sausages. The food is comforting and the space is really the perfect accompaniment to it. The experience is upscale but the prices are surprisingly easy on the wallet. VISIT: the Wunderbar, inside of Grünauer, serving Austrian beer, wine and hand-crafted cocktails. Wunderbar also serves a late night bar menu until 1:30 am every night.
Frida’s Contemporary Mexican Cuisine
14861 Metcalf Avenue
Overland Park, KS 66223
(913) 897-0606
Co-owners Ivan Marquez and the absolutely mesmerizing, Victor Esquada, have been educating the dining public for years at their other two Mexican restaurants, Guadalajara Café and Ixtapa, about the evils of Tex-Mex food that is smothered in yellow cheese. With their newest restaurant, Frida’s, it finally feels like their message has found the right venue. Expect flavorful, authentic, lighter dishes that hum with delicate ingredients like squash blossoms, pomegranate seeds and huitlacoche. Get the Pescado al Cilantro, fish of the day marinated in a cilantro pesto then grilled with almonds and Cotija cheese, served with green rice and vegetables for $10 at lunch and $17 for dinner portion. GO: to Frida’s for dinner first, the menu has a much broader selection of dinner-only specialties.
Ophelia’s Restaurant & Inn
201 Main Street
Independence, MO 64050
(816) 461-4525
www.opheliasind.com
Ken and Cindy McClain, have made it their mission to revive and keep vital the heart of old downtown Independence, MO. Ophelia’s is just one of many restaurants that the McClain’s own on the square, but is the more formal of the bunch. A talented new chef is in the kitchen in Chef Nick Jonjevic formerly from Powell Gardens. Ophelia’s is a destination in dining, and not to be missed. Try the Seared Sea Scallops which are day boat scallops served with melted celery, and a granny smith apple potato cake topped with vermouth butter and smoked bacon for $25. STAY: at Ophelia’s Inn, located right above the restaurant, in the heart of Independence Square. You could make a weekend of it.
Westport Café & Bar
419 Westport Road
Kansas City, MO 64111
(816) 931-4740
www.westportcafeandbar.com
Owner, Aaron Confessori, is a sharp operator. Having managed several restaurants in Kansas City, he went back to culinary school at the French Culinary Institute in New York and graduated in 2009. Aaron came back and transformed the old Blanc Burgers + Bottles space into a lovely French bistro with dark wood paneling and white subway tiles. The WC&B serves simple French bistro food. Aaron developed the menu with classics like Croque Monsieur, Chicken Liver and Foie Gras Mousse and Mussels. Get the Grilled Octopus with roasted potatoes with linguica sausage and lemon for $9. SIT: at the bar, before your meal. You may be waited on by some of the best mixologists in the city, like Beau Williams of soon to be re-opening, Manifesto.
Right now, as I type this post, I can hear the ice cream man coming toward my street. I can hear his recorded ragtime music punctuated with little bell clangs from almost three blocks away. When he rounds my corner and comes down my street, I can see that the old-fashioned music is warbling out of the front of the dirtiest white van I've ever seen. It is a van that is covered in faded, ripped and curling stickers promoting a long forgotten menu of items that the ice cream man supposedly at one time had for sale. Most of his frozen treats are made with chemicals to help them keep longer in the freezer, and they are typically full of artificial colors and flavors. Um, bleck. When the ice cream man stops at my corner, to assist a customer, usually a small child, I shudder. He does not appear in the window in a sparkling white starched uniform and paper hat, but instead, he is wearing an AC/DC concert t-shirt with a sweat ring around the neck and arm holes big enough to see his armpit hair. Who really wants to buy their tasty ice cream treats from that? Thankfully, I no longer have to deal with the ice cream man, now that I have learned how to make my own homemade ice cream from scratch. You can too. It's easy. I'll show you. Making your own ice cream is very chic right now. The wilder the flavors, the more we like it. We put herbs, peppers and spices in our ice cream now. We use different kinds of liquids and mix-in's to give our ice cream unique and different flavors. I celebrate this creativity. Because I know it will still always come back to vanilla and chocolate (and maybe even strawberry) at the end of the day. Old favorites die hard, but the shiny new flavors are fun to play with right now. You could blame it on talented Chef Christopher Elbow and his lovely new ice cream shop, Glacé, for creating this new obsession of mine with ice cream flavors as wild as Friday night. Chef Danica Pollard, Pastry Chef at Lidia's, is also a gifted ice cream maker on the dessert scene. What about Pastry Chef Nick Wesemann at The American Restaurant? He has successfully made beer-flavored ice cream absolutely, work. The hottest ice cream I've had to date was made by Executive Chef Alex Pope of the R Bar. His habanero pepper ice cream was sinfully hot. Hurt so good. But ice cream making is not just something to be left to the professionals, oh no, you too, even without and ice cream maker, can make easy and delicious ice cream. You're imagination is your only limitation to the flavors of ice cream you can choose to make. Last summer, I experimented with "bacon and eggs" ice cream and "dark chocolate and fresh basil" ice cream. Both flavors were absolutely, stunningly, good and put me on the path of ice cream experimentation. There are basically, three ways, I know of, to make ice cream. The extra long way, the long way and the short way. I will not judge which path you choose to take, I promise. This is about getting you to see how easy it is to make your own, and then as your comfort level progresses you can move on to other, more complicated methods, if you so choose. I would tell you that I have made ice cream using all three recipes now, and I find if each is done correctly, there is very little flavor difference between the methods. EXTRA LONG WAY TO MAKE ICE CREAM: (You will need an ice cream maker for this.) This recipe was handed down to me by my great Aunt Dorothy Lowry, who basically made this recipe every year on the Fourth of July for my family growing up in Claremore, OK. We could hear her old rock salt electric ice cream maker cranking away on her front porch before we even got out of the car in those days. I will tell you this recipe has a bit of controversy to it and a couple of important words of warning for you. The controversy about this flavor of ice cream is that it was always called vanilla, but the fresh lemon juice that is added to it at the end does give it a hint of lemon, making this ice cream never truly taste like pure vanilla . . .and never truly tastes like lemon either. I suspect the lemon is added at the end to cut the "cooked egg" flavor and aroma that this cream base can take on from being on the stove as long as it takes to cook this base. We always just called it "homemade ice cream", so I'll let you be the judge as to what flavor it truly is. The warning for you is that this ice cream requires you to stand in front of the stove and stir it constantly for 1 and a half hours. Seriously, one potty break, and you will scald this mixture to a bitter end. Once you have it on the stove, you have to stand right with it. My wise mother when writing this recipe down from my Great Aunt, actually wrote on the recipe card "get a stool to lean or sit on, you will need it." The video at the top of this post is me, stirring this ice cream, while making it for my family this year for Fourth of July. Aunt Dorothy's Homemade Ice Cream Recipe 4 eggs 2 cups of sugar 2 Tablespoons of flour 2 large cans of Milnot Milk 3 quarts of Whole Milk 1-2 lemons squeezed of their juice 2 Tablespoons of vanilla Beat the eggs in a big kettle or pot. Add the sugar and flour and beat some more. Mix all ingredients well and add the canned milk. Mix that well and add the whole milk. Cook over Medium heat on stove for 1 1/2 hours (keep stirring or it will burn.) Take off heat and cover with plastic wrap and chill in the fridge. Once cold, add the vanilla and lemon juice and mix together completely. Place in ice cream maker and follow instruction manual for making ice cream. LONG WAY TO MAKE ICE CREAM: (You will need an ice cream maker for this.) I was lucky enough to receive a copy of a cook book called Spice Dreams: Flavored ice creams and other frozen treats by Sara Engram and Katie Luber with Nancy Meadows and Kimberly Toqe. This book had some really creative flavor combinations for incorporating spices into your ice creams. My favorite was one that sounded like a creamy dreamy exotic oasis in India called "Almond Ice Cream with Turmeric, Cardamom and Cloves." I decided to kick it up by adding coconut milk in place of some of the whole milk in the recipe and tossing in a few handfuls of toasted coconut into the base while it was freezing in the machine. I am going to give you their recipe, with my substitutions. You are still making a custard base on the stove, but you only have to cook the milk and then temper the eggs with it making this a faster way to make a custard thick enough for ice cream. The previous recipe actually had you cooking all of the ingredient together, slowly and reducing it until it thickened. Almond Ice Cream with Turmeric, Cardamom, Cloves and Coconut 1 cup of whole milk 1 cup of coconut milk 1/2 cup plus another 1/2 cup of sugar 1 teaspoon ground turmeric (for color) 1 teaspoon ground cardamom 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves 1/8 teaspoon of salt 4 large egg yolks 2 cups whipping cream 1 teaspoon almond extract 1/2 cup of toasted slivered almonds 1/2 cup of toasted coconut Combine the milk (whole and coconut). 1/2 cup of the sugar, the turmeric, cardamom, cloves and salt in a medium heavy saucepan. Scald the milk mixture over medium-high heat, stirring often, for 5 minutes. While the milk is scalding, whisk together the egg yolks in a medium bowl. Add the remaining 1/2 cup of sugar and whisk until the eggs are light and fluffy. Whisking constantly, add a small amount of the hot milk to the egg mixture. Gradually, whisk the remaining hot milk. Return the custard mixture to the pan and cook over medium low heat, stirring often, until the custard is thick enough to coat the back of the spoon, about 5 minutes. Remove the pan from the heat and place in a bowl of ice water to quickly cool the custard. Let the custard cool, stirring often, for 5 minutes. While the custard is cooling, combine the whipping cream and almond extract in a medium bowl. Stir in the custard mixture. Cover with plastic wrap and press the wrap directly onto the surface of the custard. Refrigerate until completely chilled or 4 hours to overnight. The custard may be stored for 3 days before freezing. Freeze the chilled custard in an ice cream maker adding the almonds and coconut when suggested by the manufacturer. SHORT WAY TO MAKE ICE CREAM: (You will need an ice cream maker for this) This recipe comes to me by my youngest brother who is a fireman for the Tulsa Fire Department. He is also the cutest man you ever laid your eyes on. His work at the fire department has made cooking a new interest for my brother, and I have been enjoying swapping recipes with him and in this case, he has provided me with this recipe. Firemen get their recipe from family, friends, co-workers and recipe books . . .just like the rest of us do. My brother swore by this method of making ice cream, which does require an ice cream maker, but DOES NOT require any cooking. I was highly suspicious of this no-cook ice cream method, until I tried it. It is wonderful and totally works. I could not believe the results. The secret ingredient is that you use JELLO pudding mix as the base flavor for your ice cream. To stack the deck, I chose the weirdest JELLO pudding flavor - Pistachio . . .and ended up with an amazing result. Try it, you'll like it. Fireman's No-Cook Ice Cream 1 quart Half and Half 1 cup of sugar 2 small boxes of your favorite JELLO pudding flavor (I used Pistachio) 3 quarts of Whole Milk 1/2 cup of chopped, salted pistachios (omit if you choose another flavor of pudding) Mix all ingredients in a large bowl until very well blended. Making sure all of the pudding mix and sugar have been stirred together and dissolved as best as you can. Chill the base until completely cold. Add to ice cream maker and make according to the directions. ANOTHER SHORT WAY TO MAKE ICE CREAM: (Requires NO ice cream maker . . .) As promised there is one other method that does not require you own an ice cream maker of any kind. It is a recipe from the Tulsa World food writer, Natalie Mikles, and it is a winner. I would suggest you try the Butter Pecan flavor, first. Now, you, can be your own pusherman, I mean, ice cream man. It will have you singing like Van Halen: "I'm your ice cream man, stop me when I'm passin' by . . .they say all my flavors are guaranteed to satisfy." Download Aunt Dot's Ice Cream
Right now, as I type this post, I can hear the ice cream man coming toward my street. I can hear his recorded ragtime music punctuated with little bell clangs from almost three blocks away. When he rounds my corner and comes down my street, I can see that the old-fashioned music is warbling out of the front of the dirtiest white van I've ever seen. It is a van that is covered in faded, ripped and curling stickers promoting a long forgotten menu of items that the ice cream man supposedly at one time had for sale. Most of his frozen treats are made with chemicals to help them keep longer in the freezer, and they are typically full of artificial colors and flavors. Um, bleck.
When the ice cream man stops at my corner, to assist a customer, usually a small child, I shudder. He does not appear in the window in a sparkling white starched uniform and paper hat, but instead, he is wearing an AC/DC concert t-shirt with a sweat ring around the neck and arm holes big enough to see his armpit hair. Who really wants to buy their tasty ice cream treats from that?
Thankfully, I no longer have to deal with the ice cream man, now that I have learned how to make my own homemade ice cream from scratch. You can too. It's easy. I'll show you.
Making your own ice cream is very chic right now. The wilder the flavors, the more we like it. We put herbs, peppers and spices in our ice cream now. We use different kinds of liquids and mix-in's to give our ice cream unique and different flavors. I celebrate this creativity. Because I know it will still always come back to vanilla and chocolate (and maybe even strawberry) at the end of the day. Old favorites die hard, but the shiny new flavors are fun to play with right now.
You could blame it on talented Chef Christopher Elbow and his lovely new ice cream shop, Glacé, for creating this new obsession of mine with ice cream flavors as wild as Friday night. Chef Danica Pollard, Pastry Chef at Lidia's, is also a gifted ice cream maker on the dessert scene. What about Pastry Chef Nick Wesemann at The American Restaurant? He has successfully made beer-flavored ice cream absolutely, work. The hottest ice cream I've had to date was made by Executive Chef Alex Pope of the R Bar. His habanero pepper ice cream was sinfully hot. Hurt so good.
But ice cream making is not just something to be left to the professionals, oh no, you too, even without and ice cream maker, can make easy and delicious ice cream. You're imagination is your only limitation to the flavors of ice cream you can choose to make. Last summer, I experimented with "bacon and eggs" ice cream and "dark chocolate and fresh basil" ice cream. Both flavors were absolutely, stunningly, good and put me on the path of ice cream experimentation.
There are basically, three ways, I know of, to make ice cream. The extra long way, the long way and the short way. I will not judge which path you choose to take, I promise. This is about getting you to see how easy it is to make your own, and then as your comfort level progresses you can move on to other, more complicated methods, if you so choose. I would tell you that I have made ice cream using all three recipes now, and I find if each is done correctly, there is very little flavor difference between the methods.
EXTRA LONG WAY TO MAKE ICE CREAM: (You will need an ice cream maker for this.)
This recipe was handed down to me by my great Aunt Dorothy Lowry, who basically made this recipe every year on the Fourth of July for my family growing up in Claremore, OK. We could hear her old rock salt electric ice cream maker cranking away on her front porch before we even got out of the car in those days.
I will tell you this recipe has a bit of controversy to it and a couple of important words of warning for you.
The controversy about this flavor of ice cream is that it was always called vanilla, but the fresh lemon juice that is added to it at the end does give it a hint of lemon, making this ice cream never truly taste like pure vanilla . . .and never truly tastes like lemon either. I suspect the lemon is added at the end to cut the "cooked egg" flavor and aroma that this cream base can take on from being on the stove as long as it takes to cook this base. We always just called it "homemade ice cream", so I'll let you be the judge as to what flavor it truly is.
The warning for you is that this ice cream requires you to stand in front of the stove and stir it constantly for 1 and a half hours. Seriously, one potty break, and you will scald this mixture to a bitter end. Once you have it on the stove, you have to stand right with it. My wise mother when writing this recipe down from my Great Aunt, actually wrote on the recipe card "get a stool to lean or sit on, you will need it."
The video at the top of this post is me, stirring this ice cream, while making it for my family this year for Fourth of July.
Aunt Dorothy's Homemade Ice Cream Recipe
4 eggs
2 cups of sugar
2 Tablespoons of flour
2 large cans of Milnot Milk
3 quarts of Whole Milk
1-2 lemons squeezed of their juice
2 Tablespoons of vanilla
Beat the eggs in a big kettle or pot. Add the sugar and flour and beat some more. Mix all ingredients well and add the canned milk. Mix that well and add the whole milk.
Cook over Medium heat on stove for 1 1/2 hours (keep stirring or it will burn.)
Take off heat and cover with plastic wrap and chill in the fridge. Once cold, add the vanilla and lemon juice and mix together completely.
Place in ice cream maker and follow instruction manual for making ice cream.
LONG WAY TO MAKE ICE CREAM: (You will need an ice cream maker for this.)
I was lucky enough to receive a copy of a cook book called Spice Dreams: Flavored ice creams and other frozen treats by Sara Engram and Katie Luber with Nancy Meadows and Kimberly Toqe. This book had some really creative flavor combinations for incorporating spices into your ice creams.
My favorite was one that sounded like a creamy dreamy exotic oasis in India called "Almond Ice Cream with Turmeric, Cardamom and Cloves." I decided to kick it up by adding coconut milk in place of some of the whole milk in the recipe and tossing in a few handfuls of toasted coconut into the base while it was freezing in the machine. I am going to give you their recipe, with my substitutions.
You are still making a custard base on the stove, but you only have to cook the milk and then temper the eggs with it making this a faster way to make a custard thick enough for ice cream. The previous recipe actually had you cooking all of the ingredient together, slowly and reducing it until it thickened.
Almond Ice Cream with Turmeric, Cardamom, Cloves and Coconut
1 cup of whole milk
1 cup of coconut milk
1/2 cup plus another 1/2 cup of sugar
1 teaspoon ground turmeric (for color)
1 teaspoon ground cardamom
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1/8 teaspoon of salt
4 large egg yolks
2 cups whipping cream
1 teaspoon almond extract
1/2 cup of toasted slivered almonds
1/2 cup of toasted coconut
Combine the milk (whole and coconut). 1/2 cup of the sugar, the turmeric, cardamom, cloves and salt in a medium heavy saucepan. Scald the milk mixture over medium-high heat, stirring often, for 5 minutes. While the milk is scalding, whisk together the egg yolks in a medium bowl. Add the remaining 1/2 cup of sugar and whisk until the eggs are light and fluffy.
Whisking constantly, add a small amount of the hot milk to the egg mixture. Gradually, whisk the remaining hot milk. Return the custard mixture to the pan and cook over medium low heat, stirring often, until the custard is thick enough to coat the back of the spoon, about 5 minutes. Remove the pan from the heat and place in a bowl of ice water to quickly cool the custard. Let the custard cool, stirring often, for 5 minutes.
While the custard is cooling, combine the whipping cream and almond extract in a medium bowl. Stir in the custard mixture. Cover with plastic wrap and press the wrap directly onto the surface of the custard. Refrigerate until completely chilled or 4 hours to overnight. The custard may be stored for 3 days before freezing.
Freeze the chilled custard in an ice cream maker adding the almonds and coconut when suggested by the manufacturer.
SHORT WAY TO MAKE ICE CREAM: (You will need an ice cream maker for this)
This recipe comes to me by my youngest brother who is a fireman for the Tulsa Fire Department. He is also the cutest man you ever laid your eyes on. His work at the fire department has made cooking a new interest for my brother, and I have been enjoying swapping recipes with him and in this case, he has provided me with this recipe.
Firemen get their recipe from family, friends, co-workers and recipe books . . .just like the rest of us do. My brother swore by this method of making ice cream, which does require an ice cream maker, but DOES NOT require any cooking.
I was highly suspicious of this no-cook ice cream method, until I tried it. It is wonderful and totally works. I could not believe the results. The secret ingredient is that you use JELLO pudding mix as the base flavor for your ice cream. To stack the deck, I chose the weirdest JELLO pudding flavor - Pistachio . . .and ended up with an amazing result. Try it, you'll like it.
Fireman's No-Cook Ice Cream
1 quart Half and Half
1 cup of sugar
2 small boxes of your favorite JELLO pudding flavor (I used Pistachio)
1/2 cup of chopped, salted pistachios (omit if you choose another flavor of pudding)
Mix all ingredients in a large bowl until very well blended.
Making sure all of the pudding mix and sugar have been stirred together and dissolved as best as you can.
Chill the base until completely cold.
Add to ice cream maker and make according to the directions.
ANOTHER SHORT WAY TO MAKE ICE CREAM: (Requires NO ice cream maker . . .)
As promised there is one other method that does not require you own an ice cream maker of any kind. It is a recipe from the Tulsa World food writer, Natalie Mikles, and it is a winner. I would suggest you try the Butter Pecan flavor, first.
Now, you, can be your own pusherman, I mean, ice cream man. It will have you singing like Van Halen: "I'm your ice cream man, stop me when I'm passin' by . . .they say all my flavors are guaranteed to satisfy."
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