 |
| Foie Gras, Strawberry and Almond Popsicle with Marshmallow. So good. |
 |
| Aged Beef, Sweet Potato and Black Truffle. I liked the double poured sauces. |
 |
| This is Charleston Ice Cream, which we have made. Ours was not even close to this good. |
 |
| This bonsai tree was sitting on the table when we got there. In the tree was eggplant jerky. |
 |
| Caviar, Sunflower,Brown Butter and Apple. What an amazing combination. |
 |
| Oyster in a sea of sea bean and a nitrogen fog. |
 |
| Cobia - 3 ways - 3 AMAZING ways. |
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.
I'm not exactly sure what to do as a result of this recipe. There was some very extensive smoking while charring the beef, but we were prepared with a stool staged under the smoke detector and all windows open - you learn to do this when Sean Brock tells you to put a cast iron skillet over high heat. 16 minutes total of charring and my house was smoky enough that the detector should have gone off - but it didn't. I'll have to get it fixed before we do another heavy heat recipe.
That said - it was worth it. This is a long lead time recipe with a lot of ingredients, but relatively easy to execute. Cooking down the braising liquid is an exercise in torture as the aroma gets more and more amazing. This definitely serves more than 4 people, though in our case it just meant a lot of leftovers.
We didn't quite execute the truffle puree to the letter due to ingredient access and being cheap, but we produced a nice truffle flavored sauce that complimented well.
The worst part of doing these recipes is waiting for the presentation pictures to be done before eating. 
Advice: If you don't want to spring for the truffle puree ingredients this recipe is delicious without it and the braising liquid makes a great sauce. Be prepared for smoking! I have some tall 12-ounce canning jars and I find spooning a liquid I want to defat into them (working in batches if necessary) allows me to get rid of the fat very efficiently. We didn't have a roasting pan that had both a lid and a rack, so I used my dutch oven and made a base of canning jar rings to simulate a rack.
