Home at the Range: Dishing it up with dads who’re comfortable in the kitchen
For this article, I was given the challenge of finding dads who cook. I knew plenty of dads who fired up the grill on the weekends or who made a mean stack of pancakes on a Saturday morning, but I needed “take-charge” dads who were responsible for the majority of the family’s meals, who did…
Yeeeooowch! Kitchen hazards can be a painful learning experience
Flames! Sharp edges! Deadly bacteria! Sounds like the next Hollywood blockbuster, but you don’t need to leave the house to encounter this peril. These dangers lurk in every home. Anyone planning to enter a kitchen should read these cautionary tales closely and learn how best to escape the frightful trip to the emergency room or,…
A Playful Decision: How do you choose which theater company’s show is right for you?
Scan the entertainment pages of the local papers and you’ll find many productions staged by a large variety of companies in many venues, but nothing that tells you what to see. Choosing a play can be as difficult as selecting a bottle of wine from an unfamiliar list. “What a lot of people don’t realize,”…
The Warmth of the Season: Crock-Pots allow busy cooks to savor ethnic cuisines
The cool breath of autumn often conjures up warmth in kitchens across America. People begin pulling out their slow cookers from deep inside their cupboards to concoct time-tested chili recipes and traditional pot roasts for Sunday dinners. Slow cookers offer the freedom of adding all the ingredients at one time and letting them emerge hours…
Review: Atomic Cowboy in St. Louis
Sure, the name conjures the image of Slim Pickens riding an atomic bomb like a bucking bronco to his (and the world’s) doom in “Dr. Strangelove.” But once you’re through the door at Atomic Cowboy’s new location in The Grove neighborhood (it was formerly in Maplewood), it’s clear that this new-and-improved version is channeling the…
Review: Boogaloo in St. Louis
GUY’S PERSPECTIVE In the St. Louis monthly/weekly/daily publication echo chamber, once a neighborhood is christened “revitalized,” “hip” or “up-and-coming,” perception universally trumps reality. Stick a new pan-Asian restaurant in an old storefront on Martin Luther King and suddenly, “The Ville is the next Dogtown!” Are entertainment writers no better than real estate agents? (Full disclosure:…
Farmer Paul’s Roasted Fall Vegetables
12 to 15 servings
Keep it kosher at this vegetarian brunch spot
You don’t have to wait until Sunday to try Shmeers, University City’s year-old vegetarian kosher bistro. It’s a great place to bring a paper or your laptop (this place is a WiFi hotspot), grab a table and enjoy some good coffee and breakfast. Located at Delmar Boulevard and Interstate 170, Shmeers has made itself at…
Usually relegated to pies by Americans, winter squash is a staple in other cuisines
Squash was the one of the first things American Indians taught the Pilgrims to cook. And, like Americans today, the colonists ignored this vitamin-packed foodstuff. “Here’s the funny thing: Squash is the quintessential American vegetable, but very few people know how to cook and prepare it,” said Paul Krautmann of Bellews Creek Farm. This season,…
Where’d My Entrée Come From?: Finding the path food takes from the farm to your plate
Whether you’re sitting down to a restaurant meal of a burger or filet mignon, the food on your plate probably went through many hands to get from the person who produced it to the one who cooked it. We hear a lot about those two end points, but the middle is as mysterious as the…
Versatile Chambourcin grapes are growing on Missouri winemakers
First, let me congratulate the Dressel family’s Mount Pleasant Winery in Augusta for the outstanding achievement of winning its first Governor’s Cup at the 2005 Missouri Wine Competition for the gorgeous 2003 Norton. If you have read this column recently, you will know that I put high esteem on the difficulty of winning any award…
Community arts can bring about social change
To date, there are 126 graduates of the Community Arts Training Institute collaborating, creating and making a difference in the St. Louis area. Artists of all disciplines – poets, visual artists, performers, musicians – are bringing the arts to nontraditional audiences (read: not the crowd at Friday-night gallery walks), with the mission of creating social…
Documentaries dance to the beats of jazz, AfroReggae and organ music
This month’s lineup of the 14th annual St. Louis International Film Festival brings together a diverse blend of narrative features, documentaries and quality shorts compiled by Cinema St. Louis’ executive director Chris Clark and his team. And, as always, the SLIFF – held this year from Nov. 10 to 20 – will have a few…
Music legends Cash and Carter live again in ‘Walk the Line’
Within the past year or so, Ray Charles got a biopic (“Ray”). So did Cole Porter (“De-Lovely”). And so did Bobby Darin (“Beyond the Sea”). It’s a great time to be a dead American musical icon! The trend continues this month with “Walk the Line,” the long-time-coming biography of one of country music’s legends, Johnny…
Shake off the chills with a classic Sidecar
The Sidecar was first created in Paris during World War I as a way of relieving the symptoms of the common cold. According to lore, a captain who was routinely escorted to his favorite watering hole in the sidecar of a motorcycle ordered some brandy, a traditional cold remedy of the day, and suggested squeezed…
SLU’s sustainable food program competes in the fast-food market
When Yale University decided to start a sustainable food program on its campus, it took years to get off the ground. When Saint Louis University wanted to start one, the administration contacted longtime local restaurateur Eddie Neill. “I signed on immediately,” he said. “It’s an immediate impact on our kids’ well-being and, in the long…
