Guest Bartending at Prairie Fire

So one of my cool chef friends, Sarah Stegner, has invited me to be a guest bartender at Prairie Fire!  Here’s how it works:  I tend bar, whipping up a tasty rhubarb and gin cocktail.  You come hang out with me and throw tips in the jar.  All the tips I earn I’ll donate to the fabulous Academy for Global Citizenship.  Simple as that!

The astute blog reader might notice that my site’s masthead photo has always been rhubarb.  I love rhubarb!  I prefer you leave the strawberry out of the strawberry/rhubarb pie and give me my rhubarb straight up! No messing around.  Why put a second fruit in there when the first one is so perfectly delicious?!  So when Prairie Fire’s bartender Dan Sviland contacted me to devise a cocktail I could get behind, I was thrilled to have rhubarb season coincide with my bartending gig.  Mix up a tasty rhubarb syrup, toss it over ice with the amazing North Shore Distillery’s Gin #6 and a splash of soda.  Seasonal.  Local.  Perfect.  Swing by and I’ll make you one…or two.

With any luck, mine will look as nice as this:

So what is the Academy for Global Citizenship and why should we be supporting it?  AGC is a fabulous charter school on the south side .  What do they have going for them? A garden. Chickens. Yoga. Organic meals. Plus, of course, school-type stuff!  This is the kind of innovative school our city needs more of and you can help them by drinking rhubarb cocktails!  Why would you pass that up?  Still need convincing?  Here’s some cuteness for you:

Gardening with Harvest Moon Organic Farms

Chef Stegner will also be offering two specials from the kitchen for you to nosh on in the bar, and I’m proud to say I helped develop these ideas!  Thinking about the radish explosion in our garden right now naturally led to spicy braised pork shoulder on a Three Sisters Garden polenta cake garnished with our radishes!

Also coming out of the kitchen is a spring greens pesto flatbread with spinach, a farm egg, Fayette Creamery Avondale Truckle cheese, and greens from our garden!

I’m honored too that my farmer friends will be joining me that evening.  Come out to meet:

Tracey Vowell and Kathe Roybal from Three Sisters Garden

Vicki Westerhoff from Genesis Growers

And Sarah Elizabeth Ippel of the Academy for Global Citizenship will be there too.

We’ll see you there!

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Tuesday, May 31

Prairie Fire

215 N. Clinton (right on the Green Line)

6-8pm

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Farms represented:

Three Sisters Garden (cornmeal)

Genesis Growers (farm eggs, greens)

Maple Creek Farm (pork)

Mick Klug Farms (rhubarb)

Fayette Creamery (Avondale Truckle cheese)

Uplands Cheese (Pleasant Ridge Reserve cheese)

And stuff Ellen and I grew in our very own garden!