Innholdsfortegnelse for August - September 2008 i Taste of the South

grilled plums Recipe development by Virginia Hornbuckle Yield: 6 servings Preparation: 10 minutes Cook: 10 minutes 6 plums, halved and pitted 1⁄4 cup vegetable oil 3 to 4 cups Buttermilk Ice Cream (Recipe follows.) or ice cream of choice 6 tablespoons honey PREHEAT grill to High (400° to 450°). BRUSH plum halves with vegetable oil. Place cut side down on grill grates. Grill for 5 minutes. PLACE 2 plum halves on each plate. Top with 2 scoops ice cream. Drizzle each serving with 1 tablespoon honey. Serve immediately. buttermilk ice cream Recipe development by Virginia Hornbuckle Yield: 7 cups Freeze: 8 hours 30 minutes 4 cups whole buttermilk 1 cup heavy whipping cream 1⁄2 cup sugar 1⁄4 cup firmly packed light brown sugar 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 1⁄2 teaspoon ground…

COMING UP WITH A GIFT FOR SOMEONE who is difficult to buy for can be quite a challenge. And Gwen Yearwood, mother of country-music star Trisha Yearwood, knows that feeling well. “Trisha’s impossible to shop for. I mean, you can try to think of a gift or something to give Trisha,” Gwen says. When Trisha married Garth Brooks, moved to Oklahoma, and began cooking for a family, Trisha’s sister, Beth Yearwood Bernard, had an epiphany. “Beth had the idea of putting together a loose-leaf folder of recipes for Trisha’s birthday that year,” remembers Gwen. “We used the computer and printed them out and even made copies of some of the handwritten family recipes, like my mama’s, and included those.” Beth’s daughter, Ashley, also had a hand in creating the gift…

START WITH A GOOD IDEA, AND PEOPLE WILL jump on the bandwagon. Edwin Marty has learned that lesson since he returned to Birmingham, Alabama. His good idea was to start an urban farm in his hometown, reclaiming vacant lots and converting them to productive use. This summer, his Jones Valley Urban Farm is enjoying its seventh season Urban farming—growing food close to the people who will eventually eat it—is not a new idea, says Edwin. But after World War II, there was a shift in how Americans thought about farming—from a way for a family to make a living to a business run by a corporation. The production of food moved away from urban areas. Jones Valley Urban Farm is just one of hundreds of farms around the country that…

Recipe Rescue In the June/July 2008 issue, in the recipe for Barbecue and Corn Cakes on page 25, 1 cup of mayonnaise is listed as an ingredient, but it’s not used in the directions. Can you help? —Shirley Warner Kentucky EDITOR’S NOTE: We’re so sorry for the omission. The 1 cup mayonnaise should be mixed with the sour cream and eggs before you stir the mixture into the dry ingredients. Your e-mail has prompted us to add a new feature to our Web site that we’re calling “Recipe Rescue.” When a recipe problem has an easy fix like this, we’ll post it on our Community bulletin board. If the problem is more complicated, we hope to generate some discussion among other readers that will help you solve it. As a…

cajun boiled peanuts Yield: 4 to 6 servings Preparation: 5 minutes Cook: 8 hours 11⁄4 pounds raw peanuts, in shells 1⁄4 cup dry crawfish, crab, and shrimp boil PLACE peanuts in a slow cooker. Sprinkle with crawfish, crab, and shrimp boil. Add enough water to cover peanuts. COVER and cook on Low for 8 hours, or overnight. TO STORE, place in an airtight container and refrigerate. beer-marinated kabobs Yield: 4 servings Preparation: 25 minutes Marinate: 6 hours Cook: approximately 10 minutes 1 boneless chicken breast, cut into 1-inch cubes 1 (8-ounce) beef fillet, cut into 1-inch cubes 1 pound hickory-smoked sausage links, cut into 1-inch cubes 1⁄2 dry pint grape tomatoes 1 small bell pepper, stemmed, seeded, and chopped 1 recipe Beer Marinade (Recipe follows.) PLACE chicken, beef, sausage, tomatoes,…

IF COOKING IS A LANGUAGE, THEN SOUTHERN cooking is a language with many dialects. In New Orleans, a crawfish étouffée speaks volumes about the city’s French heritage. In the Appalachian Mountains, a bowl of soup beans reveals a lot about the hardscrabble lives of the Scottish people who settled there. And along the South Carolina coast, near Charleston, you can hear the whispers of the Lowcountry’s English past in the subtle flavors of she-crab soup. One of the most accomplished native speakers of that Lowcountry dialect—at least in the kitchen—can be found in Pawleys Island, 74 miles northeast of Charleston. Here, Louis Osteen, the chef/owner of Louis’s at Pawley’s and the Fish Camp Bar, cooks with a decidedly Southern accent. This unpretentious gentleman with the gentle, rumbling voice has helped…

CAN ANYONE IMPROVE on the basic mixing bowl? Clever kitchenware manufacturers have been giving it a try, and they’ve come up with a mixing bowl for almost every purpose. Who can resist adding a few to the pantry? First, the basics. No kitchen should be without a set of stainless-steel mixing bowls in graduated sizes. Invest in a quality set, and they’ll last a lifetime. The smaller bowls can double as the top half of a double boiler for melting chocolate or making custards. And the rapid heat transfer of stainless steel makes the larger sizes perfect for making an ice bath to cool down food. Best of all, they’re stackable for easy storage. Another essential is a batter bowl (a tempered glass bowl with a pouring spout). Dishwasher-safe, microwavable,…

WHEN EXPLORER CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS TOURED the Caribbean Islands during his famous voyages, he discovered fruit-bearing plants that had been cultivated in South and Central America for thousands of years: peppers. Used first for decoration, then for medicinal purposes, peppers eventually were seen as a valuable and healthful source of nutrition, one Columbus gathered and shared with Europe upon his return. Members of the genus Capsicum, peppers include not only the spicy varieties such as jalapeño, habanero, and cayenne, but also the milder sweet peppers. Though technically fruit, peppers assume the role of vegetables when it comes to cuisine. Both the hot and mild types have the same South American origins. Today, they’re grown primarily in China, Turkey, Spain, and Mexico, but you’ll also find these versatile savories popping up in…

THE LEGACY OF MAYBELLE NORWOOD IS TOLD in the skillet—a cast-iron skillet to be exact. It was, says her son David Norwood, her kitchen tool of choice, particularly at breakfast, when she would rise with the sun to prepare the first meal of the day for her husband and four children. “When I was young, she cooked in a cast-iron skillet on a wood stove,” David recalls. “You didn’t have a lot of temperature control.” And like so many other post-Depression Southern families in small, sleepy towns like Hartselle, Alabama, the Norwoods also didn’t have a lot of money. So last night’s supper beans often made a second appearance at the breakfast table. It came from back during the Depression, when people had to be resourceful with the food that…

Cover: Cake plate by Grestel, from Home Goods, 800-614-4663, www.homegoods.com. Fire Up the Grill Pages 14–21: Picnic basket from World Market, 877-967-5362, www.worldmarket.com. green plate and table runner for Menu 3 from Pier 1 Imports, 800-245-4595, www.pier1.com. Sweet Fruit Treats Pages 22–26: Yellow dessert plate and white platter by Vietri, available at At Home Furnishings, 205-879-3510, www.athome-furnishings.com; green bowl and all linens from Anthropologie, 800-309-2500, www.anthropologie.com; oval cast-iron Tableware by Lodge Manufacturing Company, 423-837-7181, www.lodgemfg.com. Tailgating for 2 Pages 27–31: Location courtesy of Samford University, Homewood, Alabama, www.samford.edu. Georgia Cooking in an Oklahoma Kitchen Pages 38–43: Salad plate and green soup bowl from HomeGoods, 800-614-4663, www.homegoods.com; green plate by Fiesta, available at BB’s China & Glassware, 800-393-7856, www.webfolks.com/bbs; green dessert plate by Signature Housewares in Sorrento pattern, 877-999-2433, www.cooking.com.…

FOR YEARS, THE CITIZENS OF New Orleans had been cautioned about “the big one,” a storm that could devastate the Louisiana coast and leave the Crescent City in ruins. That ominous warning became reality on August 29, 2005, when Hurricane Katrina struck with such force that the levee system protecting the city was breached, allowing the muddy waters of Lake Pontchartrain to pour in unrestrained. The water rose, roiling like a pot of gumbo, and left much of New Orleans underwater. Life in this magical place was changed forever. Like Dorothy in the classic movie The Wizard of Oz, New Orleanian Amy Cyrex Sins wished to “wake up where the clouds are far behind” her. Her home sat just 10 houses from the much-photographed 17th Street Canal levee break, and…

SEVERAL YEARS AGO MY MOTHER HAD A FOUR-DAY house party during which she served an almost exclusively gelatin-based menu. I don’t think it was on purpose; she just wanted to make everything in advance so she could spend as much time as possible with her friends. But by the end of the second day, when the guests had already consumed a crabmeat mousse, a strawberry mousse, two kinds of tomato aspic, and a charlotte russe, one complained that he could not get up from the table. “I think,” he said, “my blood has coagulated.” None of the rest of us saw anything funny about the food. This was in the Mississippi Delta, after all, where congealed items are a staple of our diets. In Gourmet of the Delta, a cookbook…

LOUIS OSTEEN IS STRETCHED SORT OF THIN THESE DAYS. THE CHEF who helped bring the regional cooking of the South Carolina coast to national prominence has a restaurant in Pawleys Island, South Carolina, and a new one in Las Vegas. He spends a lot of time flying back and forth between the two. He also serves on the board of directors of the new Southern Food and Beverage Museum in New Orleans. But he still tries to make time to spend with his family—his wife, Marlene, and their three grown daughters and five grandchildren, ranging in age from 31⁄2 months to 11 years. We caught up with him at the museum’s grand opening where he was cooking one of his signature dishes for the crowd—shrimp and grits. ▸ Who was…