Vegetarian Southern Food Again

Mark returned for a short visit, this time with his awesome new wife, and I made a vegetarian Southern meal the last night they were here. It was semi-successful.

The grits were fine, nothing fancy -- you can see them soaking on the right side of the picture. Just soaked, simmered for a few hours, and finished with half and half.

I made black eyed peas -- I browned onions and garlic and flour carefully but quite a bit, then added some sherry and a lot of vegetable stock and some fresh thyme and cooked it all down for an hour and a half. It was a nutty brown, very rich and good.

I quickly sauteed garden collards with some red pepper flakes, finishing them with vinegar.

Florida okra and tomatoes have started appearing in stores, so I made stewed tomatoes and okra. Very simple: just sweated half a Vidalia onion in some butter, then added the okra (stems cut off) and a few chopped tomatoes (seeds and some skin removed) and cooked it all down for 15 minutes, covered.

And I made strawberry rhubarb cobbler.

Deer Sausage and Mushroom Gravy

My friend Dave gave us some venison that his cousin shot and took to a processor. Item #1 was this entertainingly packaged sausage.

It looks like something you would buy from under the table at a flea market, but it is very tasty. It's seasoned like standard American breakfast sausage -- black pepper, sage, salt, red chile flakes -- and is well balanced in a way that highlights the dark, sweet deer flavor.

Item #2, unfortunately -- and Dave warned me about this -- is a packet of square patties with some kind of seasoning added such that they taste very much like fast food chicken sandwiches. They are quite alarming. The meat is too finely ground and the seasonings oddly chemical. They taste nothing like deer. They are nearly inedible.

I put some of the sausage to good use for a recent dinner. I made two sausage patties and browned them and set them aside -- they were probably medium rare at that point, but they cooked a little more in the sauce at the end.


I then used the same pan with a little extra olive oil to saute onions, garlic, shitake mushrooms, and cremini mushrooms. Then I added vermouth or maybe leftover Riesling and scraped up the pan goop left over from the sausage. There was a lot of it -- very effective. I added chicken broth, fresh sage, and thyme, and let the whole thing simmer a bit.

I thickened it slightly with cornstarch, which made for a nice glossy brown sauce.

At the end I added a bunch of parsley and reheated the sausage patties in the sauce. I served it over polenta/grits...I think I called it polenta that night.

Grits

Here is my big Free Times story on Anson Mills and grits.

Fun fact about the dead tree edition of the story (which I will send you next week, Mom): those grains on the cover aren't actually grits. Looks to me like some kind of wheat berry or other grain. Glenn Roberts of Anson Mills showed us a bunch of different grains, but I don't have notes on which grain that was, nor do I know how it got on the cover.

There's also an incorrect caption. But small embarrassments aside, the article is up and I'm happy.

Here is a dish I made last week: yellow grits topped with a very simple sauce made from pancetta, canned tomatoes, garlic, and lots of parsley and salt and pepper.

I cooked the grits in the crockpot for a day and a half with just water and salt. They were amazing.

Vegetarian Southern Food

Our pal Mark was in the US last week, and because he is currently not eating meat (long story), I got to cook some vegetarian food. It was fun. I think it's been about five years since I gave up my 12-year vegetarian spell.

Because Mark lives in Kyoto but is from around here, I wanted to make him some Southern food. These are lima beans, cooked very simply overnight in a crockpot, with olive oil and salt added in the last several hours. I experimented with the mustard greens, sauteeing a few chunks of red miso paste in some olive oil to see if I could get a meaty, salty fullness for a base the same way I would from a ham hock or some bacon. It was delicious and did have a full taste and a brownish pot liquor, but I don't know that it was that brilliant.

The grits were fermented. I interviewed Glenn from Anson Mills several months ago, and he told me that during the summer one can pre-soak grits at room temperature and get what he called "pinpoint ferment," which completely changes their taste and texture. I could never find any other information on the phenomenon, but when I soaked some grits Glenn had ground coarsely from John Haulk corn, they did indeed ferment rather quickly. It was a sweet, mild ferment, never sour, and after I let them do that overnight I rinsed them thoroughly and cooked them like normal: 1.5 or so hours on the stove, gently, with salt and butter and a little cream at the end. The fermented flavor was strong, but sweet and corny and smooth. Very strange. Lawson and Mark loved it, too, although they'd never heard of it, either.

Grilled Salmon with Winter Tomato Relish

I'm calling this "winter tomato relish" because it contains only fresh things which you can reliably find at most grocery stores in early March and that don't taste insipid and awful: cherry tomatoes, red onions, garlic, parsley, and fresh lime juice, plus salt and pepper and olive oil. I can think of a whole lot of fresh herbs I'd like to put in there, but I didn't have any, because it's early March.

As fresh dinners go, this was really easy. An hour before dinner I made the relish and started the grits. If you keep the heat quite low, after the first five minutes you only have to stir slow-cooking grits every 10 or 15 minutes to incorporate the skin that forms on the top. An hour was just long enough for the relish flavors to blend well (at room temperature, of course). I finished the grits up with a little parmesan cheese and half-and-half. Then I grilled the salmon, sliced up an avocado, and assembled the plates.

Shrimp and Grits Away from Home

We went to the beach with some friends this weekend, and there we improvised a meal of shrimp and grits. The meal was also supposed to contain roasted eggplant, which I burned, and a salad, for which our friend couldn't find the lettuce he'd brought home from the grocery store. So it was just the shrimp and grits. I am not normally a cream sauce fan, but people were interested in that, so we made the dish above. I toasted the shrimp shells in a dry pan, then simmered them with white wine and strained the shells out. I made a roux, sauteed shallots in it, and then added the stock and some cream. We cooked the shrimp in a separate skillet and added them at the end, along with diced raw red and yellow bell peppers, green onions, and parsley. We served them over some very seriously coarse red and yellow grits.

I loved the bowls at that beach house.

Tomato Gravy II: A Recipe

Tomato gravy is one of those Southern foods for which there are hundreds of different recipes. I, of course, believe Lawson's recipe is the best. It's how he won over my parents, after all.

It's a simple recipe, but it requires lots of fresh tomatoes in season, and they're supposed to be peeled. I suppose one could make it with canned tomatoes, but since the fresh, bright tomato flavor is the whole point, I would advise against it.

With so few seasonings, the tomato flavor is brassy and acidic and not sophisticated at all, but it's wonderful.

This recipe serves 6 to 8 people.

Saute until crispy but not too brown:

- 1 package bacon

Drain on paper towels and set aside. Pour out all but 2 or tablespoons of the bacon fat, if there is extra. Saute:

- 2 onions, preferably Vidalia, diced

Add and simmer until slightly reduced and thickened, about 20 minutes:

- Several pounds of fresh tomatoes (~10 medium?), peeled, seeded, and chopped

Add salt and pepper to taste. Crumble the bacon and add it to the sauce. Serve over grits, garnished with parsley if you like. A fried egg on top is good. Sauteed shrimp are good. If you wanted to be really South Carolinian, you could top it with a thin fried pork chop.

Breakfast of Champions

Here's my favorite breakfast, made by Lawson: Grits with Tomato Gravy. The gravy contains bacon, onions, and tomatoes. Lawson uses coarse grits, and accompanies each serving with a fried egg.

Pork Feast

My brother, his girlfriend, and my parents are all visiting us here in Columbia. For the first big meal, Lawson smoked a pork butt and some pork ribs. He went to work; I took the day off, and we all monitored the smoker all day. With the pork we served sliced garden tomatoes, steamed okra, white corn grits, and Lawson's homemade mustard-based barbecue sauce.

We ate outside. It was hot, and we were supplied with the other usual South Carolina outdoor hazards: here is Russell picking a fruit fly out of his wine.