Much to be Said for Fat

Bacon, lard, and fried chicken. It would be acceptable to ask, what's not to love? We finally made our decadent fried chicken meal. The idea was to take selected recipes from the January 2008 Gourmet and turn them into a true feast for the southern senses. It only took months to get it scheduled with folks who could truly appreciate it: a guy from Arkansas and his partner who spent years in Texas. Okay, so Texas isn't really the south but that's okay for me. This is not the sort of meal you cook for the two of you. You need a bit of a crowd, or 5 of us. at least.

The menu:

Buttermilk fried chicken
Crispy buttermilk biscuits (yep, with lard)
Green beans with ham hocks
Bacon cream gravy
Strawberry rhubarb pie (not from Gourmet but from the local Bipartisan cafe - a place known for a number of things but especially their pies)

The buttermilk fried chicken marinates overnight in buttermilk, onions, and seasoning. The bacon gravy is essentially bacon cooked up crispy so you get a good amount of fat. You save the bacon to garnish the chicken with (let's see fried bacon on fried chicken). You use the fat from the bacon to make a roux and then add milk and pepper to get this really nice creamy, peppery, bacon gravy.

The key to the biscuits is getting good lard and don't overdo anything: i.e. working in the milk or overkneading it. We get our lard from Viande, a local butcher who renders their own. I didnt realize until too late we didn't have a normal biscuit cutter. So, we had giant biscuits but no one seemed to mind!

The one real departure in the recipes I made was with the green beans. You're supposed to cook the ham hocks and green beans together for well over an hour. I cooked the ham hocks for about an hour and then added the green beans as I really didn't want to cook the green beans to within an inch of their little lives. This rendered really tender and rich hammy flavors while the green beans maintained some semblance of being a green bean. Great flavors all around.

I won't bother including the recipes here but suffice it to say that the January 2008 Gourmet focus on southern recipes is one of the best they've ever produced. Pick it up used or go to their website www. gourmet.com and just start experimenting with what's there. Sure, you'll have to jog an extra 5 miles or so to afford the calories, but you'll find the rewards worth it.