La Michoacana Ice Cream

Ice cream has got to be one of the best food inventions – creamy, smooth, sweet, and just what you want on a hot day. Those hot days are gone, and even the pleasantly mild days are numbered. Oh, who am I kidding waxing poetic about the bygone days of ice cream eating? I eat ice cream in the winter – just not while outside.

I snuck in a visit to La Michoacana, the tiny Mexican ice cream shop in downtown Kennett Square, this past weekend while on the most convoluted route (errands love weekends) from Wilmington, DE to Radnor, PA.

I was hoping to get my new found love, the paleta, but when the cucumber and chile paleta I had my heart set on was not available, I was switched to ice cream in a cup – a scoop of avocado and a scoop of mamey. Mamey, a tropical fruit tasting like peach and apricots, was a first for me –pink and fruity!

Besides having all sorts of exotic and traditional ice cream and water ice flavors in frozen bar form or in a cup, La Michoacana’s ice cream is very reasonable. When the cashier asked for $3 for two small cups of ice cream (two scoops each), I thought for sure she had only seen the one cup I was holding. $1.50 for ice cream!! I scream!

La Michoacana Ice Cream, 231 E. State St. Kennett Square, PA 19348
610-444-2996

Talula's Table

Living on the outskirts of Kennett Square, Pennsylvania for two years while attending school for horticulture, I can’t say that Kennett Square and its historic Main Street held many attractions for me. Kennett Square is the sort of place that excites your mother when you mention “quaint town.”

Thanks to the previous owners of Django restaurant in Philadelphia, Aimee Olexy and Bryan Sikora, who closed up shop in Philly to move to the country, there’s now a place in Kennett Square that excites me – and your mother.

Talula’s Table, a gourmet food shop with prepared foods, take away dinners, and catering, sits smack in the middle of historic Kennett Square’s main drag. Talula’s Table prides itself on making fresh foods daily with consideration to the season and local ingredients. They also make a concerted effort to prepare a few vegetarian options.

Recessed shelves and coolers are filled with gourmet goodies perfect for a picnic, or to take home and make a meal. Gourmet crackers, preserves, pickles, teas, chocolate, and other foodie fodder line the shelves. Fresh breads and pastries are made daily, and a wide selection of artisan cheeses is displayed in a case along with sides and entrees just waiting to be taken home and heated for dinner. Sandwiches made daily are stacked in a cooler and ready to grab and go. A coffee bar and bottled drinks will quench your thirst.

While Talula’s Table is set up for grabbing and going, there is a large farmhouse table in the middle of the store that can be booked for occasions, along with a round table tucked in the front corner and a couple of bistro tables on the sidewalk, if you would rather enjoy your eats in situ. That’s exactly what I did.

I sampled the goat cheese and beet salad with glazed pecans. The beets were perfectly tangy from a marinade, and I was delighted with the beet's different red hues. Sometimes it’s the little things that impress.

The only vegetarian sandwich option was egg salad on focaccia. I love egg salad, but am very cautious about eating boiled eggs at restaurants. I’m scared about rubberiness and freshness, so almost never eat boiled eggs that I don’t cook myself. I wasn’t afraid of the freshness at Talula’s table, so decided to take the gamble on rubberiness. The eggs were fresh and cooked perfectly. After all the deliberation, the egg salad turned out to be disappointingly bland. A couple of cranks of the pepper mill and some sweet relish mixed in would have livened things up. (All sandwiches come with a free little bag of chips.)

The mac and cheese is the style that can be cut into squares and retain its shape – just the kind I prefer. They heated that baby up, since I was dining in, and, let me say, the mac and cheese was absolutely dreamy and creamy. (I didn’t want to make that rhyme, but… it’s true.) As per my usual complaint about mac and cheese, I wish Talula’s Table’s mac and cheese had a sharper cheese mixture. That aside, I’d put Talula’s Table in a tie with Morning Glory’s mac and cheese as one of the best I've sampled in these parts.

For dessert I chose a banana cream cake solely for the reason that I had bananas on the brain. Those bananas are now on my hips.

Even though Talula's Table is not quick-lunch cheap (all of this food, plus two drinks, were split between one hungry person and one not-so-hungry person, and rang up to just under $30), I wish a gourmet food shop like this had been around when I was living in the area. I do drive through Kennett Square about twice a month for work, so maybe I'll forget to pack my lunch on those days.

Talula's Table, 102 W. State Street, Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, 19348
Phone: 610-444-8255
Open daily, 7am-7pm

Mushroom Festival

When I first moved to the Northeast for school / work, I moved to Kennett Square, PA – otherwise known as “The Mushroom capital of the World.” This weekend, I went to the Kennett Square Mushroom Festival.

Kennett Square and the immediate surrounding area in Southeastern, PA produce 40 percent of the mushrooms consumed in the United States. Most of these mushrooms get slapped with a sticker from Dole - the main distribution company - so don't disclose their PA origin.

Mushroom production in the area started more than a century ago with Quakers growing mushrooms underneath carnation beds. Italian immigrants were then employed in mushroom farms. Now, the descendents of those Italians own most of the mushroom houses and employ mostly Mexican immigrants. Mexicans, though, are beginning to own and operate their own farms.

Having lived in Kennett Square, PA and Avondale, PA for three years, I know what mushroom farms smell like. It’s not pleasant, if you’re wondering. Imagine a nose burning perfume of manure, rubber, and asparagus tainted urine. What smells is the fresh medium on which the mushrooms grow – a mixture of hay, manure and water.

While I was in school, I had the opportunity to tour some farms and learn about mushroom production. Quite fascinating! The Button, Portabella, and Crimini mushrooms most commonly found in stores are grown in shallow beds of compost in a sort of bunk bed system inside low, windowless, cinderblock buildings. The compost is inoculated with mushroom spawn. Mycelium (fungus roots) then grow. Little white mushrooms, or “pins” then appear. These tiny mushrooms grow into larger mushrooms and are then harvested about 4 to 11 weeks after the growing process starts.

"Pins" to the left and mycelium on the right.

Specialty mushrooms (Shitake, Oyster, Maitake, Enoki, etc.) are grown differently. After having toured the farms, I understand why these mushrooms are more expensive. Shitakes are grown on little composite loafs of oak sawdust and must be rotated by hand. Oyster and Maitake mushrooms are grown in plastic bags filled with sawdust. Enoki are grown in plastic jars. These loaves, bags, and jars take up more space, require different growing environments, and are more labor intensive – hence the higher price in the store.

Beech Mushrooms

Shitake Mushrooms

Grey Oyster Mushrooms

While at the festival, I indulged in fried mushrooms - something I rarely do - and cream of mushroom ice-cream! If you learn anything from Iron Chef America, it's that anything can be made into an ice-cream. Last time I went to the festival I had pumpkin mushroom ice-cream, but the pumpkin ice-cream was too spicy for me to taste the mushroom. This year I tried cream of mushroom. It wasn't bad. It tasted like sweetcream ice-cream with a hint of mushroom soup. There were, of course, hunks of button mushrooms in the ice-cream.

We left with three packages of mushrooms - Oyster, Pom Pom, and Maitake. We briefly thought about making mushroom fajitas, but with all the stroganoff being made out there, I knew exactly what I was craving. Damn, that VWaV stroganoff recipe is good. The only alteration I made, other than mushroom variety substitution, was to replace the soymilk with sour cream.