I write all the time about what a great food town Charleston is. It’s mostly because of the food (but also because of the beach, and yeah, ok, fine, because of our friends, and the beauty of this old city) that I’m so sad to be moving. I’ve been working on a list of all the restaurants (using The Charleston Chef’s Table as a sort of guide) we’ve tried here and all the ones I’ve been meaning to try, and thought I’d make it a post, and perhaps it’s own page on this site. So, if you look up top, there should be a new tab of Charleston Eats where I list most restaurants I’ve heard I should check out, with ones we’ve actually tried checked off. Sometime when I’m feeling really ambitious, I’ll write up blurbs about all of them, but for now you just get a list. It’s amazing to me how long it is, how many we’ve tried, and how many we have yet to try. It’s also amazing how many other places aren’t even on the list– this is just a serious food town, and if you like to eat, I recommend coming here for at least a week and trying to eat your way through it.
buy our house!
Just putting this out there on the interwebs in case anyone knows anyone looking for an adorable house in Charleston, SC. Our 1948 2 bed/1 bath bungalow is just around the corner from one of the best restaurants in Charleston (the Glass Onion), is very close to a brand new Harris Teeter grocery store, is 4 miles from MUSC (where my husband bikes to work each day) and down town (where I work, a quick CARTA bus trip away), and is 15 minutes from Folly Beach. We have loved this house and put a lot of work into it, and hope the next owners love it as much as we have.
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snow in the southland
Last night Charleston got some snow. It’s pretty much the first snow that’s “stuck” in like 20 years. Even though we’ve seen PLENTY of snow in my husband’s home state of Colorado, we were giddy and excited like kids. I thought I’d share some photos.
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puddin’ head
The last time my mother was in town, we took her to The Hominy Grill, one of our favorite Charleston restaurants, and a media favorite too– I know Anthony Bourdain and Alton Brown are big fans. We told her she absolutely had to try the chocolate pudding, as it was the best we’d ever had. So thick it’s practically ganache, so rich it’s practically deadly, and so dark it bears almost no relation to the milk chocolate pudding cups most of us carried in our school lunchboxes, it’s one of the best desserts I’ve ever had. It’s also one of Alton Brown’s picks for “Best Thing I Ever Ate,” as our waitress told us when we were there with my mother. Alton knows his stuff. This is pudding so good, Jon got a little embarrassing mmmmm-ing and ahhhh-ing in what was basically a chocolate pudding-gasm at the table, right there with my mother in the middle of the most polite city in America.
Today, I got a hankerin’ for some Hominy Grill chocolate pudding and thought I’d use Google to find something similar. But it turns out it’s not a closely guarded secret, and I found a .pdf of the Hominy Grill chocolate pudding recipe from local food writer Holly Herrick (I just got her Charleston Chef’s Table cookbook and her Southern Farmers Market Cookbook, so check those out!). It came out absolutely delicious, and a chocolate pudding-gasm definitely ensued. Because I couldn’t find the recipe in easily linkable form, I thought I’d reproduce it here. It seems to have been originally published Jan. 5, 2008 in the Charleston Post and Courier.
Hominy Grill Chocolate Pudding
chef Robert Stehling
- 8 ounces dark, Belgian bittersweet chocolate, chopped
- 1/2 cup sugar
- 6 egg yolks
- 4 cups heavy cream
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
Reserve chocolate in a large bowl. Separately, whisk 1/4 cup sugar into egg yolks. Mix remaining sugar with cream and vanilla in medium saucepan and bring to a boil. Pour a little hot cream into the bowl with the egg yolks and whisk, then pour the remainder of the cream over the chopped chocolate, stirring with a spatula until smooth. Add the egg yolk mixture and salt, and then strain into a pitcher. Refrigerate to cool.
Pour into 2/3 cup ramekins (I have no idea how much my ramekins hold, but it ended up being 8 ramekins full), place ramekins in a shallow pan half filled with water (water bath) and cook at 300 degrees for about an hour. Chill for at least 3 hours before serving (we ate ours after only an hour and it was still delicious), and serve with a fat dollop of fresh whipped cream.
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CSA Charleston: we used it all this week!
Another delicious week with our Pinckney’s Produce CSA!
This week our box included:
- 2 heads lettuce
- 1 bunch kale
- 1 bunch collards
- 5 gigantic carrots
- 1 bag field peas
- 2 heads broccoli
- 5 radishes
- 5 ears corn
- 2 acorn squash
- 4 bell peppers
- 6 tomatoes
- 1 pie pumpkin
- 3 ears decorative corn
Click on through to see what we did with it all! Continue reading “CSA Charleston: we used it all this week!”
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octohhhber
Charleston in the summer can be pretty brutal. The humidity in the air gets so thick you can literally see it in a haze around the moon. Temperatures rise into the high 90s and stay there for weeks. Months. At least we have the beach! we say. When friends from outside the South come to visit and marvel at the oppressiveness of our summers, the way the water in the air seems to cling to every cell of exposed skin, the impossibility that it’s not somehow literally steaming what with the wet and the heat. Oh but you should be here in October, we say. October is the best month of the year.
Last weekend it was 88 degrees and we were out at Folly Beach. But October was coming, sneaking up as leaves began to fall in fits and starts, one at a time from the trees. My dog Bessie snatches this falling foliage like it’s a snack, dropping like manna from heaven, but she also enjoys eating grass and vegetation of all kinds, so shes’s a weirdo. October was coming.
And indeed it did. On the verrrrry last day of September, the temperature suddenly cooled off, to the point that I had to break out a cardigan to wear on my commute. Right on schedule, October has arrived. And it is glorious. I feel like a Romantic poet all stirred and uplifted by the beauty of my environment. If I weren’t such an awful poet (truly), I’d be composing sonnets on what happens as September sets and October rises like a harvest moon. Instead I’m daydreaming about bike rides that don’t end with me flopped in a sweaty heap under the living room AC vent, the dogs licking the salt off my skin as I swat them away, laughing at their tickling tongues. I’m thinking about oyster roasts, as they say the season is finally back in full swing. I’m itching to go camping, maybe on the beach, maybe up in the mountains where we might actually see some fall color. I’m wondering when is too soon to bring the boxes of sweaters down from the attic, afraid of a last gasp of summer that might try to hang on, and keep me in sundresses and flip flops. I’m eagerly anticipating what fall goodies will be showing up in our CSA box, though slightly worried it might be an endless stream of mustard greens and beets. I’m watching for my tan, accumulated over beach weekends since April, to start to fade. I’m looking forward to October.
Ohhhh, October is here.
erniebufflo's south & west kitchen 