Slow down, you eat too fast

During my White River State Park tour a couple weeks ago, I had one of those I-had-no-idea-this-was-here epiphanies, which was the discovery of the Wishard Slow Food Garden. This nifty urban community garden is situated just along the southwest bend in the downtown canal by the WRSP visitors center, and it is definitely worth paying some attention to.

Wishard Slow Food Garden in White River State Park

So what exactly is Slow Food, you might be wondering? In simplest terms, imagine the polar opposite of fast food — soul-satisfying, heartwarming dishes prepared using wholesome fresh (often organic and locally sourced) ingredients, prepared with love and respect for the origins from which they came. Slow Food doesn’t necessarily mean it’s cooked slowly, although sometimes it is, or that it takes a long time to serve and eat, although sometimes it does. The whole movement started in Italy several decades ago (where Slow Food isn’t a new or shocking concept, just an everyday way of life). Chefs, culinary bigwigs, food industry experts and people who just plain appreciate good quality meals have jumped on board with enthusiasm. Myself included.

Right here in Indianapolis, the 6,000-square-foot Slow Food Garden consists of five big plots, each planted with some of the most gorgeous produce I’ve seen anywhere in town. Now in its second year, the project is sponsored by Wishard Health (nice move!) and supported by a state grant. Laura Henderson, the brains and beauty behind the Indy Winter Farmer’s Market as well as founder of the Growing Places Indy organization, directs the operations of the garden from planting to harvest.

Duos food truck in White River State Park

Duos Food Truck is just one of the recipients that benefits from the Slow Food Garden, along with Pogue’s Run Green Grocer, Veggie Share and other local businesses. Duos co-owner and chef Becky Hostetter, a major Slow Food proponent, utilizes weekly yields from the garden as inspiration for the recipes she serves at Duos. Think deliciously fresh and healthy gourmet vegetable soups, salads, sandwiches and the like… today marked the third time I’ve eaten lunch at Duos, and food that was great to start with just keeps getting better with every visit. (Perhaps because Becky’s got so many great building blocks currently peaking at the Slow Food garden?)

For lunch today, I received a lovely sampler plate with tastes of Gunthorp Farms chicken salad, panzanella salad and a little slice of roasted portobello mushroom sandwich.

Duos lovely lunch sampler plate

In the chicken salad, Becky replaced the usual mayo with a pickly giardiniera dressing and small pieces of marinated veggies, a genius move considering temps are hovering around 90 degrees at the moment and I’m not sure how well mayonnaise would have held up. The dressing had a little spicy kick of some flavor I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

For the uninitiated, panzanella salad consists of toasty white bread cubes mixed with chopped vegetables, herbs and a tangy vinaigrette. Yummy. The chopped tomato and peppers tasted like Becky had literally just picked them out of the garden, cut them up and tossed them into the mix. Which I imagine is exactly what she did.

The portobello mushroom sandwich was great, too, a meaty roasted bite of mushroom atop more of that same crusty bread with a little bit of cheese and a roasted red pepper jam on top. I could have easily eaten a whole sandwich of this stuff; as it was served, I couldn’t help but think that it would have worked perfectly as an awesome hors d’oeuvre.

An intriguingly named Ligurian vegetable soup turned out to be a light brothy cup full of fresh vegetables, chopped roughly to maintain plenty of bite and texture. I spied potato, kale, fennel, onion and I’m not sure what else amid a sprinkling of melty cheese and a scattering of chopped basil that lent a bright summery note to the whole dish.

Ligurian vegetable soup

I finished my meal with a little dulce de leche cheesecake square, a luxuriously creamy filling with a hint of cinnamon, draped with a thick caramel sauce that oozed slowly down the sides. Heavenly. I was so excited, I literally inhaled this dessert as I was eating it and got a little choked. It was totally worth it.

dulce de leche cheesecake bar

Thanks to a newly announced collaboration between the Wishard Slow Food Garden, Duos and White River State Park, Slow Foodies can count on finding Becky and company serving lunch each Thursday from a parking spot right beside the garden. This is an ideal location that allows you to enjoy your lunch al fresco along the rock wall in the shade, or stroll down the steps to eat alongside the canal. And because Duos changes up its menu each week, it’s always a new experience. The only downside to this much variety is that now I’m going to be bugging Becky about when she’s planning to make those cheesecake bars again…

If you want to find out more about the Slow Food Garden, stop by on Wednesdays from 4 to 6 p.m. for community work-and-learn sessions each week now through August. I might just see you there.

For more info:

http://www.wishard.edu/slowfoodgarden

http://www.growingplacesindy.org/

http://www.slowfoodindy.com/

http://www.duosindy.com/

It takes two to make a thing go right

If you worked in downtown Indy back in the mid 1990s, chances are you remember Essential Edibles, a quirky and delicious little lunch spot unusually situated in the basement of an old Catholic church in the Lockerbie area. And if you were like me, you were sad to see it close in 1997.

Fans can rejoice again — after years of private chef work, former EE owner Becky Hostetter is up and running again. Literally. Together with her business/chef partner John Garnier, Hostetter is cooking up a storm in her new Duos food truck. Customers log onto Twitter and Facebook to find the mobile kitchen’s location, dishing up lunch Wednesday, Thursday and Friday from various downtown parking spots; breakfast at the downtown farmers market; and occasional weekend meals in other destinations.

What’s cool about Duos is that the chefs change up their short menu of gourmet soups, sandwiches and salads every week. And because Hostetter is a vegetarian and Garnier is a meat-eater, they make sure to offer something for everyone — usually a couple of sandwiches, several kinds of side salad, maybe a soup or two. Everything is organic and locally sourced as much as possible.

I’d tracked down the truck with an editor friend on a blustery day back in March. The weather curtailed sitting outside on Mass Ave, so we ate in my car. The food was good, and we swapped tastes of everything — the Cajun meatloaf sandwich had a nicely spicy kick, but I preferred the Big Al’s sandwich, a drippy, gooey grilled Fontina cheese panini sort of thing with roasted red peppers, balsamic vinegar and basil. Yum.

I revisited Duos on Thursday just this week, bringing hubby along for the ride. It was a little cool outside, but the weather was sunny and beautiful, and the Military Park location was perfect for enjoying an al fresco lunch on the downtown canal. We parked at the White River State Park garage, walked across from the Indiana State Museum and waited in a quickly moving line to get our food.

Duos in action

On this day, our options included pimento cheese and herb roasted turkey sandwiches, wheatberry and orzo pasta salads, green gazpacho and asparagus soups, and an almond cake for dessert. We decided to try both the sandwiches and salads, washed down with bottles of Maine ginger brew and root beer.

Both sandwiches were served on the same hearty whole-wheat buns — hubby’s turkey contained thick slices of flavorful meat, avocado, lettuce, spouts and Jarlsberg cheese. He pronounced it delicious at first bite.

herb roasted turkey sandwich et al

My pimento cheese sammy consisted of a generous scoop of the cheese filling with lettuce, tomato and a slice of onion. The cheese was yummy, but very heavily laced with olives. So much so that it was difficult to discern any other flavor. This was perfectly ok with me because I love olives, but the intensity of the briny saltiness might have been a little overpowering for some diners. Serving it on flatter bread and spreading it out a little thinner might have helped distribute the flavor a little more evenly.

pimento cheese sandwich etc.

The salads were both awesome IMO – served in little plastic cups that looked deceptively small at first, but offered a surprising amount in the end. The delicious wheatberry salad was unlike anything I’ve tried before. Studded with small crunchy bits of organic carrot and red onion in a mild vinaigrette dressing, the chewy wheatberry grains were really satisfying. I loved it, as well as the orzo pasta with roasted veggies that reminded me of something similar I’d eaten at Essential Edibles back in the day.

orzo pasta salad and wheatberry salad

Hubby has a beef, though. I believe I may have mentioned his hatred of onions once or twice? Basically, if he even thinks he sees one, smells one or tastes one anywhere in a dish, it’s game over. He won’t even take a courtesy bite to be nice. So if there’s one thing he hates about dining out, it’s when onions make an appearance without forewarning. It’s ok when the menu advertises them in a dish, as he can then plan accordingly to avoid it. But when they just show up in something he was otherwise really looking forward to eating, he gets upset.

Three out of the four items we ordered for our Duos lunch contained onions. My pimento cheese sandwich included a whole raw slice, which I picked off, but still immediately disqualified it from hubby tasting. (He claims that even if you remove the onion, it’s too late at that point, having already “tainted” the rest of the dish.) The salads both included small slivers of red onion, caramelized and soft so they weren’t raw, but offensive to hubby just the same. Sigh. I think the wheatberry salad mentioned an onion inclusion on the chalkboard menu, but the orzo pasta salad description just held a vague reference to roasted vegetables.

I’m not trying to pick on Duos here, this actually happens to us quite frequently in restaurants. We try to remember to always ask when ordering, but sometimes we forget and get nailed. The point hubby wants to make is that he feels menus should alert diners to onions in any and all dishes, no ifs, ands or buts. I think he may start lobbying Congress for a full disclosure bill.

The price for each Duos sandwich with a side of salad was $7.50, so with two meals and two drinks tacked on, our total bill came to $20 even. A little pricier than fast food, but certainly in keeping with what you’d pay for a nice casual lunch for two downtown. And definitely in line with the quality of the ingredients and creativity of the chefs preparing them. I’ll be back…

For more info:  

http://www.duosindy.com/