Cookbook Survivor Resolution: Southern Discomfort
I Give You Two Minutes For You and Your Gallant Crew
Ok, so? Pretty good dish, even with my deviations from the precision of the book. (I bite back the thought: because of them.)
The tenderloins are way too small to have stood up to grilling. As it is they took a lot of watching under our very hot broiler. But ok, fine! The glaze is pretty delicious.
The rhubarb butter, on close reading, is not a compound butter. It’s just a technique for preserving spring rhubarb for a good while as a fine puree. Ok, so, that’s a rhubarb-strawberry jam, is it not? Sort of? But I gilded the lily and combined it with actual butter. It was, very amazingly really, great with the glaze.
I had a bunch of mushrooms and I did them in a butter-olive oil mix in a cast iron pan under high heat. I’ve discovered something from other cookbooks and experience—don’t stir mushrooms a lot and you get a great crust as the moisture evaporates out of them. Stir them a lot and you get a kind of moist buttery goo.
The buttermilk pie is made. We haven’t eaten it yet but I’m pretty optimistic.
I will hang on to this book, doubts and all, until next week. Next week I make the West African-sauced chicken wings and other small plates at the Eagles playoff game. So no pressure. This is pretty much Dread Pirate Roberts to Wesley: Good night, Wesley, tomorrow morning I will probably kill you. But so it goes at Cookbook Survivor.
By way of an update, the buttermilk pie is pretty goddamn great.
So excited by this. I’m in Charleston at this moment staying with a Brock fan who writes on barbecue!!!