The Sweetest Hangover

Monday Morning Coming Down
I just ate lunch.  Not exactly breaking news, but in the glutted days after Thanksgiving, lunch takes on a halcyon character: a turkey sandwich here, a nibble of stuffing there. (By the way, down here in Dixie they call it dressing and often make it from cornbread. I will never do either.) Delight, already cooked, greets me every time I open the fridge.

In fact, today's lunch included turkey liver pate, not on the Thanksgiving menu but a by-product thanks to the fact that our West Wind Farms turkey came with gloriously intact, fresh giblets. (Sounds a little naughty, no? Well, I guess this is food porn.) I used a recipe for chicken live pate from the yellow Gourmet cookbook, but tarted it up with cream and extra soft butter worked in at the end to compensate for the fact that the free-range bird's liver isn't as rich as those coddled chickens'. I subbed some of my husband's high-end bourbon for the indicated cognac. A salutary shift, may I say, and harmless as it cooks off.

Remember my ugly pears? A few of them, transparent with sugar, top my upscale offal. Edna Lewis, in The Taste of Country Cooking, praises the "meaty texture" of these preserves. She's right.  I can't eat Kiefers raw, but the alchemy of heat and sugar turn their grainy, unyielding flesh into a toothsome bit of caramel and a perfect foil for gobbler foie. The nutty sweetness also brings out the best in softy, rindy cheeses.

After I munched 6 or so of these morsels, I remembered my roasted cranberry-apple chutney, a riff on this epicurious recipe, but minus the butter and o.j. and plus clementine sections and crystallized ginger. I also subbed shallots for the onion. I don't know which I loved more desperately atop my pate, but I might have to do it all again tomorrow.

Swee'potatoes 3 Ways

Our good friends the Murphys hosted a Thanksgiving dinner for 12 adults and 8 kids. We brought the aforementioned cran chutney and turkey, Shoaf's Loaf rolls, mixed braised greens, 2 pans of sweet potatoes, and pie.

Not any pie--sweet potato pie, tart with buttermilk, airy with egg whites. Actually, I made 2 pies, the first of whose crust was flaky and rich with lard that I rendered from a pork shoulder I roasted a couple weeks ago.

 Delicious (both the pork and the piecrust), but I was so excited by this fatstravaganza that I spaced out and worked 4 oz. instead of 4T. lard into my dough. I think the technical term for the resulting structural failure is pastry slump. Fortunately, I had enough batter to fill this piecrust to about tart depth, and kept it home so I'd be sure to have enough for breakfast on Friday morning. I think this is about as close to making a fried pie as I may ever get.

I made my recovery piecrust with half butter and half Spectrum shortening. Perfectly good, and didn't put me in that morally questionable position of bringing a pork-fat pie to a dinner attended by many who eschew the eating of furry beasts.



Yam I Ain't

About those other sweet potatoes. I said 3 ways, didn't I? The pie is #1.  The other 2, though traditional, are startlingly delicious, smooth, and rich.  Instead of steaming the sweets as for pie, I roasted them till they swooned, then force them through a strainer. (This took forever and I don't recommend it if you have an alternative. My food mill is in storage, and I'm a little nuts.)

Both preparations are luxe with butter and cream. I deepened the flavor of the traditionally tinted orange sweets with maple syrup and topped them with butter-fried sage leaves. Comforting and kid-friendly. The surprise hit, though, was the chipotle-infused purples. Because of all their berry-colored antioxidants, the tubers have a winey flavor that melded seductively with the smoky adobo sweetness of the peppers. There were finger tracks in the baking dish, and no leftovers.  

These odd-looking tubers have a fascinating history.  Sweet potatoes originated in the Caribbean and Central America and remain primarily a food of the American South. However, the purple sweets I found at Whole Foods are descendants of  a variety that traveled with Columbus to Spain. From there, other explorers launched them on an itinerary leading to the Philippines, China, then Japan, where the purple variety emerged. Early Japanese immigrants brought it to Hawaii, and now they're grown in North Carolina for sale in southeastern markets.  Whew! I guess that means they've almost circumnavigated the globe.

Sweet potatoes, by the way, are neither yam nor potato, but a usually orange relative of the morning glory. True yams, on the other hand, are white to pinkish-purple starchy tubers from the Old World that can be as big and shapely as a Folies Bergère dancer's thigh.



Soup for Nuts

A steady stream of emails last week from foodie sites conveys the anxiety--and possibility--that clings to a spent turkey carcass as surely as pie-pounds cling to my carcass. Some ideas are better than others. Turkey tacos, okay. Turkey-pear Stilton pie made with prefab crust? maybe, but if it involves buying stuff I don't already have around, maybe not.

Something easy and traditional appeals to me, so I simmered bones, carrots, celery, onions and garlic all afternoon and into the evening, then used the jiggling stock to make a rich, dark tortilla soup from the Lee Bros. cookbook. I hope you made stock too, and will treat yourself to a much-deserved bowl of something soothing in the holiday-hectic weeks to come.

Talk to Me
What did you do with your leftovers?

A Faint Rumbling in the Distance

Yes, that sound you hear is the first of the Great Peaches of 2008 rolling towards a farmers' market near you. Or maybe it was the stampede of otherwise-reasonable people shoving each other aside to get at them. Last Saturday, Jones brought several dozen boxes of Derby peaches to the MFM. (A reminder to all readers: start posting those peach recipes now!) You could just feel the pent-up desire as word spread that they were there; the movement toward the north end of the market was almost unconscious. Must. Have. Peaches.

Of course, I've already written about last year's traumatic frost. No need to dwell on that! Nor on the near-miss we experienced this spring. But it hardly seems real that we already have mature stonefruit at the end of May. Up north, where I hail from, we don't get scratch (except strawberries) till at least June. My trees up at Jones won't bear till later--my earliest, the Harrow Beauties, in July. But the arrival of the Derbies sent me into a bit of a panic, so on Memorial Day, up to Jones I dashed.

My friends the Harpers and the Iveses came along with their kids. Little Anna and my son Gus collected baby peaches. They plan to found a museum on our front stoop.

Gus wandered into a fairyland zone of the orchard, where my heirloom Elberta tree is.

The last time we were up there, the peaches were tiny and the difference between the frost-stunted fruits and their healthy brethren was negligible. Now the runts stand out. The rains and heat have also encouraged the vetch and the leaves and the grasses; the place glowed green against a heavy sky. On this sultry day, the whole place felt enchanted.

We even found a peach-troll.

After we visited my trees, we went over to pick some more strawberries. Not that I needed any; I'd bought 4 quarts at the MFM on Saturday. But it's getting so that I feel ill at ease if I don't have to rearrange the condiments in the fridge to make room for berries. By the time we got over there, piled-up clouds were tumbling in and spattering us occasionally with big cooling drops. Just as we filled our buckets, thunder growled us off the field and we took refuge in the lunchroom adjacent to the Jones farmstand, just in time. As rain hammered on the tin roof, we reveled in pimento-cheese sandwiches, tender white beans and cornbread, and lemonade.

It was a perfect Memorial Day.

Country Honk

We had an open house kind of party on New Year's Day and without reflecting too deeply on my hubris (I guess if I had, I wouldn't have committed it), I bought a country ham at Schnuck's, the Memphis grocery store with some local cred. They stock several types, but I went for Tripp's, because I've been to their place and they were really nice. Oh, and the ham is great. Melissa Petersen wrote about it for the debut issue of Edible Memphis (where you can see some of my other writing) and held a fancy tasting, slicing it prosciutto-style and serving it with melon.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm all for the idea that we've got a ham here that can go hock-to-hock with the Italians. But I'm also committed to mastering the local idiom if at all possible, so for my New Year's fete I decided to serve it on biscuits. When in Rome, doncha know. Except it's Memphis.

Um, you're thinking, it's May. Why are you talking about January?

The January ham experiment was a debacle, that's why. My guests were too polite to say anything, but we had too much ham left over at the end of the day to spell success. Here's why: In order for country ham to be palatable, it either needs to be sliced paper-thin, or it requires a couple days of scrubbing, soaking and simmering to remove the mold and salt and render it tender enough to yield to your teeth at roughly the same rate as the bread product into which it is tucked. Otherwise, you get an awful result. You bite into a fluffy, tender biscuit (I did get that part right, thanks to White Lily), only to find yourself in a Brazilian jujitsu match with a slab of salty gristle as crumbs fly all over yourself and the nice new acquaintance you were making till just that moment. It just doesn't make good party food unless you tenderize it.

But I didn't have a dutch oven large enough for my country ham, so I took it back to Schnuck's, where they sliced it on a bandsaw--not an elegant meat slicer that would give me something I could pair with figs--and returned my ham to me in bone-in 1/2"-thick increments. As of now, at least 12 of these slabs remain in my freezer. Like Dr. Frankenstein, I've been experimenting on them ever since.

I had no technique in January, but I can now get one of these hunks to a point of toothsomeness and desalinization that will harmonize with a biscuit. After placing it in a pan of cool water, I bring it to a bare simmer for 20 minutes or so. But once I've done this, I have several other options. My son Gus tests most of them for me, since my husband doesn't eat the furry beasts. So the other night when Josh was out, after rummaging through the fridge for something to eat, I found a bunch of broccoli rabe from Keith and Jill Forrester's stall at the MFM. Grabbing a hunk of ham, I decided to work the Tennessee-Italy connection in reverse.
4 cloves sliced garlic sauteed in olive oil, then chunky matchsticks of ham, probably a few ounces tops. (Country ham is smoky and salty even after soaking, so the best sub if you don't have any will still be prosciutto.) I like to parboil my rabe before chopping it, so I dropped it into boiling salted water for a few minutes and pulled it out with my tongs once the stalks were tender. After plunging it in cool water and chopping it, I added it to the saute and got it good and tasty. Meanwhile, I augmented the cooking water and returned it to a boil, then tossed in a half box of mini penne and a handful more salt. I reserved a little cooking water and used it to bind the sauce to the macaroni, and was all set. This didn't even want cheese.

It appears to have been a success. Note the glazed eyes, the wanton abandon with which he shovels the food into his maw.
And now, behold the noodle fiend, his passion spent. Nothing pleases a mom quite so well as a child with a full stomach and a vacant gaze. The olive-oil slick about the mouth is lagniappe.