Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Southern Independent Book Sellers Nominate Southern Farmers Market Cookbook

"SFM" makes the long list for best cookbook nominees for cookbook written by a Southern author or about the south: http://www.sibaweb.com/siba-news/siba-news/166-2010-siba-book-award-long-list-announced

From The Greenville News, March 10, 2010

On The Charleston Chef's Table, author Holly Herrick, and Southern food trends...

http://www.greenvilleonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2010303100028

Monday, March 8, 2010

Reflections On a Festival Well Done

No matter how great a delicious meal tastes while you're savoring it, if it's a really great meal, it just keeps getting better with time, allowing you to re-visit each bite of the experience at your own pace and with the fickle selection of your own memory. Such an experience is never forgotten and can stay with you for a life time.

As I sit back and reflect upon the select moments and meals of the 2010 BB&T Charleston Wine & Food Festival which concluded yesterday afternoon, I have a similar feeling. As seamlessly, joyously and deliciously as everything flowed over the past 3 1/2 days, it's even more perfect basking in the afterglow of the past.

Considering the epic planning required to pull off such a huge event with such aplomb is mind-boggling, yet Angel Postell and her talented team did it without so much as a glitch, despite the fact that this has been the most attended and ambitious festival since its inception five years ago.

My early perspective on this festival was from the demonstration tent where I worked with Ciaran Duffy and an energetic group of volunteers to get the kitchen set up and the demonstration food prep organized and underway for the visiting chefs. Far from the glitz and glam of Bubbles 'N Sweets, it is none-the-less the heart and soul of the festival - a kind of glorified camp kitchen. Despite some late food deliveries towards the end of last week, Duffy ironed out the glitches and made it happen, so successfully that many volunteers (including myself) were excused to go play.

So, play I did. I visited the tasting tents and ate some delicious food and drank ample quantities of wine. I saw old friends and met some new ones. I appreciated the gradual warming temperatures and early bloom of spring in Charleston. I was awed by the talent, precision and passion of culinary genius Daniel Boulud as I, the luckiest person on the planet, watched him prepare a world-class feast for 65 lucky guests at an exclusive fund-raising dinner on Saturday night.I savored beautiful music and a gorgeous plate of pink duck breast with a sweet, pungent blood orange sauce and a square of crepes layered between seasoned, cream cheese from The Dining Room at The Woodland's during the Gospel Brunch on Sunday morning. I signed a lot of books!

Of all these (well, with the possible exclusion of the Boulud experience), I think it was the vignettes of people, especially chefs and locals, interacting and enjoying the festival and themselves that made it an especially unified and wonderful festival. McCrady's Sean Brock and Cypress's Craig Deihl strolling down the central path on Marion Square, heads bent in quiet, friendly banter, for example. Or, Hank's Frank McMahon laughing with Robert's of Charleston's Robert Dickson about the good old days when he started out in Robert's kitchen - a vignette made even sweeter in knowing the veteran singing chef is retiring in June, 2010.

They just kept coming and made me smile knowing that Charleston has become what she's always been destined to be - one of the best food towns around populated with some of the most talented and convivial chefs around. Thank you to the BB&T Wine & Food Festivals for providing me and nearly 20,000 others so many delicious memories to enjoy for the rest of my days, or at least until the next round in 2011.

Monday, March 1, 2010

American Farm to Table Restaurant Guide Turns on the Heat

As an advocate of all things local, hopefully organic, and ideally bio-dynamic, I'm really excited about the new web site, www.americanfarmtotable.com. In the contention for the fiercely competitive James Beard Award for best culinary web sites, it's definitely one worth visiting. The site features restaurants from across the United States that buy from and cook with locally raised produce and products, and shine as a result. Charleston's own FIG and McCrady's are among the honored seated at "the table." This site, and the glorious restaurants cited in it, give huge testimony to why fresh and local makes the best food and the most delicious dining experiences available for all of us to enjoy.

Culinary Cost-Cutting 101

Coupon Crazy

When I was a little girl, I marveled while watching my Great Aunt Frances sitting at her linoleum-topped kitchen table, cutting coupons from the daily newspaper in the tiny Kansas town she lived in until she was nearly 100 years old.

It seemed like such a waste of energy in order to save a few pennies on, what I thought, were probably things she wouldn't normally buy anyway. But, I was naive. She, a thrifty survivor of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, had her coupon system down pat and it's probably one of the reasons she made it through a long life of hard times, many of them spent alone.

The latest bout of monetary unpleasantness, however, has created a market for New Age couponing systems. The internet now has a number of hot coupon sites (I like couponmom.com) which provide free, brand-name coupons and more if you select to register as a member. They're just a click, a printer, and five minutes away. In addition, many grocery stores' websites offer lists of daily specials. And, here's the kicker. Many provide selections from the kind of items you usually purchase, anyway. That was it for me. The last straw supporting my long-standing anti-coupon mindset finally broke its resistant back.

Harris Teeter's online specials shopping list became this list-hater's new best friend. I dipped into it with reckless abandon. With a little practice and increasing knowledge, I'm slowly forming my own semi-profitable coupon system. By combining the free manufacturer's coupons from sites like couponmom.com with a daily special shopping list constructed from Harris Teeter's web site (harristeeter.com) , my handy VIC card, and an extra dose of concentration at the grocery store, I have scored some serious savings.

The best yet happened last week. Granted, it was a big sales day at the downtown Teeter. The store was offering buy one get one, two or even three, all over the place on big ticket items like beef, coffee and wine. Since I'm expecting company in a couple weeks, I decided to stock up on these and other staples. The net result was a whopping $67 total savings. In essence, I bought three weeks-worth of groceries for less than I usually spend in one week!

My heart raced with anticipation as I watched the basket cave with the weight of my cache and the numbers creeping slowly higher on the cash register. Then, as the cashier started calculating in the selected coupons, the numbers amazingly started going down. It was like getting on the scale after a week of gorging Haagen-Dazs only to find you'd lost five pounds. I was beaming. She was beaming and said, "You did good today!"


Admittedly, a follow-up trip to replenish the fresh vegetable drawer just one week later only yielded $10 in savings, but next time I'll do better. I'm on a coupon-crazed mission. Intelligent use of coupons and smart shopping add up to saving a lot more than pennies. And, I'm not in Kansas anymore.

One Plucky Chicken, Four Marvelous Meals

With grocery costs rocketing to the stratosphere, it’s imperative to save wherever you can at the supermarket without eliminating taste. In addition to reaching for reduced daily specials, what you buy and how you put it to use in your kitchen can happily translate to huge savings with bodacious bite.

In this era of grocery gouging, chicken can become your new best friend for just pennies per four ounce serving when paired with practical pantry staples like pasta and veggies. Low in fat, high in protein and exceptionally versatile, chicken marries equally well with the exotic (think truffles or saffron) to the humble (think roasted potatoes and rosemary).

For these reasons, it’s a regular menu guest at my house, where I pride myself on transforming a single, four pound chicken (preferably organic and purchased at a reduced rate) into four fabulous feasts for a group of four. That’s sixteen meals, folks! A four pound chicken runs anywhere from $6-$10 (depending on where and how you shop), throw in a little change for ingredients to flesh it out into a meal (4X), and you’re looking at less than $20. A night out for a family of four at any fast food favorite will set you back the same amount or more faster than you can say “heart attack”.

Gotcha? Let me tell you how it’s done!

Meal #1: This is the launching pad for the meal plan event(s) – a whole roasted chicken. Since it’s going to be transformed several times, keep the seasoning simple – ground pepper, a nice crust of coarse salt and a rub down with olive oil. Roast at 425 until done (about 20 minutes per pound) and top it with a few love pats of butter to sink deeply into the bird. Allow the roasted chicken to rest and re-absorb its juices. Cut the both legs and thighs away from the chicken (reserving warm). Cut the breasts away from the rib cage, cool and store in your refrigerator for later use. Serve both legs and both thighs with steamed vegetables and roasted potatoes for a satisfying, nutritional meal. Go ahead and prepare a pan gravy with a little roux, white wine, chicken stock, Dijon mustard and fresh tarragon to dress things up, but hold on to the carcass!

Meal #2: Start this after the roast chicken dinner to prepare for tomorrow’s old-fashioned and DELICIOUS chicken noodle soup. With a sturdy chef’s knife, cut up the reserved carcass remnants – the rib cage and spine – into four or five coarse chunks and put them in a two quart soup pot with a quartered onion, carrot, celery stalk and a clove or two of garlic to make an impromptu stock. Add a few peppercorns, a bay leaf and fresh thyme for added flavor. Bring it up to a boil, reduce to a slow simmer over low heat and forget about it for three to four hours. Allow to cool and refrigerate, covered, overnight.
About thirty minutes before you’re slotted to serve dinner, skim off any accumulated fat off the top of the stock, strain it, discarding all solids except any bits of chicken flesh. Finely chop an onion, carrot and celery stalk and sauté them in the same pot with a tablespoon of olive oil until softened. Season, return the strained stock to the pan and bring up to a boil. Add reserved chicken and about ¼ pound of dried pasta (flat noodles, spaghetti, linguini – your choice) and cook until tender. Serve with a drizzle of fresh herbs (parsley, tarragon, or thyme will do) and freshly grated Parmesan cheese. A small, fresh salad and warm baguette make this a meal.

Meal #3: Chicken Salad Deluxe! This is where you can really have fun with chicken’s flavor/texture marriage versatility. Cut one of the reserved breasts into chunky, ½” cubes and toss in a bowl with coarsely chopped dried cranberries (or another dried fruit like figs or currants), coarsely chopped roasted almonds, fresh herbs, a dollop of Dijon, a dash of mayo and vinegar, salt and pepper and you’ve got a meal in minutes over a bed of greens. Other flavors that work in tandem with chicken include curry, paprika, cinnamon and almost any fresh herb imaginable. Make this your own!

Meal #4: Chicken Sandwiches Supreme! Again, versatility and imagination set the stage for show-stopping chicken sandwiches prepared with freshly roasted chicken breast. Go for the best quality bread you can find, from baguette to whole grain, and fill it with thinly cut slices of the remaining breast and toppings. One sliced breast will handily complete four sandwiches. Zip up mayo with fresh basil and Dijon mustard for a fresh, personalized sauce, top with a slice of red onion and crisp romaine. Go whole hog and add a few pieces of browned bacon and a slice of avocado if the mood moves.

Chicken never tasted so good for so little.