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?

Fall Ephemera

A Lengthy Cooldown 
Here in the Mid-South, fall lasts forever.  It's not like Chicago, my last perch, where the shoulder seasons--spring and fall--are technicolor blips on the way from the pure steel gray of winter to the deep somnolent green of summer. A Memphis autumn is a long slow slide from crippling heat through endless rain to crisp days that remind me of New England but never lead to snow. In fact, down here, the transitional seasons dominate.  Winter is a brief pause on the way back to summer.

What this means for us eaters is that fruits and vegetables that make brief appearances up north linger into October here.  Take the tomato.  Some growers I know pull up their plants and hang them in the cellar, where the fruits ripen well into the fall. Others take their chances with the frost, betting that the midday sun will make it worth their while.


Highly Perishable

A couple of weeks ago I bought a small bagful of the season's last tomatoes from the Dodsons. Our growers didn't suffer the curse of blights that Northeasterners did this past summer, but constant rain and uncommonly cool weather left our tomatoes mealy and flavorless.  There were exceptions, of course, and recent warm weather brought out the best in Thomas Dodson's small heirlooms. Olive oil and a few generous pinches of salt concentrated the flavor for a savory lunchtime salad.  The leftovers did not keep well, though. Wish I'd eaten them all right away.


Give Beets a Chance
And now, a digression from strictly local fare. I haven't gone completely off the beam--the green stuff on my plate is arugula from Gracious Gardens' Tim Smith, aka "The Arugula Guy" (though wouldn't it be more fun if we called him Rocket Man?).  I bought it at the winter market next to Tsunami on Saturday (that's where you'll find the Dodsons, too).  But I confess that the rest of my salad's ingredients hail from the produce aisle of our local Whole Foods.  And the star?

Sturdy yet brilliant, reviled yet unbeeten.

Don't worry, only a few more beet puns before I move on.  But take in their day-glo glamour. Why is the beet the butt of every extended yucky-food joke? I blame cafeterias and salad bars that serve beets that taste of can lining. But roast a beet yourself, then marinate it in sherry vinegar and shallots, and you have an earthy, piquant foil for smoked fish and peppery greens.  How frisky does that salad look?

Panicked by a recent editorial about the desperate state of the eastern Atlantic & Mediterranean bluefin tuna fishery, but craving smoked fish, I bought some smoked mackerel instead of trout, which is usually farmed and so less delicious, or salmon, which is hard to keep up with in terms of which fisheries are endangered.  Mackerel, along with their smaller cousins the sardines and anchovies, appear at least now to be numerous and healthful.  More importantly for us, they are absolutely transcendent with beets and arugula. Beets me why more people aren't snarfing down this combo every chance they get.

Sorry. Can't beet 'em, join 'em.

Falling into Grace 
And now my beet moment has passed. Come November, I'm looking for comfort and creaminess and orangey-colored foods.  I'm back at my stove, pan-roasting chickens and braising greens, thanking my oven for its warmth against my knees.

I've started taking delivery of pastured chickens from Downing Hollow Farm every couple of weeks.  The birds are bosomy and firm--none of that spongy stuff you get from industrial fowl. For a recent supper I cut one up and browned the parts. After sauteeing shallots, ginger and garlic, I deglazed the pan with a good splash of sherry vinegar and chicken broth. Buttermilk-mashed sweet potatoes and creamed spinach round out the plate.  Best thing?  I made the buttermilk.

I'd gone mad chasing around town for the real thing.  Recently Whole Foods started carrying products from East Tennessee's Hatcher Family Dairy, and their buttermilk is quite good, free of carageenan and the other thickeners that even respectable organic cooperatives like Organic Valley add to theirs.  But they were out.  I raced over to Easy-Way, which used to stock the buttermilk in glass bottles from Rock Springs Dairy. Nuthin'.

So I got to work. 



As If By Magic

I love microbes. Because one day I had a half-cup of month-old buttermilk in my fridge, and the next I had 2 cups of delicious, useful, fresh-tasting cultured dairy goodness on my counter.  Or coyly peeking from behind a curtain.

How did I do this?  I googled "buttermilk how to make" et voila.  You mix buttermilk and fresh milk in a 1:3 or 4 ratio and leave it out for a day.  Yes!  Leave it out!  It's crazy, but it works! And the taste is fresh and, well, alive. I'll get into the science of it another time, if you like.

This buttermilk gave tang to my sweet potatoes and body to my creamed spinach.  I also tested Marion Cunningham's recipe for Buttermilk Baked Eggs from The Breakfast Book.  Sounded tasty, but not so much. (Otherwise, the book's a winner.)  Basically, it's Egg in the Basket (which my mom called Pig-in-a-Poke) with buttermilk poured over it, baked for a bit.  Better with nutmeg and thyme mixed in and some cheese on top, but not a keeper.  However, the buttermilk is.
  
A blog lives through its readers, so talk to me.
Have you tried making cultured dairy products at home?  Cheese, yogurt, creme fraiche?  What, why, how?

And what's your position on beets?  Do you have any entry-level recommendations for beet newbies?