The Roanoke Times | File photo.

Thanks to blog reader Debbie, who shared with me a link to a recent Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article about Roanoke. This is the most comprehensive travel piece about our fair city I’ve ever read. The writer, Gretchen McKay, apparently traveled here with her family to run the Blue Ridge Half Marathon in April.

While here, she squeezed in an amazing amount of experience. The article covers outdoor activities, historic places, museums, shopping, and our favorite topic – FOOD!

I’m going to share a restaurant-related excerpt from her article. I’d encourage everyone to read the entire piece and tell me what you thought of her assessment of our region.

“My husband and I? We hit Roanoke’s dining scene pretty hard, squeezing in more than a half-dozen meals over the weekend. We started on Friday morning with breakfast at Thelma’s Chicken & Waffles on Market Street, and by Saturday night we’d also sampled the peanut soup at the Roanoke Hotel, wood-fired pizza at Corned Beef & Co., fried-green-tomato BLT’s at Billy’s and incredible sushi at Formosa Lounge (served in glowing martini glasses). Helping to wash it all down were some top-notch mojitos at Habana Cafe, a Cuban restaurant on Market Square, and local craft brews at Blue 5. (All the running makes me hungry! At least that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.)

Roanoke also has gourmet bakeries, sandwich and ice cream shops and restaurants focused on sustainable cuisine. On Sunday, I had one of the best brunches of my life at Local Roots, a farm-to-table restaurant in charming Grandin Village, a district listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Two miles from downtown, it also has a restored 1930s theater, an old-fashioned ice cream parlor and vintage shops.”

The Sriracha grilled cheese is the newest flavor at Pop’s. Photo courtesy Pop’s Ice Cream & Soda Bar on Facebook.

Esquire magazine honored National Grilled Cheese Month in April by blogging about grilled cheeses from across the map on its Eat Like a Man blog. A former Roanoke Times online intern, Katrina Tulloch, freelanced one blog entry for Esquire about Roanoke’s finest location for grilled cheese sandwiches: Pop’s Ice Cream & Soda Bar in Grandin Village.

Specifically, Katrina wrote about the $6.50 Swiss Melt at Pop’s, which is made with Swiss cheese, artichoke hearts, horseradish and Dijon mustard. It is one of about a dozen different kinds of grilled cheese made at Pop’s.

Other grilled cheeses featured on the blog during the month were the pecorino and almond pressed sandwich from Tartine Bakery in San Francisco, the ropa vieja from Sugarcane Raw Bar & Grill in Miami, the Caprese at Cheesie’s Pub & Grub in Chicago, and the grilled cheese at Bouchon Bakery in New York City.

To round out the month, Esquire put all of the sandwiches featured for the month up to vote by Esquire.com readers. The winner was recently announced, and Pop’s came in THIRD place behind only Cheesie’s of Chicago and Roxy’s Grilled Cheese Truck in Boston. According to the bar graph on Eat Like a Man, Pop’s pulled in about 17 percent of the vote.

I know part of that is because Katrina promoted the heck out of the contest on her social media channels, which likely drove a lot of Roanokers to go on Esquire.com and vote for Pop’s. Thanks for all the love for the Roanoke food scene, Katrina. And congratulations to Pop’s! Maybe this is the place for Diners, Drive-ins and Dives?

Anybody familiar with Pop’s is probably not surprised they can hold their own against grilled cheese makers across the country. If you have never been to Pop’s, get thee to the shop in a hurry to see why people love it so much. You can read more about Pop’s on their Facebook page here.

Cellphone apps are extremely popular, and that’s no different in the restaurant world.

Currently, there are apps that help you make reservations at restaurants, find restaurants in unfamiliar territory, seek out sources for special dietary needs, show user reviews of restaurants, find your way to specific restaurants or allow you to see other people’s food pictures. I’m probably just scratching the surface there.

Everybody has an opinion about the best restaurant apps out there. Chow.com thinks the top nine apps are Open Table, Vegout, Menu Pages, Around Me, Foodspotting, Urbanspoon, Yelp, Near+Now, and Citysearch. About.com adds Zagat to Go, Alfred, Tipulator, Wine Ratings Guide and Oysterpedia to the list. That last one is an app devoted entirely to the popular seafood item; it offers “listings for over 200 oyster varieties. Each listing includes detailed information including flavor, size, harvest location, and tasting notes,” according to About.

Mashable.com put its 35 favorite restaurant apps in a graphic chart that you can see here.

In addition to apps that help readers choose between the many dining options available in this world, some restaurants are having their own specific apps created. These allow customers to do things like place take-out orders or advance dine-in orders, make reservations, peruse the menu and map the location.

I’m interested to hear your thoughts on restaurant apps. Which ones do you use, and why do you like them so much?

Photo courtesy National Cattlemen’s Beef Associaton.

I stumbled across a great blog recently while searching for a new way to prepare venison tenderloin. It’s called Hunter-Angler-Gardener-Cook, and as you can guess based on the name, it’s written by a guy who loves to hunt, fish, garden and eat.

On that blog, I found a recipe for a sauce called Cumberland sauce. The writer, Hank Shaw, describes it as “the ultimate wild game sauce” because it includes notes of sweet, tart, savory and spicy. The beautiful thing about this sauce is that it would pair just as well with a nice beef steak or roast as it does with venison or duck.

When I made this sauce to go with a roasted venison tenderloin, my husband declared it one of the best sauces I’ve ever made. It’s going in my recipe box, and if you like a good pan sauce with dark meat, it should go in yours. My substitutions were: 1/4 sweet onion for the shallot, since I didn’t have a shallot; Srirachi for the cayenne; and I used the regular beef stock instead of the demi-glace, which might cause it to take a wee bit longer to reduce the sauce, but not much.

A note on the currant jelly: You should be able to find it at any decent grocery store. I found it at the Towne Square Kroger store near Sam’s Club in Roanoke. It was $3.50 per jar, which is a little bit on the high side but you only use 1/4 cup and you’ll be able to find lots of recipes that call for currant jelly should you want to cook with the rest instead of spreading it on bread (which is also yummy).

Read more »

For today’s Front Burner column, I wrote about the websites I usually visit in order to find great restaurant recommendations before I travel. The column was inspired by our recent vacation, which was a cruise out of Ft. Lauderdale with stops in the Bahamas, St. Maarten, St. Thomas and Grand Turk, Turks and Caicos.

The very day we returned, the Carnival cruise ship Triumph suffered the engine room fire that stranded it in the Gulf of Mexico. The miserable conditions on board were all over the news, but that won’t stop me from taking another cruise. In fact, this was my second cruise and I can’t wait to take another.

I understand that cruises are not for everybody. I fell in love with this travel method because it’s a very affordable way to visit several different countries in one vacation. I don’t know that I could ever book travel to and between all those places, along with accommodations every night and food every day, for less money than a cruise. Even if I could, it would be a lot more work.

I still love traveling directly to one location and spending as much time as I want there, and I have stopped at ports where I wished I had several more days to explore (Dublin!). But getting a short peek at a destination helps me to determine whether I’d like to spend more time there in the future (Dublin!).

Before we get to the food, which is, after all, what this blog is all about, I want to address the comments I’ve heard from folks who say they’d never cruise now after what they saw happen to the Carnival Triumph and the Costa Concordia. My response is that there is risk inherent in any type of travel, whether it be in a car, a plane, on a train or on a ship. If you don’t want to take the risk, you don’t travel. I’d rather be on a cruise trip that’s in trouble than on an airplane that’s going down, but that’s just me.

Read more »

Celebrity chef Guy Fieri.

Even people who never land on the New York Times website and who never read restaurant reviews have been talking this week about a scorching review of Guy Fieri’s new Times Square restaurant, Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar.

The review by Pete Wells was styled as a series of questions directed straight at Fieri, a celebrity chef and host of the popular Food Network show, “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.” Although Fieri owns nearly a dozen restaurants already, Wells was nowhere near impressed by the Times Square place. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever read a more negative review. It earned zero stars and a “poor” rating.

A sampling of some of Wells’ zingers in the review:

* “What exactly about a small salad with four or five miniature croutons makes Guy’s Famous Big Bite Caesar (a) big (b) famous or (c) Guy’s, in any meaningful sense?”

* “Hey, did you try that blue drink, the one that glows like nuclear waste? The watermelon margarita? Any idea why it tastes like some combination of radiator fluid and formaldehyde?”

Read more »

John William Houston of Floyd County helps to raise pigs for Tendergrass Farms. Photo by Rebecca Barnett l The Roanoke Times.

FLOYD COUNTY — My visit to a farm last week inspired the same sentimental feelings those trips always do.

As I scratched a pig’s back and laughed at the ornery turkeys pecking a hole in a feed bag, I thought about how neat it would be to live on a farm.

But then I yanked my thoughts back to reality, because I know farming is one of the most difficult, dangerous and least profitable jobs — especially livestock farming, which brings with it prohibitive processing laws and high feed costs.

That reality gives me great respect for what Floyd County resident David Maren is trying to do with Tendergrass Farms, a new online store that sells grass-fed Virginia meat and ships it all over the country.

“What Tendergrass Farms is offering is convenience for both sides,” said Maren, 23. “We’re trying to do the legwork so it isn’t hard to be the farmer or hard to be the consumer.”

To continue reading this column, click here.

To visit the Tendergrass Farms website, click here.

The folks over at The Daily Meal, a national food blog, got curious about what Americans have been interested in cooking these days. So they conducted some research, using the most-searched terms on their own website and several other leading search engines in the country.

According to The Daily Meal editor Anne Dolce’s report, here’s how they continued the research: “From there, we dove even deeper into our research to find out not only what foods the country was craving, but what people wanted to do with those foods. By using average monthly searches for highly searched recipes, we crafted a unique algorithm that weighted The Daily Meal searches against other search engines to yield a search score for each recipe that would help us rank the recipes.”

I met Paul Hanstedt when I was a student in the English program at Roanoke College and he was a professor. Although I was never lucky enough to land in one of his classes, we have kept in touch through the wonders of Facebook.

Paul is a talented writer who recently published a book called “Hong Konged: One Modern American Family’s (Mis)adventures in the Gateway to China.” Just one of the many (mis)adventures Paul had in Hong Kong was the discovery of private kitchens, which are essentially tiny restaurants set up in people’s private homes.

Some folks wouldn’t be brave enough to try these hole-in-the-wall dining spots, but Paul was. He has written an awesome essay about the best one he found, and the essay was published on a travel blog called Roads & Kingdoms. I found it fascinating, and I think you will, too. So click here to read it.

Enjoy your weekend, everyone. Don’t eat any shark fin by mistake.

It is the pesky question that haunts millions of people every day before they go to work (or the night before, if they’re proactive people): “What am I going to eat for lunch tomorrow?”

Some folks buy lunch at a cafeteria or restaurant five days per week. They don’t cook, or they don’t have time to pack lunches, or they just aren’t concerned about the financial or nutritional affects of dining out that often. That’s cool, but that’s not me.

I like to eat lunch out about once per week — it gives me an opportunity to try new restaurants, which provides fodder for my blog and columns. On those other days, I’m standing in front of the refrigerator scratching my head just like a lot of other people. Lately, I’ve been pretty good about packing big lunch salads with leafy greens, fresh tomatoes and cucumbers, any other vegetable I have on hand, kidney or garbanzo beans, and some cheese. Another great summer option is the good old tomato sandwich – I had one of those yesterday, washed down with some cucumber water.

But even those gorgeous salads will get a bit old if I try to force myself to eat one 4 days per week, and the fresh tomatoes will not last forever, alas. I imagine if I had to pack lunches for children every day, as well, and my head explodes.

I’ve been wandering around Pinterest and some other sites lately and I’ve seen a few ideas I thought I’d share:

* Easy Lunchboxes – This is a site designed primarily to sell you reusable, three-compartment lunch containers. But if you click on “Neat ideas” and then “Yummy lunch gallery,” you’ll find that there are some 150+ pictures of packed lunches submitted by users.

A couple of my favorites: Cold grilled chicken strips (finger-friendly!); egg salad wrapped in a lettuce leaf; a yogurt “sundae” topped with fresh or dried fruit; a few chocolate chips and a few mini-marshmallows; cold pasta salad; meatballs; and mini muffin quiche.

A great hint from this site: Use silicone muffin cups as reusable ramekins to corral stuff like goldfish crackers, cheese cubes or Jell-O.

Read more »

Inage courtesy of PBS.org/food

The talented and delightful Julia Child, who taught so many people to be more adventurous in the kitchen, would have turned 100 years old on August 15. Even though she died in 2004 (just two days shy of her 92nd birthday), fans of the “French Chef” are remembering her on what would have been her big day.

In particular, PBS has planned a big celebration featuring special programming and online features. They’re encouraging folks to cook a favorite Julia Child recipe and share pictures and comments about it on their website or Facebook page. They’ve also got some other commemorative coverage planned. Here are the details:

* Cook your own version of a classic Julia Child recipe, then share pictures or thoughts by tweeting with the hashtag #CookforJulia. Or you can post pictures and comments at PBS Food or on the PBS Food Facebook page.

* At PBS Food, you can see almost 100 “exclusive, limited-time full episodes from: In Julia’s Kitchen with Master Chefs, Cooking with Master Chefs, The French Chef Classics, Baking with Julia and three Cooking in Concert specials.” There’s also recipes, articles, links and a Julia personality quiz there.

Read more »

* Salem High School Culinary Arts Director Jeff Shupe was supposed to take over the Chef’s Circle at the Salem Farmers Market tomorrow (Saturday), but something’s come up and he will be unable to do it. In his place, the fantastic Chris Parkhurst of Firefly Fare in the Roanoke City Market Building has agreed to fill in.

Those of you who dine at Firefly Fare know Chris is a master with fresh, local ingredients and makes some killer vegetarian dishes in addition to meats. The Chef’s Circle is free and it begins at 9:30 a.m. It is recommended that you bring a lawn chair if you don’t want to stand the entire time.

* Big changes are afoot at Pomegranate restaurant in Troutville. On July 24, they will start serving lunch and launch a new menu. The lunch menu, which will be available 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, includes a burger, Philly cheesesteak, chicken strips and BBQ, as well as salads and side dishes.

The new dinner menu features small plates such as conch fritters with Caribbean mayonnaise and blood orange barbecued shrimp with margarita-marinated grilled watermelon. Examples from the large plate section include vegetable-crusted salmon and chicken puttanesca.

Read more »

My cake pendant from Inedible Jewelry.

This past weekend we went to Campout East, a music festival at Glen Maury Park in Buena Vista that featured two of our favorite bands, Cracker and Southern Culture on the Skids. Several food vendors were set up on the site, as was an amazing artist/crafter/jewelry maker who founded a business called Inedible Jewelry with her sister.

Jessica and Susan Partain make and market these itsy, bitsy food items made out of polymer clay. They make them into earrings, cufflinks, charms and more. As you can see from checking out their Etsy site, their masterpieces include hamburgers complete with tiny toppings, little lattice-crusted pies, olives, sushi, honey bears, tacos, doughnuts and TONS of other items.

Well, I couldn’t walk away from this tent without making a purchase, so I settled on this adorable slice-of-cake charm, which I’m using as a necklace pendant on a silver chain. Despite the size of this picture, it is really quite small – about the size of the last digit of my pinkie finger, or smaller.

Check out how incredibly detailed it is, right down to the swirls of frosting, the colored sprinkles and even the TEXTURE of the cake layers themselves! I just have to shake my head when I think of how much work went into it.

Inedible Jewelry is based in Charlottesville, so technically it’s a bit outside of our coverage area. But you can purchase the product online at the Etsy site. The sisters have received a lot of press attention, including an appearance on the Martha Stewart Show, which you can watch here. You’ll also find instructions at that link for making tiny lemon or lime slice charms.

When you watch Jessica make a lemon slice charm on the Martha Stewart Show, you’ll see how much work it requires. Martha seems a little baffled to me, actually. I think this is one of those things you’d be better off letting someone else make for you!

If you checked out the Etsy site, did you see a food item you’d wear?

Being the big food lovers that you are, I would not be surprised if many of you are already using Pinterest, the hottest new social networking tool on the Internet. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of folks out there who don’t know what it is or have not had a chance to check it out.

Pinterest is, essentially, a virtual bulletin board where you can “pin” images of all sorts of interesting things, from recipes to works of art to pieces of furniture. These pins almost always include a link back to the original source. So if I pin a photo of a delicious stuffed pork tenderloin, it really isn’t going to do anybody else any good unless it links back to the recipe for said delicious stuffed pork tenderloin. Because of these attached links, Pinterest is a great way to create and maintain a collection of visual bookmarks, so to speak, that lead you back to information you want to save.

I love Pinterest, and here’s why:

1. Because it is like eye candy, and I find it very pleasurable and stress-relieving to peruse the boards and look at all those pretty images.

2. Because I can share links with others, learn what interests others, show a bit of my own personality all WITHOUT having to read stupid comments, status lines, arguments and more. I am all for promoting the written word (obviously), but sometimes you have to tune that out. While commenting is possible on pins, I have yet to see anything insulting or offensive. Now, I’m sure the trolls will get there eventually because they’ve slithered into all kinds of nooks on the web. But Pinterest comments usually are along the lines of: “Ooh, that’s a pretty wedding cake” or “Oh, I can’t wait to try this recipe” or “Hahaha!! That just made me almost fall out of my chair laughing!”
Read more »

If you have not already, check out Karen Hager’s new gardening blog, “Down to Earth.”

Karen writes a column of the same name which appears in The Roanoke Times Extra section every other Saturday, so you may already be familiar with her writing voice and the deep level of gardening knowledge she possesses. Karen launched this blog a couple of weeks ago but it is really starting to ramp up now as we head into PRIME gardening season in Virginia.

I am personally very excited about this new blog because I’m a gardener-in-training. I was raised by two parents with very green thumbs but my thumbs so far are more of a yellow shade. Gardening is one of those hobbies that really takes practice, but when you have success it is so gratifying (plus, very few things feel as good to me as a hard day of work in the garden followed by a refreshing shower and a cold beer or glass of lemonade). I’ve learned and implemented something new every year.

So far this year, I’ve expanded my herb garden and my vegetable garden. Boy, cutting out grass by hand with an edging shovel is really back-breaking work, but now I have more space for my plants to grow. I have planted two zucchini plants which are so far taking off, but I plan to keep a close eye on the weather. Next up: tomatoes!

Karen welcomes gardening questions on her blog and also encourages experienced gardeners to share their observations and insights with the rest of her readers. So head on over and have fun! And don’t forget, when you are out there in the yard, to wear a hat and sunscreen!

I’d like to draw your attention to a post over on the RefreshRT blog, which was created to provide our readers with a place to offer suggestions as we work to redesign Roanoke.com.

This particular post is about comments. Specifically, what do you think should be the rules for commenting on Roanoke.com? The RefreshRT team is looking for your top three rules.

I rather like this rule from TUAB (The Unofficial Apple Weblog) that was shared on the RefreshRT post:

“Be nice, stay relevant and don’t say anything you wouldn’t say to someone in person.”

But that’s just me. If you can provide some input, please click here to read more and comment on this topic. Thanks!

The Roanoke Times l File photo

Update: I found some stores in this area that carry powdered peanut butter. Please see my comment below for details. End update.

I’ve heard of powdered peanut butter before but I’ve never had an opportunity to try it. For March, which is National Peanut Month, I received an email with a gluten-free recipe (below) that called for this ingredient. My curiosity was piqued again, so I wrote to a company and asked for a sample. I’m eager to receive it and see what I think, because this is one of those things that just sounds too good to be true.

I say that because powdered peanut butter supposedly has 75 to 85 percent fewer fat calories than regular peanut butter. It sounds like a Frankenstein food, but I looked into how it is made and it sounds fairly simple: Roasted peanuts are pressed until all of the oils come out, leaving nothing but a floury substance behind. One of the companies that makes powdered peanut butter, Bell Plantation, saves the peanut oil and sells that separately.

Bell Plantation’s product, called PB2, contains (per 2 Tbsp. serving) 2.8 grams of fat, .55 grams saturated fat, 0 grams trans fat, 0 grams cholesterol, 94 mg sodium, 3.7 g carbs, 1 gram sugar, and 4.3 grams protein. The listed ingredients are peanuts, sugar and salt. Some – particularly raw foodies – may be turned off by the fact that the peanuts are roasted first.

Powdered peanut butter is reconstituted with water to form a paste that can be used just like regular peanut butter. From what I understand, you can add as much water as you like to achieve the consistency you like. According to Bell Plantation’s website, you can also mix it with jams or jellies or fruit juice or dip fruit straight in the powder as one might dip strawberries in sugar.
Read more »

Ar-ti-san:
1. noun: A worker who practices a trade or handicraft. One that produces something (as cheese or wine) in limited quantities often using traditional methods
2. adjective: pertaining to or noting high-quality, distinctive products made in small quantities. Example: artisan beer.

Notice that this definition of the word “artisan” does not include any references to mass-produced chips or chain restaurant pizza. However, bags of mass-produced chips and chain restaurant pizza are being marketed as “artisan,” as are many other products.

USA Today noted this word’s rise in popularity in a recent article, which was picked up by the news/gossip blog Gawker. A word of warning: If foul language offends you, you may want to read the USA Today story and skip the Gawker story. However, if foul language amuses you, you’ll probably enjoy Gawker’s take on this.

As the USA Today story points out, everyone from Domino’s to Tostitos to Starbucks is jumping on the artisenal bandwagon. Is it accurate for them to use that word to describe the products? Is it fair?

Read more »

Uncrate.com

Today is one of those days when I need to clean out the “refrigerator” and offer a bunch of leftovers for consumption. But like a lot of actual leftovers, some of this food news is pretty darn good.

New addition: Oktoberfest beer tasting at Wine Gourmet
Wine Gourmet, located at 3524 Electric Road, Roanoke (Promenade Park), is hosting a special beer tasting this Friday, Sept. 30, from 5 to 8 p.m.
Aaron Layman, the beer buyer for Wine Gourmet, said local distributors will be on site sampling out more than 10 German beers and craft beers. Brats and beer bread will also be available, and it’s all FREE!
If you have any questions, you can contact the shop at 400-8466.

Local boy does well
A Roanoke native, Daniel Mowles, works as executive chef at the Roger Smith Hotel in New York, NY. According to his uncle, Roanoke resident Jeff Fletcher, “Daniel was born and reared in Roanoke and is now in NYC by way of the Cordon Bleu in London with stops in Roanoke at Metro! and in Miami Beach along the way.”
Fletcher sent me an email with a link to a recent New York Times article about a special dinner prepared by Mowles and featuring Civil War-era foods. Check out the article here.

Chocolate contest winners to go to state fair
Three locals who won the Everybody Loves Chocolate contest at the Salem Fair will now advance to the Virginia State Fair level of competition. The Everybody Loves Chocolate contest is sponsored by the Virginia Egg Council. The state competition is Oct. 1. The local winners and their concoctions are:
* Kerrington Dowdy, Salem — Chocolate Lover’s Favorite Cake
* Catherine Wortman, Bedford — Chocolate Sour Cream Pound Cake
* Kaileigh Dowdy, Salem — Really Rocky Road Brownies
Kerrington and Kaileigh Dowdy appear to be related. I will update you on how they do at the state fair and work on getting those recipes. Good luck, folks!

Read more »

One of my favorite songs is “Strawberry Letter #23″ as performed by Shuggie Otis. And over the past week, as I received a great recipe for strawberry shortcake from a reader and tasted some delicious strawberry lemon shortcake bars made by my colleague, I just couldn’t get that original version out of my head. Rainbows and waterfalls (and strawberries) run through my mind…

It’s appropriate. Strawberry season in Virginia is almost upon us.

In early to mid-May, often right around Mother’s Day, local strawberry farms open for the picking. And there is no strawberry like a strawberry you plucked yourself, brought home, rinsed briefly and scarfed standing over the kitchen sink.

Here are a couple of pick-your-own-strawberry farms in our region. You should DEFINITELY call in advance to see if the strawberries are ready before you go.

* Dansby’s Strawberry Farm at 4481 Colonial Turnpike in Rocky Mount will have berries this year, and they are expected to ripen in the next couple of weeks. The phone number is (540) 576-3658.

* Scott’s Strawberry Farm is at 5234 Joppa Mill Rd., Moneta. Phone number (540) 297-7917. When I called today, I got a voicemail greeting that said the berries are not ready yet but call back after May 1. UPDATE: Scott’s will have a Strawberry Festival at the farm on May 21 and 22 with live music, horse and buggy rides, delicious strawberry ice cream and other treats. Parking fee $2. Call for more details.

* If you are near South Boston or want to drive down that way, you can check out Dean Puryear Farms at 3191 Huell Matthews Highway, South Boston, VA 24592. Phone: (434) 575-7307 or 517-0237 (night)

Read more »

Hi boys and girls, ladies and gents. I would like to pass along the following food news:

* The Hotel Roanoke and Conference Center will celebrate Earth Hour on Saturday, March 26 between 8:30 and 9:30 p.m. by turning off all of the lights. That means dinner and drinks at the Regency Room or the Pine Room Pub will be by candle light. Sounds romantic – check it out.

* The Food Channel (Foodchannel.com) has created a new online store where you can buy a lot of the products and gadgets you see on their shows. Even if you do not get The Food Channel, it is a fun site to peruse. I see “I [heart] the Gulf” t-shirts, with two shrimp forming the heart, and proceeds going to Gulf Coast fishermen. I also see gourmet foods, cookware, wines and more.

* Tabasco is finally joining other makers of Buffalo sauce. What took them so long? Anyway, Tabasco Buffalo Style Hot Sauce should soon be hitting shelves at a store near you, if it has not already. It will retail for $2.65-$3.99 per 5-ounce bottle. Do you think they’ll be able to take on the competition? I dunno, I sure do love my Frank’s Red Hot!

The staff at The Daily Meal apparently got together and brainstormed the best food- and drink-related inventions and discoveries of all time, and their list of the top 50, ranked in order of importance, is pretty entertaining.

Editor Colman Andrews writes, “What we ended up with is a list of things that we, yes, simply couldn’t cook — or eat and/or drink — without. As usual with such compendiums, we have been both selective and subjective. We’ve probably missed some obvious and vital items, and we have frankly allowed ourselves to have a little fun here and there.”

So, they know we aren’t going to agree with all of them (drink tabs? Well, they are number 50) and will probably be able to come up with a few we would have added if we’d been sitting around that table. The one I question most, besides drink tabs, is teflon ( No. 43). The one I would’ve had a hard time disqualifying is electricity. A bit broad, yes, but if you’re going to include fire on the list, and a bunch of appliances run by electricity, then maybe electricity.

However, I have to admit that I actually enjoyed their “10 Food and Drink Inventions We Didn’t Need” list better than the Top 50. Possibly because I like snark, but also because who hasn’t purchased or taken an appliance or gadget we think is going to be really useful, only to later realize it’s a huge waste of space? Usually these items are relegated to shelves in the basement for a while, then to the yard sale pile, before I get rid of them completely.

At the moment, I have a special tray just for serving jellied cranberry sauce in the basement, for example.

I agree with 9 out of the 10 useless inventions. Personally, I like having a wine stopper on hand because some wine corks – particularly those plastic ones – can be devilish to get back in the bottle. Also, I love my combination wine stopper/pourer.

What would you add to or subtract from either of these lists?

You’re hanging out in an airport terminal. Bored out of your mind at the DMV. Waiting for your laundry to finish drying at the ‘mat. Wherever you are, if you can access the Internet from your mobile phone, you can find out what this crazy redhead is up to on the old Fridge Magnet blog.

That’s right! The Roanoke Times/Roanoke.com has a spiffy new mobile website that makes surfing for local news and entertainment easier than ever. Of course, if you are in a foodie mood, you can read this blog, food columns and restaurant reviews. But the mobile site will give you access to tons of other info, as well.

As you can see in the screen grab here, the first thing you’ll notice when you log on to http://m.roanoke.com is breaking news. As you scroll down, you will see severe weather alerts and road conditions, the latest from the blogs, and that day’s most-read stories.

See the top, where it says “Latest,” “Topics,” “Search” and “Tools”? Well, if you hit “Topics,” it will take you to a nifty page filled with icons where subject matter has already been aggregated for your ease of use. The topic icons include Roanoke news, NRV news, blogs, Virginia Tech sports, UVa. sports, weather, food, arts, movies and music, varsity sports, our community tabs, sports, lifestyle, retail news, opinion, crime, business and real estate, politics and outdoors. WHEW! It’s a lot to play around with.

If you don’t see the Fridge Magnet blog on the “Latest” page, all you need to do is go to the “Topics” page, tap the blogs icon and scroll down until you find it. Feel free to leave comments from your mobile! And we would be so grateful if you like the site enough to update your bookmarks.

If you have any questions, concerns or comments about our mobile site, just let us know.

Photo courtesy ldenny27/Flickr

A tisket, a tasket, I’ve got a bunch of random yet tasty info in my basket. Let me dump it out here:

* The St. Patrick’s Day Parade is coming up next weekend in our fine city, and Wine Gourmet on Franklin Road in Roanoke does not want to be left out of the party. They are having an “Erin Go Brew” beer tasting event on Friday (March 11) from 5 to 8 p.m., so you can wet your whistle in anticipation of the next day’s festivities.

The tasting will feature 12 different beers, including Guinness’s stronger-brewed Foreign Extra Stout, Lagunitas Hop Stoopid (which I am told is hard to find in Roanoke) and a number of varieties from Shooting Creek Brewery in Floyd. There will also be snacks such as Irish soda bread, and Irish tunes playing. That reminds me that I need to try and make Irish soda bread again. The last time I tried, it tasted like a salt lick for deer. I’m sure theirs will be much better, so go and see Aaron and the crew!

* The Farm Bureau Women’s Committee in Botetourt County is putting together a cookbook as a fundraiser to support the “Ag in the Classroom” program. 100 percent of the proceeds will go to the program, but they only have two weeks to gather 400 recipes. Ahhhhh!! I am going to send them one or two for this great cause, and I hope you will, too! Just e-mail your recipes to bcfbwcookbook@gmail.com by March 15. For more information, check out Cathy Benson’s Botetourt View blog.

Read more »

www.vintageadbrowser.com

Here comes another fun tip from The Roanoke Times librarian Belinda Harris, who writes “Looking Back,” a column that runs in every Monday’s issue. Belinda has been mighty busy lately, because this year, the newspaper’s is celebrating 125 years in business! We are seeking keepsakes and reader memories from the past century and a quarter. If you have a cool old issue or story to contribute, or if you just want to see some vintage photographs, click here.

Back on topic: Belinda recently ran across a fantastic website and forwarded the link to me. Vintageadbrowser.com offers a collection of old advertisements, some of which date back to the 1800s. When you hit the gateway page for the site, you will see a whole bunch of categories. Check out “food” or “drinks.”

You’ll see the little girl with the little curl right in the middle of her forehead selling Kellogg’s corn flakes, the lady serving a piece of chocolate cake to her fellow and hiding the instant frosting mix behind her back, and advice about how Velveeta can help you be a good mother, to name a few. The Burger King ad you see here is from the 1970s.

I love to try and pick up on the trends when I look back through these ads. One can see the rise of more convenience and packaged foods. One can also see the addiction to gelatin in its many forms. Do you see any ads that take you back?

Did I miss something? Did the government declare a specific day in late December or early January when seed companies are all required to mail their catalogs? I mean, I know this is the time of year when they always arrive, but yesterday when I checked my mailbox I had four seed catalogs in it. FOUR!

You know what that means: If you are a gardener, it’s time to start planning and dreaming of all the delicious fruits and vegetables, not to mention beautiful flowers, you would like to plant in your garden this year.

The Burpee company is celebrating 135 years in business this year, and they’ve revamped their website and plan to send free seeds for marigolds and “White Wonder” cucumbers with any order of $30 and up. I also received catalogs from Heronswood, The Cook’s Garden and John Scheepers Kitchen Garden Seeds.

Flipping through the photo-saturated Burpee catalog made my eyes light up and my heart thaw out (just a little). Midnight black Triple Crown blackberries! Pinot Noir hybrid sweet peppers! Purple Passion asparagus! Gold Mine yellow beans! Big Rainbow heirloom tomatoes! Sigh.

Read more »

I met Cynthia Bertelsen through her role as a member of the Peacock-Harper Culinary History Friends group, which formed around a special collection of culinary books at Virginia Tech. The Peacock-Harper Culinary Collection contains more than 3,000 works, including 1,700 in a rare books room, and dates as far back as 1693. I’ve received a lot of interesting information from the friends group since I first heard of it a few years ago.

Last month, Bertelsen sent an e-mail about a special digital collection at the University of Nevada Las Vegas called Menus: The Art of Dining. It seems the folks there have collected and digitized more than 1,500 restaurant menus from around the world. The bulk of their collection is made up of the Bohn-Bettoni Collection, a personal collection consisting of about 2,000 restaurant menus dating from 1870-1930. Bohn was editor and publisher of “Hotel World” magazine and Bettoni was a restaurant manager in London in the late 19th century.

The UNLV database is so cool because you can scroll through the collection on your computer and see each of these menus. Not only does the food on these menus provide a slice of history, but some of the menus feature brilliant art work. Many of the restaurants are long gone, including some of the original Las Vegas establishments, which were destroyed to build what is the existing strip.

If you’ve got a little time on your hands to poke around and look through this menu collection, click here and have fun. Incidentally, you can also look at a few digitized versions of works in the Peacock-Harper collection here.

Hey, maybe I should send some of Howard’s old Roanoke menus, such as this Villa Sorrento menu, to UNLV, eh?

Susan Nicholson

Every Sunday, we run a 7-Day Menu Planner on the back of the Extra section to help readers plan their meals for the week ahead. This feature is written by a lovely lady named Susan Nicholson who lives in Atlanta with her husband, Nick (a.k.a. “Cupcake”). It is read by some 6 million people every week.

But Susan is originally from the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and she and Nick have traveled through the area and stopped to say hello to us at The Roanoke Times on a couple of occasions. She has a great sense of humor and an interesting past — Susan once owned and operated a microwave specialty store and cooking school. She attended the La Varenne cooking school in Paris and is a registered, licensed dietitian.

Now, Susan has a new blog where you can keep tabs on her as she tests recipes for the 7-Day Menu Planner or dines out with friends and family. Occasionally, she’ll even throw in some personal entries about her sweet new kitties, Smoke and Flash.

Find Susan’s blog, “Making the Menu,” here.  Follow her Twitter account under “7DayMenu” here or friend her on Facebook here. And if you are ever looking for past recipes from the 7-Day Menu Planner, they are archived here. A link to that archive can also be found on the main page of PlateUp.

Hopefully by now most of you have had a chance to check out The Roanoke Times’ brand new food microsite, PlateUp, which officially launched today.

Like any new baby, our new baby is causing us great joy mingled with a few episodes of colic. For instance, if you’ve spent much time cruising around our “Find a Restaurant” directory, you may have noticed missing restaurants or other problems. We purchased that database from an outside vendor, and the information comes to us via telephone listings. We have a team of folks combing that guide and fixing mistakes/omissions as we find them.

If you are willing to help out, please do this: If you find a mistake or a missing restaurant, please e-mail us at food@roanoke.com. We will be checking that inbox constantly and working on those problems.

Otherwise, most of the site seems to be working very well. I’m particularly excited about the recipe database. You guys are the masters of great recipes, so if you’ve got a signature dish you have shared here on the blog in the past or would like to share here, please test out the submission function. To do that, click on “recipes” and look for the green box on the left side of the screen that says “Submit your recipe.” It requires a quick, one-time registration with no obligations. Once you do that, the rest is very easy and pretty self-explanatory, but feel free to let me know if you have questions!

Thanks for all the nice comments so far!

I was wandering through Jo-Ann Fabric’s home decor section the other day and found some cute summer items for children, including little rubber garden boots, plastic gardening tools and bath sponges shaped like frogs and lady bugs. There among the brightly colored products was something that caught my eye: freezer pop molds!

Instantly, I was taken back to my childhood, when Mom used to let us make Popsicles with our clear plastic Tupperware molds. We simply poured Kool-Aid into the molds and let it freeze for a sweet, cold treat later in the day. I don’t have children of my own, but I picked up a set for my friend Kathy, who is trying to make a lot of homemade meals and snacks for her toddler.

It got me thinking: there have got to be recipes out there for better tasting Popsicles than the ones we made as children. After all, this is the era of the foodie, so why shouldn’t our kids be little foodies, too? Some searching around led me to an incredible site called Tipnut and a page there with 50 different freezer pop recipes. With that many recipes, you could almost have a different flavor for every day of summer vacation!

Read more »

I’m not a big fan of April Fools’ Day pranks (probably because I’m usually the butt of the joke), but if one involved delicious food, I think I could get my head around that. Such is the case with a special lunch and dinner at Local Roots Cafe on Thursday, April 1.

At both lunch (11 a.m. to 3 p.m.) and dinner (5 to 9:30 p.m.), the cafe, which specializes in locally sourced ingredients, will serve its regular menus, with the addition of several specials with an April Fools’ theme. Chef Josh Smith said he plans to start with standard dishes but prepare them in such a way that you won’t be sure what you’re seeing on your plate. It will be a surprise for the senses. If you are looking for something different and fun, head on out there. And don’t forget the cafe is planning a big move to 1314 Grandin Road (along the same strip as the theater) this summer.

On another topic, I recently learned of a wonderful Web site for friends and family who are organizing meals for a loved one in need. It is called Lotsa Helping Hands. You can sign in and create a free “community,” set up dates on a calendar when the person needs meals and invite others to sign up and take a meal date. We used it to organize meals for a friend who is recuperating after surgery, and it has been very convenient.

Read more »

When my friend Amanda got married last year, she received an awesome gift from the ladies in her family: a custom-made, glossy, beautiful cookbook filled with all of the Codispoti family recipes. Clearly, her relatives put a lot of thought and work into that book, but not quite as much work as you might think.

These days, several Web sites exist that allow customers to put together their own photo books, cookbooks and other publications. Not only can you include text, you can scan in photos and other images to adorn the pages. It is a wonderful idea for so many occasions, including bridal and baby showers, weddings, birthdays, winter holidays and more.

Amanda’s relatives used TasteBook.com. Another such site is Lulu.com. And here’s an example of a cookbook that was put together by a Lulu user. Click the word “preview” under the book image to see inside. Lulu will even offer your book for sale to other Web visitors if you want. Another site is bookemon.com, and Food Network’s Web site also has an application here. If anyone knows of other reputable DIY cookbook sites, please let me know and I’ll update this entry.

It used to be that our mothers or grandmothers kept their recipes on index cards in a little box. How many of you still do that? I admit it might be time to work on my recipe organization a little bit. Some of my favorites are in a scrapbook, but others are just shoved into a manila folder. But keeping these family recipes safe is very important.

After almost three years of blogging on the old Fridge Magnet, I sometimes worry about duplicating topics, particularly since certain times of year cause the brain to automatically turn to particular recipes. But Crock Pot cooking is something I’m never concerned about overdoing because it is such a convenient, delicious way to prepare a meal.

Just the other day, a lady in the floral department at Kroger recognized me and asked me if I would print some more easy recipes. I asked her if she liked Crock Pot recipes and her face lit up. Not long after, my dad forwarded me an e-mail that’s apparently been circulating. It’s similar to a cookies and cakes e-mail I’ve seen before. Basically, it includes links to every kind of Crock Pot dish you could imagine.

But you don’t have to get the e-mail to find all those recipes. The links all go back to the same place: a Web site called the 50+ Friends Club Cookbook. There, you’ll find not only an abundance of Crock Pot recipes, but also recipes for many different desserts. Scroll down on the first page to find the index.

There! Now you can make cranberry pork roast, Crock Pot burritos, reuben casserole, Swiss steak, cheesy shrimp chowder, crab casserole, any kind of barbecue you could possibly imagine and much more! Happy slow cooking! Let us know what you try and how it turns out.

New York Times blogger Bruce Buschel has posted his second 50 rules for the waiters and waitresses at his restaurant, which is scheduled to open in Bridgehampton, NY in the spring.

He clarifies a bit more in the opening sentences that this list might not need to be followed to the T by all restaurants because, let’s face it, there are lots and lots of different restaurants. I believe personally that what he is advising on is service for fine dining restaurants, but that doesn’t mean all restaurants cannot take something away from the list.

Once again, do you guys agree/disagree with anything in particular on this list?

51. If there is a service charge, alert your guests when you present the bill. It’s not a secret or a trick.

52. Know your menu inside and out. If you serve Balsam Farm candy-striped beets, know something about Balsam Farm and candy-striped beets.

53. Do not let guests double-order unintentionally; remind the guest who orders ratatouille that zucchini comes with the entree.

54. If there is a prix fixe, let guests know about it. Do not force anyone to ask for the “special” menu.

55. Do not serve an amuse-bouche without detailing the ingredients. Allergies are a serious matter; peanut oil can kill. (This would also be a good time to ask if anyone has any allergies.)

56. Do not ignore a table because it is not your table. Stop, look, listen, lend a hand. (Whether tips are pooled or not.)

Read more »

Those of you who keep a close eye on The New York Times site may have noticed that one particular business blog, “You’re the Boss,” recently racked up more than 1,000 comments in a short period of time – so many comments that they closed the comments after only a couple of days.

The topic? “100 Things Restaurant Staffers Should Never Do (Part I).”

It seems this blogger, Bruce Buschel, is in the process of opening a new seafood restaurant and has been blogging about his experiences along the way. He devised a list of 100 service rules for his new staff and posted just half of them on his blog. The result, as I said, was astounding. Most people felt that Buschel had pretty much hit the nail straight on the head.

I’m going to paste the rules below. Please read them and tell me if you agree with them or not. I agree with almost every one, with the exception of a few that I think would make the server seem a bit impersonal and cold. But I think these skills are sadly lacking in lots of local restaurants. Is there a restaurant in all of Southwest Virginia that gets all (or most) of these things right?

From “You’re the Boss”:

1. Do not let anyone enter the restaurant without a warm greeting.

2. Do not make a singleton feel bad. Do not say, “Are you waiting for someone?” Ask for a reservation. Ask if he or she would like to sit at the bar.

3. Never refuse to seat three guests because a fourth has not yet arrived.

4. If a table is not ready within a reasonable length of time, offer a free drink and/or amuse-bouche. The guests may be tired and hungry and thirsty, and they did everything right.

5. Tables should be level without anyone asking. Fix it before guests are seated.

Read more »