What to do with too much mint?

From Maggie’s — Blog by Maggie Restivo

June 12, 2010

In April I planted some mint in a container on my deck. I decided to go with a container so it wouldn’t bully around the other herbs and veggies I planned on planting in my raised bed. I also hoped planting it in a container would help me to, well, contain it in general. That has not really been the case. It has over grown it’s container and tarted to wrap itself around the posts on my deck. My mom and I have taken to calling it “Mintzilla”.

Monday we started studying all things bar and beverage related at school. About half way through lecture on Monday a lightening bolt struck my brain! Suddenly I knew how to take down Mintzilla. I was going to infuse Mintzilla into some vodka and then enjoy it in fabulous cocktails all summer! On my way home from class I stopped by the store and picked up a 750 milliliter bottle of vodka. Thursday after class, I came home and conquered the beast. Mintzilla is now happily residing in that vodka bottle, stored away in the cabinet above my refrigerator. Tomorrow I will taste my concoction and decide where to go with it from there.

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Day 1....maybe I should have thought about this a little more....

From Maggie’s — Blog by Maggie Restivo

February 17, 2010

And so it begins, 40 days and nights of cooking vegetarian at home. This week is an incredibly hec-tic week to kick off the vegging out challenge. If I had to pick the craziest night of this hec-tic week it would most definitely be tonight. Tomorrow is my written and cooking midterm at school (I drew veal scallopini with Marsala cream sauce, herb roasted potatoes, sauted escarole, and another veggie of my choice). Still being without a car is not helping my situation because my ride showed up way late, we had to stop by the nearest Whole Foods on the way home because no place in my town (or for three towns over) sells quinoa OR silken tofu, and we got stuck in rush hour traffic. So it was 7p.m. by the time I got home.

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The Guidelines

From Maggie’s — Blog by Maggie Restivo

January 30, 2010

I have finally decided on some personal guidelines for the 40 days of vegging out. Being that I am in my 10 week protein class at school I will not be able to cut meat completely out of my diet. However, that is not the point of this challenge. This personal challenge is about cooking a variety of satisfying vegetarian meals at home over a lengthy period of time. Keeping that in mind I have decided on a few guidelines to follow for this challenge.

1) The only meat I will eat is what we cook at school. I will take the smallest portion possible.

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Vegging Out

From Maggie’s — Blog by Maggie Restivo

January 21, 2010

This week at culinary school we did some vegetarian cooking. A vegetarian life style has always seemed like a huge challenge to me. When I go out to eat I never see many vegetarian options. When I do see vegetarian menu item they rarely seem original or well thought out. Today in class me made a delicious vegetarian lasagna. While we were sitting in the break area eating a few fellow students and myself started discussing how hard it would be to feed ourselves satisfying vegetarian meals for an extended period of time. Then the discussion took an unexpected (not really) turn to about how lent was coming up. So a few of us have challenged ourselves to eat vegetarian (school meals not withstanding, we just started our proteins phase so it’s going to be 10 weeks of meat at school.) for all of Lent.

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Pamamisu follow-up

From Maggie’s — Blog by Maggie Restivo

December 22, 2009

I just found out this afternoon that the recipe developed by a fellow classmate and myself was selected by a panel of PAMA Cooking Contest Judges to advance to the final judging!!! I have to say that I am pretty gosh darn proud of Eric and myself. We had about 30 roughly 3 days from the time we found out about the contest until the time we had to submit our recipes. We only had one shot at getting it right and had to hope like heck that our brains and our palettes were on the same page.

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Original Recipe- and I don’t mean KFC!

From Maggie’s — Blog by Maggie Restivo

November 24, 2009

Last week a magical flier appeared outside of my bakeshop classroom door. It proclaimed that Pama Liqueur was holding a recipe contest on Facebook. The challenge: to create an original recipe using at least 3 tablespoons of Pama Liqueur. The recipe had to fit into one of three categories- appetizers, entrees, or desserts. The prize: An all expense paid trip for two, to the 2010 Food and Wine Class in Aspen. After a few minutes of excited discussion about how cool it would be to win, we read the fine print and realized we had 6 days to develop and submit our recipes. The time restrictions began to sink in. Many of my classmates declared there was no way anyone could develop, perfect, and submit a winning recipe in less than a week. Only two of us remained determined to meet the challenge.

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Duck, Duck,....Duck!

From Maggie’s — Blog by Maggie Restivo

November 7, 2009

Every 10 weeks school holds a master class, usually taught by one of the chefs on our advisory board. The latest class was last Friday, taught by Chef Eric Brenner. For those of you familiar with the St. Louis area, he is the chef/owner of Moxy Bistro, and Chef Brenner is also responsible for the new menu at Molly’s in Soulard. I was fortunate enough to be able to attend his class.

Chef Brenner has a great appreciation for the flavors of France. The ingredient he chose for the class was duck. Prior to the start of the master class that was all I knew about the class and pretty much all I knew about duck. I showed up ready learn and excited to get my hands on my chef’s knife again. (the last 10 weeks have been baking...needless to say everyone in class has been itching to get their hands on a knife again! I don’t count using it at home because it doesn’t quite match the excitement I feel when I am in class with my chefs at school.)There was a nervous excitement about the kitchen as we waited for Chef Brenner to arrive. You could almost see the thoughts running through everyone’s mind- would he be mean or nice? strict, sweet, quiet our in our faces? And what the heck would we be doing with duck?

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The All Star Game Pt. 2: Let’s Get It On

From Maggie’s — Blog by Maggie Restivo

October 20, 2009

After a weekend of prep and transporting food from the kitchen in the basement of the Edward Jones Dome to the Hot and Cold Tents, more prep commenced on site. We plated and covered and garnished all manner of dishes. As we worked in the back Classic Party Rentals set up the main event tent. As Monday night’s Homerun Dervy party grew nearer, the tension in the tents grew thicker. We were divided into back of house and front of house crews. The back of house crews would stay in the hot and cold tents and continue to plate sides dishes, and desserts. The front of house crews would be working at “action stations” located throughout each of the tents neighborhoods. I was placed on a FOH crews and stationed in The Loop neighborhood (which was the Missouri Grass-fed Beef Carvery). After arriving at my action station I learned I would be one of the carvers, the only female carver....YIKES!!!! For the Derby party I would be carving a beef brisket butt. Hearing that made me considerably less nervous. The majority of my restaurant experience is in BBQ so at least I knew how to carve a brisket butt.

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The All Star Game Part 1: The Set Up

From Maggie’s — Blog by Maggie Restivo

September 12, 2009

In July the big buzz in St. Louis was the MLB All-Star game. It had been decades since St. Louis had hosted the game so everyone was very excited. As the game drew closer the town was tying up lose ends, and cleaning up the streets. Restaurants were spit shinning the silver and putting out the good china (you know, the kind you use when company is coming!) The space surrounding the new Busch Stadium started to fill with sponsor tents, MLB activities, a small Cooperstown exhibit, and a very large hard walled tent. The very large hard wall tent was surrounded by two smaller tents (and by smaller I mean large, just not very large). A very large arch was painted on the floor of the very large hard walled tent. As walls went up on one of the smaller, large tents cold air began to flow into it.

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ugh....oh and yay - biscotti!

From Maggie’s — Blog by Maggie Restivo

September 9, 2009

Well some joker on the stltoday.com’s restaurant review page is telling everyone that that BBQ restaurant I work for gets our ribs shipped in, already smoked, from the original location. Clearly, he 1) has not done his homework 2) does not remember the news coverage we got back in April when some lady crashed her car into our 2 SMOKERS and we had to shut down for the afternoon.

BBQ is a very subjective style of food. We are used to hearing a lot of “So and So’s was better” because it is the style of BBQ (or sauce or rub, or prep technique)that person has grown up on. But to spread complete lies like that is just wrong.

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