Comfort Cooking--Soul Food, Part 2

The book I blogged about a few days back (The Best Cook in the World by Rick Bragg,) turned my mind to the food of my youth and last night we had fried pork tenderloin (in my grandmother's iron frying pan,) greens (in a wok from Iowa City, 1969.) The greens are kale, stir-fried with onions and garlic and a bit of hog jowl. My grandmother would have used collards or turnip greens and would have boiled them into submission.

Also the traditional baked sweet potato with butter and a side salad of spinach, tomatoes, and homemade ranch dressing (Homemade mayo, yoghurt, dill weed, and lots of garlic. My grandmother would have preferred some iceberg lettuce, a slice or two of tomato and mayo or homemade Thousand Island dressing.)

There should have been corn pone-- one of my favorite things from my grandmother's table. But it needs really fresh white cornmeal, preferably water ground, and I don't have any.

There were, however, black-eyed peas, swimming in their pot likker. They were on my grandmother's table four or five times a week till I had had enough. But I made a special effort with these--more hog jowl, onion, garlic, hot pepper, and a bay leaf. Yep, that works!

Keeping our spirits up as we wait. . .

 

Food in the Time of Covid-19 and Blackberry Winter

We've always eaten well and that hasn't changed. But now, the evening meal is even more important-- something to look forward to when not much else is happenng, a reward for making it through another day unharmed. Last night, after John's gloved and masked weekly foray to to the grocery store, was no exception.  

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Cod, floured and sauteed in butter, cheesy grits, oven roasted asparagus and cherry tomatoes, topped with a sunny-side up guinea egg (look at that dark orange yolk!) and a squirt of sriracha, and a spinach salad with homemade ranch dressing. It was good.

We've also been having a bit of a cold snap--temps in the 30s and 40s. The old folks called it Blackberry Winter, a cold snap when the blackberries bloomed. That's why our dining table in the first picture is crowded wth tomato plants, waiting for warm weather so we can set them out. 

According to our weather report, things will moderate soon. May it be so. 

Iconic Food Memories

In a recent POST I talked about re-reading the Oz books in search of a soup sea -- and not finding it. Through the wonder of social media, a Facebook friend steered me to Kabumpo in Oz, one of the later Oz books by Ruth Plumley Thompson, and at long last I re-read the scene I'd remembered for close to sixty-five years.

Two hungry travelers are delighted to come upon a sea of vegetable soup and they encounter the king of the sea, a being made of soup bones with a soup bowl for a crown and a silver ladle for a scepter. He sings to them and then (and this was the important part for me) he wafts two hot, crispy, buttery rolls across the waves to them. 

It's the rolls I remember. Why? Because the day I read that chapter back in the third grade, when we went to the lunchroom, those same rolls were served -- big, puffy, yeasty, buttery rolls, made right there by the lunchroom ladies. It was a kind of intersection of real life and fiction and (obviously) I haven't forgotten.

Those rolls are part of a pantheon of remembered foods -- remembered and pretty much impossible to recreate: Aunt Mamie's (or more likely her cook Esther's) mayonnaise -- yellow, sweet, and lemony;  Memaw's (my grandmother Lane) Sunday chicken and dumplings; Ba's (my other grandmother) corn pone -- baked on a flat iron griddle to a brown crunch on the outside and a gooey, creamy interior that was the perfect place to put quite a lot of butter. 

Then there was the wonderful pink mamey sherbet at Cuervo's Cafe in Ybor City -- I've seen pictures of mameys but never encountered them except in that sherbet; the sandwich we bought from a guy with a little truck on the Appian Way in Rome -- roast pork, fragrant with garlic and rosemary, slapped between two thick slices of crusty peasant bread; the delicious heart attack of a sandwich from a pub in the Cotwolds -- brie and bacon on a thickly buttered baguette . . .

I could go on (I just remembered the leftover cold boiled shrimp a friend and I purloined in the middle of the night during a Girl Scout campout -- dipped in tomato-ey Catalina dressing, they were incredible. The stealth probably added to the flavor.) But I'm making myself hungry . . .

What about you? Do you have any foods lingering in your memory?

Blue Owl Levee-High Apple Pie

We received this rather improbable pie as a Christmas gift -- shipped frozen all the way from the Blue Owl Cafe in Kimmswick, Missouri. And as Claui's parents, sister, brother-in-law and three kids were coming for lunch yesterday, it seemed the perfect time to see what a Levee-High Apple Pie was like.  

First it had to bake -- almost two hours...

When at last it was done, there was a tub of caramel sauce,  laced with chopped pecans, to be microwaved and spread over the dome. 

And then it was time to try to make slices -- not easy. We ended up with somewhat disassembled slices on our plates.

But once we topped them with dollops of Charlotte Russe, left over from Christmas dinner, the messy presentation hardly mattered.

Saffron

A lone Autumn crocus blooming in my entry way flower bed. See those lovely orange-red stigmas? This is a saffron crocus and it's dried stigmas like these that produce this pricey seasoning/coloring ingredient.

Saffron has a long, long history but is best known to me as an ingredient in Spanish cooking. I grew up in Tampa where Ybor City, the Latin Quarter, was the place to go for great food -- and arroz con pollo (chicken and rice) meant yellow rice, tinted with saffron and the less expensive anatto.

Seeing the saffron crocus blooming inspired this meal -- Yellow rice with black beans, fried tilapia and shrimp, roasted sweet potatoes with onions and cumin. And a green salad that didn't get in the photo. Apologies for the slightly out of focus picture -- it's a sin to let hot food go cold so I grab a shot and don't always take time to see if it was good. But the food was.

Recycled Grits and Cane Syrup

Another beautiful morning and time to fry up some leftover grits!

I did a post on fried grits last year but I can't resist talking about these grits. These were a gift from Claui's folks and they may be the Platonic ideal of grits. One catch -- you have to cook them forty-five minutes -- not ideal for breakfast.

So I made shrimp and grits for supper -- and when making shrimp and grits, one embellishes and enriches the cooking grits with butter, light cream, and as much cheese as one dares. I used a particularly tasty extra-sharp Vermont white cheddar.

But I'm not here to talk about shrimp and grits. It's the leftover grits I'm here to praise. Poured in a pan and refrigerated overnight, they congeal nicely so that they can be lifted from the pan in tidy squares to be floured, egged, and fried.

Sausage is a nice accompaniment. And I dump in the leftover egg (which contains Tobasco and seasoned salt --Jane's Krazy Salt, to be precise.)

The presentation isn't elegant but, oh my, it's tasty. And in a nod to John's and my Florida Cracker heritage, I've got a bottle of cane syrup on the table.

Our grandparents would have poured syrup over the whole mess -- too sweet for our tastes. But I do save my last bite of grits and douse it with the delicious cane syrup -- a mini-dessert at breakfast.

The cane syrup was a gift from my brother and I am enchanted by the label he put on it: "Claimed to be pure cane syrup squeezed by a man and mule operation in Two Egg, Florida."

The perfect way to start a day!

UPDATE!!! Follow this link for some great recipes and to find out the difference between hominy grits and stone-ground.

UPDATED UPDATE_
(Vagabonde has pointed out that these recipes are full of typos -- here's ANOTHER LINK
to the place the grits came from and some more recipes -- maybe more usable.)