best of 2012

The best things I ate this year, in no order:

Lamb burgers from Pat La Frieda. These were a Christmas present from Caitlin. We'd had PLF's regular burgers before, and they're amazing. The remarkable thing about the lamb burgers is that they're exactly what you'd hope they'd be - I mean, they have the same balance of flavor and juiciness and texture as the beef burgers, but they're lamb. I know that sounds obvious, but ... I was prepared for these to just be very good lamb burgers, and instead they're the lamb burgers of my dreams.

Gotta also add the burger at Craigie on Main, and every burger at Flat Patties. And the Frisco Melt at Steak and Shake, for that matter.

Satsumas from Louisiana Lagniappe.

Ice cream! Juniper lemon curd and vinho verde pear wheatgrass from Jeni's, burnt caramel and Vietnamese coffee from Toscanini's.

Gold Rush apples. This was just the best apple I've had in years.

The roast beef and roast lamb sandwiches at Flour, and the roast beef sandwich at Cuttys.

Fried maitake mushrooms. Oh man. One of the best things I got at Wegmans.

Fried soft-shell crab. The other best thing I got at Wegmans!

Montmorency cherries.

Smoked lamb sandwiches with skordalia and red bell pepper sauce.

Boiled custard. The boiled custard I made at the start of the year is just the best I've ever made, for some reason. I made some again in December and it's just not as good.

The shrimp and grits at Classic on Noble, mentioned in my last entry.

My own roasted coffee, especially with Solerno blood orange liqueur. Many amari, especially Campari and Amaro Montenegro. Many whiskeys, notably the cognac-finished Parker Heritage Collection bourbon, Bulleit rye, and the Lagavulin 16.

Double Cola in glass bottles in Georgia.

christmas 2012

Caitlin and I visited her family in Georgia this year for Christmas (escaping some snow which melted before I came back). I left my camera there, but let me tell you what I brought back with me before I finish putting it away:

Cheerwine! It was a ridiculous week for soda finds, in fact. I brought back Cheerwine and Peach Crush (which tastes like peach Jello) but was also able to have Bubble Up, Red Rock cola, Nugrape, Double Cola, and Dr Enuf - and only passed up Sun Drop and RC cola because I can get them up here now.

Also picked up, soda-wise, but not southern per see: Dragonfruit Pepsi, at a gas station. I like it because it's so bizarre - it tastes like Pepsi mixed with a generically tropical Kool Aid. It's not like the "dragonfruit flavor" we're seeing in beverages lately bears any resemblance to real dragonfruit (which is too mild-flavored to make sense as a flavor to add to something like Pepsi - I think real dragonfruit juice added to Pepsi would just taste like weak Pepsi). It must be the name that seems marketable (though for the record, Dragonfruit Pepsi is actually called Pepsi X and has some cross-branding relationship to that ridiculous X Factor show).

Pecan log rolls. Oh man, my favorite candy maybe. Also got almond log rolls which I haven't tried yet.

White barbecue sauce and moonshine taffy, both gifts from Caitlin's mom. (As well as homemade pear preserves, crabapple jelly, and zucchini pickles.)

Frog legs!

Sausage for biscuits and gravy. Can't get much up here except Jimmy Dean.

Duke's mayo. Southern brands of mayonnaise are generally preferred for things like pimento cheese and tomato pie. I usually get Blue Plate because that's what I'm used to from New Orleans, but got Duke's to check it out.

Tony Chachere's, a Louisiana seasoning blend that is a staple for me.

Luzianne tea bags. I use great oolong and pu erh teas for hot tea, but for sweet tea, man, it has to be Luzianne.

Self-rising cornmeal. Just a time-saver, sure, but totally unavailable up here.

Deep-fried peanuts

Country ham

Souse (a form of head cheese, though I'm expecting it's seasoned differently from the Cajun head cheese I'm used to)

I'm undoubtedly forgetting stuff - my luggage was heavvvy. And this isn't counting what we ate there, of course - which I would put off until I'm less worn out from just getting back, but I have a busy week coming up and then boom it's the new year, so, highlights:

Vera and Jerry took us out to Classic on Noble in Alabama, where the shrimp and grits has been called "one of the 100 dishes in Alabama to try before you die." Man, that's underselling it. Oh, everything else was good too - fried oysters, coconut pie - but for once, Caitlin and I both got the same thing, even though there was a crab cake with fried soft-shells on the menu. It was just so good you wouldn't want anything else - not just the best shrimp and grits I've had, the best grits I've had, period.

These amazing greens made by a co-worker of Caitlin's stepfather - poke sallet, collards, and turnip greens, I think he said. I have to up my greens game and my grits game.

Doughnuts and fried pies (cherry, coconut, peach, and sweet potato, in my order of preference) from Vogelsberg Bakery in Carrollton, GA. Good God. I almost didn't get doughnuts, but thank God I did - absolutely the best doughnut I've had in my life. Yeast-raised doughnut, glazed - your basic non-cake doughnut, you know? But so good. So amazingly good. And usually I far prefer filled doughnuts!

Barbecue!  Pulled brisket, which I kept putting on pimento cheese sandwiches. The barbecue sauce was very peppery, as in black pepper - which I love, since that's what I'm used to from Rudy's in Texas.

And the chains - none of which I'd been to in years: Cracker Barrel, which gets a bad rap (as all chains do and as most deserve) but is comfort food regardless; Steak and Shake, where I got a Frisco melt for the first time since moving out of Indiana six and a half years ago, and which still absolutely serves the best chain hamburgers; and Sonic, which I hadn't been to in even longer. (The creamslushes at Sonic - a mix of "slush" and soft-serve ice cream - are a lot like the freezes - half soft serve, half snowball - I loved in New Orleans.)

Unsurprisingly, once I came home to an empty fridge, I started cooking - Coca-Cola salad, pimento cheese with Duke's, Coca-Cola cake, pork stock still cooking away as we speak for greens.

I'm sure I'm forgetting things.  It was a good week!

Some post-Thanksgiving cooking:

The obligatory Thanksgiving sandwich, with turkey, stuffing, sage-and-garlic gravy, Dijon mustard, and cranberry sauce (subsequent versions were made with truffle butter instead of mustard and cranberry, a Caitlin innovation):



Turduckconfit - turkey skin wrapped around turkey breast wrapped around duck breast wrapped around Jimmy Dean sage sausage, each layer bonded with transglutaminase, slow-cooked in duck fat:



Chicken-fried steak, pre-cooked - strips of steak bonded to chicken skin, eventually buttermilk-battered and fried.



The cranberry-pecan bread didn't quite work - I substitute fresh-squeezed unsweetened cranberry juice for the water in a regular baguette recipe, but the acidity must have wreaked havoc - the dough didn't stretch so much as tear, and the final product was dense and looked like whole-grain bread. We're going to try it as pain perdu tomorrow.

The colcannon twice-baked potatoes were pretty great, though. Caitlin's idea, my execution:

First make creamed greens - blanch kale and turnip greens, squeeze every drop of liquid you can out, and chop finely.

Meanwhile cook chopped garlic, chopped fennel, and cream together until the cream gets very thick and is about to break. Blend the cream, garlic, and fennel together along with salt, fennel seed, and if you have them, a tablespoon or so of cooked nettles, to make everything bright green.

Return the sauce to the pan, add the greens, cook until very thick.

Bake your potatoes, split them in half, scoop out the innards, and mash them with the creamed greens. Add a little butter or a little more salt if needed.

Fill potato shells with the colcannon; bake 15-20 minutes before eating.

thanksgiving 2012

I'll update with photos of anything interesting, but - the things I am making for Thanksgiving or as part of Thanksgiving weekend:

Cranberry-pecan bread (yeast bread, not baking soda) and pain perdu with the leftovers

Turduckconfit: turkey skin wrapped around turkey breast wrapped around duck breast wrapped around sage sausage, all bonded with transglutaminase, slow-cooked in duck fat.

Colcannon twice-baked potatoes

Carrot and celery root gratin

Maple-coffee pecan pie

Cranberry-lime pie

aka arnold palmer, half and half

Man, fuck a bunch of winter. Sometimes when you wake up and it's still dark out, you need to make some lemonade iced tea.

(I have ceased calling it anything but "half lemonade, half iced tea" when I order it, because there doesn't seem to be a nationally understood term.)

Although there's a cider cocktail called the Stonewall, I implore you not to call this unnamed cocktail the Stone Walnut:

3/4 oz nocino (walnut liqueur)
1 oz rye whiskey
Pour into a mug and top with hot unpasteurized apple cider.

This has been our favorite cocktail of cider season. You really, really need to use farmstand apple cider - I don't think anything in a supermarket will come close. Depending on the apples the cider was made with, and how tart it is, you might want a squeeze of lemon juice.

You might also need to adjust the amount of nocino for sweetness - I'm using homemade stuff (which is dead simple if you can get green walnuts - chop them into halves or quarters, cover them in vodka for a couple months, add sugar to desired sweetness).

I always associate beets with fish.

There's no real reason for that association outside the context of my own life: I first learned to like beets when I was living in Gentilly almost twelve years ago (wow), when I happened to be eating a lot of fish. The beets were a whim - I roasted them, rubbed the skins off, and sliced them, as a side with pan-fried fish and homemade "tartar sauce" made with pickled garlic.

The sweetness was nice with the fish, and I've gone back to it a lot of times since.



The cod fillet was smoked in the stovetop smoker after being rubbed with miso. No tartar sauce this time - just black pepper and a five-minute egg fried in cilantro oil.