In celebration of this year’s National Farm-City Week, the new B&O American Brasserie is offering a three-course, prix-fixe menu featuring ingredients from farms across the area. The promotion starts today (Nov. 20) through Nov. 25. (The restaurant is closed Thanksgiving Day.)

The menu was created by the restaurant’s executive chef E. Michael Reidt and is available for $38. The food pairings look exciting, and if you haven’t been to the glam city restaurant in the old B&O railroad headquarters, this would be a good time to try it.

The farm menu features:

1. Knopp Farms sweet potato soup with lobster and winter-spiced “marshmallow.”
2. Duo of beef from Roseda Farms (strip loin with braised short rib) with Arnold Farms cauliflower and One Straw Farm Swiss chard.
3. Firefly Farms goat cheesecake with Reid’s Orchard apples and pear cider sorbet

Let me know if you go.

This is a big weekend for farmers’ markets as shoppers descend on area markets to gather their Thanksgiving ingredients in abundance. Here’s a list to find one near you. Go early and rested.

Green Spring Station in Lutherville will be one of those markets welcoming patrons from 2-5 p.m. this Saturday in the shopping center parking lot. But the good news is that it won’t shutter the market at the end of the month.

Starting in December, the market will continue from 1-3 p.m. the first and third Saturday of each month through May in the common area of the mall near Tark’s Grill. The first one will be Dec. 5.

The following vendors are confirmed so far: Albright's Farm, Alima's Zucchini Delights, Bees By The Bay, Charles Street Gourmet, Dangerously Delicious Pies, Edible Favors, Gunpowder Bison, Hawkshill Creamery, Lisa Anne's Toffee Apples, Savory Soups, Scotty's Goody's, Sweetie Pie Bath & Body Works, Tuckey's Farm, and Two Ocean's True Food.

It’ll certainly help the gray days of winter pass faster.

Photo by Suat Eman/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Father Leo Patalinghug—Maryland’s newest cooking celeb—is scheduled to be the subject of a feature segment at 9 a.m. Sunday (Nov. 22) on CBS’s News Sunday Morning during its annual episode devoted to food.

You may remember that the St. Mary’s Seminary priest bested chef Bobby Flay in a Throwdown fajita challenge on the Food Network this summer. But Father Leo has a bigger mission besides whipping up fabulous dishes. He encourages communal meals on his website Grace Before Meals as a way to connect families and friends.

The show was taped at Renegade studios in Hunt Valley. You can read more about Father Leo in the December issue of Baltimore magazine.

Pictured, from left: Renegade president Tim Watkins, Father Leo, and CBS senior correspondent Rita Braver.

No major show spoilers here except to say that contestant Jennifer wowed the judges with her Quickfire challenge and made it to the final four last night. For a recap of the episode, read Max’s blog. She nails it as usual.

But my co-worker Jess Blumberg discovered something interesting yesterday about contestant Jennifer, who is the chef de cuisine at 10 Arts in Philadelphia. Jess is working on our annual Top Singles issue for February and is researching other regional magazines.

Well, it turns out, in the November 2008 issue of Philadelphia magazine, Jennifer Carroll, aka chef Jen, was named one of Philly’s top bachelorettes. In her magazine photo, she looks classy with her blond hair cascading around her shoulders and wearing a black-patterned sheath and killer heels—a little different from the weekly Jennifer we see in a ponytail, making faces, and looking frantic under pressure.

In her magazine comments, Jennifer says: Her secret talent is changing a tire faster than a man (be afraid, Toby Young) and her last meal would be eating a Krispy Kreme doughnut. We knew we liked this girl.

What’s also cute is that on the website of her restaurant 10 Arts, her bio familiarly calls her “Jenny.” She’s a native Philadelphian and not that far from us. Maybe we should “adopt” her as one of ours?

Photo courtesy of Bravo TV

I was getting a turkey sandwich recently at The Wine Merchant in Lutherville, but I was really on a search for wine—and not just any wine. I was looking for Henry’s Passion.

The story behind the wine captivated me, and I had to have a bottle or two. The wine was created in memory of 21-year-old Henry Lubke, an ’05 Boys’ Latin alum who passed away from an undetected heart condition in 2007. He was in California at the time, pursuing his love of winemaking at Chateau Felice Winery in Sonoma County. (His story is on the winery’s website.)

In his honor, the winemaker bottled two barrels of merlot that Henry and the cellar master had made. The wine sold out last year by Christmas, said Joe Ciletti, owner of The Wine Merchant. The second vintage ($17.99) is available now at several local stores. "The wine is great," Ciletti said. "It's another great blend."

The best part is that proceeds benefit the Henry George Lubke IV Scholarship Fund at Boys’ Latin. What a wonderful tribute to a young man who was following his dreams.

Wow, how did that happen? Two weeks from today, we’ll be gorging ourselves on turkey and all the trimmings. My sister is hosting my family’s big meal, and, of course, we’ll bring various side dishes to help out. And being native Baltimoreans, we certainly will have a big bowl of sauerkraut on the table.

Locals know they can thank our city’s German immigrants for adding fermented cabbage to our turkey meal. But I appreciated my heritage even more after reading Martha Thomas’s story about our Baltimore food tradition recently in The Washington Post. Martha is a regular contributor to Baltimore magazine. I think you’ll find her story hits home, so to speak.

It also brought back memories of me trying to serve sauerkraut to Thanksgiving dinner guests in Ohio and Florida when I was living there. To say they were shocked is an understatement. But then the Ohioans thought it was weird we ate steamed crabs. And the Floridians had no clue about using Old Bay on seafood.

I’ve been making my grandmother’s recipe for years. It’s not fancy, but my family loves it. And it’s a way to honor Grandma, who died many years ago. I hope you enjoy it.

Grandma’s sauerkraut
1 small package refrigerated sauerkraut
1 pork chop
1 apple
I onion
2 tablespoons sugar
Place sauerkraut in a large pot. Cut pork chop into fourths. Peel apple; core, seed, and cut into quarters. Peel onion and quarter. Add pork chop, apple, and onion to the pot with sauerkraut. Add enough water to see it come through the sauerkraut (that’s such a grandma kind of direction). Bring to a boil. Add sugar and stir. Cover pot and simmer for two hours. Remove apple and pork chop before serving.
Note: Sorry! I have no idea how many it serves. We always have a big crowd for Thanksgiving dinner, and everyone seems to get enough.

Like many others, I enjoyed reading the recent New York Times blogs on “100 Things Restaurant Staffers Should Never Do,” especially since I’m usually on the receiving end of service.

Part one presented such dictums as “Never serve anything that looks creepy or runny or wrong” and “Never touch a customer.” Part two had these admonitions: “If someone complains about the music, do something about it” and “Do not disappear.”

The list is based on requisites for servers at a seafood restaurant that the writer, Bruce Buschel, is building in New York. His wait staff is going to have a lot to live up to.

I agreed with many of his “rules,” though some seemed like a stretch, like this one: “If a guest goes gaga over a particular dish, get the recipe for him or her.” That’s a nice thought, but have you ever seen a chef’s recipe? They make humongous amounts, not what a home cook would want anyway.

But what do I know? I asked two of our magazine interns, Johanna Anderson and Hilary Thomas, who are servers at local restaurants, what they thought about the NYT list. The women had strong opinions about the rules. Essentially, they felt that diners should remember, “Servers are people, too.”

Here’s a synopsis of what they had to say:

From Johanna, who works at a bistro in Annapolis:

She agreed that many of Buschel’s comments involve common-sense practices. But she said that his list also involves elements of service that are measured subjectively or are difficult to quantify.

For instance, diners may feel their servers are “racing around the dining room as if there is a fire” (No. 71) when a waitress is simply walking quickly to the kitchen to pick up food and serve it while it is still hot.

She also said she is “irked by rules like, “Do not interrupt a conversation. For any reason.” She’s been on the receiving end when she hasn’t taken an order. “If you want to talk without pausing for the first 15 minutes of your time in a restaurant, don’t snap at the server if you don’t have a martini in front of you when you take a breath.”

I thought Johanna really hit home with this remark, “Don’t become a houseplant.” Evidently, houseplants are guests who stay long after the check has been settled. She doesn’t mind that they linger, but she does mind when they stay after the restaurant has closed. She has to remain until her table is gone.

She also reminds us that the rules work both ways. One rule says, “Do not announce your name. No jokes, no flirting, no cuteness.” She asks that diners do the same: “No making sexual innuendos. No—to men—asking me to sit on their lap, especially when your wife is sitting beside you.”

From Hilary, who works at a casual restaurant in White Marsh:

She pointed out that a lot of a server’s duties are dependent on their boss or manager. For example, one of Buschel’s mandates states, “Do not take an empty plate from one guest while others are still eating the same course.”

But she points out that “pre-bussing, as it is usually called, is mandated by most restaurant managers. So in some ways, a server does not really have a choice in the matter.”

She also thought the rule about asking people if they had allergies was too inquisitive. “Aren’t medical problems personal.” It may be embarrassing if a person has to announce the allergy to the rest of the table, though they could alert the staff beforehand.

She also wants diners to realize that she can’t always tell them if the restaurant is out of an item (Buschel’s rule: “Let the guests know the restaurant is out of something before the guests read the menu”). “It’s only possible if the kitchen lets everyone know,” she pointed out.

She also had some advice for diners:

Do not order a big-price meal and then not compensate the server if the service was good. (She told me that she’s seeing more skimping in this economy. She said she gets paid a pittance per hour and has to share her tip with numerous people from runners to busboys.)

Do not complain to get a free meal or after you’ve eaten 75 percent of your meal.

Do not allow your child to make a mess and leave it there for “the help” to clean up.

But I think she summed it up best when she said:

“Do treat your server the way you want to be treated by them.”

Chef Marta Quintana decided to take a detour from opening Havana Road, a Cuban restaurant, in the space occupied by Grano Pasta Bar on The Avenue in Hampden. She is focusing instead on her Cuban line of products, which are available now at Whole Foods in Mt. Washington and Annapolis.

But she’s not ruling out having a restaurant at some point after she gets her commercial business established, she says. Her game plan was to get into Whole Foods; then, establish public awareness of the brand and herself as a chef. Next on the list is to work on a restaurant.

The Cuban native, who came to the U.S. when she was four and now lives in Lutherville, was inspired by her mother and grandmother’s cooking. She worked in the hospitality industry for 25 years before being laid off a year ago. She then turned to what she knows best. “I knew how to cook and entertain,” she says.

Her products, which she describes as fresh, wholesome, and having no preservatives, include red beans, Cuban salsa, rice ensalada, mojo, and mojo verde. She said mojo sauce in her native country is garlicky, oniony, and citrusy. “We put it on everything. It’s like ketchup.” There are more products to come.

The label on her eco-friendly containers is a photo taken by her father in 1948. It’s a reminder of family and home. But it’s the cuisine that is the bridge. “To me, food closes the gap between the two countries.”

Marta will be demonstrating her products and giving cooking demos at the two Whole Foods. Check the website for dates. This weekend, she’ll be at the Mt. Washington location between 11-3 p.m.

So what’s going to happen to the Grano space, now that owner/chef Gino Troia has moved around the corner? I have a call into Gino. I’ll let you know what he says soon.

By now, you probably know that the American Visionary Art Museum finally has a new restaurant. It’s been a long culinary drought, but the intriguingly named Mr. Rain’s Fun House officially opened this week.

I was perplexed, though, when I checked out its website. There’s no hint as to what’s actually on the menu, which is described as “iconoclastic Americana cuisine, classic cocktails and farm to table philosophies.” Huh?

So I contacted the restaurant’s general manager Perez Klebahn, who is also the beverage director, and he was kind enough to send me a working dinner menu. Here are some of the items listed:

Soup and salad: roasted beets and rutabaga with snow peas, croutons, and gorgonzola with a citrus ginger dressing ($8); coconut and galangal (okay, I had to look this up in the Food Lover’s Companion. It’s described as a rhizome with a hot, ginger-peppery flavor) with oysters ($8), and purple yam soup ($7).

Appetizers: wild mushroom terrine with blackberries and cocoa reduction ($9), crab and mango tartare ($12), and adobo ribs ($10).

Entrees: prawns and pheasant ($20), tangerine duck ($25), flat-iron steak ($24), and black-eyed pea cakes ($15).

The menu sounds as interesting as the museum. The chef is William Buszinski, formerly of Sputnik Cafe in Crownsville, which he owned with his wife Maria. She’s now the business manager at Mr. Rain’s.

The restaurant serves lunch, dinner, and Saturday and Sunday brunch. It’s open Tuesday-Sunday, and closed on Monday. There’s also no phone number on the website. The one listed on a press release is 410-244-1900.

Has anyone been there yet?

I’ve been thinking about cookbooks because a friend of mine just released a beautiful one this week called The Brandywine Book of Food. It has recipes, gorgeous photos, and focuses on the culinary terroir of the Brandywine River, which mostly winds its way through Pennsylvania and Delaware. I can’t wait to buy it.

But I’ve been wondering if I’m one of the few people who still treasures cookbooks. I love to read them, just for fun, even if I’m not looking for a particular recipe.

Some people say they’ve pretty much abandoned the books in favor of websites like epicurious.com. I agree that I’m also a fan of plugging in a few ingredients and, voilà, you have an instant recipe with ratings from cooks who have actually made the dish. But I still like my printed books.

Then, today, I saw an article in the New York Times titled, “Cookbooks As Edible Adventures.” It concurs that cookbooks are still alive and well. In fact, there are dozens of new ones with varied approaches that will be published soon, including The Pioneer Woman Cooks by a wife and mother who lives on a cattle ranch in Oklahoma; My New Orleans, co-written by chef John Besh, who owns six restaurants in the city; and So Easy by Ellie Krieger, a nutritionist who puts delicious into healthy foods, to name just a few.

Just reading the NYT story made me start picking out which books I would like to add to my collection. But the local Brandywine cookbook by co-author Roger Morris—who has written for national food publications—particularly appeals to me because I used to live in Wilmington, DE, and I appreciate the landscape that houses such gems as Longwood Gardens, the Brandywine River Museum, and Winterthur, a duPont estate.

Check out the book or take a day trip to visit the area for yourself. My favorite restaurants, whose chefs have shared recipes for the book, include Domaine Hudson, Harry’s Seafood Grill, and Simon Pearce. But you won’t go wrong if you just go to the local Jake’s and grab a burger and shake.