Easter Sunday Brunch: April 4

We’re getting ready to serve our five-course Easter Brunch on Sunday, April 4. After your Easter morning celebration, head our way for an incredible mid-day meal… and try to arrange a post-feast nap in the sunshine for yourself.

We’re serving three small starters:

A Waldorf knife-and-fork salad made with romaine hearts, candied walnuts, grapes, pickled celery, and buttermilk dressing.

A saffron and butternut squash bisque with gorgonzola cream and maple-candied house bacon.

A Croque Madame (a traditional French ham, egg, and cheese open-face sandwich) on brioche with country ham, mornay sauce, and a sunny-side-up egg.

For your entrée, your choice of:

Pan-roasted rainbow trout with a goat cheese potato cake, palm heart-red onion slaw, and sweet pea coulis, OR…

A peppercorn-charred petite filet with whipped root vegetables, asparagus, and red wine jus.

Dessert will be an assortment of pastries and sweets: cinnamon rolls, fruit tartlets, chocolate egg truffles, and éclairs.

Only $35 a person (that’s just $7 per course… a great price.) Children’s options and vegetarian options available; please let us know in advance!

*** Please note that the picture in the ad above is not the actual Easter meal… we only have so many stock photos of our food.

Sneak Peek at Two New Cocktails

April’s Fool

The fool, an English dessert, is made by whipping together raspberry purée and sweetened cream. Our fool is made with sparkling white wine, Chambord (a raspberry liqueur), and topped with hand-shaken cream. Sound fancy? April Fools! It’s just a Kir Royale with some cream on top. But it IS delicious.

Tequila Rita

A sassed-up version of the classic Tequila Ricky (tequila, lime, and soda water over ice). We take the basic idea and make it spicy with serrano tequila, cinnamon simple syrup, muddled basil, and Gran Marnier.

The Cheeses of Green Dirt Farms

One of our favorite sources for beautiful, local, and ethical ingredients is Green Dirt Farm in Weston, Missouri (about 50 miles from Lawrence, Kansas).

The farm raises sheep for meat and milk. This post will focus on the farm’s cheeses, which are made with milk from their own grass-fed ewes, and are similar to French farmhouse cheeses.

Pachamama’s features the Farm’s cheeses on our Green Dirt Farm Sheeps’ Milk Cheese Plate. We serve three of their five award-winning cheeses: Prairie Tomme, Bossa, and Woolly Rind. The descriptions on Green Dirt Farm’s Web site are so fantastic, we’ll just quote them here:

Prairie Tomme is “a French alpine style cheese that is similar to Gruyere or Gouda. The cheese has a smooth firm texture and a buttery, nutty taste. Its flavors reflect the pastures that our ewes are eating, with floral grassy notes and an earthy aroma.”

Bossa has “an edible rind which has been washed with brine while it ages. Washing the rind develops the beautiful orange color that gives the cheese its distinctive flavor and aroma. When fully ripe the cheese has a nutty, meaty, musky flavor.”

Woolly Rind is a “version of a classic Camembert style cheese. It has a lovely edible white bloomy rind that is sometimes mottled with flecks of tan, blue or orange as the cheese ages. […] It develops a lovely forest floor aroma and buttery, mushroomy flavors with a natural sweetness to the rind.”

Bossa and their fresh cheese are both 2009 American Cheese Society winners! (Thanks to Sarah and Jacqueline for letting us use the pictures from their Web site.)



The Pachamama’s Green Dirt Farm Sheeps’ Milk Cheese Plate, pictured here (taken via iphone by Ken). Mustard-seed conserve in the foreground, followed by wedges of Prairie Tomme, Bossa, and Woolly Rind. A square of quince paste on the left side. Walnut-raisin toast from Wheatfields in the background.

There’s so much praise to sing of this Farm, it’ll have to be continued in future posts.

More spring desserts!

Our dessert menu comes out today. Here are four of our new spring sweets, starting with... S'mores!



“S’mores”
What says summertime (campfires, late nights in tents) better than S’mores? This is Teresa’s original take on the camping favorite, with house-made vanilla bean marshmallow, house-made graham cracker, house-made chocolate chocolate-chunk ice cream, and burnt orange caramel.

Peanut Butter-Milk Chocolate Tart
This tart will be a hit for those who crave salty and sweet together. The tart’s pretzel crust has a lining of peanut butter and a chocolate custard-ganache hybrid. Topped with banana-lime sorbet, and bananas flambé.

Jay’s Cinnamon-Ginger Crêpes
Jay, the substitute pastry chef while Teresa was on maternity leave, invented this light and savory dessert. These fluffy crêpes are filled honey and chevre (goat cheese) whipped together, and served with pecan praline ice cream and macerated tangerines. (A “Jay” fun fact: he’s never been to culinary school; he learned the hands-on way, by working in restaurant after restaurant.)

Chilled Chocolate Soup
The presentation of this “soup” is amazing. Lift the chocolate cover, like you would the lid of a soup tureen, and you’ll find the chilled chocolate soup garnished with a small slice of chocolate pudding cake, brioche, and a raspberry coulis.

On Deck for Spring...

We're changing several of our menus in the next few weeks, updating our fare for warmer weather. Here in Lawrence, Kansas, spring has flirted with us - yesterday it was 60 degrees and sunny for most of the day - but is only teasing as of yet - today, we're frowning at the three inches of snow that fell overnight. And downright glaring at this weather report:

"A steady snow will continue to fall through mid-afternoon. Cloudy and windy. Temperatures steady near the mid 30s. Winds NNE at 20 to 25 mph. Chance of snow 85%. Snowfall of 1 to 2 inches through 4:00pm.

Here's our restaurant, being snowed on:



And our snow-covered patio (where last year, at this time, we were sitting in the sunshine...):


The view through the giant windows in our main dining room (looking onto the intersection of 8th and New Hampshire):



So, ignore the irony of blogging about spring menus in the aftermath of a snow storm. Get excited about these "menu unveilings":

Tuesday, March 23: New Dessert Menu
Thursday, April 1: New Cocktail List
Thursday, April 8: New Seasonal Dinner Menu

More on these menus, and on our Easter Brunch's menu, soon.

New Dessert Menu on Tuesday, March 23...

The days of winter-time comfort eating — intense chocolates and rich, buttery desserts — are behind us now. It’s time for a refreshing dessert menu. Pastry chef Teresa Heustis has created six all-new desserts, plus two updated versions of Pachamama’s classics (the molten brown sugar cake and almond-apple tart).

The menu goes into action on Tuesday, March 23, but here’s a sneak peek:

Strawberries ‘n’ Cream



The flavors of strawberries with cream instantly evoke sunshine. In the glass are layers of strawberry and cream panna cottas with basil tapioca on top. Garnishing the plate are grilled lemon pound cake and flash-fried basil leaves.

Lemon Cream-Blueberry-Rhubarb Napoleon


Traditionally, a Napoleon is a stack of alternating layers of pastry and cream. Teresa breaks the mold once again with her version: it’s layers of crisp almond tuile (very very thin cookies) and lemon cream, with a sweet-and-tart blueberry and rhubarb compote on top. To the side is a scoop of amazing ice cream: salted almond caramel.

Teresa Heustis attended the California Culinary Academy at age 17, specializing in baking and pastry. She has worked in a San Francisco bakery, a Portland chocolate shop, and Aqua, a restaurant in San Francisco. She has been Pachamama’s pastry chef since May 2008. For more about Teresa, click here.

Penne and Sautéed Winter Vegetables á la Chetan

Guest-contributor: Chetan Michie

Our cook Chetan Michie is unplugged and proud of it. He's worked in the service & entertainment industry for years, not only as a cook, but also as a ska & reggae DJ, concert promoter, and doorman for the Replay Lounge.

On Saturday, he catered a gig through Pachamama's at the Jackpot Saloon & Music Hall for Kid Congo. He created this vegetarian recipe, which highlights seasonal vegetables and utilizes traditional techniques. Here's his hand-written take on it:



And now... Chetan's recipe.




Email questions about penmanship to pachamamas.restaurant@gmail.com. (Just kidding... sort of. Stay old-school, Chetan!)

Featured Artist: Joshua Rizer

Guest contributor: Stephanie Bell

Pachamama’s Restaurant is displaying the paintings of self-taught Joshua Rizer, a Kansas City native. Joshua has been drawing, writing, filming, composing and most recently, painting for seventeen years. His works are realist and surrealist at once, blending fairy tales, archetypes and literary figures into everyday scenes. He explains his methodology:

“I don’t believe in, or agree with, a lot of artistic jargon and rhetoric. Personally, I value the lowest common denominator of understanding over the elitism of high concept. I sometimes hear people characterize accessible work as, 'dumbed down,' but I believe archetypes, symbolism, myth and commentary can be sophisticated and approachable simultaneously. I prefer communion over confusion.”

Here’s a painting from Joshua’s Dysfunction series.

“I hope that I am able to accuse and console at the same time. I would like to unsettle the viewer by suggesting that they might somehow be complicit in any number of spiritual, ethical or emotional maladies, but also reassure them that these are faults we all experience.”

From Joshua’s “The Big Top” series:

“I found a setting where each piece could be an exhibit of freakish failure, strength or overcompensation. I wanted the series as a whole to tap into our appetite for both train wrecks and redemptive spectacle alike.”

A beautiful wine quote...

"You could spend the rest of your life tasting wine and still not exhaust its variations, each bottle a little ecosystem of grapes and soils and weather, yeast and bacteria, barrels of wood from trees with their own soil and weather, the variables cross-multiplying until each glassful approaches a singularity, a moment in time on earth."

From the article "Dining with Robots," published in The American Scholar. (Also anthologized in Best American Science Writing of 2005.)

Here comes Peter Cottontail...

The sun's finally shining in Lawrence on a regular basis (welcome, spring!), and our chefs Ken and Brian are busy plotting a fresh menu. After the doldrums of winter, we're all excited by thoughts of lighter fare such as greens, crisp asparagus, and other ingredients brought on by April showers...

Including rabbit.

Yes, cute 'n' fluffy widdle bunny rabbits. In the past, when we've served rabbit dishes, we sourced our bunny meat from Rare Hare Barn in Leon, Kansas. Check out their Web site, and you'll see pictures of ridiculously darling rabbits you can purchase. To eat.

The adorable-versus-delicious dichotomy can be a hard concept to reconcile. Today's New York Times posted an article, "Don't Tell the Kids," about the trend of bunny-raising and eating (which is, unfortunately, a process that involves killing.) The article provides an interesting discussion on the ethics of eating snuggly animals, and on the relationship of bunny-eating to the Slow Foods movement. One line in particular stuck out:

"In an age when diners scoop marrow from roasted beef shins and dissect the feet of pigs raised by people they’ve met, rabbit certainly seems like the right meat at the right time."

It does seem like the right time in food history to rekindle a love for rabbit fare. With folks raising backyard chickens, urban-gardening, and local-food shopping, the relationship between man and meal is perhaps getting more honest. People are beginning to be able to eat steak and think about cows at the same time. A bunny can live a sweet, happy life, be loved and petted... and still be a link in the food chain.