Showing posts with label eating out. Show all posts
Showing posts with label eating out. Show all posts

Thursday, April 29, 2010

Kansas City Culinary Adventure

When I travel, I find that food is a great way to get immersed in the local culture. Even when you’ve been to a place more times than you can count there is always a new place to discover along with your old favorites. Growing up in St. Louis, we had family and friends in Kansas City and were frequent visitors (a 4 hour drive). On my recent trip to Kansas City, to surprise my friend of 29ish years for her big 30th birthday (our birthdays are 3 weeks apart), I ate my way through the weekend.

(We had matching surfer shirts when we were 8 too)

No trip to Kansas City is complete without barbecue. I started my visit with a trip to Oklahoma Joe’s BBQ. The original location is a true Diners Drive-Ins & Dives kind of place – inside a gas station! We hit the new non-gas station location for a Carolina style sandwich. Mine included almost a whole bird’s worth of smoked turkey, spicy coleslaw, and BBQ sauce on a soft roll. With a GIANT side of fries, I was pretty full through the next BBQ stop.

Saturday started with a trip to downtown Overland Park, Kansas. While you might not think of KC as a foodie destination, you’d be proven wrong by downtown OP. Anchored by the long-standing Culinary Center of Kansas City, this is a happening food place! The Culinary Center has been teaching Kansans how to cook since 1998! My uncle works with them on their graphic design, so he took me in to meet the owner. Owner Laura Laiben O'Rourke started her career as a lawyer before deciding to head to culinary school and open the culinary center. It was interesting to talk with her about the business and how it has grown and evolved over the years. Check out the website to see everything they are doing. They have everything from classes to lunch to cooking supplies (in the retail shop). After seeing a cookie decorating class in action we headed out to see a few other fun food spots. We were too early in the season to see the weekly farmers’ market, but there were other stops to make.

Just down the street we stopped into the local outpost of Penzey’s Spices (based out of Wisconsin). Wow! I picked up a few spices on my wish list – Mexican epazote for my Rick Bayless recipes, smoked Spanish paprika to remind me of my recent vacation, and lemongrass to add to my many Asian recipe creations. It was hard to resist buying one of everything. I could have spent hours smelling all the spices in the store, but I had a BBQ lunch date and had to keep moving.


Next up, we stopped into an olive oil shop that had just opened. You could mix and match numerous varieties of olive oils and balsamic vinegars in any combination you liked, with suggestions of course. They also offered one of my favorite things – samples! The best combination we tried was a blood orange olive oil with tangerine aged balsamic vinegar. It was tangy, citrusy, and delicious. I can imagine picking up produce at the farmers’ market and then stopping in to get some oil and vinegar to dress it up for the table.


The culinary weekend was capped off with a trip to an old favorite – Fiorella’s Jack’s Stack. You could make a meal out of the side dishes, but why skip the expertly smoked beef brisket? We started off with a few giant onion rings to keep us quiet while we waited for lunch. I had a jumbo sized beef brisket sandwich accompanied by their famous cheesy corn and baked beans. There is nothing healthy about the cheesy corn – but it is delicious. Here’s the link to try it out yourself . The beans could stand alone as a full meal – according to the Jack’s Stack website, 15% of the side dish serving of beans is hickory pit roast beef. They describe the dish as “plump beans swimming in a savory sauce with man-sized chunks of fork-tender beef brisket.” You can’t go wrong with that!

With a quick weekend trip it was hard to even make a dent in my KC Restaurant ‘To-Do List’. The next time you find yourself heading KC, let me know and you can try a few places for me. I’m already thinking about the places I am going to visit on my next trip.

Sunday, January 10, 2010

My Love Affair with Brunch

I've mentioned before that I could eat eggs for all three meals a day and never get tired of them.  I love breakfast food, and that means that a good brunch destination is essential for my weekend happiness.  Thanks to our friends Mary and Angel (of http://www.vintage78.blogspot.com/), we have been brunch regulars at the Centre Street Cafe in Jamaica Plain, MA for the past few years.  Check out why at http://www.localinseason.com/!

Centre Street Cafe on Urbanspoon

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Gambling on a Good Lunch

In my family, road trip routes are planned with dining destinations in mind. We do our research and pull out our 'if we're ever in such-and such' lists and create a plan. It's fun to stop at unique local places or spots that we don't have in our neighborhoods.

Our trip home from Rye, NY this past weekend presented us with quite a few travel routes. I started thinking about the cities we'd pass through and some good lunch options. It seems like all the cooking shows recently have been featuring burger challenges - guess it's a sign of the times. Burgers are affordable (except for that $5k burger from Hubert Keller) and definitely embraced by many different cuisines.

We opted for a route up through Connecticut casino country and pulled off the highway into Mohegan Sun to visit Bobby's Burger Palace. Bobby Flay is on a lot of TV and magazines - so it's hard to miss that he has a new burger place. We placed our orders for some geographically diverse burgers and found a spot to do some great people watching. The gambling crowd is pretty interesting at 2 p.m. on a Sunday.

We went for three very different burgers plus some shakes and two types of fries. The Philly burger - peppers, onions and cheese. The Dallas burger - spice crusted with BBQ sauce, pickles, and slaw. The L.A. burger with avocado relish, jack cheese, watercress and tomato. The shakes (mango and a black&white) were tasty and the sauce with the sweet potato fries was great. It was a nice tangy horseradish mustard. I took home a take-out menu to use as inspiration for creating some new burger dishes at home. I'll have to create my own signature burger to sell for thousands!

Happy eating from Good Cook Doris, her brother (of the Indy BBQ fare fame, on the left), and the hubby (of "When He Fends for Himself", on the right).




Bobby's Burger Palace on Urbanspoon

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