Time keeps turning and Flat 493 keeps cooking. Let’s try to get back to a somewhat regular menu sharing, shall we? Nevermind that I tried to do this last week and WordPress crashed on me. Here we are. Hopefully. Cross your fingers.
Highlights from the past two weeks:
— Trader Joe’s has a new and sadly temporary dill salad, including dill potato chips. We first paired it with a simple, gorgeous steak from Smoke City (of course). We also used it for our first ever attempt at frying chicken. I know, I know. But we are now much less scared of it. The August edition of FOOD & WINE shared an recipe based on this. I can’t find the mag version online but can’t go wrong with the OG esp when it turned out That. Dang. Well.
— We adapted this sweet potato, chicken, corn, and poblano recipe for us. Mainly, roasting diced sweet potatoes instead of bothering to noodle. Hampton, who isn’t big on peppers, LOVED this sauce. I made extras and happily ate them all week for lunches.
— Because we had to buy buttermilk to fry chicken, we also did Borscht with Buttermilk and Grated Cucumber from the August F&W. Holy heck, so tasty. Hampton doesn’t do hard-boiled eggs, so we topped our topping of sour cream with a dollop of caviar. As you do.
— Leftover fried chicken went into this skillet casserole which is darn similar to something my hairdresser bff and I used to make before watching AMERICA’S NEXT TOP MODEL with her young daughter. You can’t watch a bunch of unrealistically skinny pretty people with a tween without carbs. (Nevermind that she is now unrealistically skinny and pretty and older than I was when we did this.) Also, the end of the poblano cream sauce was a great add. Even for Hampton!
— because we loved the Dill-icoius salad so much, as mentioned above, Hampton started brainstorming. TJ’s has a mustardy BBQ sauce called Carolina Gold, with chips to match. So why not make a Carolina Gold version of the dill pickle salad?? (Fun fact: I only knew the chips before this discussion and didn’t realize there was an actual sauce.) He thought at first we should do steak again but NC is more known for pork. I was originally thinking we would side this with ribs, but he realized chips = breading = pork schnitzel (in case you’re wondering why I married him).
We made a salad out of TJ’s Ready Set Salad kit…. which is apparently so new it’s not on their website yet? It has much in common with the Dill-icious bag: kale and multiple cabbages. I love both of these kits bc TJ’s loves to throw broccoli in a salad and neither has it! The Dill does have radish and cauliflower, we just added radish to the RSS for our new shenanigans. Oh – and a few crushed up Mesquite Smoked Almonds (thanks to Zach from the #749 for this add when Hampton mentioned the plan to him).
The dressing was a mix of buttermilk (that we still had), creme fraîche, TJ’s ranch powder, and the Carolina Gold BBQ sauce.
We used Smoke City pork chops, pounded thin, for our Carolina schnitzel. We dredged them in flour, the end of the buttermilk (finally) whisked with an egg, and then a coating of panko and crushed up Carolina Gold potato chips. A few minutes in some canola oil + butter and it was time to serve.
If you’re looking for other details, feel free to comment! See you next week. Maybe…
Ann Davis-Rowe 