Chef and culinary instructor Bob Brassard of Broadmoor Bistro and some of his students. I will write more about Bob and the impressive culinary program more extensively later, but here’s a quick run-down from http://www.broadmoorbistro.org.

The Broadmoor Bistro is a student-run skills application by the students at Broadmoor Technical Center in Shawnee Mission School District. The Broadmoor Bistro has been in operation since fall of 2000 offering an evening dining event created and served by culinary arts students enrolled at Broadmoor Technical Center. Broadmoor Technical Center, located at 6701 W. 83rd Street, Overland Park, Kansas offers culinary arts and commercial baking instruction to students enrolled in Shawnee Mission School District high schools.

Junior and senior students from the district high schools enroll in year-long elective classes at Broadmoor Technical Center in their area of interest.  Part of the culmination of the culinary arts instruction is the students’ skills application in the Broadmoor Bistro.  Students create menus, cook, serve and run the Broadmoor Bistro.

The Bistro is a 2008 constructed 3,000 square foot addition to the Broadmoor Technical Center.  A bakery, kitchen and classroom with auditorium seating and a full culinary display kitchen, about 4,700 sqft, were remodeled in 2007.

This center is an amazing resource both for the local culinary scene and the community. These students are the next generation of chefs, pastry chefs, restaurant owners, and hospitality professionals that will exercise and refine their talent in venues across the country.

Looking for a great meal that’s reasonably priced? Anyone can book a table (Wednesdays only) and eat a four-course meal ($25/person) of fine dining. Make your reservations here: https://www.broadmoorbistro.org/reservations/add/date

Prominent local chefs including the late John McClure of Starker’s, Colby Garrelts of Bluestem, Celina Tio of Julian, and Michael Smith of Extra Virgin as well as guest chefs from around the country have lent their time and expertise to help educate and encourage these young culinary students. KC Originals has also partnered with Broadmoor Bistro to cross-promote and strengthen our culinary community.

I’ve known about Broadmoor Bistro for a while, but have only visited the center recently. I was impressed by the dedication of Chef Brassard, the modern learning kitchen and restaurant, and the top-notch food served weekly. I’m making reservations soon.

Chefs Dave Crum and Patrick Ryan prepared an amazing meal using a variety of heirloom beans, summer vegetables, and plenty of pork dishes. You can read more about that adventure here.

I have held onto these beans for too long, waiting for a good reason to cook them. Winter is losing its grip on Kansas City. With the recent minor snowfall and drop in temperature, I decided it was time to make a winter soup of yellow eye beans and smoked ham hocks for dinner on Valentine’s Day since Pam and the kids are out of town. Rancho Gordo describes these beans as dense, creamy, and chowder-like when cooked. Sounds like he-man food to me.

Since I purchased the beans, I have wanted to photograph them because they look so unusual. The deep yellow “eye” is mesmerizing. Being the food geek that I am, I put off going to work this morning to shoot photos of the beans in weak winter morning light. For the last image, I put the beans in a metal bowl filled with water to soak. I reflected sunlight from a stock pan lid into the water. The play of light and murky shadow reminded me of gravel in an aquarium.

Can’t wait to get home, cook, and eat some beans!

Shrimp snacks. It’s not a sexy name but it gets to the point.

I bought a bag of these shrimp-flavored chips (unlike the cheese-flavored package depicted above) at Kim Long Asian Market a few days ago while stocking up on rice, spices and other supplies to cook Thai food. “Made with real shrimp” is printed on the $1.19, 2.5-ounce bag printed in yellow, red, and orange-pink colors with a stylized shrimp illustration on the front to leave no doubt about the flavor of this snack.

The shrimp snack is a mixture of tapioca flour, shrimp, eggs, salt, sugar, milk, oil, and other ingredients blended and fried into puffy chips. They resemble pork rinds or chicharrón, aka fried pork skin. These chips are smooth in texture, ultralight in weight, and taste vaguely like shrimp. The flavor has the essence of shrimp but isn’t overly fishy in taste or aroma. Shrimp snacks are delicious as is but I’ll bet they would taste great dunked in onion dip, guacamole, or a sweet chili sauce.

Even at 28 pieces per serving (two servings per bag), shrimp snacks will hardly conquer an appetite. Like eating a bag of Doritos or Ruffles, it’s easy to plow through a bag and still be hungry.

This seafood-flavored snack reminds me of dried roasted squid jerky that I’ve eaten from a street vendor in Thailand and other Asian snacks I nibbled on while growing up.

Today, it is common to see wasabi peas and seaweed-flavored snack mixes in supermarkets, sold in bulk at Costco, and other venues. The appearance of snacks with Asian roots and influences is part of a broader mainstream acceptance of, demand for, and bastardization of sushi, Sriracha sauce (which originated in Thailand), Japanese mochi, peanut sauce, wasabi, tempura, egg rolls, and Asian cuisine in general. It is no longer exotic to eat Thai or Vietnamese food now than it was to eat sushi in the ’80s and ’90s or Chinese American food after it was first introduced in the U.S.A. and gradually became as ubiquitous as McDonald’s.

Unadulterated shrimp snacks, green tea ginger candy, tamarind chili candy, red bean and coconut milk desserts, bánh cam (sweet sesame balls), and other treats found at local Asian markets still inspire food nostalgia. I think about trips as a kid with my Mom to aromatic Vietnamese-run stores, poking around in our kitchen cabinet drawers to figure out what’s what, or anticipating some dessert, such as tapioca with coconut milk, that Mom would make on the stove top.

These memories and an undying sense of adventure prompt me to grab something unfamiliar off the shelf at Kim Long or to order dishes I have never had previously no matter the cuisine. Whether it is stinky, spicy, sweet, strange for the moment, or just packaged in vivid colors and described in another language, I’m willing to give it a try, sexy name or not.

Two Kansas City tea entrepreneurs travel to Asia to steep themselves in ways to grow, process and serve an ancient beverage.

Silver Needle King and Jasmine Snow Dragon sound as exotic as their origins.

Kansas City tea merchants Zehua Shang and Paula Winchester have each traveled to mountainside farms in Asia where these premium loose leaf teas grow. Long journeys to China and Taiwan enable them to learn and share firsthand knowledge of how tea is harvested and produced.

The adventure is a stimulating experience from farm to teacup.

http://www.kansascity.com/2012/01/31/3399910/a-thirst-for-tea-knowledge-leads.html

Kansas City Star Magazine
Since 2009, I have written the weekly Last Bite recipe feature for Kansas City Star Magazine available each Sunday in the newspaper and online. I contact local chefs for seasonal recipes, revise and edit to a specified format with a lede, fact check, and coordinate photography arrangements and publication schedule with my editor at The Star.

I have worked with chefs from bluestem, EBT Restaurant, Jasper’s, Renee Kelly at Caenen Castle, The Brick, Michael Smith, The Farmhouse, Westport Cafe and Bar, and many others.

For current recipes featured in Last Bite, visit http://www.kansascity.com/living/food/last-bite/.  Past recipes are archived on The Star’s web site.

Chef Jennifer Maloney, Cafe Sebastienne

Chef Howard Hanna, co-owner of The Rieger Hotel Grill and Exchange.

I’m not the first person to shoot photos of compost. Over ten years ago, I remember a Crossroads Arts District gallery displaying work by an artist that shot carefully composed photos of compost covered in snow. At the time, it appeared to be too artfully arranged, the colors too saturated. It looked too staged to think of it as art.

This composite image is not art to me, but documentation of decay as part of the composting process. The photos were taken at dusk in low light. Most of them turned out blurred and unusable. I discarded most of the digital images as quickly and thoughtlessly as scraps of fruits and vegetables. I cleaned up the four images above in Adobe Photoshop to remove the gray haze of late afternoon winter light. I lightened the images and heightened the colors to visually shrug off the flatness of winter’s tired color scheme.

In daylight, the compost pile is actually quite bright and full of energy as if Jackson Pollack played with his food. New scraps are tossed onto old, rotting flesh like a mass grave. I spot the broken shell of a pumpkin, its flesh pale and dehydrated. It reminds me that  Halloween and autumn have quickly passed. Now that I ‘m paying attention, it’s surprising to see how many scraps have accumulated in a short time.

I think about the lack of snow and ice this winter. The soil in the backyard is dry and dusty. This compost is not decaying as quickly as I imagined.

I’m left with evidence of a recent juicing initiative in the household, wilted flowers that now serve another purpose and telltale clues to past meals. It’s heartening to know that this compost found a temporary residence here instead of decaying in a plastic bag destined for a city dump.

In spring, I’ll shovel this compost onto the garden beds and blend it into the soil with seeds and transplants. With luck and good weather, the remnants of the past will fuel growth for spring and summer vegetables and herbs and future meals. For now, I pass the winter keeping track of the stillness strewn about the ground in slow decay.

Forgotten, abandoned

and clinging, hanging on a line

until winter’s aging process

yields to summer’s utility

Last night the Kansas City Supper Club convened for an event organized by Winifred Wright at The Rieger Hotel Grill and Exchange, where Chef Howard Hanna prepared a Samoan meal. Nearly forty food lovers gathered for this feast featuring dishes representative of the chef’s heritage and culture.

I didn’t copy down the traditional names for each dish and drink, but they were listed on a mirror in the event room where we were seated.

The meal began with a brown beverage called ‘ava, a ceremonial drink made from a dried root that is mixed with water and strained before serving. The taste was earthy and slightly bitter.

A ceviche-like seafood salad arrived as the first course. Because Hanna didn’t have access to all of the fresh native seafood available in Samoa, he improvised with scallops.  This light salad dressed with citrus refreshed the palate and whet the appetite for heartier fare.

Main courses and sides included roast pork and chicken, canned corned beef that was sweet and surprising delicious, starchy taro root prepared similarly to mashed potatoes, and a mixture of seasoned greens with kale that approximated the type of greens used in Samoan cuisine. Bananas cooked in sweet coconut milk rounded out the meal.

The meal was a delicious introduction to traditional foods that everyone seemed to enjoy. The serving dishes went back mostly empty to the kitchen. Lively conversation, opinions, and jokes added to the fun social atmosphere. For my first outing with the KC Supper Club, it was a pleasure to meet a number of people that I had only interacted with online. The gathering reminded me how food is a social connector where people of different backgrounds can sit, bond, and learn about each other.

After the event, I stayed behind and chatted with Howard at the chef’s counter near the kitchen. We spoke about business briefly before discussing our respective Samoan and Thai heritage. Howard mentioned how he had grown up in Manhattan, Kansas as a kid with Samoan roots and a culture that extends over several thousand years.

The food we ate tonight was not an exact replication of what a traveler would find in Samoa, but these dishes were authentic. Authentic cuisine is a slippery notion. The ingredients, tools, geography, and conditions of a food’s origins and cultural associations will naturally vary when exported and prepared elsewhere. Using what is at hand, isn’t that authentic and true to the spirit of any cuisine?

The Thai dishes I make at home are derivative of my mother’s cooking and adapted to my taste. Her Thai cooking is similar to the food prepared by her mother and sisters half a world away, but it’s not the same food she grew up eating. Mom and I don’t have access to food from the land and sea there with the same freshness or local terroir, as the French say. We both cook food with a lineage that stretches across time and distance, but we take it in new directions based on memory, technique, and circumstance.

Similarly, Howard channels Samoan food memories from his relatives and direct experiences from eating food in Samoa as a child. He spoke about the power of cultural memory and how it shapes his approach to preparing traditional dishes for family, friends, and guests. Last night’s dinner was a rare opportunity to experience a fleeting taste of a distant culture’s cuisine in the heart of Kansas City.