Mt. Airy, NC

Little Richard's BBQ

This was my dinner tonight at Little Richard’s BBQ in Mt. Airy NC. Both my clients and the hotel staff told me to go here, so I did. That’s chopped barbecue and barbecue slaw (finely chopped cabbage with ketchup and vinegar, I am told — delicious, especially with the meat), and some fine NC hushpuppies, and in the background some corn fritters.

These last were recommended by my client, and they were terrific, little globs of creamed corn breaded and absolutely perfectly deep fried super crunchy, even past the point where the barbecue was et and they went into their little go-box to head home to tallasiandude. THAT is some quality fry technique.

And of course there was vinegar-pepper sauce and sweet tea. They were out of banana pudding.

I was also tipped off by my client to the fact that supermarkets here sell country ham in vacuum sealed shelf-stable packets. Off to Food Lion I went, and now my luggage is full of salty pork. Here’s the loot.

Food Lion loot

There’s a few packets of different brands of country ham slices and ends and trimmings, some smoked pork jowls and chunks of side pork (both for flavoring beans and greens and such), 3 meaty country ham bones that are going to become winter melon soup when the weather gets colder, a bag of salt and vinegar pork rinds, some pork chop breading mix and the cutest damn bag of locally ground cornbread mix I have ever seen.

There is also some pimento cheese, liver pudding and blocks of local sausage that I am going to go back for tomorrow on the way to the airport. They’ve also got a huge array of Utz chips, and those good Lay’s Carolina BBQ chips, plus another flavor in that line I’ve not seen before called Cajun Spice or something along those lines, which I really want to get but probably won’t because I can’t carry it home. Ditto for the bottled vinegar barbecue sauce, Yuengling and Shiner Bock. Stupid TSA and their rules that prohibit me traveling with runny foodstuffs.

Oh, and there’s a Biscuitville next door to the hotel. Stopping there too en route to the airport.

They may vote wrong down here but they sure do eat well.

delicious li’l pork meatballs

Today I made some tiny meatballs and miniburgers out of:

1 lb ground pork
5 soaked and minced shiitake caps
a minced scallion
juice from a thick slice of ginger
2 or 3 tablespoons of oyster sauce
ground pepper
a crust of multigrain bread
1 egg

I browned ’em in peanut oil, and I just had some now as a snack, and they came out pretty good. Good with rice, Asiany in flavor but not so much so that they won’t also be tasty with the peas-and-turnips in butter I’m making next. Nom.

hit and miss at The Publick House

I really enjoy The Publick House in Brookline. It has awesome beer and very good french fries, and a congenial atmosphere. (I enjoy nerdy beer snobbery.) But it does seem there’s a spottiness to the quality or at least the execution.

The french fries are even better than last time, which would have been difficult, but now they are *crunchier*. I didn’t detect quite as much meaty flavor, which makes me wonder if they changed cooking fat. If so, I guess I am willing to trade crunch for porkiness. And the sauces, good lord, the sauces: truffle oil mixed into ketchup. garlic mayo. spicy mayo. mayo-mustard whatever it is. YUM.

But my arugula salad with duck cracklings really missed the mark. The cracklings tasted off, stale, as if the fat was old or they’d been sitting around. It made the otherwise acceptable baby arugula mostly unpalatable, and I would go further to say that the goat cheese didn’t do the duck flavor (even had it been at its best) any favors. Bummer.

The ribeye was delicious, with a bit of truffley butter and an unusual and surprisingly complementary diced salad of minted tomato and cucumber, but its shaved potato gratin wasn’t sufficiently cooked. Just because you cut a potato paper thin, y’all, doesn’t mean you get to skip out on cooking the damn thing. I dunked it into the truffley ketchup and ate it anyway, but it bummed out the tallasiandude.

All was forgiven, though, because the Rodenbach beer was so terrific. It’s a Flemish red ale, light in body and extremely easy to drink, especially on a hot day, with a strongly sour flavor, almost like a citrus drink but with more complexity and a bit of bubble and bitter. Absolutely delightful, and just the thing for me after a long couple of days at work getting to a release deadline. Hurray!

summer vegetable yum, right quick

Cut up about 3 summer squashes (yellow/zucchini/whatever) and an onion into large dice. Sweat the onion in a scant tablespoon of bacon fat (or butter or olive oil), then add 2 large cloves minced garlic and the squash. Sprinkle with Lawry’s seasoned salt, and let cook, stirring occasionally, till squash is almost tender. Dump in a bag of Trader Joe’s Soy-cutash, grind in some pepper, add a little more Lawry’s if needed, and cook till hot and squash is tender.

Eat over rice with grated cheddar. Yum.

clove buds rendered in gold and diamonds

Padma Lakshmi has a new line of jewelry, and all of it is pretty, but one item in particular stands out. She made a pair of earrings in the shape of clove buds, with square diamonds in the center. They’re pretty just as abstract organic shapes, but food nerds will almost certainly recognize them as cloves immediately, and that makes them so much more awesome. Why have plain diamond earrings when you can have FOOD-shaped diamond earrings?