Tonight will be a cooking night, since I promised to bake a cake for tomorrow's permaculture gardening workshop with Charlie. I told him that I've never baked a cake before, so if it's awful, he has to tell me it's delicious anyway.
Now I wish I had thought ahead enough to buy lots of strawberries last weekend for this dessert, but it looks like it will be a carrot cake. I'm using the recipe from the Moosewood Cookbook, and making a cream cheese (Organic Valley, NEVER Horizon!) and pecan frosting. The carrots are from my garden, the pecans are from the farmers' market, the butter is from Homeland Creamery, and the rest of the ingredients will be organic except the baking powder and soda.
As long as I'm in the kitchen, I'm going to bake marinated pork chops (from Back Woods Family Farm), use the rest of the egg salad (which I had AGAIN for lunch) in potato salad (red potatoes from Gann Farm, lovage and dill from the back yard, an organic leek still in the fridge from Deep Roots Market, and of course, Duke's mayonnaise), and cook a small pot of field peas frozen from my garden last year.
"Lip Lickin' Sweet and Smoky BBQ sauce" is made in Greensboro. Around this area you can't throw a rock without hitting a barbecue joint. I will commit a sacrilege right now and confess that I don't care much for chopped barbecue. I'm not into that vinegary sauce that's used in North Carolina. When I go, it's for the hush puppies. These will be the first pork chops I've eaten in ten years, by the way, so I'm planning to put this sweet sauce on them.
Uh, how do I cook pork chops? I don't remember! But I poured this stuff over them last night.
According to the Slow Food RAFT map, our region is the "Corn Bread and BBQ Nation." I understand why, but I don't have to like it. If I really decide to cook this meal the way my family did when I was growing up, I'll fry my cornbread like pancakes, or make corn muffins. Around here people bake it very sweet, like cake.
2 comments:
Just this week I posted about making "chopped barbecue" for my yankee friends... And even gave out my hushpuppy recipe.
Is Joe's still doing barbecue in Whiteville? I remember when it was just a shack--when they built the nice building, something was lost.
Gosh, I don't know, since when we go down to Lake Waccamaw we eat there or Wilmington or the beach. But Dale's Seafood is still going strong. And there used to be a place between Lake Waccamaw and Whiteville called the Chitlin Shack. I never had the courage to try it.
I'll take a look at your corn dodger recipe. Is that what y'all called them when you lived around there? I started calling them "hush puppies" when I moved west to Greensboro because that's what all the restaurants called them.
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