Potlikkery

cruze farms & southern food writing conference

No way was I missing out on a field trip to Cruze Farms. Their buttermilk was hyped so much during the Southern Food Writing Conference that I wanted some of that for myself.

I can't recall the last time I was so motion sick. I was so glad to be off the tour bus. I was hot. I thought I might vomit. No buttermilk cocktails were offered on this jaunt. Boooo.

So Cruze Farms was an oasis of dairy delight after being cooped up on a miserable rocking tour bus. It is an oasis no matter what circumstances brought you there, mind you. The farm is located inside Knoxville city limits, but falls within the historic (think National Register) Riverdale community, one of the oldest parts of the county first settled given its prime location at the crotch of the French Broad and Holston Rivers. Just not enough occasions to use the word crotch.

Although dining at Blackberry Farm was a once in a lifetime experience, being at Cruze Farms was like coming home, even though most of my farm experience is recent and equine in nature. I could have spent all day there. We were treated to hoecakes hot from the griddle which we drizzled or drowned with as much honey as we could stand. Jaanki flipped the hoecakes and I chatted with her a bit later, after the freak lightening storm popped up. Turns out she spent time growing up in Johnson City, so we were on the same plane comparing notes with that. 

The longest line was for buttermilk biscuits. Oh. My. Golly. Had to be the best biscuits I've ever eaten in my life. They were HOT out of the oven and ooooozzing butter. It was one of those die-and-gone-to-heaven biscuit experiences. Better than the ones at the Loveless Cafe. Hmmm, trying to think of other places where I've had stellar biscuits. Cracker Barrel's are fairly good, actually. Where else? I make darned good shaggy biscuits. And I learned a thing or two about biscuits from Nathalie Dupree and Cynthia Graubart from their panel at the conference. 

Pair all that biscuit eating with samples of buttermilk and the one percent (I think?), and the chocolate, that I didn't sample. Despite my chocolate aversion, I would have drank the chocolate milk if Cristina made another round offering them. She didn't. Her primary role as milkmaid came to an end when the thunderstorm hit. 

Ayaka was busy scooping salty caramel ice cream when the downpour hit. Everyone scrambled to squeeze under the two tents, but I sought cover under the farm-shed close to where Cristina doled out the milk, which was well protected and gave me a birdseye view of everything. 

The rain and the lightening turned our biscuit party into a danger zone given the electrical cords and other items that could easily shock any of the Cruze farm workers if they stepped in the wrong direction. Colleen scrambled, shoving the tent covering Ayaka closer to the shed I sheltered in so that there was no gap to let water cascade down her back. Alas, Ayaka was drenched, but she cheerfully kept scooping while Cristina, in the true spirit of teamwork, held the roof of the tent so that it would not drip water down Ayaka's back.

As soon as everyone had adjusted for the storm, it stopped and the sun shone almost immediately. Emma left the protected cover of shelter and offered everyone a biscuit. She helps Colleen assemble the buttermilk biscuit dough. What a charmed chore that is! Lucky girl.

While some may think that a thunderstorm "ruined" the biscuit party, I don't. It offered a lovely interlude. Mother nature is unpredictable. Learning to roll with it offers the best learning environment for everyone. As far as I can tell, all were in good spirits. The storm cooled the day and offered visitors a memorable experience. 

Going on this field trip was part of the Southern Food Writing Conference that I paid for so in accordance with the new FTC regulations, I received no other form of compensation for the udder love and affection I show for Cruze Farms and their bovine products. 

blackberry farm & southern food writer's conference

Writers received a Pimm's Cup garnished with lemon and cucumber for the ride from Knoxville to Walland, TN. The danger in the Pimm's Cup is Pimm's being such a subtle liqueur makes tossing a half dozen down quickly, quite easy, and that can surprise a drinker. This was not the case with me. I received one. Just saying. Beware the seductive nature of the Pimm's Cup.

The hills rolled. Light filtered through leaves and around the bend of each curve of the road. The last leg of the ride was lovely and anticipation mounted as our tour bus pulled up to the white gates of Blackberry Farm. Necks craned for a peek at the farm's famed red barn. The bus struggled along the road and dropped us off near the garden where a bevy of servers awaited us with a cocktail, an International in small Ball jars. An International is a dangerous cocktail as well. 

Hors d'oeuvres included a mint and fava pesto on bread. As I took my first bite I glanced into my cocktail because the taste made me think it should be coming from my glass. The mint was unexpected. The other offering was a meaty thing that I didn't take so as to not seem so greedy. Should have tried it all. You know what they say about hindsight. A couple of violinists serenaded our party until we were shooed up to the barn for a glass of champagne and a six course meal that began after six and ended after eleven.

Oh what a night. Seating was assigned. Not sure who arranged that. Twas good and evil. I sat with strangers and they became acquaintances. Our was the last table served. Thus consciousness of whom the people sitting at the table being served first erupted, well, in my head, not so much in anyone else's that I know. 

Pausing before tasting to capture images of food with my camera or iPhone was a travesty, especially since the low-lighting made my 5D inoperable. The iPhone with flash was what I used for the following photos, and they're wretched, really. Cannot do justice to the courses served. 

Blackberry farm beet and blue cheese salad: strawberries, purple mizuna, pea tendrils, pecans and saba. Golden beets, regular beets, and a cheese so soft and creamy that it couldn't be cheese. I suck as writing about food and describing it. Restaurant reviewing is not my forte. All I can say is how I love beets, and this was an extraordinary way to begin with beets from the garden. 


North Carolina mountain sunburst trout: smoked Cruze farm buttermilk consomme, watercress and red turnips. Trout so tender and buttery it melted in my mouth. The confusion came when my tablemates and I discussed whether to use the fork of the spoon to attack this dangerous fish with. Service refreshed our silverware between courses, otherwise we would have struggled with eight to ten inches of flatware on either side of our plates. 

Guinea and dumplings: poached farm egg, guinea confit, potato gnocchi and hen of the woods mushrooms. This was my favorite. Divine. Yummy. I could eat this all night. Every night. The poached egg was simply fantastic. And the salty flavors were fantastic, too.  Who knew you could, or should eat guinea? As I told my tablemates, I've contemplated going vegetarian for some time, for a variety of reasons. But it's occasions like these, when the opportunity to eat guinea arises, that I simply could not go vegetarian. Yet, how often do I get such an occasion? Once in forty years. So, it will be okay to go vegetarian. If I live to be eighty, perhaps I'll have another chance at eating at Blackberry Farm, or trying a novel game meat. 

Grilled and braised painted hills beef: open faced biscuits with carrots, lamb's quarters and fava beans. And so the beef. We were confused at first, thinking that one of these was beef and one was lamb. Tasty, indeed. I wish I had taken notes. My memory has faded at this point. It was an astonishing meal. I can't say that every course outdid the next because the guinea and dumplings was my favorite, but this grilled and braised beef was delicately flavored in a style reminiscent of barbecue. 

Biscuit ice cream: biscuit feuilletine and strawberry jam. Should have set a coin adjacent to the plate to give you perspective. This bite of dessert was small. It was just enough, really, after all the courses. We were stuffed so much that our brains were spewing out of our ears by the time dessert came 'round. So, this was delicate and lovely, but rather anticlimactic. I'm so particular about dessert. If it isn't pie or cheesecake, then I'm usually disappointed. This taste was enough to cleanse and freshen the palate.

Biscuit cuillere: chocolate mousse and raspberries. As not-a-chocolate fan, this was ever-more anticlimactic than the previous dessert. Fresh raspberries inside were tasty treats, and the crunchy bottom crust was notable. If I loved chocolate, no doubt the dark chocolate flavor would likely make me al orgasmic and such. The moussey-bits were perfectly moussey: fragile and refined.

As a wine-loather I confess that the wines served were excellent. Perhaps I've never had wine as good as these and that is why I do not prefer wine at all. They were: Domaine Thomas et Fils Sanserre 2010, Chateau Montelena Chardonnay 2009, Belle Glos Las Alturas Pinot Noir 2010, and another Chateau Montelena Cabernet Sauvignon Calistoga 2009. Loved the Chateau Montelena's and shall seek out their product and start a wine habit.

Eating at Blackberry Farm was part of the Southern Writer's Food Conference that I paid to attend, so according to the new FTC regulations, I'm including this statement that I received no other form of compensation for this endorsement. 

making piece, bring on the pie

Every few chapters or so Beth M. Howard alluded to her pie crust recipe, mentioning how it was a simple ratio, not even a recipe. How, it's not even complicated at all, that you follow a few guidelines, and voila, you have pie crust. She wrote about flour and fat and water and salt I kept waiting for a semi-exact recipe to appear, since it was a book about pie memoir.

And since she learned it from a retired pastry chef from the merchant marines... omg, what a story. What a recipe! It's a great as all the recipes I never learned from my grandfather who was a cook in the Navy. Wonder if he can recall any of those? Interestingly he did all the scratch cooking at his house while my grandmother cooked from cans and boxes, except for her pineapple upside down cake. I don't think he ever naked. Mostly he cooked savory. But I digress...

Sometimes I surprise myself by my reading habits. Used to be I was impatient and flipped back and forth in a book. As a teen I skimmed a book's last page or too, just to be bitchy, but that was was fiction. In reading Making Piece: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Pie I expected recipes and thought they'd appear randomly inserted between chapters. Must be having a mid-life moment because I failed to turn to the back of the book to check for recipes. They were there!

A good deal of the book isn't so much about pie, though it is a central and recurring theme of the book. It's about Beth Howard and how she killed her husband. Oh, I'm being dramatic. She thought she killed him. He was a hard-working German man whom she never saw. She desired a more intimate relationship, but that wasn't possible because he loved his work more, perhaps? She asked him for a divorce and he keeled over: Read the book. Imagine an irreverent Year of Magical Thinking meets American Gothic, Road Rules, and my favorite-- pie. Howard lives in the American Gothic house, don't you know? Ultimately pie is what keeps Howard together. It keeps her sane. It gives her something to focus on. It is her passion. And she follows where her passion leads her. 

Making Piece serves as a manifesto for grievers everywhere: Immerse yourselves in pie-baking and you will know peace (and piece, may I slice a piece of peace for you?). It's an interesting concept, pie baking as a balm for grief. Howard followed her bliss, made pie documentaries, judged pie baking contests at the Iowa State Fair, traveled across the country in an RV, and landed in Iowa, a few miles from her childhood home, near the Dibble House, in which she resides and operates a pie stand, Pitchfork Pie Stand, summer weekends.

Following her, and her dogs, on this transformative adventure zig-zagging through several states--Texas, Oregon, California, Arizona, and Iowa is never boring. What I loved the most is her idea that "the world needs more pie." Pie making, eating, sharing as a means of world peace. Lovely sentiment. I agree. Can't we all just get along, bake pies, eat pies, and live in harmony? Read Making Piece, it's a lovely book with pie deep down at the heart of it all. 

Normally I'd be at the American Library Association's (ALA) annual conference in June, which is in Anaheim this year. And guess who sits on a panel? Beth Howard. Would be lovely to meet her, but I won't be going to ALA this year because we had unexpected things come up (like Ian's hospitalization) and no money to go. Drat. Another time. Maybe I can wrangle a [work] trip to Iowa later this summer and pony up to the Pitchfork Pie Stand for a personal pie of my own.

I mentioned a few posts back that I'd grown ovaries and decided to make pie crust from scratch rather than rely on my old standby the Pillsbury pie crust from the dairy section of the grocery store (although sometimes I use another brand whose name I've forgotten, it's wholesome and organic and is stocked at Earthfare, my favorite place to shop, and no, they don't pay me to endorse them). And Howard's crust was the main contender for such a pie crust. 

Working it up was easy enough. Getting it to tacky stage was....meh. What do I know from scratch pie dough? But who cares? Because what does it matter, really? At the Southern Food Writing Conference I attended a few weeks back in Knoxville, Nathalie Dupree talked about wasting the makings for biscuits, just a few cents, really, and what does that matter in the long run, when it comes to building the best darned biscuit you can? So, my mindset changed thanks to Dupree, and experimenting with pie crust to get it right isn't such a big whoop. Or is that whup? 

Nevertheless, after dividing my dough into two balls and rolling them out, one did better than the other, so the better of the two I used for the base dough and the worse of the two I let Elsa cut with cookie cutters to make a "fancy" top instead of a full top. My favorite pie is peach, blackberry, and blueberry. Can't recall if I've shared the recipe here before. And I'm never exact with it--with exact ingredient amounts, anyway.

The worst part about making the pie crust was that my head was pounding as I mixed the shortening and butter and flour and "fluffed" in the ice water. But, we were invited to a Memorial Day barbecue and I didn't want to arrive empty handed. I wanted to bring pie. The guy who invited us, a dear old friend whom Ian and I have known since sixth grade, was an Air Force veteran, and it turned out that his father was, too. So I was doubly pleased to have made pie for these two men and their family. We also had strawberry shortcake and banana pudding. So quite the triumvirate of desserts that day!

8 or 9 organic peaches, peeled and sliced thinly

pint of blueberries, washed & picked over
smaller container of blackberries (1/2 pint) I didn't pay attention, washed & picked over
1/2 cup of flour
1/3 cup of sugar
1/8 teaspoon nutmeg
1/8 teaspoon cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon cloves
1/4 teaspoon candied ginger
1T freshly squeezed lemon juice
1T butter 

Preheat oven to 450 F.

Combine the fruit in a large bowl. Add flour, stir together. Add sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, stir well. Add candied ginger and stir well. Pour contents of bowl into pie shell and distribute evenly in shell. Sprinkle lemon juice over filling. Slice pat of butter into small pieces and distribute evenly around pie.

Then at this point you'd top with another crust or do a criss-cross crust, etc. Or if you had a very wide in circumference bottom crust, you could fold it over the filling in more of a rustic pie-type style.

Bake for 35 minutes with crust covered with aluminum foil so that it doesn't turn too dark. Then remove foil and bake for another 10 minutes (45 minutes total), or until crust is the shade that you prefer.

Luckily my forgetting to throw in the dash of salt didn't have any real effect on the crust's taste. There was less than a piece that we brought home. But, I must do better at perfecting my crust-making skills by the next pie I make. 

Because I am a major pie fan, and I love memoir, and this book featured two of my most favorite elements, I contacted the publisher and they sent me a review copy of Making Piece. Just letting you know, so I'm in accordance with the new FTC regulations, but otherwise, I received no other form of compensation. 

wayne scott strawberry festival

Certainly is festival season around this blog. Since I'm a mother, taking our daughter to festivals seems like the thing to do, when the weather is nice. Actually, there won't be many festivals between now and October, when the Apple Festival happens. So on Saturdays I think we'll hike or canoe.

Until we arrived at the strawberry festival I didn't realize it was officially called the Wayne Scott Strawberry Festival. This is another first-time attendance at a local festival for me. Have heard of it for years, but never went. Mostly, I don't like crowds. This wasn't crowded, actually, so that excuse doesn't work. And most festivals are all about food, so it makes sense that I'm there, right? Cuz I'm all about food. 

Strawberries are nice, but not my favorite fruit. And I don't love a strawberry shortcake, but the ones I saw other festival attendees carrying around piqued my curiosity and I decided I had to have them. Several booths competed for my money on the shortcake front, but when it came down to it, the Clinchfield Senior Adult Center's shortcake looked best. 

It wasn't completely awesome, but it was a delightful treat for three bucks. The strawberries were fresh. Not so sure about the cake. The ice cream was inside a cooler to keep it chilled as the gentleman scooped it, so I have no clue about what brand it was. And the whipped cream was land o lakes from a can. 

There was plenty of other festival food, but we didn't partake. Ian isn't particularly ambulatory since he's not a week post-op yet. While I stood in line for the shortcake and found a place to eat, he accompanied Elsa to the Unicoi Elementary playground and sat on a bench while she gamboled, skipped, slid, and climbed. One thing I know about festivals and children is this: Producing them on school grounds is essential in keeping children attendees happy. 

flag pond ramp festival

May twelfth was the twenty-seventh annual Flag Pond Ramp Festival, but it was my first time attending. They didn't establish the festival until I was a (very young) teenager, so it's not anything my parents would have taken me to as a child. Plus, while I'm technically a Unicoi county native (since all people in Unicoi county not born at home are born in Johnson City/Washington county, TN hospitals), I'm not eager to claim that identity. Oh, it's complicated and suitable for another type of blog, but not this one. And since it's one of those things that kind of happens in my back yard it doesn't seem exotic enough to capture my interest, so I've never been. Also, I asked one my of friends in the know whether it was any account. He said to skip it. Since I delayed in getting tickets to the Lake Eden shindig, we ended up at the Ramp Festival instead and that worked out just as well. 

Would have written about the ramp festival experience while it was fresher in my memory except that Ian had a gallbladder depositing us at the ER early Sunday morning (the thirteenth) and I sat at his hospital bedside all week comforting him and blogging was not a priority.

Nonetheless, the ramp festival was worth the $7 I paid for a plate of the best eating I'd had in a great while. I think that if Ian had made it home from work in time to come to the ramp festival with us and had eaten ramps, he wouldn't have had the gallbladder attack. Oh, the power of the ramp.

Funny, that at my age (40) I had never eaten a ramp. Since they became all the rage in the big city, I have even less desire to eat something so trendy. It's just the way I am, the anti-trendy. My grandfather and I hunted them on several occasions in the forests of Tennessee and North Carolina. He knew several patches. And undoubtedly he offered them to me, but I declined.

As did Elsa when I offered them to her. Folks who eat raw ramps are shunned. The odor is offensive, you see. My father-in-law mentioned that when he was in the reserves that the ramp-eaters were obvious from the non-ramp-eaters. But, cooked ramps are tender and subtle as -- gee-- a communion wafer. 

Seven dollars bought a large plate filled with bacon, ramps and potatoes, soup beans, cornbread, cole slaw, your choice of pickled items, dessert, and a drink.

Elsa is not an adventurous eater. We goad her into trying new things. Ironically she loves soup beans, a food I avoided as a child. We shared a plate. She ate the beans and nibbled the cornbread. My potatoes were half and half: half cooked with ramps and half plain; Elsa ate some of the plain. Both were delicious as they were seasoned with bacon fat. 

She saw the skillet/pile of bacon as we edged through the line and trilled "Bacon... I love bacon..." and the kindly man in charge of the bacon area slipped her two pieces before we received our plate and our serving of bacon.

Seating was limited, so we wandered everywhere before landing on the steps outside the cafeteria. The festival was held in the former Flag Pond elementary school building. Fortunately we weren't too much in the way. Elsa was happy. She made a craft, swang on the swings, and played on the playground. She made friends with the people who stood around us in line. Everyone loves a toddler, especially when she shouts out "My Daddy works in Carolina." And then acts all shy when they try to make further conversation with her. Chatting with folks at festivals is always fun. I absorbed information about ramps being early this year, and even earlier over in North Carolina. 

Ramp festival next year? Sure thing!