So you're working on this recipe, got your fry oil at 350F, greens, vinaigrette, cheese and mushrooms standing by...and you fry 6 eggs. Six. SIX! JUST SIX? Fry more! These eggs were the PERFECT eggs. Hell, I would consider throwing all the rest of the stuff away (even though the salad was delicious) and frying and eating eggs OVER and OVER!
Can you tell I liked the eggs?
The rest of the recipe was delicious too, and super easy (especially if you already have rendered ham fat).
The vinaigrette came together easy, and stayed emulsified a lot better than I expected it to based on the recipe description. Was damn good too! The recipe makes a lot of it, so either cut it back, or plan on having a few salads over the next couple days. It really is the vinaigrette version of red-eye gravy.
The cheese was simple and straightforward, with the only remotely twitchy part being keeping the milk mixture at 170F for 2 minutes, which isn't that hard even on my piece of crap electric stove. I found my thermapen to be just as easy as the fry thermometer for doing this, and more accurate.
We already had pickled mushrooms from the cookbook so used them even though they weren't chanterelles.
One piece of good advice from the recipe was dressing the salad before plating. Pouring dressing over salad on the plate can look nice, and sometimes works, but dressing and tossing before plating usually works better, especially with a thicker dressing like this one. We prepared everything for plating and had it staged so the eggs could go right onto the plate after frying, but we missed the dress the salad step. This caused a slight delay from frying to eating, but it was still good. Since there were only 5 of us, I ate the 6th egg right out of the fryer while Ox plated. DELICIOUS!
Advice: Cut the vinaigrette recipe in half. Have everything staged before frying the eggs, including dressing the greens. I would fry more eggs, but, even if you just want 6, boil a couple extra. Really fresh eggs can be troublesome to peel, so it's easy to mess one or two up. We got lucky, but it was touch and go for a second. Do everything except the eggs ahead of time to allow you to concentrate on the delicate part of the recipe.
I think this is our first really successful desert out of the Heritage cookbook. Ox and I loved it, the wives were more ambivalent. Neither of them seemed to appreciate the nuts in the filling. We used the specific Black Walnuts called for in the recipe, and they seemed really good to me. I guess there's no accounting for taste.
The filling was nice and easy to make, and tasted great in my opinion. Rolling everything together was surprisingly easy, though a second pair of hands helped. We didn't use all of the filling, but the leftover was lovely to make pumpkin belvita cookie sandwiches with.
So tonight we had a lot on our plates. Ox and I had made the Pumpkin Roll, and it was in the refrigerator, and then we made Chicken Marsala using a brilliant crispy skinned chicken breast recipe we had been playing with for a while. After dinner, there were a ton of dishes, and the Dilled Green Tomatoes to do. Ox and I jokingly said that we would do the dishes if the womenfolk would do the tomatoes. The ladies were game, so this recipe is all them! (We got the last laugh because we did a shitty job on the dishes.)
When you're not doing the canning, this is a relatively simple recipe. As usual, we got our spices (dill seeds were the only thing we didn't have on hand) from the Charleston Spice Company. With a couple days notice they will have what you want at the Charleston or Summerville Farmer's Market.
The vinaigrette came together easy, and stayed emulsified a lot better than I expected it to based on the recipe description. Was damn good too! The recipe makes a lot of it, so either cut it back, or plan on having a few salads over the next couple days. It really is the vinaigrette version of red-eye gravy.
The cheese was simple and straightforward, with the only remotely twitchy part being keeping the milk mixture at 170F for 2 minutes, which isn't that hard even on my piece of crap electric stove. I found my thermapen to be just as easy as the fry thermometer for doing this, and more accurate.
We used a locally bought green tomato relish, to which we added some homemade pickles, since green tomatoes aren't in season. We'll make the Heritage version next spring or summer. It's actually one of the harder parts of doing every recipe from a book. Usually, we see what's available and fresh, and then make something based on that. Here, we have to plan ahead, plotting out recipes based on what will be available, and then hoping it's good and fresh. Initially, this was easy, because there were a lot of recipes with ingredients that were available and good year round. As the recipes dwindle, it gets a bit harder. But enough whining - this is super fun - I just feel like we need to make excuses for the long gaps between recipes sometimes.
We bought nice thin pork chops from the butcher so they required a minimum of flattening. The dredge was simple and easy and the frying went well, though we almost missed that there were no temperature checkpoints, the cooking is done entirely by time, which was nice - and worked perfectly. At least until my piece of shit electric stove stayed on when we turned it off. I can't wait to convert to gas.