The Well-Fed Bachelor #2; Red Beans & Rice

I have been hella jonesing for New Orleans lately. What's new? And I got a crock pot for my belated birthday. NOLA Jones + crockpot = red beans. This is my third use of the crock, and the first time I have managed to take a picture, even a picture of my second bowl of leftovers, as, when the food approaches readiness, I become busier with preparation and overexcited to eat so picture taking tends to get forgotten. Only later, looking at the wreckage of dirty dishes and compost slop that I think, "Oh yeah, if I had taken pictures, I coulda blogged about that, and then, well, then there would be a blog about it." 

The first outing was a skin on pork shoulder, acquired at the impeccable Bi-Rite Market. It was a pretty expensive iteration of a "cheap" cut of meat, and I stewed it in beer, cilantro, onion, and garlic. It came out pretty good, but it actualized its full potential the next day, when I cubed it and fried it. There was a generous amount of well distributed fat that created a lot of hot grease that sealed the cubes and transformed them into nearly-perfect little golden nuggets. The second outing was adobo pork. Rest assured this will be repeated, so there is strong potential that there will one day be pictures of a crockpot adobo in this very space. More pork shoulder, this time a pretty cheap iteration. Soaked and cooked at length in vinegar and soy sauce and peppercorns, the pork becomes weirdly flaky and almost dry, but infused with flavor, and the sauce was engineered generations ago to make plain, steamed rice into tangy nirvana. Next time, I will include chicken wings, and make enough to make bahn mi with the leftovers.

So, red beans. This meal would have been ridiculously cheap had I not passed by the aforementioned Bi-Rite Market for a bag of coffee and stumbled over a two-pack of house-made andouille links (All the other packages were triples, which would have left me a spare, as I was having a friend over for dinner. I could have used the spare to put into the pot, or with leftovers, but the two-fer made it feel like kismet.) full of heritage pork and smoked paprika. Then, to further run up the tab, there was no line at Tartine, and my feeling about Tartine is that since I refuse to wait in line for their delicious output when it is ridiculously long, no matter how hungry I am for it, when there is no line, I should get in there and buy something whether I am hungry for it or not. So, when I got inside, I got a morning bun, because it represents a kind of platonic perfection that gives me reason to keep breathing in generally meaningless world, and I hadn't had breakfast despite it being nearly 1 o'clock. And, in keeping with the Franco-NOLA theme, I got pear-laden brioche bread pudding which would make my diabetes counselor lunge for my throat and then break down weeping at the futility of her task after she has been restrained. I got a serving size they called a "cup" packed to go, and it easily weighed twice as much as the half pound of sausage. It was the kind of good that necessitates no discussion whatsoever of its goodness, a goodness that can be conveyed completely with glances and small facial gestures. These two late additions to the meal cost about twice as much as the pot of beans and rice.

Pound of rice and pound of beans in bulk (.99 cent a pound!), celery, bell pepper, yellow onion, garlic from the Evergreen Market.  The Evergreen is run by a several generations of Chinese family and caters to a Mexi/CentroAmericano clientele. It used to be the neighborhood's infirmary, back when this was a different kind of neighborhood. A guy like me wandering the store for too long would be approached by an old woman and asked if I felt ok or needed anything special and after some short vetting and maybe even a discussion of symptom, be sent out with Mexican pharmaceuticals. I don't think it goes on too much anymore, or if it does it has gotten much more discrete. I tend to cheat up on the garlic and down on the celery in my red beans. I got a pound and a half smoked ham hock at the Mission Meat Market for  2 dollars and change. There was no discussion of the heritage of this particular swine.

I cooked the beans for about 4 hours on high and then another 3+ hours on low. One thing I did differently this time that I have never done before when making red beans was cooking down the onion/peppers/celery /garlic with a little bacon. The flavor (and bacon) were well worth having to wash the extra pan and I will certainly do this in the future, maybe with a link of andouille.

Little Pigs BBQ, Asheville NC

This place claimed to be "Georgia Style", which I have since learned is a vinegar ketchup sauce over hardwood smoked, often pecan, meat, even though it was located in urban North(east) Carolina,pretty far from the Piedmont home of vinegar sauces and lowland home of mustard-based barbecues that carry the (North) Carolina label, even farther from Georgia. My parents really loved the ribs at this place; they were very saucy (the ribs, not my parents) and tender, as though they were cooked in a lot of liquid or something. I found the sauce a little soupy/ketchupy, and my "Carolina-style", meaning it had cole-slaw inside (Which I would have called Memphis style, or Tennessee style, but whatever. The parsing of the regional orthodoxy of BBQ styles gets real tedious for me real fast, and is ultimately meaningless, having more to do with turf than taste, but this sentence is already a run-on...), pulled pork sandwich was nearly impossible to eat as a sandwich. Both the pork and the slaw were really loose. It was plenty tasty, though. My phone/camera was out of juice, so these pictures of the parking lot were taken while it was charging in the car, but I didn't take it inside, so I didn't get any pictures of the food. I also didn't get any pictures of the food at the Arbor Grill on the Biltmore Estate, where I had what was my maybe my best meal on the whole trip, a chicken salad with local bacon and blue cheese. The only picture I did manage to take at the Biltmore Estates was this one below, which a docent yelled at me for taking.

Faidley's, Baltimore

The first time I went into Faidley's, it was late in the afternoon, well after the lunch rush. It was made clear tot me that I was breaking local custom, I was wearing seersucker after Labor Day, but that as I was clearly an auslander, I would be indulged. The young woman under the counter had better than a half dozen piercings in her face of the type I am used to seeing on South of Market bears--heavy gauge chrome hoops and horseshoes and barbells in her septum and lower lip and ears--and thick blue-black tattoos barely decipherable on the brown-black skin of her neck and arms and face. 

"Hey. Can I have a crabcake, please?" I say to her, moving up to the counter.

"You want our best crabcake?" She says, with a little suspicion, certain she is talking to a person who hasn't a clue as to the best crabcake, graciously, though, giving me entre to her expertise.

"Well, yeah." I say, knowing how to take a cue, if nothing else.

"One lump." She says to the guy at the fryer, who drops one of the fist-sized balls of lump crabmeat and little  else (something else, surely, something that holds it together and gets crispy, but no bullshit, no breadcrumb, no celery...) into the oil. And then when she hands it to me she says "We have tartar sauce, but I wouldn't recommend it."

I don't use tartar sauce anyway, but I said "If you don't recommend it..." in an attempt at being funny, but she is already ignoring me, had already finished her job with me and was no longer listening.

That was almost a year ago. I have been back to Baltimore, and therefore Faidley's, twice since, most recently at a little past one in the afternoon, in time to see the lunch rush, workers enjoying the delicious lump crab cake with a short plastic cup of draft beer.

Behind the sweet potato cake, lump crabcakes await their destiny in the fryer basket.

Muskrat was not in season during this visit.

"Every subsequent crab cake will be measured against hers."

Saltines are provided, and shown here for scale. They were out of T-shirts.