kayb

Order a jar of aji amarillo paste from Amazon. Mix a couple of tablespoons with two smashed garlic cloves, a dab of Mexican oregano, some lime juice and some olive oil. Use to marinate chicken wings, or thighs, or whatever, then roast.

Stopped by a local barbecue place on the way home from church yesterday and picked up a pound of smoked turkey. Then Child A called and requested Sonic. So I held the turkey over for dinner, which gave me time to make slaw and potato salad amid watching the playoff games. Warmed up beans from the fridge.

My grandmother always made head cheese, or “souse meat” when we killed hogs. I always refrained from eating it.

I like Sweet Baby Ray’s, but I never tried the Visalia onion version. Traditional has just enough sweet for me.

FWIW, I made a big batch of blueberry barbecue sauce last summer. Got three or four small containers of it in the freezer now. That stuff rocks on chicken. Don’t skip the step of glazing with warmed sauce after the meat comes off the grill.

As you know, I also loathe GBP’s, but I love Cajun food. When I make it, I sub red BPs for the Green, or some sort of sweet yellow pepper (Cubanelles are my fav), and cut down on the celery. Works.

One of the best dishes I ever had was in Nashville at a tasting menu. They had SV’d pig’s tail, deboned it, and fried it until the skin was deliciously crispy.

Glad things went well!

First dinner I’ve cooked in a week and a half. Pork loin stuffed with a fig-walnut stuffing, baked sweet potato, steamed broccoli.

We have a couple of local places that offer fridge-to-table meals, sized for either 2-3 people or 4-5. Typically, they’ll have a different entree every day, and two sides and a dessert that come along; they’ll post a weekly menu on Sunday or Monday morning, and pickup is from mid-afternoon on. They also have a fair selection of frozen dishes, mostly casserole-style entrees, sides and dessert, you can simply walk in and grab-and-go; advance ordering is a good idea for fam-style meals. One of the places offers a soup-and-salad style lunch menu, and the other offers carry out single meals at lunch from whatever the day’s menu is. Both are quite successful. Neither is fine dining, more along the lines of a meat-and-three type place.

I loves me some neck bones and gravy. Over rice. Mama used to make neckbones and dressing. That wasn’t half bad, either.

I had that one saved to share. Alex beat me to it. I love the fine dining experience. Would I love it nearly as much if the food were dished out cafeteria style? It’d be better than not having access to it at all, I expect.

you can peel, cube and roast the SPs and avoid the mush. Just have to have a light hand with tossing with dressing. I like oil, venerated, sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg cloves.

This is a part of the world I’ll likely never visit. So thanks for taking me along!

Like @Darienne, I love latkes and make them often. I think the best ones I ever had were in a restaurant in a Philly suburb — size of a dinner plate, and very thin and lacy. potatoes Anna and dauphinois are faves, too.

Thank God. At least it did not involve lacerations.

Re: pig lungs. I can remember eating, or more accurately refusing to eat, "liver and lights" in the wake of hog-killing. My recollection is they were cut up, fried and served in some kind of sauce/gravy. But not to me. I could probably have handled the "lights," but not the liver.

Bucatini?

My favorite sound of all is the soft "pop" of jars sealing after you take them out of the canner. Also fond of, and lonely for, the sound of bacon frying.

What you are referring to as "cracklings," I knew as "pork rinds." Cracklings were the tiny bits of meat and skin left when one rendered lard, which was then strained into buckets. The cracklings were drained on brown paper bags, and then bagged up and kept for use in cornbread. I'd give a good deal for a big pan of crackling cornbread and some new sorghum right now.

I made one shortly before Christmas. I usually make it with just a half-pound of beans, as the full pound and all the attendant meat makes enough to feed an army. This time I had people coming over, so I used the full pound. Duck confit in a can from Amazon, (here; it ain't cheap, but it's good), garlic sausage from D'Artagnan (there is no place closer than Little Rock for me to get garlic sausage), some chunks of ham instead of hamhocks, and some bacon ends and pieces instead of salt pork, and some fresh pork loin. It was pretty fine.

The first real pizza parlor pizza I ever had. Pizza had been limited to the Chef Boyardee kit-in-a-box, and later, Pizza Inn or Pizza Hut. When I was in junior high, a new family moved to town from somewhere in the New York area. Kid was my age. We all went to his house one night to watch movies, and his dad brought in three boxes of pizza from the restaurant he'd just opened. It was a revelation.

Beg to differ. In West Tennessee and Eastern Arkansas, chili with cinnamon rolls is a mainstay of the school lunch menu. Served with crackers. Cinnamon rolls for dessert. Massive, fluffy, yeasty cinnamon rolls, covered in a confectioner's sugar glaze. Damn things were the size of an infant's head. Several school booster clubs have annual fundraising dinners (generally pre-football games) featuring chili and cinnamon rolls, and sell boxes of cinnamon rolls.

H'mmm. Not sure. I typically use "sweet onions," which are yellow. I have occasionally used white. Yes, they're somewhat wetter than those caramelized stovetop, but most anything cooked in the slow cooker is "wetter," as there isn't as much evaporation. I've occasionally propped the lid open a bit with a knife after the first two or three hours' cooking. You won't get caramelized onions in 12 hours with this method. I would typically put them on after dinner, say around 8 or 9, and let them cook on low until I got home from work the next day, about 5:30. The "stinkiest" time was about 3 in the morning.

Worked wonderfully for me. Perhaps there are some finer points of caramelizing stovetop that I have missed.