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Stuff to do: September 2008
• by Byron Kerman
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FAIRS AND FESTIVALS
Collinsville Italian Fest
Sept. 19 and 20, downtown Collinsville
www.italianfest.net
Collinsville isn’t all racehorses and horseradish. The big annual Italian Fest that turns the streets into a huge, blocked-off fair of fun, games, and delicious food is going on 25 years. The cuisine-inspired activities include a grape stomp, wine judging, Italian cooking contest, wine garden and a large array of treats to sample, from spaghetti to bagna caulda (a roasted garlic-anchovy dip) to Italian roast beef sandwiches to Italian ices (look for the Italian Fest cookbook for sale, too). Other fun includes a parade, the “Paisan Pedal,” a window-dressing contest, three stages of live music, a 5K run, a bocce ball tournament, craft fair, wheelbarrow races and kids’ activities.
Taste of St. Louis
Sept. 26 to 28, Soldiers’ Memorial · 314.534.2100, x22 · www.tastestl.com
Taste of St. Louis may not have been around for many years just yet, but all modesty aside, the Sauce Magazine Restaurant Row offers more than two dozen groovy food booths for you to get a lavish and multi-part meal going. Baileys’ Chocolate Bar, Brandt’s Café, Everest Café, Fifteen, Growlers Pub, Monarch, Portabella, Drunken Fish, Vito’s and many more offer the cream of their menus for your delectation at the three-day celebration of our region’s best. Other food fun includes a Sandwich Showdown competition open to anyone and the return of the St. Louis Bread Co. Top Chef Competition, in which six acclaimed local chefs throw down Iron Chef-style. The Taste also features big-name national music acts, the Art Wars live-art competition and juried art show in the Art Dimensions Village, and the Grant’s Farm Kid Zone with petting zoo, kids’ cooking demos, Magic House art projects, Science Center Kids’ Club and Bigfoot the monster truck.
St. Louis Wine Festival presented by Van Kampen Investments
Sept. 27 and 28, Forest Park · 888.210.0074
www.stlouiswinefestival.com
The annual St. Louis Wine Festival benefits from a picturesque location. With dozens of white tents arranged in a semicircle around Forest Park’s Grand Basin at the base of Art Hill, the Fest puts guests in a good mood before they take their first sip. And with more than 150 wines to sample from exhibitors representing vintners near and far, laissez les bon temps roulez. Prepare for eats for sale from the likes of Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse & Wine Bar and Lucas Park Grille, and live music from the golden throats of Kim Massie and Erin Bode. The Festival cooking-demo stage is a marvel – it’s a covered tent with an enviable kitchen inside, complete with restaurant-size fridges, full ovens and ranges, a wine cooler, and so on. It doesn’t feel temporary in any way.
SPECIAL EVENTS
Wasabi Sushi-Eating Contest
Sept. 21 – 3 to 8 p.m., Wasabi (1228 Washington Ave.) · 314.477.8581 · www.wasabistl.com
How do you prepare to compete in a serious sushi-eating contest, with a trip to Japan as the first prize? Hardcore competitive eaters stretch out their stomachs by drinking a gallon of water at a time. That’s a thought, but even still, that sushi rice has a way of expanding after it’s eaten, and the idea of a delicacy like sushi inhaled until pounds of the stuff lie in a great ball inside you, well damn, second place just sounds really rough. The annual Sushi-Eating Contest at Wasabi is a bizarre, intense affair worthy of a Japanese game show. Come early and stay late for the St. Louis Osuwa taiko drummers, Hatsuko Eilers’ fashion show featuring kimono modeling, karaoke and dance contests, the Bon Odori traditional Japanese dance troupe, and top-spinning demos.
National Kidney Foundation Chili Cookoff
Sept. 27 – 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., Westport Plaza
314.961.2828 · www.nkfstl.com
You can get away with putting just about anything in chili. SPAM, chocolate, grape jelly, shredded White Castles and lord only knows what else have all probably found their way into the competitors’ chili at the St. Louis-area National Kidney Foundation Chili Cookoff and Salsa Competition. The 33rd annual contest is a real party, with elaborately decorated booths and costumed cooks, more than 50 different chilis and salsas to sample, and trucks-o-beer to cool the palate. If you can’t eat another bite of chili, consider biting into grilled chicken breasts, burgers, brats, portabella mushroom sandwiches, fruit smoothies, frozen lemonade and much more in the vendors’ area. Live music, kids’ games and crafts are part of the deal, too. At five bucks to get in and 50 cents per sample, you’ll run out of hunger before you run out of money.
Chefs’ Wine Country Barbecue
Sept. 28 – 1 to 4 p.m., Mount Pleasant Winery 800.467.9463
www.mountpleasant.com
Traffic will be unusually thick on the roads from St. Louis to Augusta when Mount Pleasant Winery hosts its annual Chefs’ Wine Country Barbecue. More than 30 acclaimed chefs from St. Louis restaurants and clubs will try to outdo one another with hors d’oeuvres, vegetables, fish, meats and desserts for guests to sample in tapas-style servings. The American Culinary Federation Chefs de Cuisine Association of St. Louis presents the party, which includes wine selections you can purchase to complement the dishes, plus a silent auction, all to benefit the Chefs de Cuisine Education Foundation and the ACF Chef and Child Foundation.
CLASSES
Bass Pro Shop Dutch-Oven Camping Cuisine Workshops
Tuesdays in Sept. – 7 p.m., Bass Pro Shop · 636.688.2500 www.basspro.com
There’s a fire pit in front of the Bass Pro Shop in St. Chuck, and when they’re not sacrificing virgins in the flames to appease the goddess of the hunt, they’re dropping a Dutch oven in the coals to demonstrate the marvels of slow-cooked, campfire cuisine. Stop by on Sept. 2 for Selecting and Seasoning Cast-Iron Cookware, Sept. 9 for Cooking Breads in a Dutch Oven, Sept. 16 for Stews and Chili in a Dutch Oven, and Sept. 23 for Roasting in a Dutch Oven. Bass Pro camping veterans will lead the cooking demos and offer samples at the workshops, which are all free.
CHEF APPEARANCES
Kurt Michael Friese
Sept. 10 – 7:30 p.m., Schlafly Bottlewoks · 314.241.2337 www.slowfoodstl.org
It wouldn’t be all that surprising if chef Kurt Michael Friese had the Slow Food snail mascot tattooed on his chest. The man lives and breathes the Slow Food, locavore, sustainable-agriculture, gourmet philosophy. He’s the owner and chef at Iowa City, Iowa, restaurant Devotay, which specializes in foods grown nearby by farmers dedicated to responsible stewardship of resources. He’s on the Slow Food USA national board of directors. He’s a former instructor at the New England Culinary Institute, and the editor of food magazine Edible Iowa River Valley. What brings him to our neck of the Mississippi is a book tour for his new collection, A Cook’s Journey: Slow Food in the Heartland. The compendium of recipes and stories comes from Friese’s tour of Slow Food-approved doings in the Grain Belt. He delves into brick-oven baking; making prosciutto with Iowa hogs; microbreweries in St. Louis and Ann Arbor, Mich.; smoked trout from Lake Superior; and the rebirth of Al Capone’s own Prohibition rye whiskey, among other ventures. Chef Friese will be riding low and talking Slow as part of the SLOWednesday series at Schlafly Bottleworks.
Raghavan Iyer
Sept. 16 – 6 p.m., Kitchen Conservatory · jpdanklef@aol.com
Apparently, curries work a lot like rabbits. When you’re not looking, they multiply, big time. Indian cookbook author Raghavan Iyer’s new title, 660 Curries, explores the spicy, colorful and surprisingly variegated world of curry. Iyer, who has called curry “the gateway to Indian cooking,” will demonstrate a recipe or two, with tastings for all comers, and then sign his cookbooks. The St. Louis Culinary Society welcomes him at Kitchen Conservatory, where this 2004 winner of the International Association of Culinary Professionals’ Cooking Teacher of the Year Award will hold court. E-mail for a reservation for this one – there’s an attendance fee and a limited number of spots available.
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