green eats

i saw krishna tonight and i realized that i still have not written a post about green eats... there is no excuse for this because she has had her awesome green/local/delicious catering business for almost a year now and my readers need to know about it.

stuffed mushrooms

a year ago krishna had a regular boring 9 to 5 office job and dreamed of one day opening her own catering business. she took cooking classes night to hone her skills and graduated from the midwest culinary institute last year. all her friends who had ever eaten her food (including me) were like "you can do it, your food is delicious, people will want it." she was not sure. finally she decided to take the plunge and quit her job and she has been going nonstop ever since.

arroz al horno with blood sausage

she cooks for people in their homes, does dinner parties and weddings, and she also does fun stuff like cooking demonstrations at park + vine and wine tastings at market wines. i have never been able to get her to nail down prices for me but that is because she will work with each of her clients' budgets to make food that is both delicious and within their price range.

gambas al ajillo

most the pictures in this blog are photos of a spanish meal that krishna made for maggie's birthday back in january. it was delicious and muy autentico. maggie used to live in spain back in high school and had very specific recipe and ingredient requests, and krishna was able to give her exactly what she wanted.

salad with potatoes, oranges, and red peppers and i have no clue what it is called in spanish

there are so many catering businesses popping up all over cincinnati right now. even if you are specifically looking for a caterer who focuses on fresh, local ingredients, you have your choice. of course i think you should choose krishna for all your food preparation needs because she is my friend. but also she is just a damn good cook. over the past few years i have tried all different kinds of things she has made... brunches, indian food, appetizers, this extravagant spanish meal, salads, soups, desserts. it is all ridiculously good.

red velvet trifle... totally not spanish but it's what maggie wanted

i remember one time krishna prepared an afternoon tapas-style cocktail party for her birthday. one of the things she made was this fig and caramelized onion spread with rosemary. i was obsessed with it. i loved it so much that the next time she made it she gave me her extras and i ate it on everything i could think of for days. and the thing is i don't even really like figs that much (i know that's crazy). it's like she just understood the flavor, texture, and qualities of the figs so well that she knew how to make them into something even better than they started off as (suck it, grammar nazis).

here is krishna serving up her awesome turkey chili at the findlay market chili cookoff

krishna just knows what she is doing with every ingredient in the kitchen, and spends pretty much every free moment learning about and working with local and sustainable food sources. she is always traveling to different farms to find out where to get the best of whatever specific food product she wants, she belongs to vegetable and meat CSAs, and she is very active in the cincinnati slow food movement. there is nothing she puts in her recipes that doesn't belong, and at the same time she comes up with totally unique flavor and ingredient combinations. her food is clean and fresh. the flavors and ingredients are distinct, bold, and thoughtfully created. everything always looks amazing and tastes just as good as it looks.

forkheartknife

it has been a long time since i have been this excited about a place and a post. i am so excited i don't even know where to start. we have a lot of things coming together here. i will break it down.

forkheartknife

forkheartknife is a new catering kitchen and occasionally a casual restaurant on main street just south of liberty. i first heard about it from this soapbox article via wine me, dine me.

the kitchen

the minute i finished reading the article i was totally excited. fresh, interesting, cheap food in over the rhine = awesome. the story of how co-owners sierra and leah decided to start their kitchen = emotional. the innovative, dynamic style of the kitchen = intriguing. i had to know more.

sierra's blog

my next stop from the article was the forkheartknife blog. i read the entire blog in a couple of hours. i was so fascinated that i started in on the clean plate club blog, sierra's former blog. yes, i am a stalker. i was just totally into the awesome photographs and even more so, sierra's writing style. here, i will give you some examples:

i flipped through my recipes and found this tart recipe (bon appetit?). they are beautiful and when leah and i did our taste testing i was jumping around yelling YUM with my mouth full and the chills on my arms. a sure sign that we had struck gold. this one is vegetarian with asparagus, piquillo peppers and goat cheese baked in an egg custard with a sprinkle of spanish paprika.

i make a lazy pickle, or “quickle” (because i like making combo words, too). i don’t have a granny to teach me the fine nuances of canning, and so i get stuff in a jar with a tight lid and keep everything in the fridge for safety. for veggies like cukes, peppers, okra, onions, green beans, softer veggies: pack a jar with the vegetable, heat the pickling brine on the stove and pour it over the jar after it comes to a boil, making sure that the seasonings are equally distributed in each jar. the lids go on while things are still really hot and that usually leaves me hearing the POP of the jars sealing. things cool down and they go in the fridge for up to a month. i love them in the first week, usually still nice and crunchy and fresh tasting. not that they get less crunchy, but its fun to taste how things change while they are hanging around longer…

little known fact: long ago, before i even started culinary school, i lived in providence, rhode island for 6 months. while i was there, i worked at a bakery, as a barista and counter person. i would have to go in at 4 in the morn and dust all the flour off the glass display shelves, arrange the bread, scones, muffins, cookies, etc. and i fell in love with food then. that is when it happened. walking in there on a cold morning when it was almost impossible to get out of bed, and having it be hot and steamy from the ovens.. the glass fogged up… the smell… romantic as hell. i gained about 20 pounds in those 6 months, eating that bread and marveling at its perfection.

i swear i got the chills when i put this bite in my mouth. i wanted to do something bacon wrapped for this party (how is it ever wrong?). and i remembered jenna raving about this bacon wrapped date thing she’d had at a wine dinner at dunham cellars.. stuffed with manchego made for the perfect combo! manchego cheese is my favorite, its spanish and its got a great, smooth, nutty flavor. with the sweet date, the nuttiness grounds the bite, the crispness and saltiness and fat of the bacon adding everything else you would ever want! EATING FOOD IS SO AMAZING!!

the combination of straightforward, to the point descriptions plus the uncontainable excitement for food itself and feeding other people that comes through in every sentence just got me. that plus she makes pickles!

pizza night

a quick segue into pizza night. one final reason i became fully obsessed with forkheartknife. pizza night is a thing that used to happen last summer. a group of guys who are all amazing cooks would get together and make this amazing pizza (homemade everything... dough, pizza sauce, sausage, you name it they made it) on thursday nights in the take the cake space.

the pizzas were an absolute revelation. i could not get enough of them. they would make seven kinds of pizza, plus two appetizers (usually some variations on bruschetta... my favorite was the tuna paste mashed up with fresh garlic... yum). occasionally there was a sorbet which i never seemed to be able to get my hands on.

you would show up at like 7, pay $10, bring all the wine and beer of your own you wanted, and just hang out and chat and eat. the appetizers came out first and then one by one, the pizzas. it was just one pizza at a time so you would kind of snack all evening while you drank and met new friends. the food was amazing, straight up skilled kitchen creativity, and it was also just such an experience going there and eating awesome food and talking to people who loved food and relaxing and having fun, all while knowing it could not last forever or probably even much longer.

pizza night was so good that i vowed to myself i would never breathe a word about it on this blog. i only told maybe five or six of my friends about it. i never even took pictures of it (and i always take pictures). it was so awesome and felt so tenuous and fleeting that i was scared it might get overrun with people and disappear forever. and then at the end of the summer it was over. now it is just a memory for the people who were able to experience it. however, rumor has it that the pizza night guys are hard at work developing their new idea of opening a full on restaurant. i am very excited about this but i know it will not be the same.

here is the point of me talking about pizza night: on one of sierra's blogs, i found this post. she had been to pizza night! and then i found this post. and this post. and this post. and this post. she had made the sorbet at pizza night!!!

after that i was officially obsessed. i had to meet this girl and eat her food.

sunday brunch

a bit more internet stalking and i learned that forkheartknife was open last week for thursday dinner and sunday brunch. they are just getting started and don't know until that week when they will be open. so they post it on facebook and twitter. if that is too hard for you then fine, more food for me.

anyway i had to go asap so i rounded up erin and we went for brunch. we sipped coffee outside while waiting a few short minutes for a table and then we decided we had to try one of everything on the menu. it was wonderful and everything i hoped it could be. we ate some delicious things:

fruit gazpacho and lemon bread pudding with raspberry sauce

bacon and collard green frittata and spiced roasted potatoes with chimichurri and red pepper romesco

if those photos don't sell you then there is nothing i can say that will. the food was awesome. fresh, simple, to the point, and very flavorful. the bread pudding especially impressed me. i am not a big sweet breakfast person and it was perfect. the lemon custard (was it custard?) was tart and rich without being too sweet. the raspberry sauce was deeply flavored and balanced the lemon perfectly. the bread itself was thick and chewy and totally able to handle the strong flavors of the lemon and raspberry. so. damn. good.

on top of all that we got to meet sierra and leah who are just as awesome in person as they seem on the internet. sierra even gave us a couple of muffins which we munched on later that afternoon. they were moist, tasty carrot muffins with big fat juicy raisins and pineapple chunks inside. delicious.

thank you forkheartknife for living up to all my wildest internet stalker dreams! i am excited to see how this place develops. you should get there as soon as humanly possible, but don't forget to make sure they are open first.