But then for some reason, I stopped buying the stuff. Call it my pretensions to fine cooking, but pork tenderloin started to seem…pedestrian. The boneless, skinless chicken breast of the pig world. And I was a real cook, someone who’d make hot dogs from scratch just to say he’d done it.

Nonsense! Pork tenderloin is great, and it’s still cheap as hell, and you should be making it more often. I did, however, move beyond the pre-marinated packaged version and made my own marinade. Four ingredients (one’s water), and it takes just a couple hours. Plus, you get to make a delicious pan sauce with the leftover marinade.

You’ll notice my tenderloin is just a little bit rosy inside. This is perfectly safe, and totally desirable: Especially with a low-fat cut like the tenderloin, keeping your pork medium-well ensures that it will be juicy and not dry. Also important to avoid dryness: Rest it when it comes out of the oven for a good 10 minutes before slicing.

To go with this, garlicky mashed potatoes would be delicious, but I didn’t have any potatoes; I had a head of cauliflower. Well, you can “mash” (OK, fine, puree) roasted cauliflower into a tasty facsimile of mashed potatoes, and either dish goes real well with that pan sauce. Enjoy!

Mustard-and-Garlic Pork Tenderloin

1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
1/4 cup water
2 tbsp. Dijon mustard
2 tbsp. finely chopped garlic
1 pork tenderloin (12-14 oz.)
1/4 cup chicken stock
1 tbsp. butter

In a small bowl, stir together the vinegar, water, mustard and garlic. Pour into a gallon zip-top bag and add the pork. Marinate in the refrigerator for 2 to 4 hours.

Preheat the oven to 400° F. Heat a pan over high heat.  Remove the tenderloin from the marinade (reserve the remaining liquid) and season it on all sides with salt and pepper. Sear in the pan until all sides are well-browned, about 1 minute per side. Transfer to a baking dish and bake for 20 minutes.

While the pork cooks, make a pan sauce. Reduce the heat under the pan to medium, and add the chicken stock and about 1/4 cup of the reserved marinade. Cook until reduced and somewhat thickened. Turn off the heat, add the butter, and swirl the pan until it melts completely. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Remove the pork from the oven and let stand for 5 to 10 minutes. Slice about 1/4 inch thick and serve drizzled with the pan sauce. (The pork will be slightly rosy—this is totally fine and makes for juicier meat. But if you’re really terrified of any hint of red in your pork, cook for a few minutes longer, measuring the internal temperature with a probe thermometer until it hits 150° or 155° F.)

Mashed Cauliflower

1 head cauliflower, chopped into rough chunks
Olive oil
2 tbsp. chopped garlic
2 tbsp. butter
1/4 cup chicken stock, plus more if needed
Fresh herbs, such as parsley, basil or chives, chopped

Preheat the oven to 400° F. Place the cauliflower on a baking sheet, drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle lightly with salt and pepper. Bake for 20 minutes. Transfer to a food processor and add the garlic and butter. Process until completely pulverized, about 30 seconds. Scrape down the bowl and add 1/4 cup of chicken stock. Process until combined. Add more chicken stock a few tablespoons at a time until the mixture is slightly loose in texture but still holds together, like thick mashed potatoes. Season to taste with salt and pepper and sprinkle with chopped fresh herbs.

As you might expect, many things have happened since last February, chief among them that I’ve moved to Los Angeles!

Yes, for the past 10 months, I’ve been an Angeleno, exploring this enormous city’s incomprehensibly gigantic list of choices for food and drink. Birmingham will always be close to my heart (and I’ll be visiting at least once a year: I’m still running FoodBlogSouth, and it’s not going anywhere), but The Messy Epicure is now officially a Southern Californian.

I promise not to let this site go for another year, so keep an eye out for updates on what I’m cooking, eating and drinking, but in the meantime, here are a few of my favorite spots so far in the City of Angels:

• Starry Kitchen (you have to call ahead to request it,  but get the chili crab)
• Jasmine Market (the most unassuming hole-in-the-wall with the greatest Burmese and Indian food)
• Bestia (there’s nothing served here—food or cocktail—that isn’t delicious)
• The Spare Room (the most fun you can have in Hollywood—craft cocktails, bowling and a closet full of board games)
• Rivera (in a town full of awesome cheap Mexican, awesome expensive Mexican; also mezcal)
• Hide (best sushi value in town—try the mackerel)
• Slicetruck (LA’s supposed best Chicago pizza ain’t all that, but this thin-crust is)
• The Flintridge Proper (a bar in a strip mall in the suburbs just happens to have the best gin selection in America)
• Bigfoot West (good whiskey selection, great happy hour, fantastic bar trivia and close to where I live!)
• POT (Korean food like someone’s grandma cooked it [only the grandma is Roy Choi] plus ’90s hip-hop blasting on the speakers, and weird/delicious drinks to boot)

One thing I haven’t yet found in LA: good Deep South barbecue. The kings of SoCal ‘cue, Bludso’s and Baby Blues, are both Texas-style, which means no smoked chicken and sure as hell no Alabama white sauce.

Anyway, watch this space.  And be sure to read my stories for LA Weekly—I’ll be writing about food, drink and cooking for the mag’s Squid Ink blog.

New Orleans is home to lots and lots of awesome food, and plenty of it is stuff most tourists never get to enjoy. Take Cake Cafe, a wonderful bakery and breakfast spot in the Marigny neighborhood. When I lived in the city pre-Katrina, I hadn’t even heard of this place; it was only on a trip a few years ago that a friend who lives nearby took me there.

So I was surprised to see the place mentioned on Serious Eats, in a post about its apple-and-goat-cheese-filled king cake. This thing is pretty decadent: cream cheese filling, goat cheese, brown sugar and cinnamon, and apples—it’s like four king cakes in one!

Too bad Serious Eats didn’t score an actual recipe. So I had to come up with one myself. I started with the dough from CHOW with a few adjustments (mine’s a bit sweeter, and theirs doesn’t measure the flour by weight, plus I went with a mix of almond and vanilla extract), and then kinda winged it based on Serious Eats’ photos.

The result was a pretty huge success, if I do say so myself. The tangy cheese and tart apples combine beautifully in the filling, whose richness provides a nice counterpoint to the bready cake. (Don’t take this as a knock; king cake is supposed to be bready.)And you’ve got two days left before Mardi Gras, so get baking!

Apple-Goat Cheese King Cake

Dough:
1 cup whole milk, warm
1 tbsp. (or 1 packet) active dry yeast
1/2 cup sugar
1 tsp. salt
2 tsp. orange zest
4 egg yolks, beaten
2 tbsp. bourbon
2 tbsp. orange juice
1 tsp. almond extract
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 1/2 tsp. freshly grated nutmeg
23 oz. (about 5 cups) all-purpose flour
1 stick (8 tbsp.) butter, cut into pieces

Filling:
1 (8-oz.) package cream cheese
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 pinch salt
1/2 tsp. vanilla extract
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
6 oz goat cheese
1 large or 2 small Granny Smith apples, cored and sliced

Icing:
1 1/2 cups powdered sugar
1/4 cup milk
1 tbsp. bourbon
Yellow, green, and purple food coloring

1 plastic baby

Make the dough: Add the milk and yeast to the bowl of a mixer fitted with the dough hook attachment and let stand until frothy (about 5 minutes). Add the sugar and the next 8 ingredients (through nutmeg), and mix on medium speed until well combined. Turn the speed to low and add the flour a bit at a time. As the flour incorporates and the dough begins to form a ball, turn the heat up to medium and knead until the dough is smooth and pulls away cleanly from the side of the bowl, about 5 minutes. (You may need to add a little extra flour if the dough is very sticky.) Add the butter a few pieces at a time, kneading until fully incorporated after each addition. Form the dough into a ball and transfer to a large bowl coated with cooking spray. Cover with plastic wrap and let rise for 1 hour. Punch down the dough, form into a ball, cover, and let rise for 1 hour again.

While the dough rises, prepare the filling ingredients: Add the cream cheese, sugar, salt, and vanilla extract to the bowl of a mixer fitted with the paddle attachment. Beat on high speed until fully combined and fluffy, about 2 minutes. Set aside. In a separate bowl, stir together the brown sugar and cinnamon, and set aside.

After the dough finishes its second rise, preheat the oven to 350° F. On a lightly floured surface, punch down the dough and roll into a rough rectangle about 18 inches long by 8 inches wide. Spread the cream cheese mixture evenly across the surface and then dot with crumbled goat cheese. Spread the apple slices across the middle of the rectangle and sprinkle with the brown sugar mixture. Fold the dough over the filling, pressing the edges together to seal, then roll lightly to form a tube. Bring the edges of the tube together to form an oval shape and press together to seal. Place the cake on a baking sheet lined with a Silpat or parchment paper and place in the oven with the door ajar for 3-5 minutes. (The dough should puff up a bit—this makes for a lighter-textured cake.) Close the door and bake until the cake is golden brown, about 50 minutes. Remove from the oven and let cool completely.

While the cake bakes, make the icing: In a bowl, stir together the powdered sugar, milk, and bourbon. Divide the mixture evenly among three small bowls. Color the contents of one bowl green, one yellow, and one purple. (Don’t be a afraid to be generous with the food coloring—you want the color to look pretty intense and artificial.) Once the cake is cool, hide the baby in it by inserting from the bottom so the hole won’t be visible. Drizzle each color of icing over the top, waiting a minute or two in between colors for the icing to dry out and harden a bit.

On Saturday, December 15, I’m running a holiday mixology workshop at Painted Shovel Mercantile in Avondale. For $25, you’ll learn three seasonal classics: Mulled Wine, Eggnog, and the French 75—plus a Painted Shovel Holiday Margarita I’ve created just for the class. (And yes, you get to try all the drinks!) To enroll, please call 205-593-2083 or email paintedshovel@gmail.com.

And on Sunday, December 16, my bread and rolls class returns to Freshfully. This lesson sold out last time, so make sure to grab your spot now. It’s just $15, and you’ll learn my foolproof bread-from-scratch recipe, sample some delicious bread and rolls, and go home with a batch of dough all ready to bake immediately (or to freeze and bake later). Enroll online here.

See you this weekend in Avondale!

When I read the Birmingham News report about Bistro Two Eighteen, I have to admit, my feelings were mixed.

It’s a new restaurant downtown (yay!) in a historic building (yay!) from a Birmingham-born, culinary-school-educated chef (yay!) with a that’s only open for lunch and during the week (boo!) and has a weird confusion of a “French” menu that includes classics like quiche Lorraine as well as burgers and gumbo (boo!).

I stopped by for lunch last week (the restaurant’s second in business), and I’m glad to say the food is better than expected! The place is similar in feel to Chez Fon Fon and Chez Lulu but with lower prices than the former and larger portions than the latter.

The food is mostly French, though there’s gumbo on the menu and they were playing New Orleans jazz, so maybe they’re going for a little Creole influence too. And for some strange reason, they have shrimp and grits available as an appetizer. I understand you’re in the South, but if you’re going to be a French restaurant, be a French restaurant.

The specialty of the house seems to be steak frites—you can’t go wrong with meat and fries. It’s a pretty good portion of flatiron steak, with two options of sauce: horseradish cream or chausseur (a mushroom, tomato and tarragon combo). I ordered mine medium, and it came out exactly right, paired with a simple salad. And those fries are excellent: skinny and super-crunchy, and they stay that way even after they cool off. The whole deal is $12, a bit steep for an everyday lunch but a very good price for what you get.

One of my dining companions ordered the quiche Lorraine and got a massive portion of well-made quiche—the crust wasn’t soggy, it was cooked through nicely, and it contained all the correct Lorraine ingredients. Nothing life-changing about this dish, but a solid one all around.

I also got to sample the crawfish and leek crepes (pictured above), which are rich, creamy, and indulgent, maybe even too much so for lunch. The side of rice and green beans, on the other hand, was just kinda sad. I’m not sure whose idea it was to pair starchy rice with starchy crepes, but someone in the kitchen should know better.

And that leads to my biggest criticism. In the News article, the chef/owner claims that “the menu changes daily.” If that’s the case, I would have expected to see at least the barest nod to seasonal produce. I have no problem with seeing the same basic entrees every day, but there was nary a mention of butternut squash or satsumas or any of the delicious winter items there could have been. If they’re putting cherry tomatoes on their salads and serving green beans in December, I find it hard to believe that the menu is really going to change much.

If and when Bistro Two Eighteen starts to stay open for dinner (which the owner claims it will soon), I think the menu will start to make a little more sense. An $18 boeuf bourguignon sounds absolutely wonderful, but I can’t see ordering it at lunchtime. Perhaps when there are separate afternoon and evening menus, there’ll be a little more of that changing-every-day they promised.

As for decor, the place has it half-right. One side wall is the original 19th-century brick, accented with some subtle light fixtures. Simple, elegant, appropriate for the location—perfect. The other side is this weird half-wall that doesn’t go all the way to the ceiling, giving a bit of an impression of the cubicles most of the downtown-worker clientele are trying to escape by coming here. I’m sure there was a reason that half-wall is needed, but I’m not a fan.

Overall, I recommend Bistro Two Eighteen wholeheartedly. I’d love to refer you to the restaurant’s website for more information, but as is typical in this town, the establishment has failed mightily at technology. The website listed on its Facebook page is a horrendous Register.com placeholder. Bistro Two Eighteen, you’ve been open for nearly a month—put something up on your damn URL! Even if it’s nothing more than a logo with your address, phone number and hours, you will have succeeded. (If anybody from the restaurant is reading this, I’m happy to be your web consultant and set you up a simple, easy-to-maintain WordPress page. Just email me.)

So, in the interest of keeping Birmingham food lovers informed and new businesses in business, here goes: Bistro Two Eighteen is located at 218 20th St. N, Birmingham, AL 35203. Its phone number is 205-983-7999. It is open from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday.

I love bread. I love eating bread, I love baking bread, I love kneading bread dough.

And I want you to, too.

So I’m working with awesome local-food-only grocery store Freshfully to put together a bread-making class on Sunday, October 21.

Look: People are afraid of baking their own bread. For some reason, they think it takes some kind of alchemy (plus a French accent) to bake a decent loaf. They are wrong. All it takes is four ingredients and a couple hours, and you can have as much fresh-from-the-oven bread as you want.

In the class, I’ll go over my pretty-much-foolproof method for making all kinds of bread and explain some of the science behind how bread-making works while you mix and knead your own batch of dough. Then, while the dough rises, we’ll sample a bunch of my own breads (including white-chocolate, olive-and-herb, and more), paired with some local cheeses.

At the end of the class, you’ll go home with a batch of bread dough ready for baking (sorry, Freshfully doesn’t have an oven) or freezing for later (yes, I’ll tell you how to do that as well).

Registration is $30, but for reading through this post, I’ll save you five bucks! Just use coupon code DOUGH at checkout.

See you Sunday!

There’s only one good thing about air travel these days, and it’s a cookie.

If you’ve flown Delta recently, you know what I mean: Biscoff. A delicious, Belgian-made, cinnamon-tinged crunchy little thing, of which I always ask the flight attendant for seconds. I honestly wasn’t sure if I enjoyed them so much just because they were the only respite from the soul-crushing experience that is flying on an airplane or if I might still like them under 35,000 feet. Content to let the mystery be a mystery, I never ordered any off the internet (which seems to be the only non-aviation-related place in America you can buy them).

But then I was walking down the peanut butter-and-cereal aisle at my local Publix and saw a familiar red logo. Biscoff Spread. Assuming this would be some horrible concoction of shortening and sugar, I turned the jar around. The first ingredient listed? Biscoff cookies.

This stuff is literally ground-up Biscoff cookies, mixed with extra sugar and oil. It’s smoother than peanut butter, and good lord is it magnificent. (There’s also a chunky version, which I haven’t tried yet.)

We had just been eating it by the spoonful when the lit-theory-class/post-modern sector of my brain said, “What if you took this cookie spread, and made it back into cookies?” And thus, Meta-Cookies. Cookies made out of cookies.Given the stuff’s consistency (and location in the grocery store), peanut butter cookies were the obvious starting point. I grabbed a basic recipe and made a couple alterations, cutting the sugar and adding a little extra oil (since Biscoff Spread has a lot more sugar and somewhat less fat than peanut butter). I also ended up having to cook them almost twice as long to get the crunchy texture I like in a peanut butter cookie—not sure why that is, but such are the mysteries of Meta-Cookies.

Don’t expect these things to taste like peanut butter cookies: They’re all about sweetness and cinnamon, with none of the roasty or nutty flavors you’d expect. Biscoff Spread is also a lot softer than peanut butter, so the cookies spread out during baking more than I planned for. Just leave plenty of room on the pan and you’ll be fine.

Meta-Cookies
Makes about 18 cookies

1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, at room temperature
2 tbsp. vegetable oil
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup Biscoff Spread
1 egg
6 oz. all-purpose flour
3/4 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt

Beat the butter and oil in an electric mixer on medium speed with the paddle attachment until fluffy, about 2 minutes. Add the sugars and beat until fully combined, about 1 minute more. Scrape down the sides of the bowl, add the Biscoff Spread and egg, and beat until fully combined. In a separate bowl, stir together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. Add to the mixer and beat on low speed until just combined. Cover the mixer bowl and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes or up to overnight.

Preheat the oven to 300°. Scoop out about 2 tbsp. of dough, roll into a ball, and place on a baking sheet lined with a silicone baking mat or parchment paper. Repeat with the remaining dough, spacing balls about 2-3 inches apart. Press down each ball with the back of a fork in a cross-hatch pattern. Bake until the edges begin to brown, about 18 minutes. Remove from the oven and let cool on the baking sheet for about 5 minutes, then transfer to a cooling rack and let cool completely.

Being as how I work for Liquor.com, I’m usually called upon to make drinks at parties.

Okay, what I mean is I force everybody to try the fancy drinks I make instead of just mixing bourbon and diet soda. But the fact remains that making drinks all night is no way to enjoy any kind of festivities.

Enter punch. People have been enjoying big bowls of boozy conviviality for almost 500 years.  (Really. There’s a whole book about it—a good one, might I add.) And making one ahead of time frees you up to enjoy your own party, not to mention impresses your guests (and gets them nice and toasty).

For my Fourth of July party, I wanted something light and summery but still a little exotic.

I had a bottle of pisco on my cart left over from the samples I called in for this story (it’s a tough life, being a spirits writer), which fit the bill nicely. Pisco is a grape-based brandy from South America (Chile and Peru fight over who invented it). Unlike the more famous brandy, cognac, it’s not aged in wood for very long, so it’s clear, and it has an earthy, yeasty character that matches really well with fruit flavors. In other words, it’s a wonderful unusual summer-cocktail ingredient.

And one of the most famous pisco cocktails just happens to be Pisco Punch. But this is Alabama, and I’m into eating local, so I made my own version, swapping the pineapple juice for two of the South’s most delicious hot-weather crops: watermelon and peach. And for a little zing, I added another thanks-to-my-job sample: Cocktail Kingdom’s Falernum Bitters. Spicy with clove, black pepper and ginger, it’s a perfect seasoning for any tiki, tropical, or otherwise extra-sweet drinks.

So how are you supposed to get watermelon and peach juices? Easy—your blender or food processor. Watermelon pulverizes in seconds into a watery puree (you don’t even have to take the seeds out, though you should cut off the rind) that strains quickly and easily. Peach takes a little longer: Pit the fruit, puree it (skin and all), and use a spatula to push it through the strainer. You’ll end up with a concentrated nectar that’s almost thick enough to eat with a spoon (resist the temptation) and just aches to be mixed with liquor. (You could just use peach puree instead of straining it, but this punch will end up pulpy).

Dixie Pisco Punch
Serves 10 to 12

Sliced citrus or other fruit (optional)
1 (750-mL) bottle Pisco
20 oz Watermelon juice (from about half of a medium watermelon)
8 oz Peach juice (from about 6 peaches) 12 oz Lime juice (from about 8 limes)
4 oz Simple syrup (one part sugar, one part water), plus more if needed
20 to 30 dashes Cocktail Kingdom Falernum Bitters

Fill one or two 1-quart containers with water (and slices of citrus and other fresh fruit, if desired) and freeze overnight until solid. Add all the ingredients to a large bowl and stir to combine. Taste, and add more simple syrup if needed. (Remember that after you add ice, the punch will not be as strong, so go easy on the simple syrup.) Chill until ready to serve. To serve, pour the punch into a punchbowl. Run warm water over the outside of the frozen containers to loosen the ice blocks, pop them out of the containers, and add them to the bowl. Serve in small punch cups or wine glasses.

What do you do after building a highly successful chain of barbecue restaurants? If you’re the people behind Jim ‘n Nick’s, you open a high-end Mexican restaurant.

I’ll admit, I didn’t have very high hopes for Little Donkey when I first heard about it, but one taste cleared away all my doubts. I was invited to the place on opening night last week for a media “preview,” and just about everything was fantastic.

The high point has to be the appetizers, chiefly the chilaquiles pictured above. Tortillas are coated with salsa and then fried, creating a unique soft-but-crunchy texture. A huge plate of this concoction comes topped with sour cream, queso fresco, and—here’s the best part—a pair of soft-poached eggs. Look, if you don’t like runny egg yolk on just about anything, there’s something wrong with you. And this might just be the dish to convert you.

There’s also an indulgent queso fundido with generous portions of chorizo and mild roasted chiles mixed in. And these come with a portion (too small a portion—four is not enough to scoop up all the cheese!) of tortillas.

Oh yeah, Little Donkey makes its own tortillas. As in they soak corn in cal, grind it in-house, and cook the things to order. Eating a fresh-cooked tortilla is one of the transcendent food experiences everyone should have, and now that’s real easy for Birminghamians.

I also got to try the house guacamole. As a lover of avocados, I am pretty easy to please with a bowl of guac, but what impressed me about this one is that the kitchen clearly put extra effort into it. There’s a super-smooth, creamy base with nice chunks of avocado, tomato and onion mixed in. I suspect they puree some of the ingredients and then mix in the larger pieces. It’s a simple step, but it makes a difference.

The entrees, while a bit weaker than the starters, were still pretty great. I ordered the chiles rellenos, which the menu described as two peppers stuffed with crema, cilantro, pickled onion, and cheese. I got the single largest poblano I have ever seen, stuffed with all of those things, as well as diced potato.

Not sure what happened there, but it tasted good. The pickled onions are an inspired choice, and the slightly-spicy tomato sauce it floats in is very nice. One qualm: The pepper itself was a little, err, crunchy. Usually, the peppers are roasted before frying in chiles rellenos, and I don’t think that was the case here.

My table also got to try a drunken hog torta and an assortment of tacos. The best of that bunch was the al pastor, a mix of smoked pork (not surprising that barbecue folks got that part right) and pineapple for a welcome note of sweetness. It’s a Mexican-food standard, done authentically and well. The torta was also quite nice, with pork, beans, and lots of cheese, plus a dish of meaty broth to dip it in, which reminded me a little bit of a Chicago-style Italian beef sandwich.

The place also has a little bit of tippling royalty: Alabama native LeNell Camacho Santa Ana, who ran a Brooklyn liquor store that was at the center of the early-2000s craft-cocktail revival, created the drinks menu.

Her signature creation is the Donkey’s Daddy at left, a mix of both bourbon and tequila (the place is Southern and Mexican, get it?) flavored with hibiscus syrup and lime. It’s a lot stronger than it tastes, as the floral-sweet hibiscus covers up the distinctive notes of both spirits.

I was less impressed with the Paloma, a bubbly mix of grapefruit, lime, and tequila. It reminded me of just a so-so Margarita, the slight bitterness of the grapefruit adding a kind-of-unpleasant finish. I’m no stranger to bitter flavors—I love Negronis—but the other Palomas I’ve had were made with grapefruit soda, not grapefruit juice, and were significantly sweeter.

Regardless, I will most definitely be back, and frequently. The place has a lovely patio out front, and there are a whole mess of dishes on the menu I want to try, starting with the chile-spiked-buttermilk fried chicken. I’m also excited about the house-made aguas frescas, including my very favorite, horchata, a sweetened rice milk with cinnamon that is absolutely perfect with spicy food. And the chef told me in an interview for my Magic City Post preview that the rotating seasonal soups are his secret favorite dishes. Absolutely ordering one of those next time.

The “In Jars” appetizer at Empire State South includes boiled peanut hummus. Boiled. Peanut. Hummus. Boom: Mind blown.

I have no idea why nobody had thought of this magical concoction before, but holy crap is it delicious. On bread, on celery, with your fingers, just licking the damn food-processor blades, whatever.

And my apologies to chef Hugh Acheson, but I had to rip it off.

(Yankees, you may not understand what boiled peanuts are, and for that I pity you. They’re green peanuts boiled in salted water and eaten hot in an explosion of salty, legume-y goodness, but only in the South for some reason.)

Thankfully, Birmingham has a local source for fresh boiled peanuts every day but Sunday: the Peanut Depot.

I knew the original dish contained tahini, but beyond that I had to wing it for this recipe. I figured the basic idea is to swap out peanuts for chickpeas in regular ol’ hummus, so I added some lemon juice, but I left out the olive oil since peanuts have plenty of fat on their own. Adding a little water  and running the food processor for a good, long time yielded a nice, smooth puree, but something was missing. I think maybe my batch of peanuts had been boiled too long, as they were really salty and not, well, peanutty enough.

Enter unrefined peanut oil. This isn’t the flavorless, high-smoke-point liquid you might fry fish in; this stuff tastes strongly like roasted peanuts. You open the jar and the kitchen will instantly smell like ’em. Just a little splash perfected my hummus.

Soon after I made this, I discovered that Acheson’s actual recipe was in Southern Living four-and-a-half years ago. Ah, well. I did a pretty good job—Acheson adds garlic and cayenne, doesn’t use peanut oil, and boils the nuts himself with Old Bay and star anise, but the basic bones are there.  I dunno if garlic would really add much to this recipe, but pinch of cayenne might have been a good idea. My peanuts were also plenty salted to start with and didn’t need any extra added, though your mileage may vary.

Note that this recipe starts with a pound of boiled peanuts in the shells. I forgot to weigh them post-shelling, but I probably had about three quarters of a cup.

Boiled Peanut Hummus

1 lb. boiled peanuts, shelled
2 tbsp. water
2 tbsp. tahini
Juice of 1 lemon
1-2 tsp. unrefined peanut oil

Add all the ingredients to a food processor and puree until completely smooth, stopping periodically to scrape down the sides. If the mixture remains chunky, add up to 2 tbsp. more water, a little bit at a time.

The most serious of these is bluefin tuna, AKA toro, the kind of tuna that goes into high-end sushi all around the world. The delicious species is on the razor’s edge of extinction: There are only a few thousand left by some estimates. If you care about the planet at all, you should probably not eat any of it again.

And that’s not the only fish to steer clear of: For various reasons, Atlantic salmon, imported farmed shrimp, and freshwater eel (AKA unagi, my favorite sushi-roll ingredient) are all rated as “avoid” by the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch guide.

But it’s not all bad. Wild-caught Alaskan salmon is an extremely well-managed fish, and you can eat as much of it as you’d like without worrying about the environment (your wallet, on the other hand, might take a beating). And shrimp from the US (like the Gulf of Mexico), whether it’s farmed or wild-caught, is fine as well. There are even several kinds of tuna that are safe to eat—it just depends on how and where they were caught.

The key is doing your research. Seafood Watch has a wealth of information (and even an iPhone app), which I use all the time and recommend highly. You’ll also have to ask questions at your supermarket: Where was this caught? Was it caught in a net or via longline? What kind of feed does the farm use? Yeah, it’s a pain, but the way things are going, you kinda have to.

And unfortunately, the way things are going, many of the fish you like today will be harder and harder to find in the coming years. I’ve found that many of the most sustainable fish deserve a reappraisal by American palates. These are oilier, “fishier” fish that lots of people consider icky—like sardines.

Lately, I’ve gotten hooked on another one of these: mackerel. The small, dark-colored fish is great on the grill, has awesome flavor, and it’s cheap! Plus, almost all of it sold in supermarkets is a Seafood Watch “best choice” (Atlantic mackerel caught in the US, as opposed to Canada, is merely a “good alternative.”

The key to mackerel is high-heat, quick cooking. All that oil in it is flavor, but the fillets are thin, which means they’re prone to overcooking. And as they have a strong flavor, they’re best partnered with other strong tastes. I love mackerel with miso, Japanese fermented soybean paste that has loads of salty, umami flavor with a little bit of blue-cheese funk. (You might be familiar with it in the rich soup that’s often served at sushi joints.)

Miso comes in two varieties, red and white. Really either one works for this recipe, but I happen to have white miso in my fridge. You just thin it out a little bit with soy sauce and rice vinegar, plus some honey for sweetness, then spread on the fish and broil. Since it cooks all the way through from the top down, the miso-coated side of the fish gets nice and crisp and highly flavored, leaving moist and tender flesh underneath.

Paired with rice and maybe some stir-fried vegetables, this recipe makes a nice lunch for two or dinner for one. It’s easy as hell, and you can even minimize the dishes—I’ll cook this in my toaster oven and eat it right off the broiler tray!

Miso-Broiled Mackerel

1/4 cup white miso
1 tsp. soy sauce
1 tbsp. rice vinegar
1 tbsp. honey
2 mackerel fillets (about 8 oz.)

Preheat the broiler. Stir together the miso, soy sauce, rice vinegar and honey in a small bowl. Place the mackerel skin-side-down on a broiler pan lined with aluminum foil and spread the miso mixture evenly on top. Broil until cooked through completely, about 5-7 minutes. (If the miso mixture begins to burn before the fish is cooked, move the pan further from the heat.)

Okay, I haven’t blogged in nearly four months. But I have excuses! Here’s what I’ve been doing since December.

I was planning FoodBlogSouth.

Last year marked the first FoodBlogSouth, a food-blogging conference I co-founded and help organize. This year’s edition in January was bigger, better and a huge success, but pulling it off was practically a full-time job (on top of my real full-time job) for a few weeks.

I was making cassoulet.

For Valentine’s Day, Nadria made me cassoulet from scratch, using this recipe. (Okay, this isn’t actually a reason I wasn’t blogging, since she was doing all the work, but I have this picture and intended to blog about it, and now I did.)

I was in Atlanta.

I spent my birthday weekend gluttoning it up in the ATL with Nadria. We ate some incredible food—late-night seafood at Octopus Bar, fancified Southern classics at Empire State South (including the awesome stuff-in-jars platter above, featuring a boiled peanut hummus whose recipe I will attempt to re-create on this blog soon), the best $2 banh mi ever at Quoc Huong, and amazing breakfast at West Egg Cafe—and drinks—the incomparable Holeman & Finch, the Twin Peaks (yes, Twin Peaks)-themed Book House Pub, and the aforementioned Octopus Bar.

I was throwing a tiki party.

I’ve decided 2012 is going to be the year of tiki. That means fruity rum cocktails and ’50s-style “Chinese” food: shrimp toast, sticky red barbecue ribs, cream-cheese (because it doesn’t actually contain crab) rangoon, and other greasy fried things doused in sweet & sour sauce. After the Atlanta trip, we made a bunch of these dishes, put on some Martin Denny, and had some friends over.

I know, none of these are in any way good reasons for a third-of-a-year absence from blogging. Mea culpa. But I’m back!

So this is it. The end of a year of meat. A lot of pig parts have passed through my messy kitchen on my journey from pancetta to peperone, and I feel like a much better cook for it.

I’ve always been into DIY, and I’d even done some charcuterie before this challenge got started, but it had always been a huge production, taking days of preparation and far too much expense for specialized equipment and obscure cuts of meat. And that’s so not the point.

Charcuterie is about preservation, whether that’s a poor farmer making the hog he slaughters in the fall last through the whole year or a high-end chef pickling some summer vegetables so she can use them in the winter.

And preserving food is a necessity. One cool thing I’ve learned from this project is that charcuterie is where all the world’s cuisines come together. German weisswurst, Polish kielbasa, French andouille, and American hot dogs are all essentially the same thing, the only difference being spices. So are Italian salami and Chinese lap cheong. Heck, the recipes for sauerkraut and kimchi are identical save for one ingredient!

Other things I’ve learned:

• The KitchenAid meat-grinder attachment is great for grinding but the world’s worst sausage-stuffer. (I highly recommend the Jerky Cannon if you’re going to embark upon small-scale home sausagery.)
• Hot-smoking on a gas grill is totally easy, and totally kickass. My two favorite Charcutepalooza items both used the technique. (For the record: smoked chicken and hot dogs.)
• Homemade mustard is really, really pungent, especially if you let it stand for more than about 5 minutes before adding vinegar. But so worth it.
• Contrary to classical French tradition, galantine is tastier hot than cold.

The final Charcutepalooza challenge was to throw a party using my newfound skills and recipes. And throw one I did.

Using the local lamb I came into recently, I made the lamb rillettes at left, along with hot-smoked lamb-and-pork andouille. Immediately after cooking, the rillettes was stringier than I would have liked, but after topping with delicious pork fat and chilling, it became much more spreadable. It was great on top of sliced, toasted Roasted Garlic Baguette (recipe below).

The menu also included peperone, sauerkraut, and a mess of pickles: dill, a sweet-and-hot Wickles-esque recipe, and sweet-sour beets. There was also some whole-grain mustard and Kale Salad with Pecorino and Lemon. Nadria even made vegan carrot-cake cupcakes with “cream cheese” frosting, to counteract all that meat, I guess.

And then there were the drinks. After I invited Angel Negrin, formerly of Bettola and one of Birmingham’s best bartenders, he volunteered to make cocktails. Armed with bottles of white, dark, and blackstrap rums, limes, simple syrup, and some Angostura Bitters, he shook up rounds of very traditional Daiquiris. The sourness of the drinks was the perfect foil to all that fatty, salty tastiness.

Roasted Garlic Baguette
Makes 3 baguettes

3 heads of garlic
Olive oil
2 cups warm water
2 tbsp. active dry yeast
24 oz. bread flour
1 tbsp. salt

Preheat the oven to 400°. Peel the outer layers from the garlic (do not separate the individual cloves) and slice the heads in half horizontally. Place on a sheet of aluminum foil and drizzle with a little olive oil. Wrap in the foil, sealing tightly, and bake for 45 minutes to 1 hour, until the cloves are soft but not mushy. Remove from the oven, wait until cool enough to handle, and squeeze the roasted cloves into a small bowl. Set aside. (If desired, you can store, covered, in the refrigerator for up to 3 days.)

Add the water and yeast to the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment and let stand for 2 to 3 minutes. Add the flour, salt, and reserved garlic, and mix on low speed until the dough comes together. Increase the speed to medium and knead for 10 minutes, adding additional flour if the dough is too sticky. Remove from the mixer, knead briefly by hand on a lightly floured surface, and form into a ball. Place back in the mixer bowl, cover with a damp towel, and let rise for 1 hour.

Punch the dough down, knead briefly, and divide into three equal pieces. Roll each piece into a long log shape and place on a baguette pan or baking sheet lined with a Silpat or parchment. Turn the oven to 450° (the dough will rise a bitwhile the oven preheats). When the oven is hot (about 15 minutes), cut several slashes in the top of each loaf and bake for 35 to 40 minutes, until the loaves are nicely browned and sound hollow when tapped.

—

And that’s it. Charcutepalooza is done. No more grinding, curing, hanging, or smoking assignments to look forward to. (Unless I win the grand prize. Judges, vote for me!) Many, many thanks to Mrs. Wheelbarrow for putting this whole thing together, Food52 for hosting, Bob del Grosso for answering my desperate Twitter inquiries on the dreaded case hardening, and Michael Ruhlman for inspiring the challenge and being an all-around kitchen inspiration himself.

In October, a couple friends of mine launched Freshfully, an online grocery store for local food in Birmingham. It’s a fantastic idea: Farmers, ranchers, beekeepers, dairies, and other producers offer their stuff online, and you get to buy it without being limited to a once-a-week farmers’ market. (Each vendor sets up pick-up or delivery on their own.)

The site’s picking up new vendors at a solid pace. It recently added Johnson Farm, which raises grass-fed beef, Berkshire pork, Katahdin lamb, and chicken in Elba, Ala., and the Freshfully folks offered me a box of lamb from the farm’s first Birmingham delivery to “review” on the blog.

Besides going home with ground lamb, lamb steaks, a lamb roast, and a couple beautiful rib chops, I also got to meet farm owner Drexel Johnson, a cowboy-hatted, pick-up-truck-driving, grizzled rancher who fits the part perfectly. (He also tells a hilarious story.)

On to the eating. I’m not a huge lamb-cooker, so my experience is relatively limited, but I’ve really enjoyed this lamb. The chops and steaks have nice marbling, and the meat has just a slight hint of gaminess that marks it as lamb without going overboard. The stuff’s not cheap, though: A six-pound box costs $56. (To be fair, you’re paying a big premium for local meat—and that price includes the cost of driving the stuff up from Elba.)

Since it’s been freezing outside, we decided to make something in the slow-cooker with a couple shoulder chops. And I love Asian flavors in everything, so I sort of created a hodge-podge of your standard root-vegetable-heavy slow-cooker braise with soy sauce, rice vinegar, mirin, ginger, and sesame oil. This is not a culturally authentic recipe by any means, so I’m calling it “vaguely Asian.”

It came out beautifully. With a little sweetness, heavily caramelized veggies, and fall-off-the-bone meat, it’s a perfect winter dish. It also cooks long enough that you can set everything up in the morning, go to work, and come home to steaming-hot dinner. (You can cook the rice when you get home, or cook it ahead of time and microwave to reheat).

Vaguely Asian Slow-Cooker Lamb Chops
Serves 2

1 to 1 1/2 lb. lamb chops (2 large or 4 small)
2 to 3 large carrots, halved lengthwise and sliced
1 to 2 large turnips or potatoes, peeled and roughly chopped
2 small onions, roughly chopped
1 tbsp. minced fresh ginger
1/3 cup soy sauce
1 tbsp. rice rinegar
2 tbsp. mirin
1 1/2 tbsp. honey
1 tsp. sesame oil
1 cup chicken stock
1 1/2 cups cooked brown rice, hot

Heat a small skillet over high heat. Season the lamb chops on both sides with salt and pepper, and sear on both sides until nicely browned, about 30 seconds per side. Place in a slow-cooker and add the remaining ingredients except the rice. Cover, set the slow-cooker to low and cook until the lamb is completely tender, 7 to 9 hours. (If possible, turn the lamb over halfway through cooking and remove the lid for the last hour or so of cooking to let the liquid reduce somewhat.)

Divide the rice between two bowls and top with the lamb and vegetables. Spoon the cooking liquid over the top.

Making fermented foods at home is kind of like taking a trust-fall.

There’s something deeply terrifying about leaving some perfectly good food out for days or weeks to, essentially, spoil, and then eating the results. Sauerkraut or yogurt is unnerving enough, but fermenting raw meat is something altogether different.

That’s probably why dry-curing ended up as the second-to-last Charcutepalooza challenge.

This time, I went with peperone. No, that’s not a typo; that’s the original Italian ancestor of the preservative-ridden junk we put on pizzas called pepperoni. In reality, the name difference is probably a good thing, as the two couldn’t be more different.

Real peperone has a lovely tanginess with a slight sweet-spicy backbone. It’s like some kind of magical cross between pork and a half-sour pickle. (Plus, you get to use something called Bactoferm F-RM-52, which sounds like the bacteriological agent that brings on the zombie plague in a sci-fi movie.)

I carefully weighed my finished sausages and had good control over the temperature in my drying room (AKA the closet of my spare bedroom), but I didn’t measure or attempt to control humidity. When my sausages lost the required 30 percent of their weight in a week—half the time it was supposed to take—I was worried I had screwed everything up.

But I tentatively cut a slice and ate it. It tasted good, and my peperone had a nice even, leathery texture, which means I managed to avoid the dread case hardening. And I’m still alive, so I didn’t breed any botulism. Hooray!

So what to do with peperone? A little goes a long way; I’ve been eating lots of mine on Ritz crackers, and it’ll definitely be making an appearance at the final-Charcutepalooza-project meat party I’m throwing in a couple weeks.

You could, of course, use it on pizza as well, but I took a slightly different tack and made calzones. These things are great fridge-clearers: You can throw in whatever’s lying around, from half a bag of wilted salad greens to sad half-onions in zip-top bags to random hunks of cheese you need to use before they go moldy to single slices of deli meat you don’t have enough of for a sandwich.

So that’s where my Odds-&-Ends Calzone recipe comes from. I used the dough from Kenji Lopez-Alt’s Serious Eats recipe as a starting point and just kinda went crazy.

Odss-&-Ends Calzone
Adapted from Serious Eats
Makes 4 calzones

1 tbsp. (or 1 envelope) active dry yeast
13 oz. (1 1/2 cups plus 2 tbsp.) lukewarm water
22 oz. bread flour
4 tsp. sugar
3 tsp. salt
1/4 cup olive oil
1/2 onion, chopped
2 garlic cloves, minced
4 oz greens (spinach, salad mix, whatever), chopped
4 oz. peperone, diced
1/2 cup  olives, pitted and roughly chopped
1 (14.5-oz.) can diced tomatoes, drained well
6 oz. melty cheese (mozzarella, provolone, cheddar, whatever), shredded
2 oz. Parmesan cheese, grated

Combine the yeast and water in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the dough hook attachment. Add the flour, sugar, salt, and olive oil, and mix on low speed until the dough comes together. Increase the speed to medium and knead for about 1 minute. Transfer the dough to a floured surface, knead by hand 1 or 2 times, and form into a ball. Return to the bowl, cover, and let rise until doubled, about 1 hour.

Meanwhile, saute the onion in a small skillet over medium-high heat until translucent, about 3 minutes. Add the garlic and cook about 30 seconds more. Transfer the onion and garlic to a large bowl and add the greens to the pan. Cook until completely wilted, about 2 minutes. Drain very well, squeezing to remove as much liquid as possible, and add to the bowl. Add the remaining ingredients and stir to combine. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Place a pizza stone in the oven and preheat to 500° F. (The longer you can let the oven heat, the better. Give it at least 20 minutes).

Punch down the dough and divide into four pieces. On a floured surface, stretch one piece into a rough circle about 8 inches in diameter. Place a quarter of the filling mixture on half of the circle, leaving about half an inch around the edge. Fold the dough over, crimping to seal the edge, and cut vent slits in the top. Repeat with the remaining dough to form 4 calzones.

Carefully slide the calzones onto the pizza stone. Bake until well browned and crisp, about 15 minutes. Remove from the oven and let cool for 5 minutes before serving.

So Nadria’s been on a vegan kick lately. I’m always game for a challenge, so we’ve been experimenting with lots of animal-product-free recipes. (Discoveries: 1. Soy cheese is pretty terrible. 2. Soy cream cheese is actually pretty tasty. 3. Vegan butter is the most horrible abomination ever created by mankind.)

During this same time period, the good people at Lark sent me a copy of their new book Cake Ladies: Celebrating a Southern Traditionby Jodi Rhoden. The book profiles 16, well, cake ladies—a unique Southern phenomenon of women who aren’t professional bakers exactly but who are locally famous for their cakes and bring them to every wedding, funeral, and any other occasion—with recipes from each, of course.

Two of those cake ladies are the Cupcake Fairies, a pair of New Orleans women who opened a home-based cupcake business after Hurricane Katrina that tries to offer healthier option. Their recipe in the book is vegan red velvet cupcakes, colored with beets instead of food coloring and topped with vegan-cream-cheese icing.

Perfect, we thought. (Nadria loves red velvet anything.) We set out to Whole Foods for vegan margarine (ugh) and cream “cheese,” and followed the recipe exactly, with one exception—we used almond milk instead of soy milk.

It was a bit of a disaster. We ended up with rubbery hockey pucks. They didn’t taste too bad, but the texture was all wrong. At first, I blamed our using almond instead of soy milk, but as you’ll see, this recipe is just fundamentally flawed: I’m guessing the ratio of flour to fat is off somehow. (I’m not put off the cookbook entirely just yet, though; look for a post soon about another attempt with a more “normal” recipe from it.)

Undaunted, Nadria continued her vegan-cupcake quest. She discovered Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero, which seems to be the best-regarded cookbook in the (surprisingly crowded) vegan-cupcake genre.

Not actually possessing a copy of this book, we found its chocolate cupcake recipe online and decided to pair it with the icing from this Vegetarian Times recipe instead of its own chocolate glaze to recreate that red-velvet flavor.

I’m a big vegan-baking skeptic, but that second batch was mighty convincing. (That photo above is a couple of the results.) It really got the moist, crumbly texture perfect. As in you-could-fool-a-carnivore perfect—even with almond milk instead of soy. I was blown away.

I wouldn’t say this recipe is any healthier than a normal cupcake, but if someone you know loves sweets and can’t eat dairy, this book is a goldmine. (And if you need a Christmas present for Nadria, consider this your official suggestion.)

Charcutepalooza is a yearlong project I’m participating in to make recipes from Michael Ruhlman’s Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing. For more information, see my introductory post.

So it’s finally arrived. The Charcutepalooza challenge I knew was coming and dreaded above all. Galantine. It’s simple enough: a rich chicken pâté, flavored with warm fall spices like cinnamon and clove. But here’s the tricky part: The whole thing is rolled up in the skin of the chicken. Which means you have to remove a whole chicken’s skin in one piece.

I’m not sure why this terrified me so much. I mean, I’ve slaughtered and butchered a whole pig; this should not be a big deal. Maybe it’s the precision required. One poke of the knife and the thing is ruined. After all, I’m The Messy Epicure, great supporter of imperfection in the kitchen!

But I managed. It’s a challenging task, but chicken skin is remarkably tough and much more difficult to pierce with a boning knife than you’d think. In reality, the biggest problem I had was that there was too much filling. I ended up have enough for a second galantine, which I wrapped in plastic wrap and poached in water instead of stock. (Honestly, I couldn’t taste very much difference between the two.)

So a few days before I made my galantine, I had the pleasure of attending a Four Coursemen dinner here in Birmingham. And what was the first course but delicious, made-fresh-that-afternoon galantine? To serve mine, I, well, shamelessly ripped off the Coursemen. Which is to say I made a persimmon jam. The sweet fruit is a perfect autumnal accompaniment to the galantine. And the pâté spice mixture you need for Ruhlman’s galantine is a perfect seasoning for the jam. (In my recipe below, I just used a pinch of each ingredient in the mixture.)

Now the beauty of a DIY food project like Charcutepalooza is that it lets you experiment with something chefs don’t normally mess around with. At a restaurant, you might pay twelve bucks for a couple slices artfully arranged on a tiny platter, but when you make one yourself, you’ve got half a damn galantine in the fridge and no idea what to do with it.

And that’s how I discovered pan-fried galantine. Snooty French chefs with medals around their necks will tell you you’re supposed to serve thin slices, ice-cold. But Nadria isn’t really a fan of chilled meat, and there was no way I would be able to eat three pounds of cold galantine all by myself before it went bad.

So on her suggestion (and feeling sinful the whole time), I pan-fried a few slices. And they turned out good! I was afraid the delicate chicken mixture would fall apart, but it didn’t. And the slices browned beautifully on both sides, becoming just slightly crisp. I even chopped some up and cooked it in a breakfast hash with some leftover butternut squash. (Actually, it was extra filling from Serious Eats’ squash, sage, and Parmesan pasties.)

And that led me to a ridiculous idea, which I sadly didn’t have the chance to try: Deep-fried galatine. Imagine it—tasty sausage, wrapped in what amounts to crunchy gribenes. (If you’re not familiar, gribenes is Yiddish for crisp-fried chicken skin, basically the Jewish version of cracklins.)

I’ll leave you to that Charcutepalooza fantasy while you check out my persimmon jam recipe.

Persimmon Jam

3 medium fuyu persimmons, peeled and chopped finely (or pulp from 3 medium hachiya persimmons, seeds removed)
1/4 cup sugar
2 tbsp. maple syrup
1/2 cup water
Pinch salt
Pinch ground cinnamon
Pinch ground black pepper
Pinch grated nutmeg
Pinch ground ginger

Combine all the ingredients in a small saucepan and bring to a boil over medium heat. Reduce the heat to low and simmer for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally and adding more water if the mixture becomes too thick. Puree in a food processor to a uniform consistency.

These guys (there are six of them, and not all are trained chefs) are right on trend for the food world. They’re all about local ingredients and regional dishes. They spent two days before the dinner visiting farms and other food purveyors in the Birmingham area, tweeting enthusiastically about everything they found. And then they turned it into an impressive five-course meal.

The food was great, but more importantly, it was inspiring. More on that in a second, but first, the requisite rundown of the eats:

We started with a galantine paired with persimmon jam and an arugula salad with pink peppercorns and a honey vinaigrette. Ironically, the same dish was this month’s Charcutepalooza project, and I’m not ashamed to say I blantantly ripped off this presentation for my own galantine. (Said post will be up on Saturday; keep an eye out.)

Next came my favorite dish, a shiitake mushroom soup topped with whipped goat cheese and sage flowers. It was a pure taste of fall, really intensely mushroomy and nice and hearty. They used just a bit of ground nuts (either walnuts or pecans, I can’t remember) to thicken the soup, a very tasty idea.

After that were the main courses: Gulf tripletail (that’s a fish, non-Southerners—and a sustainable one at that) pan-roasted with broccoli, rapini, and black rice, and braised pork belly (left) with pink-eyed purple-hull peas, mashed turnips, and apple relish. I’ve been seeing lots of pork belly on local menus lately, and that’s a good thing. Properly cooked until totally tender but still holding together (which this was), it’s rich and unctuous and perfect, pretty much regardless of your sauce or sides.

Dessert was a poached pear with goat-cheese custard. Honestly, this was the weakest course, as the pear was a bit undercooked and not soft enough. But the custard was clever, and tasty—tangy and sweet and creamy all at the same time.

Sadly, the Coursemen went back to Georgia. But they were hugely impressed with Birmingham, and I hope they’ll be back soon.

Which brings me to the real point of this post. If an underground supper club can succeed in Athens, why can’t we have one here?

The beauty of the thing is that it cuts all the restaurant problems out of the equation. There’s no health department to worry about: To make everything legal, diners don’t pay for the dinner—they make a “suggested donation” for attending the event. And you don’t have to hire any staff: The cooks serve everything themselves.

And there’s certainly a community of die-hard foodies in Birmingham who’d be willing to spring for something like this. (Foodie Book Club, I’m looking at you…)

I may be a very experienced home cook, but I don’t think I could work a commercial kitchen, churning out a hundred or more covers during service. However, I could handle 15 or 20 folks for a dinner party (with help).

So consider this the birth of Birmingham’s newest underground supper club. I’ve got a friend on board to help plan, and things are in the works.

Now I want some opinions, locals. What kind of food would you want to see at an underground supper club? Where should it meet? Can we pull this off?

Watch this space for more.

A confession: I did not take the picture above. But I did make the dish. (My far-crappier photo is below.)

I’ve now reached the level of blog-notoriety where I get free stuff! And so far, the best cookbook I’ve received is a copy of A Southerly Course: Recipes & Stories from Close to Home by Martha Hall Foose from the good people at Clarkson Potter.

What I like about this book is that it comes from the modern South. I don’t mean it’s modern Southern food—”deconstructed” pimento cheese sandwiches and the like are nowhere to be found. I mean it reflects the way people in the South actually eat. It’s not all fried chicken and black-eyed peas; Asians, Greeks, Mexicans, and plenty of other people live here and have made their mark on Dixie’s cuisine.

A Southerly Course presents dishes you’d expect, like crawfish bread, dirty rice, and custard pie, alongside chiles rellenos, kibbeh, Greek salad, and Korean-style grilled scallions. The recipes are elegant and just a touch fancier than most Southern cookbooks. And they come with fun stories and reminiscences that explain where they all come from.

I do have one objection: Not a single recipe in this book calls for okra. And I got my copy when a full pound of it was showing up in my CSA box every week. But that’s not really Martha Hall Foose’s fault.

The recipe that immediately lept out at me was the peanut chicken. I’m a sucker for anything peanut-flavored, whether it’s Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups or Ollie Irene‘s wonderful Tallulah cocktail. It’s an easy recipe: Coat a whole chicken with a paste made of peanut butter, onion, soy sauce, and vinegar, then bake. The mixture really perfumes all the meat nicely with a subtle, vaguely Asian, nutty flavor. (Leftovers make for a really interesting chicken salad, to boot.)

I had a couple CSA pumpkins on hand, so I also tried the book’s baked pumpkin recipe as a side. It’s also simple: Brush the inside of the squash with a mix of melted butter and maple syrup, and roast. Sounded good, didn’t really work. The sauce ends up pooling in the bottom of the pumpkin and you end up with three bites of deliciousness, plus a whole lot of bland pumpkin. Ah well. The chicken redeemed it, anyway.

Peanut Chicken
Adapted from A Southerly Course by Martha Hall Foose

5 tbsp. creamy peanut butter (use natural if possible)
3 tbsp. soy sauce
2 tbsp. rice vinegar
1.2 tsp. cayenne pepper
3 green onions, chopped, divided
1 (3- to 4-pound) chicken
1 (1-inch) piece fresh ginger, peeled
2 garlic cloves

Preheat the oven to 450°.

Stir together the peanut butter, soy sauce, vinegar, cayenne, and half the green onion in a small bowl. Spread half the paste under the skin of the breasts of the chicken. Spread the remaining paste all over the outside of the chicken. Stuff the remaining green onion, the ginger, and the garlic into the chicken’s cavity.

Place the chicken breast-side-down in a roasting pan and bake for 20 minutes. Reduce the oven temperature to 325° and flip the chicken over. Bake until a meat thermometer inserted into the deepest part of the thigh reads 165°, 30 to 40 minutes more. Remove the chicken from the oven, cover, and let rest for 10 minutes before carving.

Charcutepalooza is a yearlong project I’m participating in to make recipes from Michael Ruhlman’s Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing. For more information, see my introductory post.

The recipe option that immediately jumped out at me from this month’s assignment was English Pork Pie. I mean, pork and pie—what’s not to love?

That third word, that’s what. Taking a closer look at the recipe, I found it to be, well, too English. Which is to say, bland. The pastry crust has no salt in it at all! The pork is seasoned with a little thyme and pepper and nothing else! No wonder British food has such a bad reputation.

So I went to Spain instead. Last time I made chorizo for Charcutepalooza, it was the spicier Mexican version. This time, I looked to Ruhlman’s Spanish-style chorizo recipe, which he uses to make a dry-cured sausage. Basically, it swaps various types of chile powder and cumin for smoked paprika, AKA pimentón, my most favoritest spice.

I love pimentón and its amazing smoky flavor so much, I also incorporated it into the pastry dough, just like I do in my greens pie. It gives the finished product a gorgeous golden color, as well as a nice subtle flavor that matches the chorizo filling very well.

Just beware; this is not in any universe a light or fresh-tasting recipe. It’s heavy, a little greasy, a bit spicy, and excellent. You’re going to want to eat more than one empanada in a sitting. This is a bad idea. You should probably serve these with a salad, one topped with a vinegary dressing. Nadria found this theoretically Spanish salad from a restaurant at Disneyland, which was tasty if rather labor-intensive and not particularly Spanish. (The recipe is quite adaptable: In order to use what we had on hand, we subbed rice wine vinegar, cheddar cheese, pears, and a mixture of pistachios and pecans.)

You could also make lots of tiny empanadas—15 to 20 instead of the six in the recipe—for an elegant New Years’ Eve-type appetizer. But don’t serve ’em cold. That’s much too English.

Empanadas de Chorizo

Dough:
8 oz. all-purpose flour
1 1/2 tsp. salt
2 tsp. smoked paprika
4 oz. (1 stick) cold butter, cut into pieces
4 oz. cold lard, cut into pieces
1 egg
1 tsp. milk

Filling:
1/2 small onion, finely chopped
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped, divided
12 oz. pork shoulder, cut into 1/2-inch cubes
1 1/2 tsp. salt
2 tsp. smoked paprika
2 tsp. chile powder
1/4 to 1/2 tsp. cayenne pepper
1/4 cup chicken stock

Make the dough: Stir together the flour, salt, and smoked paprika in a medium bowl. Rub the butter and lard into the flour mixture with your fingers until the mixture resembles coarse meal. Beat the egg in a measuring cup, pour half of it into a small bowl, and set aside. Add enough water to the measuring cup to make 1/2 cup and stir to combine. Add the egg-and-water mixture to the flour mixture and stir until the dough just comes together. Shape into a disc, wrap with plastic wrap, and refrigerate for at least 1 hour. Stir the milk into the reserved half of an egg and refrigerate.

Make the filling: Heat a small pan over medium heat. Add the onion, 1 garlic clove, and a small amount of oil. Cook until the onion is soft but not browned, about 4 minutes. Scrape into a small bowl and refrigerate until cold. Combine the remaining garlic clove, pork, salt, smoked paprika, chile powder, and cayenne pepper in a small bowl. Grind the mixture through the small plate into the bowl of an electric mixer. Add the cooked onion mixture and mix on low speed with the paddle attachment for about 1 minute. Add the chicken stock and mix until combined, about 1 minute more. Cover and refrigerate until very cold, at least 1 hour.

Preheat the oven to 425°. Divide the chilled dough into 6 equal pieces and roll each out on a well-floured surface into a rough circle 5 to 6 inches in diameter. Spoon one-sixth of the meat mixture (about 2.5 oz.) onto one half of each dough round and shape into a crescent shape, leaving about 1/2-inch border. Fold the dough rounds in half over the filling and crimp the edges to seal. Place the empanadas on a baking sheet lined with a Silpat or parchment paper. (At this point, you can refrigerate the empanadas for an hour or two—this will help keep the fat in the dough from leaking out during baking.) Brush the empanadas all over with the egg-milk mixture and cut three small slashes in the top of each one. Bake for 15 minutes, reduce the oven temperature to 325°, and bake until the filling reaches an internal temperature of 165°, about 15 minutes more.