Day 3: Carolina Food Only

Here's where everyone else is posting about their week of local food.

Today I was significantly less lame than earlier in the week. I worked at home, so I was able to make a decent lunch:

• Slices of goat cheese rolled in Adluh cornmeal and fried in some bacon drippings
• Chopped garden cucumbers and tomatoes with salt and dill seeds. I remembered early this morning that the dill seeds in the pantry were harvested from the garden a few years back.

Tonight's meal was a shrimp purloo. The local shrimp I bought at Publix were a bit past not very good, but we decided to eat them anyway -- I just didn't use the shells for stock, and I rinsed the shrimp and boiled them quickly before sautéing them. It seemed to kill off the yuck. I'm cavalier about bacteria and food safety, and I'm sure someday it'll bite me, but I hate the idea of throwing away food that someone carefully caught or harvested.

I used summer squash, okra, bell peppers, and a Big Jim chile from the garden -- a little unorthodox for a purloo, but both local and historically Southern. I used Carolina Gold Rice, too, and Caw Caw Creek bacon. And I used a bottle of Thomas Creek Multi Grain Ale, and some garden thyme, parsley, and chives.

Since I haven't been able to find local onions, the purloo was missing that all-important oniony flavor structure. In a rich, savory dish, it's almost like the other flavors hang on the onion -- it kind of stretches everything out and makes it more available for tasting. I'd thought about that before, but tonight it was dramatic. The chives did nothing -- added at the end, they made the dish oniony but didn't add anything more the way real onions would have.

Black pepper would also have been good. And vermouth. But it was fine.

Anyway, those tortillas I so optimistically mentioned last night? They were very much like tasty, crispy chapatti. Because they lacked baking soda or baking powder, they were not soft or pliable.

So today I was finishing up a call to the Adluh Flour company for a totally unrelated reason (Free Times cover story -- watch for it) and nearly slapped my forehead: Adluh Self-Rising Flour. Carolina-grown wheat milled in Columbia fits the challenge guidelines just fine, so those extra ingredients in there can sneak right by the censors. I found it at Bi-Lo, the third grocery store I visited. Honey-sweetened blueberry cobbler, here I come.

Day 2: Carolina Food Only

Today I got HUNGRY. Again I took a South Carolina peach and a big container of cornmeal mush (made with Anson Mills blue grits) to work, and though the peach was lovely, the two-day-old mush wasn't so good. Without any fat to make it keep longer, it tasted both bland and overripe. Things that aren't fruit shouldn't taste overripe.

Some emails from this afternoon:
Me: Do you think Taco Bell uses local products? Grass-fed Carolina beef? Piedmont beans? I'm huuuuuuungry.

Lawson: Sorry, baby. When you get home you may have some crusty salt and whole milk.*

Me: Mmmm! Maybe I'll float an egg in it. And a tomato chewed by a local rat.**

* That Celtic Sea Salt I bought is in huge, crunchy crystals. I keep meaning to crush some up in the mortar and pestle.

** Rats have been putting big old ratty teethmarks in our garden tomatoes by night. Grrr.

So I drank a lot of water, and when I got home I fried a few pieces of Caw Caw Creek bacon to fix me up. After that I was fine. But still I feel unprepared for the rest of this week and somehow deprived, even though the only things I really miss so far are vinegar, lemons, chile powder, and olive oil. I guess that's a lot of things.

Dinner tonight is burritos:

• tortillas made from Anson Mills biscuit flour (not ideal gluten content, but all I had), grease from Caw Caw Creek bacon, and water
• sausage from Caw Caw Creek
• eggs, scrambled, from Wil-Moore Farms
• salsa made from tomatoes, poblano chiles, and parsley, all from the garden

It's funny, this experiment. I was just telling Lawson that I don't have any food restrictions -- not a vegetarian anymore, no major financial limitations (several years out of school), not afraid of any particular cooking method or ingredient -- so it's interesting to have some again. It's good to think about food differently for a while.

I found a good South Carolina beer: RJ Rockers Pale Ale.

Day 1: Carolina Food Only

The Eat Carolina Local Food Challenge crept right up on me: starting today, for one week, I've agreed to eat only products grown and/or processed in North and South Carolina.

So I'm going to post my daily updates here.

I went to Rosewood Market yesterday and found myself in the odd position of worrying how I would get enough fat this week. I'd intended to buy some local butter, but the Happy Cow Creamery's butter only comes in giant quantities, like five pounds or something. I probably should have sprung for it and made a few cakes later this summer, but it just seemed excessive. Funny, considering I had no problem buying the gallon jug of olive oil from World Market a few months back.

On a semi-related note, here is my dog inspecting a large garden zucchini.

Anyway, here's what I ate today:

• coffee - Sumatra Mandheling, roasted in our backyard
• whole milk - Happy Cow Creamery, Pelzer, SC

• peach - SC grown, from Rosewood Market
• cornmeal mush made with Anson Mills blue grits, City of Columbia tap water, and Celtic Sea Salt

• French rolled omelet with eggs from Wil-Moore Farms, goat cheese from Split Creek Farm, and basil from our garden
• Tomatoes from our garden
• Cucumbers from our garden
• Beer - Thomas Creek Pilsner and Multi Grain Ale -- the former of which is TOTALLY FOUL. Seriously, do not drink the Thomas Creek Pilsner.

For the omelets, which need just a tiny smear of cooking fat, I ended up rendering a little 1/2" square piece of Caw Caw Creek bacon -- we got a deal and bought far too much of it a few months back, so I guess I'm all set for fat for the week after all.

Tomorrow's dinner will involve ground pork. First I have to get through lunch, though. I'm dreaming about the leftover cornmeal mush fried in bacon grease, with cherry tomatoes cut up on top. Maybe some chives scattered over the whole business.

Hot Dogs

Here are some of the hot dogs I ate this week. I did not photograph the one I ate yesterday at Jason and Laura's fun party.

Okay, the hot dog thing got a little out of control. But through all this experimentation I've determined that in the future I will leave ketchup off my hot dogs. Lots of mustard, plus whatever else is around, seems to complement the hot doggy flavors best -- ketchup doesn't belong there.

White Acre Peas

Lately I've been learning more about Southern peas, which are beans, and include things like black-eyes peas, crowder peas, field peas, and these white acre peas. I think. I'm having a hard time sorting out the taxonomies and the regional variations and figuring out what's going on from my halfhearted internet research. This might need to become a real, carefully researched article.

Anyway, all these pea-beans have been amazing so far. This batch I cooked with just a little bacon, a few garden okra, and some water. I rendered the bacon, added the water and peas and okra, and gave it about 25 minutes at a half-covered simmer. We had it with grits and tomatoes.

Plain, Simple Clams

Local clams from the shrimp guy at the All-Local Farmers Market again. This time I sauteed some garlic and a dried Thai chile, then added vermouth and water, turned the heat up to high, added the clams, covered the skillet, and pushed down tight for about 5 minutes, shaking the pan every 30 seconds or so.

On the side we had orzo with parsley and butter, plus some garden tomatoes and eggplant.

Leek, Potato, and Mushroom Tart

Hey, I made a good pie crust! Like, the real way: cutting the butter in with a fork and a cool, fast hand, then chilling the dough, then rolling it out, then folding it up so I could move it and unfolding it in the pan.

This is a new thing for me. I hadn't tried the real thing in several years, partially because I thought I didn't care that much about pie crust and partially because the whole procedure seemed fussy. But I think that was just me being defensive about my poor pie crust skilllz.

Of late, I've been alarmed by the premade frozen pie crusts we sometimes buy -- who knows what's in those? And my simple oil crusts have been tough and nasty. So when I decided to make a roasted vegetable tart thing the other night, I knew I had to make a real crust.

The egg yolks were the trick. I used this recipe for the crust. For the filling I sort of followed the recipe except that I used fewer potatoes, left them in bigger chunks, and added a whole bunch of quartered cremini mushrooms. I also added the two egg whites left over from making the crust. And I used a deep springform pan, so the vegetables had plenty of space.

The whole thing was wonderful. It wasn't eggy or creamy at all. At that high temperature, each vegetable roasted up perfectly, with internal juiciness but lots of browned surface. It was a little oniony -- these were unpredictable local leeks, and they were not as mild as I would have liked. Otherwise, though: perfect.

Local Beets

Apropos of not much, here are some local beets from the All-Local Farmers Market. They were so tender and delicious -- quite a bit juicier and milder than what I get from the grocery store. And rich, so rich -- I could only eat small amounts. I roasted them at 400 degrees for 80 minutes, covered in tinfoil, and sliced them up with just a little butter. They did not need salt or pepper. I wish I could remember the name of the farm they came from.

Classic Mojito Recipe

The point of this post is to record my mojito recipe. I had it down last year, but I managed to completely forget my recipe over the winter and have had to spend the past month re-perfecting it.

Easy way to remember it: the Rules of Twos.

For each mojito:

1. Put about 2 inches of fresh mint leaves in the bottom of a tall glass. Smush them up a little with the handle of a sharpening steel, which is the perfect muddler if you're not into buying something as fancy as a muddler.
2. Mix in a measuring cup:
   • 2 ounces freshly squeezed lime juice, which is about 2 limes' worth of juice
   • roughly 2 teaspoons granulated sugar, depending on how sweet the limes are
   • 2 ounces light rum
3. Mix. If you're making several, you might as well put it all in a shaker with some ice to get it really well mixed, but for just one I wouldn't bother.
4. Add ice to glass on top of mint.
5. Pour lime-sugar-rum mixture over ice.
6. Add 2 to 5 ounces club soda, depending on desired strength, and mix well.

This is a classic mojito recipe, something surprisingly hard to find online.

Actually, decent drink recipes can be hard to find, period. For one thing, neither the public nor the alcohol industry seems to understand the concept of "parts." For example: the back of the Kahlua bottle in my liquor cabinet instructs me to mix 1 ½ parts Kahlua to 1 ½ parts vodka as the base for a White Russian. I am not kidding.

Here, take a look at the mojito recipe at the official Bacardi site: 1 part rum, 2 parts club soda, 12 mint leaves, half a lime, and half a part sugar.

Now, the whole point of giving a recipe in parts instead of measurements is that it's scalable. If you tell me to mix 1 part Canadian whisky with 2 parts motor oil, I can make one small cocktail or an entire punchbowl full.

I'm serious here: You cannot mix measurements and parts in the same recipe. Mix half a lime with half a part sugar? What if I'm making a bathtub full of mojitos? Is Bacardi suggesting that a lime is a quantity fixed in relation to a part? Cause that would make my head explode.

Moreover: there is no such thing as half a part. Rather than halving the part, you double the parts of the other substances. Instead of "half a part Sweet-n-Low to 2 parts Asti Spumante," you would need to specify "1 part Sweet-n-Low to 4 parts Asti Spumante." That's kind of the whole point.

Astute readers will chip in here to observe that my recipe requires 2 inches of mint but doesn't specify the diameter of the glass, which is equally imprecise. That's true. So here: Use 12 to 22 mint leaves per drink, depending on how much you like mint and how much mint you have.

Also: No, it's not okay to make a mojito with dried mint. That's pretty much the definition of not okay. If you don't have any fresh mint, just drink a stupid beer. Or some rum and soda with a squeeze of lime -- nothing wrong with that. Just like in cooking, you have to let the ingredients on hand dictate what you make. You don't make beef Wellington out of leftover hamburgers just because you're craving beef Wellington and don't have any tenderloin.

Sheesh.

It's strange having a one-sided conversation here these past few weeks, Mom. It seems to be leading me to lecture imaginary conversational partners. I wonder where you are today -- crossing into Canada, probably? If you get near a computer anytime soon, tell me what you're eating.

That summer I helped you, Dad, and Russell move up to Alaska, I remember eating in a lot of rural Canadian diners. I ordered a lot of Denver sandwiches. Eat one for me. Tell 'em you want 2 ½ parts egg to one lime's worth of bell pepper on six ounces of toast. See how they feel about that.

Stir-Fried Noodles with Shrimp and Herbs

We have Thai basil and regular basil growing steadily now (except for the Japanese beetles chowing down on them every night), and the All-Local Farmers Market always has local shrimp lately, so I made this herby stir fry. I marinated the shrimp in a little lime juice and fish sauce first. Then I stir fried onions, red peppers, and rice noodles (already soaked and cooked), then stir fried the shrimp and a bunch of basil, then added a sauce of soy sauce, fish sauce, and sugar. I served it over lettuce and more basil, plus some mint.

It was one of my more successful stir fries -- instead of the wok, I used a giant skillet, which made much more sense since we have one of those awful flat-top ranges. Since the skillet was bigger than the burner, I could move things on and off the hot part of the pan just like with a wok over a gas burner.

Garden Foods

The first garden foods are beginning to creep in to our meals. We don't have enough tomatoes yet to eat plain -- the rats got to the first round -- but we had some yellow cherry tomatoes for our salad. And we didn't have enough yellow squash for a squash gratin, but we had enough for a potato gratin with a little squash mixed in.

I liked this potato gratin enough that I plan to make it again soon. I sauteed some sliced red potatoes in olive oil, salting them lightly, then added a sliced squash, then moved the whole thing to a gratin pan. I sprinkled some thin slices of Emmenthaler cheese around and poured a little cream over the top, ground some pepper over the whole thing, and then baked it and browned the top. It was roughly based on MFK Fisher's descriptions of her cauliflower gratin and similar dishes she would make when she was young and poor and living in France.

That funny little thing on top of the chicken is smoked chicken liver. Astoundingly good.

First Okra of the Year

And so it begins again.

I picked up some local crowder peas at the Rosewood Market and cooked them very simply with bacon, salt, and the first two okra pods of the season. And I understood this time what's so special about crowder peas. Lawson describes it as a metallic flavor, and yes, there's a brassy freshness even after 25 minutes of cooking. They taste sort of like fresh peas and sort of like dried beans. Very exciting. We ate them with cold smoked chicken and a simple green salad.

I am impatient for more garden okra. I almost became unprofessional yesterday while interviewing a lady who represents a certain organization that promotes local food when she told me she doesn't like okra. What? She's only lived here a year, though. I guess it took me a few more years than that to come around. She was very neat otherwise. But okra. OKRA.

Spicy Pork Tacos!

Spicy pork tacos! I don't know why that requires an exclamation point, but it does.

Lawson smoked a pork butt last week. We ate the meat with his homemade barbecue sauce for the first few days, but then I decided to try something else. I added chopped roasted green chiles, a fresh green chile, some diced tomato, lime juice, and salt to the leftover smoked pork, and I served it with corn tortillas. On the side we had roasted cauliflower. It was pretty delicious -- the smoked pork stood up really well to the roasted green chile flavor. I will try it again next time we have smoked pork around.

Note to readers: Kris/Mom is going to be on the road for the next 40 or so days, so it'll just be me posting...and she'll have a lot to catch up on when she returns.

Pipián Verde

So I made a pipián, the pre-Columbian dish made from toasted squash seeds, tomatillos, chiles, cilantro, and a few other things ground up and stewed with poultry. James Peyton's recipe called for duck, preferably wild, but I used a chicken.

I didn't know quite what it would taste like -- I'd never eaten one before -- and couldn't quite imagine the flavor, so I didn't tweak the recipes much (Peyton + Gabilondo + internet). Next time I will. It was rich but not as full of chile flavor as I would have liked. And a whole chicken was too much food with all that thick nutty sauce. It was mostly like a dull mole (and indeed, Peyton says pipians are like ancestors of moles -- basically pre-roux sauces thickened by tortillas or nuts).

Toasting the pumpkin seeds was fun; they popped and danced and browned nicely. But even with a whole cup of cilantro and some green chiles, the sauce was a kind of an icky light brown. Next time I'll use a whole bunch of poblanos and tomatillos and fewer pumpkin seeds. A little white wine or vermouth would be good. Maybe more oregano. Lime juice instead of vinegar for brightness. And I think I'll cook the sauce for less time -- use breasts or smaller pieces and only cook the thing for 45 minutes or so once the chicken is browned. I don't think it was improved by the few hours of stewing.

Lawson's growing tomatillos this year, so it shouldn't be long before I try again.

Strawberry-Rhubarb Cobbler

I saw rhubarb at the grocery store last week (nobody I know seems to grow it) and got to thinking about the rhubarb sauce you used to make when Russell and I were kids. I remember eating it plain, slightly warmed, with a spoon. That was just rhubarb and sugar, right? It was magical.

Then, in one of the many strange food coincidences of the late spring, my pal Kerry sent me a link to this rhubarb pie post.

I also saw that strawberries were on sale, and not knowing whether Lawson was ready to handle plain rhubarb sauce, I then got to thinking about strawberry-rhubarb pies.

But you know what? Pies are too fancy, with their fussy rolling pins and optional lattices and pie weights. So I decided to make a cobbler.

My favorite chapter in the 2000 Joy of Cooking is "American Fruit Desserts." It covers cobblers, grunts, slumps, crisps, pandowdies, and apple brown betty. The linguist in me is ecstatic over this.

I used the Joy strawberry-rhubarb cobbler recipe. It has just a tiny bit of cornmeal mixed into a basic biscuit dough. I used white whole wheat flour instead of white flour. And I made rough blobby chunks of dough the way you used to instead of rolling out the biscuit dough or something else all fancy.

It was delicious. Lawson, who found his one previous run-in with rhubarb pie kind of weird, loved it. So now I have to find out if I can grow rhubarb down here in South Carolina.

New Crab Salad

This salad may never happen again, because it required hyper-fresh crab meat and just the perfect ingredients. But it came together nicely -- the crab was so sweet and delicate. And it was the perfect accompaniment to chicken wings.

I dressed some crab with lemon juice, olive oil, salt, and pepper and let it sit for 10 minutes. Then I tossed it with arugula and topped it with crumbled goat cheese and pieces of rice crackers. Wonderful texture -- crispy and soft and cool.

Update: Turns out Anne Postic wrote about crab salad in today's Free Times. What are the odds? Her recipe sounds wonderful.

Crab Cakes

Every year at the beach Lawson makes crab cakes. But this year we brought the crabs back home to pick, and I made the crab cakes.

I used a simple combination of several recipes. This was roughly it:

1 lb crab meat
1 cup crushed crackers (These were thin rice-and-wheat cocktail crackers. Saltines would work, or bread crumbs.)
2 or more T mayonnaise
1 T Dijon mustard
1 T lemon juice
1 t lemon zest
1 egg
1/2 onion, diced and sauteed
3 T parsley, finely chopped
salt and pepper

Mix; form into 4 to 6 cakes; roll in salted cornmeal; chill for an hour or two; pan fry.

I also made a salad that we ate over two days -- one of my usual bean, herb, and citrus summer salads. It contained garbanzo beans, mint, cilantro, roasted red peppers, carrots, pumpkin seeds, lemon juice, olive oil, salt, and pepper. On the second day I added some spinach.

Red Chile Plate II

Here's my own attempt at recreating Santos' red chile beef plate. Like you, I boiled the beef first, then cut it up and browned it -- so strange, but it works! I made the sauce from soaking whole dried red chiles, though. I brought them to a simmer, then soaked them for about two hours until they were nice and bright red, then blended them up with the strained broth from boiling the beef. Same seasonings as you, pretty much, though I added a bay leaf, a touch of red wine vinegar, and one small minced garlic clove.

It was tasty! We ate it with corn tortillas and a salad. Homemade tortillas would have been much better, and since the beef was so much work, it would have been worth it to take that extra step.

Some Food from the Beach

I mysteriously forgot to use my camera much last week, but I still got a few meal shots. Usually the annual beach trip is a social thing -- we share a house with several friends -- but this year nobody could come, so Lawson and I had a whole house to ourselves. So we didn't do our usual elaborate 11 PM dinners. Here are a few things we ate.

Barbecue with butter beans, sweet potatoes, slaw, and a tiny bit of rice and hash. We always stop at D&H Barbecue in Manning, South Carolina, on the way to the beach.
Slow, simple breakfast of strawberries, eggs, and toast
Indian fish curry but without coconut, since the one we bought was rancid
An impromptu pasta with scallops, tomatoes, basil, and cream over some of the tastiest dried fettuccine I've ever had. Wish I could remember the brand.
As usual, I failed to take a picture of a single blue crab, although we caught about fifty of them and brought home a bunch to pick. We put crab in the fish curry. And Sunday when we got home I made a semi-successful crab quiche (too much tarragon, crust too thick).

We also ate at Louis' twice, where some things were fabulous (the salad of roasted beets, goat cheese, and pecans; the scallops), some things were poor (the grouper), and some were educational (the nairagi toro, which our server portrayed as some magical new lifeform but which turned out, when we looked it up later, to be marlin belly. It was like blander, more delicate tuna).

And we ate at Landolfi's, a perfect little Italian bakery plunked down in the middle of Pawley's Island, South Carolina. As usual, we ate some wood-fired pizza and then took home eclairs, cannoli, sfogliatelle, and the most amazing little raspberry-almond tart covered in pine nuts. Lawson hates the tarts -- he says they taste "like an adult's idea of dessert -- like fruitcake, like medicine" but I adore them.

It was a good trip, but I'm happy to be back home.

Pho

Recently I made pho. It was quite tasty, though far from perfect, and I had to serve it with cilantro and mint instead of Thai basil, as it's too early in the season for garden basil.

I really liked slicing the beef so thin and sparely, though. I loved its texture, barely cooked and so tender. What other dishes call for thinly sliced beef like that?

We're off to the beach tomorrow morning for a week. Packing up the kitchen supplies has, as usual, been the hardest part of getting ready. The house we stay in is well stocked with equipment, but who knows what kind of spices we're going to need? Lawson always brings star anise, cumin seeds, cinnamon sticks, coriander seeds, and cardamom pods, but I just realized today that those are all large-ish things rather than powders or tiny seeds, so maybe he just picked them for portability. They're all hard to find at beach grocery stores, but so is, you know, turmeric. We bring dried chiles and fresh herbs, too, and fish sauce and shoyu and cornstarch. But sometimes we forget them, which is why our cupboard contains four boxes of cornstarch brought home from past beach trips.

More on pho in next Wednesday's Free Times.