Mayhaw Man

This piece, in the USA Today mentions several new beverage related exhibits in New Orleans. These are a major improvement over some of the other recent additions to the New Orleans drinking scene, which usually have a sign out front reading, "Big Ass Beers!" Edited to say that if any of you are planning on attending the SFA Field Trip this summer that virtually every place mentioned in this article is on the schedule, including in some way or another, Liz Williams. the handsome woman pictured behind the bar in USA Today.

You're lucky that you didn't ask about something that people like to talk about.

Here are some various pig roasting ideas with varying degrees of discussion (and lots of gory pictures for your pork porn enjoyment) Labor Day Pig Roast in Chicago Pit Roasting a Pig (discussion with some photos) This one involves digging a hole. It is from eGCI a year or two back. Here is an excellent non damaging way to go. And it includes me! You'll no doubt love it. Here is a little bit of discussion and some photos of a really big deal "Pig Pickin". The photos start on page 38! Here is a bit on an upcoming event that you may be interested in. Just make sure you get there before they get out the vinegar jug and ruin all of that good meat. Hope this helps

Everybody loves a good egg! The winners are listed on the top of the page on the first part of the egg part of the site. I particularly like Elizabeth Williams eggs, and also Rick Ellis's. The winner got to wear a handsome crown for the evening and I believe that you will find a picture or two of these deviled delights here, in Varmints phot blog from the SFA conference last year in Oxford.

Just in case you are short on deviled egg related reading material (and really, who can ever have too much of that?) you might want tio peruse the recipes contained in the results of the Southern Foodways Alliance Deviled Egg Competition I went to the "taste off" last year at On The Square Books in Oxford. There were some great examples of the things at that event.

Ok. I didn't do this one, but I was a victim. Many of you who follow my little chronicles of growing up in the house of a great, perhaps world class home cook know that my mom doesn't make too many mistakes. Well, this story is about a mistake she made, a bad one, and one that caused her whole family to suffer great trauma, not to mention hunger previously unknown by the Hamaker boys. My mom went on a short trip when I was in high school. She planned well and cooked some stuff for us to eat while she was gone. For the first night of her absence she left a Seafood Casserole. This, my jaded friends, is not Tuna Hot Dish. This thing consists of crabmeat, shrimp, really, really good cheese and an assortment of onions and various colored bell peppers (yes, I will be happy to put in recipe gullet when it finally rears it's glorius head) and a pyrex full of it costs about $75 bucks. It ain't cheap and it ain't your grandma's casserole. Anyway, we all love this stuff. It's pretty amazing and we usually only saw it for Sunday company lunch (while you occasionally see people here talking about "the Old South" and having the preacher for lunch they are just speaking in hyperbole-we actually did this regularly), so it was a pretty big deal having it on a regular night. Well, my brothers and I all rode to and from school together (in my bad ass 1972 Ford Bronco, but that's another story for another website) and as we all had sports in the afternoon we usually didn't get home until 6:30 or so. My dad, knowing this was a great deal for us and that this would be maybe the only chance that we would ever have to eat something this good while sitting in the den (we NEVER ate in there-EVERYBODY at the table, together, every night) watching manly TV (this would be the era of Mr T, JR, and Farrah), came home from his office promptly at 5 and put it in the oven so that it would be ready when we hit the door. About 6:30 all of these stinky teens show up and smell the stuff and head in to clean up and chow down. Pretty soon, we are all standing around the kitchen waiting on my Dad to pull this thing from the oven. One of my brothers, the youngest one, mentioned that there was an unusual smell eminating from the oven. We passed it off as something on the bottom of the oven. My dad, who was as excited as we were, and into a couple of cocktails at that point, decided that we could wait no longer. He put on the mitts (which was funny enough, as he can't cook a lick-I mean none-not an egg-not boil water-nada, nothing) and opened the oven. As soon as he opened the door, we knew something was horribly wrong inside of that oven. My father, knowing at that point that there was a problem, uttered a profanity that I don't think, up to that point, I had ever heard him use except for the time that I got, well, nevermind that. Let's just say that he didn't use the big words much. He pulled the casserole out of the oven and we immediately could see what was wrong. We didn't need to know whether to laugh or cry. My father, in his excited hurry to get this thing in the oven before we got home, had failed to take of the THREE layers of Saran wrap that COMPLETELY encircled the pyrex dish. What we had at that point was a sort of free form sculpture of plastic wrap and fabulously expensive seafood in heatproof glass. It was very, very sad-but really funny. My dad just started mumbling something about, "Brooksie left the instructions, but they didn't say anything about unwrapping it!" Well, we ended up hitting the magic freezer (so called because there is a seemingly bottomless amount of good things to eat in that freezer) and pulling our some filets and whomping them onto the grill. We couldn't wait (we being my brothers and I) for my Mom to call and check in. We ratted out my Dad as fast as we could laugh our way through it. She gave my Dad a bunch of crap, and then he finally started laughing about it. To this day, everytime we eat one of those things (they are still a pretty special treat), that story gets retold. Usually with gross exageration, nothing like the completely accurate story that I am telling here. So, my mother's biggest mistake in the kitchen, in 70 years, is a single night of letting my dad cook. It hasn't happened since.

One you can get: The Cotton Country Collection One you can't get: The Cookbook They're both pretty great.

Dom DeLouise!

I prefer to think of it as "6 yankees". This keeps me from getting riled for not being selected as the champion in this little battle.

Isabelle's Gourmet uses lavender boxes. They are an East Coast Company. In New Orleans, the boxes are generally white with green printing on them. Maybe pink is a West Coast thing after all.

Gourmetfoodmall.com is an excellent and growing resource for all kinds of stuff-from high quality coffee, high end chocolates and pastries, sauces, salsas, jellies, spreads, to cheeses to breads. Once again, just as a disclosure, I work for them-BUT I make nothing off of transactions as the stores on the mall are owned by the vendors themselves, so I am just offering this as an option that you may not be familiar with it

Those are absolutely collards. That's pretty funny. I've never given much thought to them outside of the American South, but I suppose as it is just a green, and probably not native, that other people in other parts of the world eat them, as well.

I don't let it sit, at all. Straight from the flour into the grease. I have always been told, and it makes sense to me, that letting the flour become water laden prevents the crust from being uniform across the surface of the chicken. My mother, my grandmother, their housekeeper Dorothy, and every other chicken champion I knew growing up did it this way. And when I started in the restaurant biz, it got reinforced in a less pleasant manner. I once worked for a guy, Mike Anderson, who was pretty serious about this. I was working the pass line, calling tickets and moving food (this is a 400 seat restaurant-this job was a study in supervision of chaos into a food ballet between all of the stations-when it went right, this was the single most satisfying thing that I have ever done at any job-no matter how much money I was making-I loved running that army) and a bunch of fried shrimp hit the line. Mike was standing on the other side of the line, in the way (but hey, he owned the place) looking at food, as he is a NUT about food quality. He saw some shrimp that he figured (correctly, as it turns out) someone had dug out of a pan after they had been in there for a while and then fried. He started picking them up, one by one, and kind of tossing them-not gently-right into the middle of my chest. All the while, I was ignoring him and trying to keep my ballet from turning into an anarchic free for all. Eventually, I had to acknowledge these 300 F shrimp hitting me in the chest and I stopped what I was doing and just looked at him. All he said was, "pay attention to the food. Things are running great tonight, but if you send out crap they aren't coming back. Don't send out crap. If they don't come back, nobody gets paid". That was a pretty good point, I thought. So my point here is that, to this day, I don't let the food sit in the flour. Straight to the grease.

We were served udder at Boccondivino in Milan. It was actually pretty good..more subtle than I thought it would be. ← I am sure that it was udderly delicious.

A video of this would make excellent fare for reality TV . Perhaps there was a security camera recording the events? I can smell big money here.

Couldn't agree more with that assessment of the sandwich at Napoleon House. I was telling someone that yesterday, who of course, didn't listen. But North Carolina tourists can be pretty hardheaded.

This thread might give you some idea of what she represented to many people.

We called my oldest son "Goober" until he got to be taller than us. We have stopped now.

Go buy the "giganto" pack of thighs. You'll be glad you did at lunch the next day.

Not only can duck fat be frozen, but if you have some ice cube trays you can freeze it in small amounts that are pretty handy to have around. Once it is hard frozen, you can just dump the trays into a container. It works great. Lord, I sound like Heloise. Sorry about that. Lucy, I have been looking forward to a trip to France. This promises to be a good one with a friendly guide. Do we have to tip the driver?

That looks great Marlene. You, of course, will get a chance to try the real thing (Dave and Brooks-we ARE the real things ) at Dean's Pig Pickin on Labor Day. After that, all of this talk about Dave's chicken will just be a good story to look back and laugh about. I wish you well in your new home with your swell new stove. Many blessings on your house and your family..

Goya Mojo Criolla is a great product along the lines that Jason mentioned above. It is generally available in North America in any decent supermarket, I think, that has a Latin food section. Actually, I am a big fan of Goya in general. THey make a ton of good products.

Mix! No problem. I also use cottonseed oil pretty regularly, but I don't think that it is generally available everywhere. It is indestructible, has not real flavor, and a high flashpoint.

marinate in something good, like soy, peppers, and chopped ginger. Overnight. Throw onto a very hot grill and char/sear a bit over charcoal. Take it off direct heat, put the top on the grill, cook to medium temp, rest, slice, eat. Delicious. They don't take very long either. Make sure to use a thermometer and pull just before it gets to temp. It will go the rest of the way as it rests.

I have to admit that I find it amazing that a discussion about fried chicken could go into this much detail and end up involving people from all over the globe (who knew that an iconic dish like fried chicken would have so much general appeal?). Chicken Frying in Japan, all parts of North America, Europe, etc. has, on some level, got to be a really great thing. This has been most enjoyable. Thanks to everyone.