This recipe is all about the chocolate; three kinds, in addition to the chocolate crust. The addition of biscotti is fun too. The recipe calls for two biscotti , broken up, but I was feeling snacking and only managed to get one and 5/8 biscotti into my tart. Oops.

I definitely snuck this one in under the wire, baked late tonight after a long day of work and as I’m battling a killer head cold. As such, I don’t have too many photos or other pithy commentary on how this tart was revelatory, made me sing, or got me laid. Suffice it to say that if you’re in the mood for chocolate, this tart should scratch that itch.

Oh yeah, and I sprinkled sea salt on top, because, well, c’mon. Salt. Chocolate. Need I say more?

Get a copy of Baking with Julia for the recipe, or you can find it here.

Last year we raised $650 for Share Our Strength with the first ever Triangle Food Blogger Bake Sale, and this year we’re looking to beat that! The 2012 Triangle Food Blogger Bake Sale, in conjunction with the nationwide Food Blogger Bake Sale, is coming up in April. Details are still being finalized, but if you are interested in participating please e-mail me (matt@greeneatsblog.com) with your Name, Blog/Twitter, and E-mail.

Save the date!

2012 Triangle Food Blogger Bake Sale

Saturday, April 28th

10am-12pm

(Location TBD)

I hate medicine. I will do everything in my power to avoid taking medicine. I never finish a full course of any prescription (blame me when a super-bug destroys mankind) and stubbornly refuse to even take Advil for a headache. I prefer homeopathic remedies like tea, herbs, and good old fashioned sleep. Today I’ve downed two cups of tea, plus a BLT for lunch (bacon is a remedy in my house). I’ll repeat the process tomorrow, with some chicken soup thrown in for good measure.

My question is this – what are your favorite homeopathic or homegrown cold remedies? I’m always on the lookout for a miraculous consommé or healing salve that I haven’t tried. Please help a sick guy out; leave your favorite homemade cold remedies in the comments!

What: A Durham Food Swap

Where: 918 West Markham, Durham

When: Saturday, February 11th 3pm-4:30pm

For more information and to RSVP visit the Facebook event page: Durham Real Good Food Swap

Growing up in Connecticut my exposure to the pig was mostly limited to pork chops, pork loin, and bacon. Ribs were mostly of the beef variety, and barbecue was a verb, not a noun. Don’t get me wrong, pork chops can be a revelation when they are done right, but when they are done wrong; let’s just say you’d be better off putting gravy on a football. It wasn’t until I moved to North Carolina that I fell under the spell of the pig, and now I’m addicted. I can make sausage gravy in my sleep, I have learned that bacon is a flavoring as well as a food, and if you need to find me at a pig pickin’, I’ll be the one finger-deep into the pork jowls, face dripping with fat. I’m not exaggerating when I say that a pig tattoo might be somewhere in my future.

Hams have always escaped me though. Buying a huge ham to cook for two people has always seemed like a waste, and I can never get the 1960’s ham-and-pineapple image out of my head. There just seemed to be so much more to pork than ham, so I generally left it alone.

And then I got a copy of the Southern Foodways Alliance Community Cookbook. There, in the gravy chapter (a whole chapter on gravy!) was a recipe for Ham and Redeye Gravy. It called for coffee. Coffee! Who the heck ever heard of coffee and ham, together? I remain convinced that this recipe must have been the concoction of some hung-over, or possibly still drunk, cook who mistakenly poured his coffee into the skillet instead of something else.

Nevertheless, I’ve made a commitment to explore some of the South’s most famous recipes, and Redeye Gravy is surely up there at the top of the list. I picked up a ham steak (something else you’ll almost never find in a Northern grocery store) and got to work.

First of all, the recipe is deceptively simple. It is basically three ingredients – ham, coffee, and brown sugar. I cheated a bit and rendered the ham fat in my skillet with some leftover bacon fat, but I figure that only Southern-fied it even more. Once I got going the aroma was intoxicating. Now I’m an impatient cook, but I made myself follow the directions of waiting until you see the first wisp of steam before removing the lid from the skillet, and I’m glad I did. I was hit with a burst of sweet, caramely, hammy steam that almost made me drool right into the pan.

My only concern with the recipe is that it says to wait until the the ham browns before continuing on to make the gravy. Sounds easy enough, but I quickly realized that when you cook ham in a coffee gravy it pretty much turns everything brown. I decided to let it cook another five minutes just to be safe, and everything seemed to work out fine.

White Loaves

It seems fitting that we’d start a baking adventure with a simple recipe for white bread. This recipe (which you can find here) makes two loaves, and is the basic combination of flour, butter, sugar, salt, yeast, and water that is the highlight of every easy bread recipe.

Let’s start off with a warning: the recipe urges you to use a heavy-duty mixer, and you’d do well to heed that advice. I have a KitchenAid, and I assumed that they fell under the heavy-duty category. They might, but after mine started struggling to knead the large amount of dough, emitting a faintly mechanical smell accompanied by ominous clicking sounds, I decided to finish the kneading by hand. I imagine my reaction to the possibility of burning out my KitchenAid is similar to that of a parent who’s only child falls off his bike and breaks his arm. There there sweetie, everything will be alright.

After a healthy 10 minutes of kneading (bonus – it can count as your exercise for the day!) the dough is wonderfully elastic and smooth. Then you add the butter, and the whole thing turns into a ragged mess. Its like sewing the perfect pillow only to take a knife to it as soon as its finished. A little more kneading, though, and things are right back on track.

Now you get to the rise, which is where I usually find that I’ve done something wrong in the mixing of my dough. Maybe I killed the yeast, or perhaps I kneaded to hard, but I’ve often been left with a brick of un-risen dough after the allotted rising time. This dough, however, was perfect. I punched down and divided the dough, performed the seems-complicated-but-really-isn’t folding technique the recipe calls for, and set the loaves into pans for their second rise. (Note: I only had one actual bread pan, so I used a vintage Pyrex casserole dish for the second loaf. Same great bread, new great shape!)

As with most bread recipes, it calls for letting the dough rise in a warm place. I got around that (we usually keep the house at 68F during the winter) by turning on my oven light an hour or so before I started making the dough. By the time it was ready to rise the oven was easily 80F.

The second rise completed, I turned the oven to 375F and set the loaves in to bake. The recipe says to bake for 35-45 minutes – I opted for 35 minutes in the pans and then popped them out and placed them on my baking stone for the final 10 minutes. I ended up with a gorgeously browned crust that was firm to the tap, just the way I like it! The recipe also says that the loaves are finished when an instant-read thermometer inserted into the bottom of the loaves reads 200F. My loaves never quite got that hot, but even in my beginning baker’s state of mind I could tell that any longer was going to scorch the loaves.

The final verdict? These loaves were super easy to make, for one. The crust was fantastic and the loaves had an airy crumb that was still had a bit of heft to it; perfect for toast I would think. The taste was your basic white bread taste, but still far superior to any mass-produced grocery store loaf. In the future I might add a bit more salt, but other than that it was perfect. Aside from my KitchenAid scare I could easily see this recipe becoming my go-to white bread recipe.

Check back in two weeks for my next BWJ adventure: Chocolate Truffle Tartlets.

A Connecticut Yankee in a Southern Kitchen: The Beginning

But it’s true, I’ve eaten some unusual foods in my 28 years. Growing up I was a fairly picky eater, but the flip switched in 2004 when I spent half the year living and studying in Ecuador. In the Andean highlands a traditional local dish is roast cuy, or guinea pig. I had to give it a try, and thus began my descent into adventurous eating.

I’ve compiled a list below of some of the more unusual things that have willingly passed through my lips over the years.

• Cuy (guinea pig)
• Live octopus
• Dried horse’s blood
• Soft-shelled turtle
• Alligator tail
• Sweetbreads
• Eel
• Chicken feet
• Blood sausage
• Beef tongue
• Goat
• Squirrel

I’m sure there are other things that I’m forgetting, and I’ll add to the list as I remember or try new culinary oddities.

Whats the weirdest thing you’ve ever eaten?

I often like to challenge myself with these random tests, and you can rest assured that I’ll be having two giant mugs of coffee and some wine on March 1st, but it’s always nice to take a step back and look at the things that seem necessary; you often find they’re actually pretty expendable.

Do you do any “detox”?

There are a lot of things that Paula Deen does with which I take issue, including the Novo Nordisk deal. Her endorsement of Smithfield Ham products is another example. What I don’t begrudge her, however, is her diabetes. That she kept silent about it for three years while continuing to cook high-fat, arguably unhealthy meals is its own ethical mess, but to say that she “deserves” diabetes is just disgusting.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect to the Deen-hate that I’ve noticed is the blatant sexism and double standards that seem to exist in the world of food today. Why is an overweight, Southern woman vilified for using pounds of butter in her recipes, yet high-end male chefs get off the hook? Is it because Deen is such a huge public figure? Why do we not disparage the memory of James Beard or criticize Paul Bocuse, both of whom use copious amounts of fats and oils in their cooking? You cannot simultaneously tear down Paula Deen while at the same time elevating the Julia Childs, Pierre Franeys, and Emeril Lagasses of the world to culinary saintdom.

The way that Deen handled this entire situation is very disappointing, perhaps even irresponsible. The way that she has been treated however is equally as disappointing. No one is perfect, and she clearly had a very difficult decision to make, one that could easily affect her livelihood. The food world needs to take a long hard look in the mirror before it continues to take potshots at Deen. If you want to tie her cuisine to her disease, fine, but then you better start knocking down the columns that modern Euro-American culinary history are built upon.

Here are a couple more points of view on the Deen debacle, all much more eloquent than mine:

Hey Paula – by Elizabeth Tamny

Why I Love Paula Deen – by Nancie McDermott

Chef Has Diabetes, and Some Say ‘I Told You So’ - by Julia Moskin, with a great quote by Virginia Willis