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Sunday, February 5, 2012

‘Mississippi Rising’ Dinner for Project Transitions, Part 1

By Michael Barnes | Sunday, February 5, 2012, 06:54 PM

Conviviality and charity go hand in hand during the annual cluster of dinners designed to support Project Transitions.

For the epic, conceptual feast staged at Gateway Guesthouse on East Riverside Drive by innkeepers Bess Giannakakis and Blaise Bahara, however, the food remained the centerpiece.

These natives of Montreal and St. Louis, respectively, who lived together previously in San Francisco and Minneapolis, chose the theme “Mississippi Rising.”

All the food and drink — or at least the ideas for the dishes — came from the basins of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Ten states — Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana — were represented. (The contributing Missouri River was snubbed.)

We’ll relate the physical and social settings in a later post — yes, it was that memorable! — but let’s record first the consumables.

First came a thick, rich wild rice soup steeped in chicken stock, almost the consistency of pudding. Inside each glorious dish rose a tiny breadstick to represent the “knockers,” the wooden sticks used to harvest the “Grass of the Midwest,” that is not directly related to rice.

“Wild rice is on every menu in Minnesota,” Giannakakis said with an indulgent smile. The concoction came with a bottle of Summit Winter Ale, brewed in St. Paul, Minn.

Next arrived small, pale medallions of pork loin nested on a reduction of moonshine-corn cream, almonds and roasted red peppers. (“There are 10 pigs for every human in Iowa,” we learned.)

Alongside sat a shot of the moonshine-like Prichards Lincoln County Lightning, a stinging white corn whiskey — that can’t be aged — hailing from Tennessee.

Tiny bottles of Budweiser accompanied the next dish, lightly breaded catfish and even lighter hushpuppies, for which Giannakakis used yeast to keep them from sinking in one’s stomach. (A recipe we will definitely harvest.)

A fresh take on fried chicken — maybe the best I’ve ever tasted — was refreshed with 9-year-old Knob Creek single-barrel bourbon, along with mashed potatoes, gravy, biscuits and gravy.

Yep, another meat dish still to go. (The portions were suitably small.) Memphis-style barbecue pork ribs indulged in a spicy rub for three days, then they were smoked for three hours before finishing in an oven. Like mother’s love.

An exquisite profiterole that mixed hot and cool chocolate around a puff of bread finished the meal. This was served with a Missouri chardonnay.

“We had to ship it in,” Bahara says. “It makes you appreciate California wine.”

As everyone was scraping the last chocolate off the plate, almost instantaneously, demitasses of espresso appeared for those who requested a cleansing of the senses.

Why the Mississippi theme, other than the couple’s life adventures up and down its stem?

“I wanted to do something to unite the whole country,” Giannakakis says. “You know, how we used to be together?”

Photos by Ashley Landis

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