midwest – Lauren Warnecke

Not Your Typical Memorial Day BBQ…

While most Midwestern Americans are whooping it up backyard barbeque style, I’ve got quite a different plan in mind. Memorial Day in St. Louis is probably the same as it is in Chicago, with the exception of a big ass dance festival at the Blanche M. Touhill Performing Arts Center. In lieu of brats and Bud Light, I’ll be high-browing it with some of the best dance companies in the Midwest (and the country) at the Spring To Dance Festival.

Fortunately my time here isn’t all work and no play. I get to play tourist by day and dance writer by night, and made a promise to myself to explore some new parts of St. Louis I didn’t see last year.

Lafayette Square was one such discovery.

Beautiful french-colonial style homes, a really big park, cobblestone streets, and pervasive greenery… this is clearly where the old money lives, and the closest I’ve come to the feeling of Paris in a long time. If ever in St Louis, skip the arch and come here. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’d like to live here.

Walk through the park, and be sure to dine at Eleven Eleven Mississippi.

The food is fresh, seasonal, and unpretentious. You’ll get great service, and a kitchen open to the dining room made Eleven Eleven one of the best food experiences I’ve had. Period.

So maybe my Memorial Day weekend is a little different than yours, but there will be plenty of time during the white pants season to sit in a lawn chair and drink beer.

St Louis Vacations

Summer draws to a close

ConnectFour1-3632 — Fall 2011 at Portage Park Farmer’s Market | Photo by Kelly Rose

We’re on the heels of my favorite season. The mornings now have a bite in the air, fashion scarves and sweaters are becoming imperative, and everything around me is turning into orange-y and amber hues. Though I’m a California girl at heart, I’ve lived in the Midwest for almost 25 years. The one thing about living here that has kept me from continually accosting my parents for moving us across the country is the leaves. Well, they have leaves in California, but they don’t turn orange and gold and burgundy.

Some people live life with rose-colored glasses; my glasses are burgundy.

Plus, the idea of not sweating profusely every time I go somewhere is highly appealing to me.

The farmer’s market is becoming particularly bountiful, and though it’s sad to see summer squash and tomatoes go out of my life, the beginning of fall means it’s “squirrel time”. What I mean is, I’m trying to make time to take everything that still just barely at it’s peak of freshness and dry it, freeze it or can it for the winter.

I’ve always wanted to make an attempt to preserve enough produce to make it through the winter without buying a shriveled up zucchini that was grown in the middle of Mexico and shipped to my local store on a refrigerator truck.

Wishful thinking…

I know that this isn’t the year for me to make this happen full stop, but nonetheless I’ve managed to buy and can or freeze 25 pounds of tomatoes, pickle a bunch of beets, blanch and freeze broccoli, eggplant, and green beans, and there is a batch of crispy squash chips in the oven as I type. I got a really big squash in my CSA box last week, was told it would be the last one, and, having eaten one squash too many, this is what I chose to do with it:

Squash Chips

Ingredients:

Zucchini or summer squash, thinly sliced and dried on a paper towel
Olive oil
Salt

Line a baking sheet (or two) with parchment paper or a silicone baking mat (spraying it with cooking spray works fine too). Arrange the squash slices in a single layer and coat with olive oil using a pastry brush. Sprinkle with a modest amount of salt and bake at 275-F for a LONG time (several hours). When they are firm and crispy, they’re done.

A great substitute for potato chips, use these chips up in about three days, stored in a plastic bag or wrapped in a tea towel

Starbucks Around the World: Sturgis, SD

I wasn’t AT ALL expecting to come across a Starbucks at the Black Hills Motorcycle Rally in Sturgis, SD. A five dollar latte just doesn’t really “go” with the whole – tough guys, topless women, Harley scene at the rally. So I literally squealed when I saw this little green flag with that beautiful siren proudly flying on Main Street in Sturgis. It wasn’t exactly a Starbucks, it was a beverage vendor who “proudly serves Starbucks coffee.” Usually I would scoff at this, but the vendors were a really nice guy from Michigan and his dad, and he gave me this vanilla frappuccino free just because I’m from the Midwest. So that gets you a healthy tip, and a big thumbs up from me.