Author: Hannah Sayle

Brandi Marter, baker-in-chief at YoLo’s Midtown location, whips up decadent cakes, cupcakes, and gelato cakes from scratch every day, and she doesn’t eat a bite of it. She’s more enticed by the pulled pork, chicken wings, and smoked brisket she prepares for her Paleo food business, Bedrock Eats and Sweets.

Okay, sure, maybe Marter tastes a smidge of cupcake here and there, but aside from the occasional nibble, she eschews any processed flours and sugars. Marter ascribes to the Paleo diet, informally dubbed the “caveman diet,” and avoids most food items that wouldn’t have been part of the everyday diet of our prehistoric progenitors. To help fellow Paleo dieters, Marter has started Bedrock Eats and Sweets, which provides to-go meals and prepared foods in bulk, including Paleo-friendly baked goods and sweets.

“There’s no fast food for us,” she says. “The owner of YoLo, Taylor Berger, came to me, and we talked about doing something Paleo because he realized there was nobody around who was providing prepared meals or grab-and-go options for Paleos.”

Marter focuses less on staying true to “what cavemen ate” and more on eliminating foods that cause inflammation — foods, she says, like peanut butter, wheat, and dairy products. However, the prepared foods she makes for Bedrock Eats and Sweets are strictly Paleo, for her diehard Paleo customers.

On Mondays, Marter posts a menu for the following week, featuring one lunch and one dinner entrée for each day. Anyone interested in pre-ordering Paleo meals can select a meal they’d like to order — for instance, Tuesday’s smoked sausage with bell peppers and onions and whipped sweet potatoes — purchase it online by Friday for $12.50 per meal, and pick it up the following week on the scheduled day.

Each meal comes with 8 ounces of protein and is made fresh that morning and delivered to one of the area YoLo locations or Crossfit gyms for pick-up anytime between noon and 7 p.m. Advance ordering is required because Marter buys much of the meat and organic produce locally, usually at one of the Saturday-morning farmers markets around town.

Marter also prepares various grab-and-go items, such as her smoked chicken salad and her banana pudding, for customers who don’t pre-order their meals. Bulk batches of these items are also available for pre-order.

“We wanted to make sure that people weren’t shying away from the diet because the amount of prep work they had to do was overwhelming,” Marter says. “This way, they have a way to swing by and pick up a meal that’s ready to go and they don’t even have to think about it.”

Bedrock Eats and Sweets, www.bedrockeatsandsweets.com (409-6433)

The story of Stacey Fields’ Southern cooking delivery service begins as much of the best Southern cooking does — at church.

“It started mainly with her church members,” says Kenneth Durham, Fields’ cousin and marketing coordinator for Stacey’s Southern Cookin’. “They’d say, ‘Oh, cook something for us’ or ‘Cook something for Papa Joe.’ From there, it expanded to doing business with local churches, and then about a year ago she got serious about it. She feels Memphis really lacks a way to get good Southern seafood, so the concept is to bring that directly to people’s homes and offices.”

Fields cooks out of her certified home kitchen, where she whips up her seafood pot pie, made with a flaky bread crust and shrimp, crab, or a seafood medley and the customer’s choice of vegetables. While this specialty rings in at $15, all other entrées go for $10 a piece, including baked Tilapia, fried catfish, and pan-fried Buffalo fish. For a couple extra dollars, the side options include the standard coleslaw and French fries but also include spaghetti and stuffed peppers.

Currently, Stacey’s Southern Cookin’ accepts online orders and orders over the phone. She delivers for free within a 25-mile radius but only from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Friday through Sunday. There is a minimum order of $30 for delivery. Eventually, Fields hopes to expand into Mississippi and Arkansas and do deliveries seven days a week. For now, she’s focusing on building her customer base and spreading the gospel of Southern seafood that has long been a part of her family.

“All the recipes are from her great-grandfather, passed on to her grandmother, passed on to her mother, passed on to her,” Durham says. “Her family has been in the food industry for generations.”

Stacey’s Southern Cookin’, www.staceyssoutherncookin.com (281-0368)

Last year was a rough year for chicken wings. Just ask David Boyd, owner of D’Bo’s Wings n’ More.

“In 2012, the cost of the wing industry was absurd,” he says. “It hurt our profit margin so much, we started looking for other items to drive traffic to D’Bo’s.”

According to a Washington Post article earlier this year, droughts in 2012 bumped up the price of chicken feed, causing farmers to reduce their flock sizes and focus on raising larger chickens. But while larger chickens might yield more breast and leg meat, even a fat chicken only comes with two wings. And since fewer wings mean higher prices, D’Bo’s began to feel the squeeze. Chains like KFC have suddenly started pushing boneless wings, and Boyd has done so as well. But he also set his sights on another trend altogether: the gourmet burger.

“We noticed the better burger business was really growing,” Boyd says. “We figured, let’s drive traffic and create a better burger concept in Memphis.”

That concept was launched earlier this year under the name The Checkered Cow. Boyd’s better burger business is housed inside the four existing D’Bo’s Wings n’ More locations, much as a combination Taco Bell/KFC operates, he explains. Customers order from the D’Bo’s menu for wings and select from the Checkered Cow menu for the local version of what Boyd calls “the pricing and free topping offerings of Five Guys but the quality and variety of Red Robin.”

There are about 30 options to choose from on the menu, most of them around $6 or $7, including some rather loosely defined “burgers,” such as the Fisherman’s Burger, a grilled or fried fish filet, and the Yella Fella, which is actually a grilled cheese sandwich. The more traditionally defined burgers come with your choice of an all-beef Black Angus patty or a turkey patty and are decked with any number of topping combinations: drizzled with barbecue sauce, as with the Memphis Burger; stuffed with cheese, as in the Oozey Burger; or soaked in Tabasco and layered with jalapeno peppers, as in the Firecracker Burger. You’ll even find one, the Elvis Is N the Building Burger, topped with peanut butter and bacon, which Boyd swears up and down is a combination that works. And if the signature burgers don’t catch your fancy, you can build your own. Choose from 12 free toppings, including cheese and bacon, or add a fried egg for $1.50.

The Checkered Cow will stay under the roof of existing D’Bo’s locations until Boyd builds brand recognition, something he’s working on with a line of humorous commercials written, directed, and produced by friends of Boyd’s late son, David Boyd II. You won’t see the commercials on television just yet, but they are currently available on YouTube (CheckeredCowBurgers), where a new one is revealed each week.

The Checkered Cow, www.thecheckeredcowburgers.com

SideStreet Burgers in Olive Branch is the definition of a one-man operation, run on convection ovens, crockpots, and the ingenuity of chef Jonathan Mah. Since 2012, Mah has been cranking out burgers, oven-roasted potatoes, and an array of daily specials from his small, two-room building tucked away off the town’s main square.

The pared-down menu is exactly as Mah intended. After years in the restaurant business — as a young boy working for his father Galvin, who owns a country buffet just up the road, and, most recently, as a sous chef at Alchemy in Cooper-Young — Mah has recognized the advantage of starting small.

“Burgers are easy for me to do, because I don’t have a Vent-A-Hood, so everything’s baked,” he says. “With burgers you can be creative. You can have so many different styles that taste different.”

The key to Mah’s operation is the daily prep work, including valuable par-cooking that makes the assembly process much quicker when a crowd of hungry lunch-goers arrives. From the counter where you place your order, you can see his fridge stacked with containers of fresh ingredients and marinated meats prepared for the day. This comes in handy when Mah is putting together a daily special like the Chinese BBQ Pork sandwich, topped with thinly sliced cucumber and cilantro and served on crusty French bread. As for desserts, the Irish Car Bomb bread pudding is not to be missed: Perfectly crispy on top and warm and soft in the middle, the self-contained treat comes surrounded by a caramelized praline and whiskey sauce.

Prices are extremely reasonable at $2 for a quarter-pound burger and $4 for a half-pound beef or turkey burger. Many of the add-ons, such as tzatziki and other house-made sauces, are free at the dress-it-yourself toppings bar, though cheese and bacon will run you an extra buck or so. And speaking of bucks, this joint is cash only, so when you drive down Tuesday through Saturday, anytime from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., or on Sunday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., be sure to hit the ATM on the way.

SideStreet Burgers, 9199 Highway 178, Olive Branch, MS (865) 384-6623 sidestreetburgers.com

Justin Fox Burks is one of the bloggers behind the Chubby Vegetarian, a talented photographer, and a dear friend of ours here at the Flyer. Many of the photos you see in this paper, and most of those in this column, are his. We sat down with Burks and his wife and blogging partner Amy Lawrence to learn more about their newly released cookbook, The Southern Vegetarian.

Let’s start with the Chubby Vegetarian. Where did the idea come from?

Justin: We started the blog in 2008 as a way for us to share the things we were making in our kitchen. Then people started asking for the recipes. We were thrilled when 40 people a day were looking at the blog. We have over 3,000 visitors a day now.

So how did you transition from bloggers to cookbook authors?

Justin: Two years ago, I was working on Jennifer Chandler’s cookbook, Simply Grilling. She was talking to her editor who was telling Jennifer about how they really wanted to do a vegetarian book and did she know anyone. Jennifer said, “Justin and his wife Amy have a blog you should check out.” They saw the huge volume of Southern-inflected things we were doing and said, “What if we took the Southern part of what you do and run with it?” I’m from Greenwood, Mississippi, and Amy’s from Flowood, Mississippi, so we loved the idea. It’s authentic to us. We ran with it.

“Southern” and “vegetarian” aren’t words most people associate with one another. How do you handle the skeptics?

Justin: In the South, there was this idea that Southern cooking was only meat, all the time, and if you so much as mention vegetarianism you were sort of laughed at. Then people started running into health problems and realized the value of vegetables and the key role they’ve always played in our Southern history. This is an agrarian part of the country, and it should be a huge part of how we eat.

What was the hardest part in pulling together the cookbook?

Amy: Editing. Editing is not easy, because there is always something to improve. At about the seventh round of edits, it got to be a bit taxing.

Justin: Cutting down the recipes was the most difficult part. There’s 860-something recipes on the Chubby Vegetarian, and we went from 600 recipes, cut it down to 300, cut it down to 200, which really hurt, and then it was like Sophie’s Choice getting it down to 100.

Some of the recipes come across as very sophisticated, even a bit intimidating. What do you say to new chefs who pick up your book?

Justin: As a home cook, we were very conscious of other home cooks and being able to follow each of the steps to a good end. Whereas a lot of chefs, when you read their cookbooks, you see that they know a little more than you do. We’re not trained. We didn’t go to culinary school. And we don’t own a restaurant. We’re home cooks. There’s nothing here beyond a home cook’s capacity.

Out of all the recipes in the book, which one would you want if you were stranded on a desert island?

Amy: Triple-Ginger Apple Crisp.

Justin: Red Beans and Rice with Andouille Eggplant. It’s life-sustaining, with good protein. It’s healthy and spicy, and there’s a lot of it.

What’s your favorite cookbook?

Amy: Betty Crocker, with the red and white checks — my first one. Also, How It All Vegan!‘s dessert section taught me a ton.

Justin: Charlie Trotter’s Vegetables. It’s gorgeous. It really helps you see vegetables in a different light.

No Joy of Cooking? No Alice Waters?

Justin: That’s an interesting point. This is not Alice Waters-type food. Alice Waters is awesome, and I love what she does, taking something and keeping it simple. We’re trying to make people think differently about vegetables. To let that vegetable take the protein position on the plate. While lightly sautéeing some greens in a little olive oil is a great approach, it’s not how we’re cooking here. We’re taking the chance to elevate things.

Justin Fox Burks and Amy Lawrence will be signing The Southern Vegetarian at the Booksellers at Laurelwood, Tuesday, June 4th, 6 p.m. They’ll also be selling The Southern Vegetarian at the Cooper-Young Community Farmers Market, Saturday, June 1st, 9-11:30 a.m.