Meet our new cheese ambassador

I ran into chef Jasper Mirabile, Jr., yesterday. He was dining with his wife and daughter at the new Peach Tree Restaurant in the Power & Light District. He liked that restaurant’s macaroni-and-cheese, which is saying something since the chef and co-owner of Jasper’s Restaurant (and the host of his own Saturday morning radio show on KCMO-FM) is kind of fussy about pasta.

He’s even fussier, in fact, since he was hired by Kansas City-based American Italian Pasta Company to travel around the country doing cooking demonstrations to promote that company’s new Italian import, Pasta Chef, manufactured by the Lensi family in Verolanuova, Italy.

Last month, Jasper picked up a new traveling assignment: He’s one of the celebrity chefs chosen by the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board to serve as an official cheese ambassador.

As one of the seven chef-ambassadors promoting Wisconsin-made cheeses, Mirabile will travel to a different city every month, for the next ten months, giving cooking demonstrations and talking up the culinary superiority of American artisan cheeses.

It’s a lot of traveling, but Mirabile likes to travel. Still, he told me, he’s restricted his out-of-town visits to Mondays and Tuesdays only. “I have a family,” he said, “and a restaurant to run.” 

But there are benefits. Visiting Boston last month, Mirabile paid homage to the famous Mike’s Pastry Shop on Hanover Street. “I sat in the shop and ate cannolis and watched the K.U. game on TV,” he said. “It was great.’