At the end of February, I went to the States for 10 days to participate in the Charleston Wine & Food Festival and to visit family and friends. Here I am (photo, left) with Katie Norris of the Junior League of Charleston, whose Charleston Receipts is one of the best community cookbooks ever assembled, continuously in print since it was publishe din 1950.
At the remarkable Thomas Rose house, I signed copies of my lowcountry book. We served my cheese straws and Oyster Benne Soup, inspired by a recipe in The Carolina Housewife of 1847. I hadn’t made the soup in several years and it was so delicious and so simple, I made it again the next day. I posted the recipe on the blog exactly four years ago today, on March 18, 2009. Which brings me to the real reason I don’t post more often: I’ve been blogging now for over 6 years, and since I am not writing cookbooks these days and living in Bulgaria with limited resources, I am not writing down everything that I cook. And though I try not to repeat myself too often in the kitchen, there are certain dishes that I return to again and again. The recipes have probably already been published here.
Take yesterday’s lunch, for example (photo, right): duck confit (which I keep on hand in the refrigerator) — the leg seared in a hot skillet and served over salad greens alongside beets and their greens and Tuscan style beans. Though I only serve confit a couple of times/year, I usually write about it when I do. Hence, if you go to the Google archive search on the right side of this page, you’ll find several references to confit on the blog. The beans are a local variety that Mikel brought back from one of his trips to see volunteers in the mountains. I had cooked them with a little bacon to serve with a Mexican meal I prepared on Friday night, but wanted more of a Mediterranean taste to accompany the duck, so I melted some onions and tomatoes in a skillet, strained the cooked beans, and tossed them with the tomato sauce. The recipe, which I first published in The New Southern Cook in 1995, appeared on the blog in September 2011.
I’ve also already written about the dearth of leafy green vegetables here in the Balkans, so any time I see any greens that aren’t spinach or cabbage (yes, I love them both, but that’s usually all I can find), I buy them and cook them. I even look for radishes with bright greens to cook! Needless to say, my heart skipped a beat when I saw these gorgeous, just-dug beets and their greens. Though the beets were large, their skins were very thin, and they cooked in less than 10 minutes, per a recipe I’ve published many times. The recipe is simplicity itself. You can find it on this blog page from November 2007. The one good thing about referring back to older blog pages is that you may not have been to that page before — and, in the case of November 2007, there are recipes for a pilau, a pie, a fish stew, a yeast bread, a rabbit dish, rack of lamb, two cakes, an ice cream, chile con carne, a candy, and black beans and rice, as well as the beets and their greens — among my ruminations.
In Charleston I was thrilled to see many old friends, customers, and colleagues — as well as my wonderful family members. At right, I’m laughing with some folks at the Thomas Rose House (1733), where I also had wonderful conversations with my old pal Kathy Purvis, the Food Editor of the Charlotte Observer, who reminded me that I had told her back in the late 80s or early 90s that heirloom crops — especially long-forgotten ones that were popular in Charleston and the South for hundreds of years — would be the next big thing! Kathy has a delightful new book about Pecans, recently released by our mutual publisher, The University of North Carolina Press. 
I was humbled by the praise that was heaped on me by dozens of chefs, writers, and food purveyors. Heather Ivey (left) and Brittney and Matt Miller of Manchester Farms Quail were exceptionally complimentary of my “groundbreaking” work. Nathalie Dupree shared the dais with me for a conversation about southern cooking in which she said that I was the first to take a regional cuisine within the South and put it into historical and personal perspective.
I was the first recipient of the Festival’s Lowcountry Legend Award in 2007. I cannot believe how huge the festival has grown and what a culinary powerhouse Charleston has become: 32 new restaurants opened in the city in the past year alone, and, from what I can tell, they’re all packed!
For me, though, the real joy was being with family and friends and dining at home. I only had a couple of meals out in 10 days. I had my Bulgarian friend Mila Ateva, the fashion designer, with me, and we ate at our hostess’s house several times, at both of my sisters’ homes, at my nephew’s, and at the homes of several friends. Mila quickly took to opening her own raw oysters at my sister Nancy’s house (Mila’s first taste of oysters had been the soup served at the booksigning)! I was impressed, because opening raw oysters is not child’s play, nor is it good for manicured nails!
We roasted oysters at the home of my dear friends Mary Edna Fraser and John Sperry, had smoked chickens at my nephew’s house, world-renowned Scott’s barbecue at my mother-in-law’s house in the Pee Dee region of the state, Chicken Country Captain and grits and shad roe and country ham and red eye gravy (among other southern specialties) at the home of Bessie Hanahan, crab cakes at my sister Sue’s, Bulgarian foie gras and wines at my wine guru Debbie Marlowe‘s marshfront home, and fresh shrimp and grilled green tomatoes on Tybee Island near Savannah with my buddies Dana and Scot. Dana drove from Georgia and my friends Chuck and Bruce flew in from Washington to see me. I have never felt so surrounded by love…and good food!
