Another on-again, off-again rain weekend. We did get a chance to get our invitations stuffed and they’re going in the mail this week! They were a bit more labor-intensive that I’d expected. We had them professionally printed, but did the assembly ourselves. We are also SO impressed with the work the calligrapher did on the addresses. If you’re interested, be sure to check out her work.
After a really impressive brunch at one of our favorite spots (they deserve their own post at some point), we drove to Maryville to visit a new butcher shop that we see active on Facebook a lot, The Local Butcher Shop. These guys know their stuff! They were extremely helpful and spoke with us about the heritage pork that they use, their curing techniques, different cuts of bacon and pork chops… oh yeah, they have lots of other stuff like beef, duck, cured meats, local bread, gifts, etc… but this was a pork kind of weekend, remember!
Duroc Heritage Chops
We selected a couple Duroc Heritage Pork Chops that were just amazing. Also in our bag was some unsmoked bacon and house-made pastrami. The chops were almost an inch thick and had about an inch of firm fat on the outer edge. This is a real deal folks! They kindly offered to trim the fat, but we had it left on and trimmed it ourselves (this eventually became dog treats as we rendered out the fat and were left with crunch cracklin’s that our dogs went nuts over. And the drippings became cooking medium for everything else the rest of the weekend.).
Radishes on the grill
Now, what do we do with these guys?? We decided on grilling over a thick cloud of hickory smoke. The fire marshall was probably alerted to what was going on in our back yard because of all the smoke and flames. There was so much wonderful drippings wasted falling into the fire, it looked like napalm. We had some radishes that were almost too peppery to eat alone so we decided to throw those on the grill with just salt pepper and grapeseed oil. Have you tried grilled radishes? They’re great. And in the case of these, the grilling reduced the pepperiness and they were to mellow and earthy. We treated the asparagus the same way and finished it off with a couple drops of apple cider gastrique.
Springtime on a plate!
- SALSA
- 3 medium peaches, peeled, pitted, and diced
- 2 green onions, chopped
- ¾ cup diced jicama
- ¼ cup diced cucumber
- ¼ tsp ground coriander
- ¼ cup fresh cilantro
- 1 small jalapeno, seeded and finely diced
- juice of 1 lemon
- ½ tsp kosher salt
- CATFISH
- vegetable oil for frying
- 2 cups fine yellow cornmeal
- 1 TBSP kosher salt
- 2 tsp black pepper
- ¼ tsp Olde Virden’s Spicy Verde (or cayenne)
- ½ tsp garlic powder
- 2 cups buttermilk
- 8 fish filets
- For the Salsa
- Combine ingredients in medium bowl and set aside or store in refrigerator.
- For Fish
- In a large frying pan add 1-1 ½” vegetable oil and heat on medium-high to about 350°.
- Combine cornmeal, salt, pepper, Olde Virden’s, garlic powder in bowl (we use a pie pan for breading.). In another bowl or pie plate, add buttermilk.
- Working one or two filets at a time, coat with buttermilk and move to cornmeal mix, coating well and shaking excess off. Fry in oil until golden brown on each side. About 3 minutes per side. Remove to a paper towel to allow oil to drain.
- To serve, top filets with salsa and enjoy.
Just a touch of gastrique
Oh and by the way, the pastrami and bacon were excellent as well! Oink oink!
