eGfoodblog: dividend

[nonblonde007]

As I was reading Blue Bird's menu, I thought, "I'm having the Summit Street Benedict", then, the next photo is it!!! It looks divine, and the French Toast doesn't look bad either. What a terrific place.

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LOL me too!

[dividend]

From the City Market Farmer's Market yesterday.

This summer I've been mostly just going to browse. Some good looking blackberries and blueberries, but I don't have time to do any canning for the next couple of days. So I just wandered. As you can see, this market gets ridiculously crowded, especially as it gets later in the morning.

One of the anchoring buildings of the open market space houses the Steamboat Arabia museum. It's a steamboat that sunk in the Missouri river in 1865, then the river changed course and left it buried in a feild. It was excavated now peices of it and all of it's contents (most remarkably well preserved) are on display.

I am a total sucker for wasabi peas:

I stopped into Carollo's Italian Market to snag some bulk kalamata olives:

And some fresh mozarella cheese:

That's ammunition for two of my favorite dishes. I'll make cherry tomato and olive salad (again from the Naked Chef cookbook), and caprese salad. Both are dishes that I love for being more than the sum of their parts, and I eat alot of them this time of year.

Finally, there's BBQ here too:

I don't eat their very often, but there patio is a lovely place when they have live music.

Edited July 29, 2007 by dividend (log)

[dividend]

I cooked dinner last night. I know you guys would much rather see more around-the-town shots, but I do try and use up the glut of produce I end up with.

I got a "salsa pack" in my share, along with some beautiful tomatoes:

I'm going to wax poetic for a moment here about how much I love eGullet. One of my favorite threads here is this eGCI course on Mexican table salsas. For me, that exemplifies all the great things about this place - sharing of knowledge and passion, piquing of curiosity and the urge to try new things. I know that before I came here, not only would I probably never have found my CSA in the first place, but I certainly wouldn't have looked at this pile of vegetables and immediately known how to turn it into a fantastic roasted salsa. Not at all authentic, I know, but this community has helped me to have the confidence to try things, with the reasonable expectation that they'll turn out good.

So I halved and broiled everything:

And chunked it all up with some salt and lime juice in my trusty KitchenAid:

The rest of the meal was jump-started from the deep freeze. A couple months ago I made up a bunch of fajitia kits - basically chopped marinated chicken peices, and chopped peppers and onions. I can just pull one out, defrost it, and cook everything up quickly in a skillet:

The end result being some pretty tasty chicken fajitas:

Like I said earlier, this is the way I like dinners to be - quick, from scratch without being labor intensive.

Pics from brunch this morning a little later - I'm getting ready to head to the 'burbs for dinner at the parents'.

[dividend]

Argh. My camera's battery died this morning, deleting some of the pictures I tried to take at brunch. The ones I did take managed to be some of the worst ones all week.

Oh well - brunch was fantastic. Bluestem is in sort an unassuming location for a fine dining establishment, tucked in along Westport road next to a sonic and a game store. We got there at noon to find the dining room crowded, so we hung out in the very comfortable lounge while we waited. It's a cozy space, with an atmosphere that's very conducise to laid back ordering and lingering conversation. Judy had brought along a jar of fresh tomato juice from her garden, which she convinced them to turn into simply sublime bloody marys:

What a wonderful treat!

We were given paper menus, which are reprinted quite frequently as items change based on what's locally available. We tried to order some fried okra, but as it was late in the brunch service, they were out. We found out later that they'd only received enough okra to fill five orders. Made sense to me, as I'd had the same experience on Wednesday with okra in the CSA shares.

While we waited for our table, we drank coffee and shared an order of pomme frites with garlic parsley:

With different dipping sauces - tarter sauce, whole grain mustard with truffle oil, spicy aoili, and smoked ketchup. The frites were great, thick cut and crispy.

Eventually we migrated to the dining room, to a sunny table by the windows:

I'd only ever been here for dinner (the best dinner I've ever eaten anywhere), and at night the dining room is dimly lit and sort of romantic. It's an equally enjoyable atmosphere when flooded with afternoon sunlight.

In addition to our individual orders, we shared an order of "Local Cantaloupe: Proscuitto Picante, Saba Vinegar, Olive Oil, and Ciabatta". This was so good that when the waitress came to clear away the rest of the plates, we made sure we'd eaten every last peice before we let her take this one.

Between the five of us, we ordered "Ham and Cheese Crepes: Berkshire Ham, Gruyere, Sunny Side Campo Lindo Egg":

"Bluestem Breakfast: Corn Muffins, Sausage Gravy, Potato Hash, Berskshire Ham, Campo Lindo Eggs":

"Frittata: Basil, Crum's Heirloom Tomatoes, Parmesan":

Also a very delicious B.L.T. with house made chips, but that pic doesn't appear to have survived.

This is the sort of place where it feels very natural to linger for a couple of hours or more, eating and chatting. I had good company - hopefully some of you will chime in and fill in my woefully inadequate description. I will say it's fun to eat with a group that not only doesn't care that you're photographing everything, but actively rearranges the table to get a better shot. Getting to geek out about the Kansas City dining scene is never a bad thing, either.

[dividend]

The last thing I want to show you guys is back to something personal.

When I was little, in the summer we often did Sunday steak dinners at my grandparents' house. My grandfather had a special method of cooking steaks, and it's what I grew up beleiving the perfect steak should be. He passed this method on to my dad, and I will now share with you this family secret.

Here's the scene:

My parents' back porch in the suburbs, with the trusty kettle coming to the perfect temperature, which is lower than most of you think when you think steaks.

Here's the method. You need a couple of packs of not too thick generic supermarket t-bone steaks, and both seasoned and unseasoned tenderizer. Adolph's is the prefered brand, McCormick's will do in a pinch.

Each steak gets liberally coated with tenderizer, seasoned on one side, unseasoned on the other. Then you stab them vigorously with a fork on both sides ("forking the steaks" is a coveted task indeed).

Then they rest at room temperature for a while. If you're grilling corn, start that first. Then onto the grill they go:

Here's where it gets complicated. My dad is ex-military, and is also a fantical hobbyist of organization skills and time management. How does this relate to steaks? It means, of course, that there's an entire complicated regime of timing to the second on a stopwatch, rotating and flipping at various intervals. I've never quite wrapped my brain around the timing (which of course means I can't be trusted to do this correctly on my own), but it appears to take between 20 and 25 minutes.

Once they're done correctly, which means completely cooked through yet fork tender, remove them to a platter:

Dish them up, preferably with grilled sweet corn and sliced tomatoes:

And eat:

Even though I've grown into a great appreciation of a beautiful cut of steak, cooked perfectly medium rare, and my method of choice for cooking steaks at home is to sear in a blazing hot skillet and finish in the oven in an attempt to acheive that perfection, my grandfather's (and now my dad's) steaks are what I crave on a Sunday afternoon.

[mamagotcha]

Wow, Div! You did a fantastic job, and thanks so much for sharing your week with us... and especially for giving us a great excuse to visit Bluestem for brunch.

[lucylou95816]

Dividend

what a great blog! Did I miss it, or did you explain the meaning of your moniker? I went to KC a couple of years ago, and went to that new style of shopping center, that is like a little city with restaurants, shops and lofts. That place was really cool. I had dinner outside at that steak place (I can't remember the name, but always in the airplane mags) and watched these cops arrest this girl. It was quite exciting. I just loved that shopping/living/eating community. They are starting to do somewhat like that out here now. Thanks for sharing your week.

[Jamie Lee]

Dividend:

Great blog! KC was the best city I ever lived in - not only because I had a great circle of single pals, not only because of all the WONDERFUL places to nosh, not only because I got into the habit of buying symphony, opera and ballet season tickets (Sunday matinees, leaving plenty of time for my guests to treat me to brunch at any number of awesome places!) not only because of their awesome farmer's market surrounded by "mortar and brick" specialty shops - but all of that, plus living in a condo just off the Plaza! It was good times.

(Moved to a much less desirable locale because of a job offer. )

You're a lucky gal.

(Figlio's, JJ's, Fedora's and especially Grand Street Cafe were some of my favorites. I took clients to Plaza III when they came to town - what's not safe about a good steakhouse in the Midwest for visitors - and spent many an hour in their lounge after dinner enjoying one of their great cigars!) (And yes, I am female, and this was way before Demi and others popularized cigar smoking females! )

J. <--- No longer smokes any substance of any kind.

[Domestic Goddess]

Thank you Dividend for sharing a part of your life and for showing us another great way to cook steaks. Maraming salamat!

[MarketStEl]

Lucylou: New style of shopping center? I direct you to the posts on the Country Club Plaza above. There's nothing new about it -- it's simply one of many things we once knew how to do well, but forgot as we rushed headlong into The Future. Now that we've found out that The Future isn't everything we thought it could be, we're going back and dusting off forgotten wisdom. To tie this back into one of the other things we've seen in this blog, isn't that also what things like CSAs are about?

Pam R: If there were any other expat Kansas Citians reading this foodblog, they didn't reveal themselves. I got to meet moosnsqrl, but not any other KC eGer, on my trip back last year. I love where I live now -- and if you've seen my foodblogs, you may understand it when I say I'd have a difficult time moving back there before they put in rapid transit -- but dividend has reminded me anew what a great place I grew up in and shown me how it's grown, and grown more sophisticated, since I left it for college and for good in 1976.

Thanks loads, dividend. I promise I won't wait 20 years before my next return visit.

[Aaron Deacon]

Great posts, dividend!

I ordered the BLT yesterday at bluestem, and immediately told my wife to make reservations for next week (if she hasn't had the baby yet) to go with her mom. Really a superlative BLT, with perfect, thick-cut tomatoes, top-notch bacon, and a little smear of mayo with a surprising hit of tomato jam. Divine. Thanks for the brunch opportunity. Good to see you all again.

Cheers,

Aaron

[dividend]

I really enjoyed the opportunity to share my week with you guys! Thanks for all the great feedback!