Day trip: Birmingham, Saturday, June 26

Ask anyone what the closest city to Nashville is, and the response will probably be Memphis, or maybe Knoxville or Chattanooga. Those responses are incorrect, and, unless you consider Bowling Green, Kentucky a city, the two closest cities of any size are both in Alabama, with Huntsville about 100 miles away and Birmingham about three hours away at 191 miles. In fact, the second-closest large city to Nashville is Louisville, which is 174 miles from here. So, Memphis, although in the same state, is third on the list of big cities, 212 miles to the west, and, if you have ever been there, you know it has a decidedly different feel to it than the state capital. As John Grisham wrote, the two largest cities in the state of Mississippi are Memphis and New Orleans! Ha! But enough geographic hurly-burly...


Well, one more fun fact: If you drive down I-24 to Chattanooga, you actually go through a corner of Georgia to get to the closest city in Tennessee!


Birmingham is known as the "Pittsburgh of the South," and the Red Mountain district certainly validates this claim (obviously its steely past is the real reason for the nickname, but the look of the city's downtown neighborhoods make for an unexpected comparison). This old carriage house is Penney Patterson's new home!

A nice reunion!

Our visit came on the day after an epic party, the main attraction of which was this beer pong table hauled up from Tuscaloosa. Click to enlarge and admire the meticulous detail with which the Alabama fight song was painted on the outer edges.

The fifty yard line, which no doubt seemed more blurry and distant as the evening progressed...

A familiar sight in dishwashers of football-loving college alumni!

Much of the original details of the house, built in 1912, remain. Note the heavy wood beams across the ceiling.

Stairs on the morning after... no traces of Bluto or D-Day!

Memories of our place on Blair Blvd. in Hillsboro Village flooded back as we walked through these doorways, which are typical of pre-Depression architecture in this part of the country.

The downstairs bathroom... a touch of class.

Classic! Penney's housemate Mary (whom we have not yet met) found this antique lift-top desk, which works well with the early twentieth-century tiles in the downstairs bathroom.

The steep descent... South Side Slopes?

After a great lunch at V. Richards (amazing place- another post for another time), the three of us went to a place that Heather and I missed on two consecutive trips to Atlanta for reasons too tedious to mention here. To our surprise, however, Flip Burger Boutique opened a location in Birmingham!

This unexpected find, for someone who had already eaten a burger earlier (the "James Beard" at V. Richards) was a gourmet ground beef Valhalla. For others, merely saliva-inducing.

The booth's lamp: a cow palace Cloud Gate!

Hmm... foie gras or kimchi on our sandwiches? This sure isn't Primanti Brothers!

Every city has a few burger places that try this kind of stuff (e.g. Burger Up in Nashville- mixed reviews so far; will go back in a couple of weeks and post), but Flip is the real deal. I got the butcher's cut, Heather the Korean BBQ and Penney the turkey. All good, and actually cooked to the right temperature! The pictures would not do them justice.

Read the fine print! Flip has wisely decided to join the anti-high fructose corn syrup trend, eschewing an ingredient that is helping make America the most obese country in the world!

Heather and I were at Fido in Nashville last night, where we noticed organic Heinz ketchup, sweetened with... real sugar! As some of you know, that company is in the process of returning to natural ingredients.

Cursory research yields the following tidbit, which makes us wonder if it's a half-truth. I suppose the point is to avoid too many sugared drinks, except, of course, Miller High Life.

Thanks again to Penney for the great weekend! We hope to see you in Nashville soon, and look forward to exploring more of The Magic City!

Is this what Beck was singing about?

Almost local... it's peach season in Alabama. These were trucked up to the Franklin farmer's market last Saturday. Ripe and juicy!

The perfect summer dessert (with vanilla ice cream).

Local blueberries, also from Franklin.
Thanks to Robin and Kristen about the low-temp pasteurized milk idea! I'll post about that another day...

Heather emerges from the comps cave for some morning sun!

See you all at Sam's bar in the village for the World Cup tomorrow morning at 8:30!

Welcome, summer! Cooking with herbs...

Summer has officially arrived today, and I am finally getting around to posting some recent developments. I have to admit that I've been slow at this, mostly because of the World Cup! If you have been following the tournament, please comment on what you think of the games and teams so far. It was nice to see Portugal live up to their potential today, albeit against really weak competition.
Back to the food... With the arrival of basil last weekend, all of the herbs necessary for fresh summer meals are now available in Middle Tennessee. The best method of keeping herbs, suggested to us at the Richland Park market on Charlotte Ave., can be seen below on the top shelf of our fridge:


And now to two recent meals...


Heather suggested a brown butter sauce to celebrate the season's first fresh sage. A little crisping in the butter intensified the sage's deep flavor. I roasted the salted fresh carrots (absolutely unlike supermarket "baby carrots" that look as if they have been marinating in orange paint) in a little olive oil to go with the WF bone-in pork chop. 4 ingredients: magnificent minimalism!
If you have read about the late Bernard Loiseau, you are familiar with "cuisine des essences" (which Loiseau inherited from the father of nouvelle cuisine, Fernand Point). The whole point was cooking delicious dishes with very few, very fresh ingredients, so that the food's true essences stood out rather than the richness of an Escoffier-era sauce that blanketed everything. This is definitely the way to go in the summer, although I do admit that I love old-school sauces and recipes, especially in the fall and winter.
If you are not familiar with Loiseau, read the first chapter of Rudolph Chelminski's well-written account, The Perfectionist here. It is, second to Bill Buford's Heat, the best book I've read about cooking.
Also, here is a great article about the legendary Fernand Point, who began his daily magnum of champagne every morning while getting his daily shave!


Back to the food. As the hanger steak awaits its fate in a cast-iron skillet, parsley and fresh garlic await theirs on the chopping block.

The result: Rare hanger steak with parsley-garlic sauce.

With a lettuce and herb salad and roasted potatoes and carrots ready, I whipped up a quick sauce to go with the steak. Hanger steak, a cut which the French call onglet (and which in Omaha was referred to as the "hanging tender"), is best cooked rare and sliced before plating. It is used a lot in French bistros because it is a relatively cheap cut while almost gamey in flavor (probably due to its proximity to the kidneys). It works very well for steak salad.
I was making a broth yesterday (the results of which I will discuss tomorrow) and used a quarter cup in the blender along with a small bunch of parsley, three cloves of the fresh garlic (still very strong despite its virgin state), about half a cup of olive oil, and S&P. The result was a very tangy sauce that I cut with lemon juice...

No need for sherry-mushroom sauce in the summer!

More soon... in the meantime I'm looking forward to tomorrow morning's Mexico-Uruguay game. As for the French... ils ont mangé la feuille!

The Frugal Gourmet

Spending time in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany this past April invariably led to delighted outrage on the part of yours truly in local markets and grocery stores, as really good cheeses and meats were a third of the price as in America. Then, when one gets back from Europe and wants to re-create a delicious plat froid, there is a problem: the ingredients are not readily available (unless your idea of cheese is colored orange - an exaggeration, I know; not all cheese in Europe is great, either) or they are ridiculously expensive (i.e. Whole Foods). Enter Trader Joe's! Over the last few months TJ's has added several interesting cheeses, including the two below. On the left is a cheddar "truckle," which is to regular supermarket cheddar what Barry Bonds is to Rance Mullinicks. The latter might bring back some amusing childhood memories, whereas the former hits it out every time (I suppose the comparison should stop with performing-enhancing drugs, since I don't think RBGH is allowed in England).
On the right is Tomme de Savoie, a masterpiece made with raw milk that is the opposite of tobacco or coffee beans: those things smell really nice in their unconsumed state, and diminish in flavor once used. This cheese is rather rank on first encounter, but cut off the rind and you get a really smooth, deep nutty flavor. Both of these are a third of the price of similar stuff at other stores and are available now!





Click to enlarge, if necessary. The truckle is covered in black wax, whereas the tomme has a rind that I would not dare to eat.

Part II: Interesting grains...

The contents of the above bag are a great substitute for regular-sized couscous or boring long-grain rice. If you cook it in broth with a few herbs thrown in, it's like Rice-a-Roni minus the suicidal "flavor pack." Here is how we used it most recently:

This stew was last-minute, but looks like it took a long time to make. I made a typical chicken fricasse (sautee chicken; reduce pan with wine/broth; return meat to pan; add other ingredients; take out solids and reduce sauce until thick), using amontiallado sherry and turkey broth (which I reduced quite a bit at the end) and about a cup of dried fruit mix (cherries, blueberries, raisins- also from TJ's). I also sauteed some almonds in olive oil in a pan until brown. I threw all that together and put it on top of a good serving of the "Harvest grains blend," which I cooked in half-broth, half-water. Wow! It tasted a little bit like tagine, and a lot like a few Spanish stews I've made, minus certain Mediterranean ingredients like olives or piquillo peppers.

Thanks again for the comments. This summer break has been great for cooking. I'll have to manage my time well in the fall to keep this up!

Farm to table!

This may be a tad too long, but I have been absent for a few days. I have an archive of good stuff to post this week, and I will begin with some great acquisitions from the local markets...

Two great reasons to buy meat from places like Peaceful Pastures (East Nashville and Franklin farmer's markets): it is a lot tastier than bland, sodium-injected, antibiotic-laced supermarket stuff, and it is cheaper than meat of similar (or less) quality that one can buy at places like Whole Foods. Case in point: bacon! This was so thick that I had to slice off the skin in some parts. But, it is very tasty and contributed to a few good dishes last week:

An all-local line-up (L to R): green leaf lettuce, Yazoo Dos Perros ale, green onions, garlic scapes, "par-cel" (as the name suggests, a parsley-celery leaf hybrid), and the aforementioned bacon.


The above ingredients plus local free-range eggs made an excellent take on Salade Lyonnaise (I did use mustard in the dressing, but cider vinegar instead of wine vinegar).

Our first cookbook, The Joy of Cooking, now in its tenth year of use, provided the kale with bacon recipe. At least three kinds of kale have been availabe in Nashville this month.

The soup pictured above was my attempt to recreate something Heather ate recently at Sunset Grill (a restaurant in Hillsboro Village that actually deserves the good reviews that most places in the neighborhood do not merit). I made this apple-turnip soup with about a pound and a half each of red turnips and Granny Smith apples, which made it quite tart (and, according to Heather, much tastier than the source of its inspiration!), even though I added the leftovers of a bottle of Riesling in the mix. This was really good stuff! There is no need for a recipe: just saute some onions, throw in the cubed turnips and apples, enough broth or water (wine optional) to cover, and simmer until soft. Puree in a blender, add salt and pepper, and add some heavy cream (half to a full cup). I garnished it with the bacon (it ended up in five meals last week!) and some par-cel leaves, which made this dish a summer version of the cream of parsnip and celery root soup that we make so much in the fall and winter.

The perfect summer wine! I don't know much about Italian wine, but this was recommended by Will at Woodland Wine Merchant, a really great store in East Nashville that Food & Wine magazine reviewed two years ago, referring to the store's owner as an "idosyncratic visionary."

The main grape in this is Vermentino.

(If you are a Nashvillian, I should also mention how great the Wine Shoppe at Green Hills is; the labeling is not as helpfully obsessive as WWM, but the staff there is energetically friendly and very knowledgable, which is especially helpful in rebuffing the attempted rivalry by a bland newcomer a block away).

A large green zucchini sat around for a week before I sliced it and used it as the filing for a five-egg omelet.

Consider the above producer's URL as I quote from The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan:

We've come to think of "corn-fed" as some kind of old-fashioned virtue, which it may well be when you're referring to Midwestern children, but feeding large quantities of corn to cows for the greater part of their lives is a practice neither particularly old or virtuous. Its chief advantage is that cows fed corn, a compact source of caloric energy, get fat quickly; their flesh also marbles well, giving it a taste and texture American consumers have come to like.

I suppose if it's the only thing you get to taste, then you come to like it. Unfortunately, most people in North America are used to flavoring-injected mass-processed meat, so there is little appreciation for real beef, from cows that eat what their stomachs naturally process: grass! Luckily for us, there are several local farms in Middle Tennessee that raise animals the right way and sell tasty, unadulterated meat. West Wind Farms is new to us this year, and has provided great stuff, notably some drumsticks we got in East Nashville last Wednesday. As for the short ribs...

I seared them in a pan, rubbed them with Chinese five-spice powder, and cooked them in the oven at 250 degrees for three hours. Fall-off-the-bone tender! The side dish was local bok choy with an easy and excellent "Asian" dressing (great recipe- click here).

Finally, more local produce factored in another Asian-inspired recipe. We used the same sauce as above for stir-fried green kale, onions, carrots, garlic, green onions, and ginger root (not local), and served on buckwheat soba noodles from Whole Foods. A really great vegeterian meal!

That's all for now. More about Michael Pollan tomorrow, along with some other recent meals using local produce.

For those of you commenting (thank you Beth and Karen!), please share ideas or recipes!

The Real Revival (Updated with Beth's comments- see yellow below)

Good morning! I have a lot of catching up to do, as some of you (Beth) know, so instead of excusing procrastination (what could I say?), I'll get right into it, beginning with two special dinners Heather and I hosted recently:

Redemption Dinner (a response to Rabbit a la Columbus)
As some of you know, the trip Heather and I took to Beth's a few months ago resulted in the most disastrous dinner we have ever put together. What was worse? The rubbery rabbit leg that looked like the prop in Repulsion, or the tart made with frozen strawberries that evoked road trip PB&Js tainted by melted gas station ice? At least Beth had nothing to do with the calamity, unless she was guilty of serving us too much wine while we were "cooking."

To redeem ourselves, we had Beth and others over for graduation weekend about a month ago, and stuck with familiar cuts of meat and fresh fruit. See captions below for the details...


The mise-en-place for the sacue Beth made for our "pulled pork" (pork roast slow-cooked in a crock pot): red onion, orange zest, dried cherries, scallions, brown sugar.


The above picture is horrible, but it is the only shot we have of the dinner. Beth, Karen, Jared, Katerina.
The sauce went really well with the pork, which had the texture of barbecue and a deep, sour cherry flavor. The potatoes were dressed with a green garlic aoli (delicious, and really seasonal, as green garlic seems to have had its run as of the June 12 markets) and the salad was dressed with yogurt and sorrel (something new to all of us; read about it here). Thanks to Beth for the reminder!

Strawberry shortcake! Delicious!!

Dinner #2: Going away for Erin Maloff

Above: Karen, Kat, Jill, Erin, Heather.
As you can see, this was an elaborate meal which focused on local produce (more on that in later posts). Heather made a bechamel sauce lasagna with local kale and spicy Italian sausage from Peaceful Pastures. The stuff in the small green bowl is roasted garlic for spreading: chop off the top of a garlic bulb, cover with olive oil, wrap in foil, and bake in the oven at 400 for about 45 minutes. The result is a soft, subtle garlic paste that can be scooped out of each clove with a butter knife.

Good times! The wine, provided by Erin, went well with her announcement of a Napa Valley wedding next May!

From all of us, congratulations to Erin and Jaron! Hopefully we'll see you soon in Seattle.