Support for food is Love is provided by Wild Alaska Salmon and Seafood 100% Fisherman family owned independent seafood sourcing, catching, processing and delivering seafood directly to the consumer's front door.

From caught to bought Wild Salmon direct from the fisherman information at WildAlaskaSalmonandSeafood.

Com here's to the local restaurants to the chef's owner operators, the staff, the ones who love being in the weeds night after night, when we go to work each morning, that's who we have in mind from where we source our food to how we deliver it, here's to them, the ones who are out there cooking for us every day.

Restaurants are the heart of everything we do.

We are Performance Food Service proudly supporting Food is Love If you drive around in St. Louis for any time at all, you will find one fact that is inescapable.

There are a lot of parks here.

I'm not talking about a grassy lot with a few pieces of playground equipment on it.

I mean, nice parks, beautifully landscaped, well planned out green spaces with mature trees, rambling trails, architectural features and history.

you like Art you say?

There are even parks here for that.

The Crown jewel of the St. Louis park scape is unarguably Forest Park, sort of like the the Central Park of St. Louis with its beginning rooted in the 1904 Worlds Fair when the park was more or less transformed into an international city for the event, walk in the grounds today the imprint is still here.

The park scene in St. Louis is vast, but all this walking around here is making me hungry.

And when you're hungry and at a park, the situation is prime for a picnic.

As a chef, I need to stay curious in order to evolve.

For me, that means looking beyond a good meal to learn more about who made it.

And what inspires them to cook?

"ancho peppers" Every great city has great food.

I'm going on a journey around the world right here in St. Louis I'm on a quest to find passionate chefs who cook from the heart " and I think it's the best" to prove that food is love "and it's gonna be delicious!"

Food is love.

Love your food.

The quest to build a perfect picnic with local foods sounds like a lot of fun, but let's be honest, this could be daunting.

Okay, I'm ready.

I, however, have an ace of my sleeve.

A chef friend and a former St. Louisan Kassie Lynn, who, after some persuading and possibly some bribery I have enlisted to act as a compass to help me navigate through the sea of foodie possibilities that lays before me.

Her decision to stock our basket with sweets first = only confirms in my mind that I chose the right partner for this.

On a normal day, there is plenty of good reasons to come to Pint Size Bakery, but when you are packing a picnic with the best things from St. Louis, a mediocre dessert course is not going to cut it.

According to Kassie, the oats here at Pint Size is something to write home about.

My favorite thing here.

I like oatmeal cream pies, but they do this thing called an oatie, which is their version of an oatmeal cream pie.

So it's two oatmeal cookies with the marshmallow cream in the middle And it's just... they have Nancy and Kristie in the back, and they do just absolutely wonderful things here.

The smell in here brings me back.

We arrived just in time to see how the filling was made and the oats come together.

Butter, powdered sugar and marshmallow fluff.

A sticky delight ..cream until it's nice and fluffy and white.

So we don't really do anything that's super fancy.

It's just mostly really good ingredients that we use the right technique on and make delicious things that people love So this is a chewy oatmeal cookie with rolled oast Brown sugar and butter flour and a little bit of cinnamon they smell delicious.

How many cookies do you eat in the day?

It's kind of a problem.

Yeah, I'll say!

They are great.

I know.

Yeah.

It's a good cookie on its own I do it's almost like a kind of cookie that you would put a butter scotch chip in Who taught you all this stuff.

Kristie and I both went to culinary school I went just right out of high school.

I went right to culinary school and ready for it and was excited.

And I've been doing it ever since.

There was a little bit of time where we were closed because of the pandemic and people were sharing with us pictures of things that they made that were our recipes, even the oatmeal cream pie.

And it was awesome to see, but they still come back to us.

They still come back to get it treat.

I mean, we're like, you think you can do it as good as us go ahead We shared, like, a ton of our recipes online and Feast Magazine, and we love to do that because people get excited sometimes things taste better when someone else makes it for you They always come back, even if we share our recipes.

Is this your favorite cookie?

Im kind of a chocolate person.

We have a triple chocolate cookie that is really irresistible.

Just have to kind of like, just let it mix in and then I'll just finish a little bit by hand and see what it is.

Kristie do you want to do the piping on these?

or should I?

Let me do it You can.

yeah.

So we start kind of like about a half an inch above and just squeeze it.

And then the hard part is the cookies cook a little crazy, so we try to match them up.

The pastry chef in me can help to take a bag and ice a few of them by myself.

Like riding a bicycle.

I grew up in a pastry shop.

I've done this a few times too, so ..

I'm getting in the spirit now you're like.

What else you got to do today?

We have some dishes is in the back.

Youve got to earn your way, you got to earn your keep.

Right?

We put them in the fridge for a little while before we box them all up, Kassie and I can always come in and help you when you get real busy.

We work for oats.

Dessert in hand, It's time to ride to the next stop you're now part of the ultimate picnic.

Two things that are almost synonymous with picnic is wine and cheese.

If you invite somebody to a picnic and you don't have cheese or wine, is it even really a picnic?

There's a lot of places to get wine and cheese, but none more appropriately named than the Wine and Cheese Place.

There is no shortage of excellent options here and all the help you need to find them.

Locally owned, The Wine and Cheese Place has an amazing selection of the best local and imported wine and cheese.

As much as I would love to go to my comfort zone with a bottle of Prisoner for the picnic.

Being a St. Louis family, a nice bottle of Deirbergs chardonelle is a much better fit.

And there's not a single person in St. Louis that doesn't know Deirbergs Yeah, right.

Well, I think we need to support St. Louis, so let's get one of those .Lets pick some cheese out.

Two bottles should do it.

And a little blue cheese sounds good, too.

And another cool thing to do here is roast nuts.

We get some to go and pick up some excellent goat cheese made here in Missouri, just outside of St. Louis in a little place called Baetje Farms.

Okay, I know it isn't St. Louis but let's be honest, how are you going to take care of a herd of 80 plus goats in, say, Benton Park or Tower Grove or anywhere in the city, for that matter.

You get my point.

Baetje Farms is about an hour outside of the city and a scenic and a scenic drive into the country, to be sure.

But the real reward is some of the best goat cheese I've ever had.

I don't know if we are shaking hands I'm Sarah.

All right, Laser.

They're all French inspired cheeses.

So our most popular one is the one that is called Bloomsdale.

It's actually mimicked after a small town in France called Valence Too its a valence they name it after the region.

So we trademarked named that cheese here Bloomdale, because that's where we're from.

So that is our number one cheese that we sell worldwide recognized it's one over five times Super gold is the world choose the word so little old Bloomsdale is making world class cheese, which is super awesome.

We have a small team here, small but mighty.

And you see it in a lot of places in St. Louis restaurants.

Yes.

Known for its high quality Baetje cheese is sold in stores and used in kitchens all over the country.

Believe it or not, the original rennet used in the goat cheese comes from Denmark.

So naturally, I had to make the trip out.

And here we age our beer washer and our amero and our feta.

Step around and see here.

smells so so good in there.

Yeah, it is my favorite room.

I'll take a bucket of that Feta.

Right?

Yeah.

Feta tomato and onion.

It doesn't get much better.

It's so important as a chef that you connect the dots where if you buy local and you come out and see, then you have much more respect for the product when you have it in your hand because you realize the story behind it and the craft.

Absolutely.

And that makes it amazing to serve it.

It's an art.

Like all of our cheeses, we strive for constituency, but you see, everyone is just a little different because its a craft a we don't have these mass machines making those cheeses.

It's a group of our six people.

Doing every case.

It's neat to see it all come together.

Hey!

I'm not sure if the goats likes me, but I love their cheese, and it's very appropriate that the cheese is in the shape of a heart.

All in all, a beautiful drive and worth the trip out But I digress, now we must get back to filling our picnic basket Those goats were so sweet.

And I don't know why.

Digregorio, is that like, you can go and get a sandwich there too?

If you want to, they'll make you a sandwich there too?

another must Another must have on any picnic is some kind or several kinds of cured meats Cheese and wine is only made better when you mix in some nice Italian specialties like Prusciuto or Capicola.

But, Kassie, where do we find such things?

Digregorio, in the iconic Hill neighborhood is a great place to start.

Digregorio is an old school Italian grocer that has all the specialties Mafalda, olives, meats dressings, just to name a few.

This is a good picnic idea Lasse Its a Mufalada, provolone mortadella Copolla, copa, salami with a mufalada spread Wow, that looks good.

Yeah, it looks great.

Yeah, its really easy.

Pull it up, wrap it up and take it on your picnic a lot of cheese.

So.

Well, look at here at any fontina, right?

It's very good cheese I appreciate you saying that If it's traditional Italian, they have it here.

And their story is a lot like other Italian immigrant stories on the Hill.

So this is your parents right here.

It's my mom and dad's wedding picture there.

Okay, so the story is there's two brothers, my grandfather Frank Digregorio.

His brother was Joe Digregorio.

So during the war, they were all coal miners, so in Sicily they shut all the mines down.

So one brother went to Belgium.

One brother came here to the Hill.

So my grandfather was at Belgium, and his whole family was working in the sulfur mines in Belgium because the sulfur, they needed it for the war The more so they were paying big money back then, which compared to today it would be big money.

So they lived there.

My mom and dad met there.

They got married.

My sister and I were actually born at the Leiage.

So my Great uncle started bringing us over.

They sponsored us over.

So we did the whole immigration thing and we came over on the Queen Elizabeth.

We went into Elis Island All of our names are on the wall.

From New York Some of the families stayed in New York The rest came here to St Louis on the Hill.

And it's called the Hill because all the factories were down on Manchester and they had a walk up Macon Avenue to come here to the Hill where they live.

So they called it la mundane, which means the mountain, over the Hill.

No doubt Frank is a St. Louis treasure Thank you very much, Frank.

Thank you, Frank.

You nice meeting you.

Thank you so much.

All I can say is it's a good thing I don't live close to this place.

Digregorio sells a ton of Volpe, which Volpe is down on the Hill Just down from DiGregorio is Volpe.

Volpe is an artisan cured meat shop that has been preparing cured meats in the Italian tradition since 1902.

We're a 118 year old Deli.

When John Volpe immigrated from Italy to start his business here on the Hill.

He lived upstairs, so there was never any excuse to not show up four generations later, And today Volpe still holds true to the standards set back then, only now Volpe foods are distribute nationally, but their home is still on the Hill and their products is a staple in places like Digregorio.

Another small but mighty grocer filled with local goodies and imported delicacies all conveniently arranged together for easy picnic pairing.

It's the Smokehouse Market in Chesterfield.

This is Thom, the owner of the Smoke House Market and has accompanied restaurant Annie Guns.

So if you're sitting at Annie Guns and you have the best steak, and say, wow, where can I get the steak?

Well, you can come over to the Smoke house and get it.

Conversely, if you're walking to the store and you see something that appeals to you and you say, wow, I don't feel like cooking we say come to Annie Guns because we feature everything next door.

This place reminds me of a European style market where instead of shopping for the whole week, customers stop in every other day to pick up what's fresh.

The idea of 40 years ago that we had was that in the true European sense that we would be a small market and not compete with the big box stores, we would handle things that they really he didn't handle specially items.

So we had a lot of imported items.

But we also have you got to remember, this was all farm ground then, so we had a lot of farmers that brought things in, raspberry strawberries and everything.

Thom likes to call the Market his 40 year overnight success story.

Walking through the store, it's clear that he spent most of those 40 years sourcing the best of the best.

In the product lifecycle, We'd be getting things from our neighbors, St. Charles County all over, and that was 1980.

So that's why we call it our 40 year overnight success story.

But we go through here.

We have wines that match everything that we sell.

We have wines and are paired with it, and you'll see it throughout the store.

Well, if we have the cheese, then we need the crackers.

Then we need the olives and we need the Tampanad or maybe they'll want some salad to go with their cheeses.

So we make everything here in small batches.

We make and package, our own little sausages and everything if they needed some pear chutney to go with their cheese some pear chutney.

We have Quince butter as we go through the store.

We have everything that you need every day In the true European sense, which you're used to, is that you buy things every two or three days, everything's fresh, everything's made in small batches on the premise.

So today we are picking up some homemade chips, Quince butter and pair chutney to go with our cheeses.

You can spend all day in this place.

But picnic waits.

When's the last time you were on our picnic?

It's been a while!

With everything we need for the perfect picnic.

Now it's just a matter of picking the park to eat it in.

Today we're headed to Forest Park.

There are so many scenic vistas in hidden corners, The biggest problem can be choosing where to go.

Luckily, no choice is a bad one.

With more food than Kassie and I can handle alone.

I have invited friend and St. Louis food blogger Whitney Schere, better known as @whitneyinthecity to come along with us.

Whitneys Instagram account is one of several dedicated pages that focuses on the St. Louis food scene Another aspect that makes the food scene in St. Louis so special.

I'm always looking for what's good and what's new.

So having a connection like Whitney is priceless.

Let the picnic begin.

What we tried to do today is, Kassie showed me around all these great places where you can get all kinds of delicacies.

But it's all from St. Louis and made in St. Louis.

This is the Quince spread or the Quince butter.

As a chef, I always bring a knife.

You got to St. Louis is like a giant melting pot because I'm not from here.

You're not from here.

And there's so many different people that aren't as from St. Louis that all come together, especially for the food scene we were talking about earlier.

Everybody seems like they're on the same team, like in St. Louis All the chefs know each other, and everybody comes together for the city, which is awesome.

But even bloggers, you were saying to me that bloggers in New York didn't necessarily work together or like each other.

No, here here, it's completely different.

We tag each other and post like each other's pictures.

In New York, you would avoid everybody else like, if we're going to an event, I'm going to sit on one side of the table.

You're going to be on the other side Were going to pretend like, we don't know what the other one does.

Let me open the wine.

There you go.

I don't know what I was thinking.

I should have done that first.

So this is from Annie Guns So what they do?

They have the big smoke cast market there.

They do a lot of stuff that picnic wise, I was thinking, like French onion dip, Ranch dip, blue cheese.

really Well, simple things that people take for granted.

The olives.

These are from Digregorios And that's a part of Frank's moms recipe.

Grab that humble fog, too.

Have you ever had that?

No Oh, my gosh.

So we got that from Clayton, The Wine and Cheese store.

We went there and got that.

They had a great selection.

I mean, the nuts they make.

Yeah.

That was an interesting concept, too.

You can go in there and they'll roast nuts for you.

They have almond pistachos, everything.

They'll roast it.

They have a house blend, which is what we got.

I hope you're hungry.

That's a Mafalda.

They do those at Digregorios They'll make sandwiches.

They ask that you order these ahead of time because of the bread.

They make their own bread at Marconi Bakery, which is their bakery.

The most important thing when you go on a picnic is that of hungry?

Yes.

And if you're not, you need to go a long walk first.

No.

We're all going to be friends who doesn't like prosciutto?

I know, right?

Salty.

No, I saw.

We talked about Louis on demond.

They have that machine that cuts the prosciutto So that is so neat, isn't it?

That's one of my favorite appetizers.

Their prosciutto And is it parmesan cheese, pesto and mozzarella?

everything is so good.

So is that your favorite restaurant you think in St. Louis?

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's okay for you to say that as a blogger?

I don't know.

It's too late now I look at all the different things you could get here.

You have a lot of wonderful ingredients from all over.

Because St. Louis is a big melting pot of people.

There's great places to have picnics.

Lets eat.

Gotta try it.

Mmm that's good Your got sweet, salt to you and your creamy.

Yeah.

Deierburg wine.

Another St. Louis family.

But picnicking is a good idea.

There you go and get everything safely.

And then you can sit with your families and friends, and you don't have to worry about anything.

Thank you.

Yes.

Cheers.

Food is love.

Food IS love One of my favorite things that I hope stays after COVID or is just here to stay are the streeterys where the different restaurants are moving out into the middle of the street, The Central West End, On Fridays and Saturday nights, all the restaurants bring tables out into the middle of Euclid, and they close the street.

It's packed in a great way, a safe way.

So when you're at a picnic like this, you can always tell how much wine you drink by how you're sitting.

So here in the beginning, I've only had half a glass of wine.

And then as the day progresses, you get further and further down.

The Missouri Botanical Gardens on Wednesday night has live music, and we'll set up a big picnic and get a bunch of different pizzas and St. Louis style pizza.

It doesn't really matter if it's cold.

It's very good.

This is garlic olive oil.

Frank from the Digregorio said that just takes some bread and dip it in there.

Its really good.

There's so much food here to explore Here we have everything.

St. Louis has been on a lot of lists recently, like in the last year or two for top foodie cities around the country.

And so that's been kind of cool.

But even sitting right here right now, think about this.

We're all by ourselves.

There is nobody.

And we're in a fairly big city.

Yeah, it's been very interesting with COVID.

And as a food blogger, it's been interesting because I think we're all kind of banning together to do whatever we can to support local restaurants.

It's now about trying to get people to go to restaurants and trying to get them to try new foods.

And even if you go to the same restaurant over and over, maybe order a second entree or try something different.

That's exactly what it's all about is trying something different.

And once you try something different, you're all of a sudden open to a lot of other new things.

And that's how food is.

Food is a little gateway to another culture where, you know, you take the chance you open the door, they let you in and you get to see something completely different.

Well, thank you very much.

It was such a pleasure.

And look at the spread from St. Louis The perfect picnic in the park.

It was just a perfect day.

Food is love At the end of the day, I've come to realize maybe there isn't an exact formula for the perfect picnic.

Maybe as long as you have something good to eat, the biggest factors are where you eat it and who you eat it with.

As far as food in this city, the possibilities are limitless.

There is a mountain of options, and we only visited a few.

Still, we ended up with an incredibly diverse and satisfying spread.

I can go on and on about the different parks in St. Louis but you should really just explore for yourself, which brings me to a formula I DO know,... to broaden your horizons.

Start with an open mind and an empty stomach.

Drive through a neighborhood you've never been to, check out the local shops get to know more about the people behind them Follow Whitney in the city and all of the other great St. Louis food bloggers, on Instagram.

Do this and it won't take you long to see why I always say food is love.

I created this charcuterie board in the spirit of sharing this is great for picnics.

You get all the ingredients in St. Louis and all the beautiful parks in St. Louis are ready for you and your friends to share.

There is no reason why you shouldn't go and have a picnic with someone you love.

Support for food is love is provided by Wild Alaska Salmon and Seafood 100% Fisherman family owned Independent Seafood sourcing Catching processing and delivering seafood directly to the consumer's front door.

From caught to bought Wild Salmon direct from the fisherman Information at WildAlaskaSalmonandSeafood.com Here's to the local restaurants, to the chefs owner operators, the staff, the ones who love being in the weeds night after night When we go to work each morning, that's who we have in mind from where we source our food to how we deliver it here's to them, the ones who are out there cooking for us everyday Restaurants are the heart of everything we do.

We are Performance Food Service, proudly supporting Food is Love