three best bites: midwest edition
I procured everything featured in this week’s best bites within a 45-minute window on Saturday morning in St. Louis. It was a whirlwind. First, my mom and I stopped by the Tower Grove Park farmer’s market, where there were dozens of vendors, mountains of tomatoes and way too many tempting smells. Then we went down the road to La Pâtisserie Chouquette, a bakery that’s on a block where most storefronts are award-winning restaurants. There’s a bread bakery that sells pizza at night, a Mexican spot, two Mediterranean options and Southeast Asian small plates, to name a few. And La Pâtisserie Chouquette, the French bakery, may be the most impressive of the bunch.
When we arrived a minute or two before it opened at 9 a.m., there was a crowd of people waiting outside to pick up preorders. Inside, there was a veritable mountain range of buns, croissants, cheesecakes and other confections. Choosing what to order was agony.
zucchini bread: This isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned Alison Roman’s zucchini bread in this newsletter, and it won’t be the last. I’ve been baking for the past few days in my parents’ kitchen, where the oven temperature has been giving me fits. But this zucchini bread may be immune to finicky ovens. I made it with fresh squash I picked up at the farmer’s market, and it came out crispy on top (thanks to a heavy dusting of turbinado sugar) and just a little bit dense inside — exactly how I like it. This recipe couldn’t be easier — you just need a couple bowls and a whisk! — and I think everyone would be better off if they made it before the zucchini are all gone for the year.
lion’s mane mushroom: I’ve been a little preoccupied with reading about foraging since I read this story last week about a luncheon in Australia that left three people dead from suspected mushroom poisoning. The day after I read the story, I found five tiny mushrooms sprouting in a raised bed in my yard, mere inches from my oregano. I scrubbed my hands harder than I should’ve after getting rid of them, and then I couldn’t stop thinking about the confidence it must take to walk around in the woods and distinguish between edible stuff and the stuff that’ll make you an Aussie tabloid headline.
Lion’s mane mushrooms definitely look like they might be a little bit murderous, but they’re perfectly harmless, and when I stopped by the Ozark Forest Mushrooms tent at the farmer’s market, I couldn’t resist buying one. I chopped it, sauteed it and served it in pasta, which was fine but also a big mistake. The couple of browned, slightly salted mushroom chunks I ate before adding the rest to the sauce might’ve been the best savory bites of my week.
jumbo-sized macarons: And now, for the best sweet bite of my week: the hazelnut macaron from La Pâtisserie Chouquette. (I also tried an A+ pecan roll.) I have no idea why the macarons at this place are super-sized, but I’m also not complaining. The filling was softer than macaron filling I’ve had in the past, and the whole thing actually tasted relatively like a hazelnut, not just a saccharine abstraction of one.
There may be no better app on my phone than the New Yorker. The interface is intuitive, and I feel like it’s always delivering me a story I didn’t know I wanted to read. This week, I spent most of a two-hour flight to St. Louis clicking through it, and I wound up reading two stories that had me very much gripped.
The first was this one, about the hidden costs of all the crap people order online and return. I know next to nothing about supply chains or logistics, but I have a reasonable amount of common sense, so I figured convenient returns might not end up meeting convenient ends for most companies. But I had no idea how bleak and wasteful the reality actually is.
I also chewed through “The Fugitive Princesses of Dubai.” The headline alone should be enough to convince pretty much anyone to spent a half hour or so on this story, but if you need more, here goes: It’s about three women who are members of Dubai’s ruling family and their efforts to escape the control of Sheik Mohammed, the prime minister of the United Arab Emirates. It reads like fiction. I wish it were.
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻❣️