I've recently been burnt out on cooking. That happens every once and awhile for me. I cook day in and day out, but there comes a time when I don't want to step foot in the kitchen. However, I wasn't going to resort to fast food. I needed to look elsewhere for a decent and healthy meal.
Ina Garten was the owner of a speciality food store called "Barefoot Contessa" for over 20 years. They specialized in ready made food that was tasty and easily carried out. Since I live in St. Louis (a pretty decent size city), I thought why not try take out food from speciality grocery stores or even chain stores? My first stop is a local grocery store on Kingshighway called Straub's. I love Straub's for a variety of reasons- they're local, they offer fresh produce, meats, and cheeses, their bakery is awesome, and they carry local products from pizza to cheese to cookies to cake. They have a "famous chicken salad" and one bite in, you'll realize why it's famous. It's incredibly simple: shredded white meat chicken, celery, and a mayo based sauce. I'm not sure what else is in the sauce because no flavor particularly stands out, but it doesn't have a gloppy mayo taste. It's so well seasoned that it's just perfect.
Then, I wanted to sample their cake. Granted whole cakes and slices are on the expensive side ($4 for a slice and between $10-20 for a small whole cake), they are worth it if you're in the mood for cake, but not in the mood to bake it yourself. I could pronounce the ingredients and nothing alarmed me (flour, butter, sugar, baking powder, vanilla, etc) and the cake was moist with lots of flavor. My favorite is their strawberry shortcake. I bought one slice one day and went back the next day to buy them out of it. It is that good.
My other stops included Whole Foods (the chain) and Dierbergs (a grocery store in St. Louis). While the take out food was good at both of these, they didn't quite compare to Staub's. I really like the salad bar at Whole Foods because the possibilities are endless. They offer every kind of veggie you would want on a salad with plenty of main course dishes as well. They also didn't offer iceberg lettuce- just really good and flavorful types of lettuces. Dierbergs also has a great salad bar with fewer options. However, they're cheaper, so that's a plus. Whole Food's deli is much better than Dierbergs because they offer a range of vegetarian dishes and really healthy foods (lots of veggies) while Dierbergs mainly sticks with fried chicken and mayo based pasta salads. Again though, Dierbergs is cheaper, but it depends what you value (price over taste and quality).
I think both have great dessert choices. I'm a fan of Dierberg's cake and they offer probably at least 5-10 different kinds a cake a day. Whole Food's desserts are also quite good with my favorite being the vegan chocolate chip cookie (remember that just because it's vegan doesn't mean lower fat/calories- it has the exact same amount of calories as a regular cookie).
Anyway, I'm still new at this take out food concept so I'm still exploring my choices. Next I think I will sample the smaller local joints across various neighborhoods in the city. That sounds like fun.
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