Pere Marquette State Park

Found out about this park when a friend of mine asked me to meet him and his family out there; I had some stuff to drop off for him, and it'd been a while since I'd seen them.

Turned out to be a pretty cool place. It's about 30 minutes north of St. Louis, on the Illinois bank of the Mississippi River; the main route there runs along the riverbank, which is a scenic drive by itself. (There's some pics of the drive in a Flickr album.)

The park itself has a fair amount of wooded trails and scenic overlooks; there's also a lodge hotel built in the 30's. (It's showing its age somewhat, but there's one of those beautiful high-ceilinged central gathering areas.)



There's also a nearby pick-your-own-apples orchard, complete with cider and a petting zoo; the cider was good, the petting zoo wasn't too silly, and the apples were very good. :) Grafton, the small town just south of the park, has some fairly obvious tourist/resort trappings (restaurants, kitchy craft shops, and the like), but the food was good and decently priced.

On the whole, if it's within reasonable driving distance for you, not a bad place to get away from things for a weekend. I wouldn't make it a major vacation destination, but it's a good place to visit if you don't have the time or money for a more serious trip.

On Kansas City BBQ

(Following up on a comment on yhlee's journal)

Barbecue is one of the two or three foods Kansas City's known for. (Kansas City's got a pretty good selection for a lot of different cuisines, but it's only really noted for a few, from what I've seen around.) KC barbecue goes back for around a century, to Henry Parry's place in the now-historic 18th & Vine district; there are at least a hundred restaurants across the city today, with a wide variety of flavors. For some people, it can almost be a religion; pilgrimages to favorite restaurants, debates on the style of sauce, the quality of the baked beans...

Once in a while I'll find a good KC-style restaurant outside of the area, but it's very rare. The things that set KC BBQ apart are: long, slow smoking, usually with a dry rub; use of sauce, almost always tomato-based (as opposed to the vinegar or mustard sauces I've seen elsewhere) and usually thick - but typically only applied after cooking, not as it smokes; sliced meat (not pulled-meat, as you find in many other areas of the country); and, hardest to duplicate, a wide variety of high-quality meat. As a stockyard town, KC has access to some of the best, and that's where I see out-of-town fall down more often than not.

My favorite BBQ is smoked turkey, though I also like lean smoked beef; several restaurants in the area will do smoked sausage, but sliced thin instead of in the usual chunks, and that can also be quite good. I'm not generally a fan of ribs, as they're usually too little meat for too much fuss; but there's one place about an hour southwest of KC, Guy and Mae's in Williamsburg, that does really juicy and thick-cut ribs.

Sauces can vary widely. Rosedale's sauce is very peppery, to the point of overwhelming the tomato flavor; Arthur Bryant's original is fairly thin, dry, almost tabasco-like; Gates' is tangy and fairly hot, without overwhelming the rest of the flavors; KC Masterpiece is very sweet, with a strong molasses flavor. (And despite the name, it's more representative of generic 'nationwide' BBQ sauce than it is of Kansas City, though I do like it in some recipes.) Most sauces fall somewhere in between; strong tomato, hint of vinegar tang, hint of sweetness, some spicy 'bite'.

A rundown of some of the places I've been to and like, behind the cut:

( Read more... )

I admit, I came into BBQ through the back door. Growing up, I never really cared for the spicy sauces, even though I loved the smell of smoking meat; I finally got into things in college, because I loved meat sandwiches and BBQ was one of the best ways to get them. (I also love Chicago-style Italian Beef sandwiches; maybe more on that another day.) Now, well, I wouldn't like to deal without it. :)

The Psychedelic Turkeyburger Recipe

I mentioned last post that KC Masterpiece BBQ sauce did actually work well in a couple of recipes? This is one of them. While I find it way over-sweet by itself, in this recipe it's balanced out by the other seasonings.

Back when I went to college, ground turkey was actually the budget option for students who couldn't afford the better grades of ground beef/ground chuck. Problem was, ground turkey is a lot blander than ground beef. So how to make a better grilled burger with it? This was my answer.

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Preparation

Start with ground turkey. Before starting to grill, mix in:

• KC Masterpiece Hickory (while the regular works, the hickory is better)
  
• Soy sauce
  
• Garlic salt (coarse-ground, like Lawrey's, works best)
  
• Poultry seasoning (the green powder was the source of the memorable name, at one late-80s BBS party)
  

Mix thoroughly, to make sure the seasonings are distributed evenly throughout the meat. If you use the amount of sauce I typically do, the resulting mix will be slightly liquid and sloppy; you'll need to handle carefully as you make it into patties.

Cooking

When you first put the burgers on the grill, be very careful as they can fall apart; even more so the first time or two you turn them. Ideally, you'll want them close to a hot spot to sear the outside, making them easier to handle; after searing, you'll want to press them occasionally as they cook. This squeezes out some of the juice, which by this point should be heavily flavored with the sauces and spices, onto the surface where it'll form a nice glaze.