Past Stuff

One of the first weekends I arrived in Indiana Dave had an event planned where he was showing IU students around the farmer's market with Christine Barbour (the local Slow Food Co-President). I was reading through her blog today and saw her write up on it. Thought I'd pass it along since it's something I did when I first arrived here.
From her blog entitled, My Plate Or Yours?

Market Tour with Dave Tallent

Yesterday I took a group of seniors from the Honors College on a “Market Tour with Chef Dave.” The theme was “If You Are What You Eat, Who Are You?” and we talked to farmers about alternative, less-toxic ways to produce our food. As we walked and talked and sampled cheese and yogurt and chocolate milk (!) we planned a lunch menu with Dave based on what was fresh and delicious, shopped for the ingredients and then headed back to Restaurant Tallent to cook a Slow Food lunch.

I really think we had all 15 students in the kitchen at once, plus Dave and Heidi, his sous chef, and Jason, the pastry chef. The Tallent crew made splendid teachers – they had the kids making pasta from scratch, chopping vegetables, grating cheese, making vinaigrette, stirring sauce, and producing a dynamite lunch. We started with a salad of arugula, apples, cherry tomatoes, and Traders Point Creamery Fleur de la Terre cheese. Then we had two pasta dishes – a spicy one with Fielder Farms Italian sausage and a vegetarian version with Capriole cheese, summer and winter squash, tomatoes, eggplant, potatoes, onions and garlic, with lots and lots of basil. The pasta was tender and perfect, the sauces exploded with all the flavors of this late summer/early fall weekend. For dessert we had picked up a cantaloupe that turned out not to be sweet enough. Jason to the rescue – he drizzled it with a bit of basil oil, balsamic reduction, and honey and scattered it with sea salt and it was unexpectedly fabulous.

Then we scooted out of there and let the professionals have their kitchen back so they could prep for a busy Saturday night. If I haven’t said it enough here before, let me shout this from the rooftops: DAVE TALLENT IS MY HERO! Thanks, guys!