Articles > Restaurants

Grab a glass

“This wine tastes like Jelly!” “Well, I think it tastes like leather.” This is an example of how a class may go when tasting different wines during The Melting Pot Restaurant’s wine school. In a classroom-like setting, a group of twenty-four students learns the basics about wine and develops an ability to compare wine and food aromas, and eventually make food pairings. Students are called on and encouraged to g…... Read more >

Tomato tales

Vegetable to fruit and everthing in between By Nina Furstenau   The 1978 movie Attack of the Killer Tomatoes begins with a tomato rising out of a woman’s garbage can in a parody of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 The Birds. They find the woman later, and it isn’t pretty.

The movie ends ominously for the tomatoes. They are cornered in a stadium and then stomped and squashed by humans. All except one, who survives when the …... Read more >

Nuts about nuts

Missouri supplies 70 percent of the world’s black walnuts By Nina Furstenau There’s something of eternity in the cycle of walnuts. Each fall, they rain down, pebbling the earth under black walnut trees throughout Missouri. The sound of the yellow-green balls hitting the earth makes a remarkably soft thump for such a hard husk. Maybe you’ve stooped to pick the harvest, stained your hands or gloves, and kept a few to sprinkl…... Read more >

Meals Cooked on a Wood Stove

By Diana West

The aroma of home-cooked meals, baked bread, and pies will lure you back to a simpler time when food was slowcooked and savored. The Briar Patch old store near Anderson serves made-from-scratch meals cooked on a wood stove.

Tina Keel, the owner, cooks supper every Friday and Saturday on an 1864 Home Comfort wood-burning stove. Since she can only cook one entrée on the wood stove, the first person to call for a reservation…... Read more >