She Who Eats

Let me begin by saying, I’m a huge fan of potlucks.  Potlucks are the backbone of the pinko revolution, in my opinion.  Potlucks have a spirituality all their own; a syncronicity.  When no one has determined who should bring what, yet everyone arrives and finds the glorious spread, laid out in all it’s splendor:  appetizers, salad, soup, pasta, side dish, main dish, side dish, drinks.  Without even trying, a perfectly balanced community meal.  Every so often there comes a time when one is faced with five spinach salads and a tub of cool whip, but most of the time the stars align and the Potluck God (or more likely, Goddess) smiles down on the community. 

The topic of potluck etiquette, however, comes up often in my circle of friends.  The only real negative effect I’ve noticed is that potlucks engender a certain level of guilt for various and personal faux pas, actions that may be understood by no one but the afflicted.   Therefore, I shall pick up where Emily Post so rudely left us hanging, and bring you the Rules of Potluck.  I hope you find them acceptable for your future events.

Store-bought food:  Store-bought food is not a problem as long as it

1.  Does not outshine the dishes made by people who at least attempted home cooking
2. The bearer of store-bought food arrives early enough to deposit the dish into a passably handsome container
3. Everyone attempts to keep it a secret, therefore staving off endless apologies that could become feeble attempts at breaking the ice if conversation lags

Tardiness- The responsibility lies with the host to communicate whether or not the potluck is a sit-down at the table meal, or an endless trough of mill-and-nibble.  If it is the latter, than anytime within the hour of start-time is acceptable, if it is the former, than everyone should arrive at the same time. 

Unacceptable potluck offerings- steak, meatloaf, soy loaf, soy cheese on anything, salads with under three ingredients,  a 20-40oz bottle of beer.  There may be towns where meatloaf or pot roast are acceptable to bring to a potluck, but this isn’t one of them.   Large hunks of imitation meat are extremely risky and should be avoided, and bringing one beer is simply NOT COOL. 

Foods that should make potluck comebacks- jello mold with marshmallows and canned fruit, tuna casserole, noodle kugel (a dish with egg noodles, eggs, and raisins), deviled eggs, pigs-in-a-blanket (with/without fake pigs), swedish meatballs in a crock pot, chicken pot pie with pearl onions, tabouli, mini quiches, lemon merengue pie. 

Suggested Topics of Conversation- Planning the revolution, keeping abortion safe and legal, political action of any kind, religious or spiritual beliefs and philosophies, childrearing, the latest great novel, art, cooking, creating, or senseless gossip is acceptable in small subgroups.

Unadvised Topics of Conversation- It’s not about topics as much as it’s about respecting the round robin.  Like a good song circle, no one person should dominate.  If you run out of topics, I suggest you begin telling a story and let the person to right add to it and so on until you’ve gone around the circle and the story is complete.  Proselytizing of any kind should be avoided, and there is an unspoken threshold of length of time spent discussing child’s bodily functions. 

That’s all I can think of at this time.  Feel free to add your thoughts if you want. 

When faced with weighty, life-changing decisions: Obama or Clinton, Grad School or Stable Employment, Rent or Buy, I prefer to return to the more immediate, more pleasant choices such as, Chicken or Fish?  Even these decisions do not lack a sense of responsibility, and so I would like to help us all out in making those less complicated choices just a little easier. 

If you are like me, all excited about local food when its flowing abundantly into my lap in late July, you may be sharing my feelings of guilt when I purchased, for example, Chilean asparagus last week.  What to do?  First, I recommend Mark Peters’ informative article in this month’s New Life Journal on winter local eats.  I’ve also done some field research of my own, so pay close attention. 

Cheese

Dark Cove Farms produces goat cheese- can be found at Greenlife

Spinning Spider Creamery (I’m not a fan but many folks are) produces many varieties of goat cheese- sells at Ingles, Earth Fare, and all the Co-ops

Yellow Branch Cheese produces milk cheeses- sells at Earth Fare, Greenlife, and the Hendersonville Co-op

Split Creek Farm offers goat cheese, goat milk fudge, goat milk soap-sells through mail order and at their farm stand

 Goat Lady Dairy- located in the whimsically named Climax, NC, the Goat Lady is a personal aquaintance who sells various goat cheeses, soft and hard, at Greenlife.

Produce

Shelton Farms in Jackson County sells greenhouse Bibb lettuce (yummers!) at Ingles

Sunny Creek Sprouts located in Tryon, I think, sells alfalfa and clover sprouts, also lima beans at Ingles, Greenlife.  I’ve been buying their sprouts for years and never knew they were grown locally until today.

Jafasa Farms produces greenhouse grape tomatoes- sells at Ingles

Robbins Family Farm produces potted herbs-sells at Ingles

Jake’s Farm grows greens and lettuce in the greenhouse- sells at Greenlife

Eggs

Local eggs taste SO MUCH BETTER than other eggs.  I promise.

Blue Hill Farm produces eggs and also cornmeal- sells at Greenlife, Earth Fare

Hickory Nut Gap Farm produces eggs- sells at Greenlife, Earth Fare, French Broad Food Co-op

Farside Farm Eggs- sells at Greenlife, FBFC, and their farmstand on North Merrimon Ave. past Beaver lake on the right

Meat/Fish

You can’t go wrong with Hickory Nut Gap Farm Spring House Meats-grass-fed beef, beef and pork sausage can be found at Earth Fare and Greenlife.  I don’t know if they are regularly offering pork or other meat cuts, quite yet, but ask the store manager or visit the website for more information.

Other-

Imladris Farms offers jams, jellies, and sometimes mushrooms (not right now, though)- I think this can only be purchased online.

Local pasta makers and upside-down flag activists sell homemade pasta at Earth Fare on Saturdays.  I love their eggs noodles, but have not enjoyed their more adventurous creations such as chocolate or chipotle pepper pasta.  You may feel differently.

The Mount Olive Pickle boycott is long over, since they agreed to offer reasonable wages and housing to their migrant farmworkers, and now they are touting local, NC pickles.  What a turnaround!  Viva Mount Olive!

I will add to this list as I learn more.  The local options at Ingles are quite exciting, don’t you think? Good luck, and happy shopping. 

I’ve just finished The Golden Compass, the first installment of Pullman’s His Dark Materials.  I wonder if this Dust, described with eery malignance, is the tangible stuff of inspiration and passion.  If so, I sure could use some.  What inspires a food writer is food.  Around these parts, I have experienced food made with intention, or enjoyment,  even love.  But rarely in WNC have I tasted exceptionally passionate or inspired food.  Therefore, I too have become less inspired.  Most restaurants I frequent here fall prey to the pitfalls of any tourist community.  Reputations reverberate far and wide, but the actual delivery most often is simply “good.”  Then one starts to question one’s own impressions, “do I think I love this food because everyone has told me I love it, or is this truly as exciting as the hype has determined it would be?”  It’s confusing, and I’ve taken myself to the internal wrestling mat of the mind on this one.   My solution:  eat somewhere critically lauded and unequivocally great.  Do so out of town.   

Central (Sen-trahl)

This was my  first foray into celebrity chefdom.  I wanted to eat food designed by a chef quoted as saying he has enjoyed a “lifelong romance with cuisine.”  I wanted to dine in an establishment keeping a “wine manager” in its employ.  I wanted at least three stars in a major metropolitan area.

Like many celebrity chefs before him, Michel Richard of Washington D.C.’s Cintronelle fame has recently opened a more affordable, lower key bistro catering to a hipper, urban crowd.  Central’s modern chic atmosphere was the perfect place to be on New Year’s Eve.  Located in the heart of the District, a mere two blocks from The White House, Central bustled with rich, festive, professionals arriving in their longest fur coats, giving way to the sleekest of black dresses/suits.

Humbled by my desperately small town ways, I was relieved when our waiter quickly alleviated the tension with his pleasant combo of succint professionalism and extreme politeness all lassoed in together with the perfect dash of informality.    The service was superbly infallible.  The best service I have received in my two star-eating life.  They served food from the right, and cleaned dishes from the left.  We ate the pre fixe menu for New Year’s and they brought new silver and plates for each of the five courses.  Water was filled dutifully with no pretention, napkins were refolded when one of us left our seats.  The service was a far cry from Asheville waitstaff, whose hipness borders on disdain and informality confuses the whole idea of service.  We eat out because we desire to feel special.  If we wanted to be treated like family, we would stay home and eat with them. 

Onward, to the the amuse bouche: Gougeres.  These cheeseball-sized gruyere cheese puffs were piled high in the delightful metal cone made for this exact occasion.  I bit into the warm flaky crust and my mouth was greeted with the steaming tanginess of gruyere.  This was too satisfying and far too fun to simply have one or two.   The bread was quite simply the most perfect French baguette I have ever put in my mouth.  Warm, rock hard floured crust gave way to a thick hearty, interior, full of holes that gracefully accepted freshly churned butter. 

Soup Course:  Mussel and roasted celeriac.  Also Carmelized duck and chestnut.  I began with an oversized bowl staring down its cavernous rim at six or so mussels, cubes of celery root, and chives.  Then a handsome man came and poured the liquid part of the soup onto the dry ingredients, thus commencing the soup course.  One bite of the sherry-based cream soup and my tongue conjured images of wet moss, clear, cold, clean salt water, and green fields in French countryside.  This soup was the most fabulous course of them all, and the mussels were breathtakingly plump and meaty.  In this moment, I felt completely and totally taken care of by Michel Richard.  Every single sensation was exactly according to his divine inspiration.  I silently praised this kitchen god before moving on to the next course. 

The foie gras parfait with apple chutney filled my mouth with light creaminess, like a savory and hearty whipped cream.  It was wonderful and paired exceptionally with the apple chutney and a thick triangle of toast.   The foie gras parfait disappaired in short minutes.  This is the one taste I continue to long for even though I’m days away from this meal. 

Our fish course was not as successful as the others.  The lobster in the ravioli was delicate tail, sweet and sumptious, but the ravioli was seated in a sauce I found both too sweet and too salty.  I could not place the sauce, it was a deep red, perhaps a beet-based sauce, but after two sticky bites I devoured the lobster and left the rest alone.  I still had two more courses to go, after all.

I tried the short rib with black bean sauce, and potatoes au gratin encased in a filo pastry crust.  The tender meat fell away from my fork with a forgiveness I knew would bode well.   The combination of flavors found in the chinese black bean sauce was the perfect marriage of sweet, spicy, and sour flavors that lended themselves well to the rib.  Although a little fatty for my taste, I found the dish to be wonderfully successful, especially alongside the crisped, delicate potato gratin creation.  My partner-in-extravagance ordered veal with mushrooms.  I ate more new types of mushrooms that night then I even knew existed, and each one offered a different experience of texture and flavor combination.  Some were more pungent than others, some were boyant and spongy against the teeth.  The sensations were exquisite.

My dessert was exactly what the doctor ordered:  an enormous platter of mixed berries with creme fraiche I could drizzle over them at will.  Each blueberry, raspberry, blackberry and strawberry was ripened just right and the clean finish rounded out the richness of my meal with a flourish.

As the Dust settled, I stood in my party dress, appraising Central for one final moment.  Staring into the bright kitchen, I saw order, excitement, skill, and commitment.  I saw passion.  I tasted it too, and was fully renewed. 

Next time you visit your capital city, get thee to Michel Richard’s Central.