The challenge of eating food

It’s becoming harder to find food these days, say nothing about good food.

Before we opened our doors last year, we had the usual sales calls from businesses trying to sell us their products, things like Yellow Pages, insurance, alarm systems and so on. The food distributors were the best, however, at misunderstanding our concept all together.

Any good salesperson takes the time to understand the customer first, and then should assess whether or not to waste their effort barking up the wrong tree. So when the food guy comes to my door with a catalog of countless pre-made, pre-packaged, mostly frozen items (I hesitate calling it food), I can see quickly that I, not the salesman, am the one that needs to step in and say that this is not going anywhere.

I say “That’s fine, but what do you have in the way of high quality flour, baking chocolate, and spices, you know, basic raw ingredients?”

I get a puzzled look, a pause, and a regress back to the original pitch, “but we have some really nice cheesecakes, frozen, individually portioned….”

I get this look because fewer places actually cook any more. What passes as cooking is nothing more than heating or thawing. Open the box. Nuke the container. Tear open the bag of a product that someone else made in a corporate kitchen hundreds of miles away from your location and trucked in for ease and convenience, serve it and call it good. What’s more amazing, that restaurants can get away with this approach, or that people have lowered their standards and actually settle for it?

I don’t expect that we will change much of that; folks will still concede to believing that Alfredo sauce as a powdered mix is an adequate substitute. But we will stick to our commitment to bring you food that we believe in and love to eat. Our kitchen is small, so we won’t be able to offer a lot of options, but what we do make will be something we’ve imagined, assembled and prepared for you from an ingredient list, not a catalog.

We’ll set the table; you bring the conversation.

Eat when you're hungry

We are ingrained in the 3 meals a day approach to eating, which is a reasonable way our culture has managed the human need for sustenance, but it really isn’t a necessary or sacred practice. Our bodies have built in mechanism to signal to us when we should eat. That signal is hunger.

But for most of us, our problem is that we don’t eat when we are hungry.

About ten years ago, as I was training for a marathon, I found that additional mileage was creating a greater caloric demand, for which I could not adequately satisfy by just eating three times a day. So I decided to just eat something whenever I got hungry, which in this case worked out to be about four to five times a day. The additional food usually consisted of a midmorning sandwich or late afternoon soup. Not a big ordeal, just a small something to satiate the growl.

I believe we would be in better shape in this country if we could listen to the signal given to us by our natural responses and eat to satisfy it. The problem comes when we eat to satisfy more than the rumble in the stomach. Boredom, stress, and anxiety, just like hunger, all need to be addressed, but tossing food their direction will only compound the problem.

Learn to listen to what your body is telling you. Eat when you’re hungry. Slow down when you feel hurried. Relax when anxious. Respond accordingly and see what it does for you.

Next Slow Meal

Announcing our final Slow Meal for the season. We have some new dinner events planned for the warm weather months and will unveil those in April. Below is the date and menu for this relaxed, extended evening of food, wine and conversation

A Slow Meal
Saturday, April 12th
6:30pm
$60 per person - advance purchase required. Call 402.438.2255 to reserve your place.

5 courses, 3 wines, 1 outstanding evening

Menu:
Malted Wheat Dumplings with Herb Infused Olive Oil
Maytag Blue Cheese Soup
Stuffed Portabella Mushroom
Braised Beef Short Ribs
Bananas Foster

New Soup Schedule

Monday
Kernel & Grain - Vn
Garlic & Bacon

Tuesday
Red Beans & Rice - Vn, GF
Pork & Green Chile

Wednesday
Split Pea & Sausage - GF
White Bean & Tomatillo Salsa - V

Thursday
French Onion - GF
Curried Tomato & Peanut - Vn

Friday
Black Bean & Lime Salsa - Vn, GF
Beef & Red Chile

Saturday
Curried Tomato & Peanut - V, GF

V = vegetarian (may contain honey)
Vn = vegan
GF = gluten free

New Soups for Spring

Here is a list of our latest soup creations and a bit about how they came to be.

Kernel & Grain

As a homebrewer, I often end up with extra or odd amounts of grain that I may not have be able to use right away for a batch of homebrew. I had an excessive amount of malted wheat set aside, more than I would ever use in brewing, so I decided to experiment with it in the kitchen, and this soup was the result.

Malted grain contributes a unique sweetness to the soup that cooperates with the sweetness of whole kernel corn, thus the name. We add rice as an additional grain, adding onions and garlic and a few other seasonings to make this vegetarian soup.


Garlic & Bacon

It has been said that bacon is the gateway meat, and I would add that garlic its the vegetative counterpart. Bacon is a prime reason many of us are not vegetarians. I love these two ingredients and decided to put them together in a lush, creamy soup. This is unapologetically rich with butter, our fresh chicken stock and thick sliced hickory smoked bacon.


Red Beans & Rice

Probably not what you might be familiar with in a dish of this title, but we took inspiration and put our own twist to it. Red beans and rice provide the vegetarian base, along with tomatoes, green peppers and cashews to give some crunchy texture, We make this a little spicy, so you might want to have a Kleenex handy.


Split Pea & Sausage

A customer asked recently why we serve so many pureed soups. I like pureed soups because the flavor and body of the base ingredient can be maximized without adding cream or stock. Legumes break down quickly and become smooth textured with an immersion blender, then matched and enhanced with other flavors, like the andouille sausage, carrots and potatoes we add.

Say goodbye to:

Smoky Tomato

Our supply of smoked Roma tomatoes is now depleted, so we will have to wait til summer to bring this one back.

bread&butter

I chuckle when I hear someone tell us, “You’re the best kept secret in Lincoln.” Of course we didn’t go into business to stay unknown, but I appreciate the spirit of the sentiment.

This is part of being new. We still meet people everyday who have come in for the first time, who admit they had no idea we were here until a friend told them. This is the best kind of advertising. It’s less expensive and much more effective, so thanks to all of you who are telling people about us. We appreciate it very much.

However, there are a few secrets about bread&cup that you may want to know about from our perspective, and one of them is knowing when is an optimal time to stop in. Since we make all our bread from scratch everyday, you won’t get a fresher cinnamon roll than at 7am, just as they come out of the oven. For you morning people out there, a freshly brewed French Press with our dark roasted Saratoga Blend, a cinnamon roll and the newspaper is a great way to start a Saturday.

Turn the clock ahead a few hours to 9:30am, when our baguettes come out of the oven. As a baker, I get to experience this anytime I like, but I forget that very few people have enjoyed a hot baguette straight out of the oven, lathered in sweet butter. This is one of the simplest pleasures of which I never grow tired. So for the not quite as early riser, I recommend rolling in about 10am for fresh bread & butter. You won’t be disappointed.

Fear not the carb, but rather beware of the debilitation of a worrisome life.

See you Saturday.