Atlanta Underground Market 01/29/12

Towards the end of January we had another opportunity to participate in the Atlanta Underground Market. Unlike all the previous markets, including the one that we had done, this was going to take place on a Sunday at Brunch time. All the others had been Saturday evenings. We felt like whatever we may have learned about the diners' habits last time might be thrown out the window with such a change!

Piccalilli and Henderson's Relish

This next market took place in a Midtown location even more centralized than the previous. For this market we kept with the original charcuterie+offal plan and we upped the ante by one more dish for variety. Our charcuterie dish requirement could technically be met by any of the three dishes we did that night. The last job I had before leaving Chicago was at Pleasant House Bakery, an English themed savory pie shop on the Southside. So I chose a couple dishes I had done there. First was a sandwich of English Rashers (back-bacon) served on H&F BreadCo. ciabatta with a piccalilli, another saucy pickled vegetable topping that is popular across the pond. This sandwich is traditionally called a Bacon Butty. I was first exposed to it as such when I staged at St. John Bread & Wine in London (served there with ketchup, the piccalilli came on something different).

Atlanta Underground Market 01/07/12

In my research into Atlanta when Rebecca and I started considering a move to The South I came across a monthly event meant to bring home cooks to a common area to share their goodies. The Atlanta Underground Market was a place where non-licensed cooks could go and sell/share their treats with those who were willing to look past legal requirements and rules for selling food to the public. To do so, attendees had to sign a waiver agreeing that they knew what they were getting themselves in to. They couldn't hold anyone responsible for anything that might have gone wrong, and in exchange they got to try foods that might not have been available from regular restaurants around town. Organizer Michaela Graham was big on unusual foods (bugs, offal, etc) and was really pushing for those foods. But she seemed to find a plethora of baking goddesses instead!

We went to our first AUM in November. It was held in a church gymnasium in a near-south suburb of ATL. There was a good deal of everything available from the approximately 30 vendors there that night. A couple were already legal local restaurants and caterers, others were immigrants cooking their comfort foods and some were actually cooking up some offal dishes. I loved what I saw and enjoy (almost) everything we ate that night. We wanted in! After contacting Michaela and ironing out some details (she didn't want direct competition with her charcuterie guy though there were 3 cupcake-esque joints there that night) we were welcomed into the next event. Since we were going to be out of state for the next event, we signed up for the January date.

The Booth

Espana 2012

About this time two years ago, Rebecca and I were finishing up planning our honeymoon, set to take place right after our late May wedding. But as any of my regular readers know, those plans were cut short when I was in a pretty bad motorcycle accident exactly four weeks before the wedding. Besides many changes that have followed that accident, we also had to cancel our honeymoon. It was to be two weeks spent in the Northern half of Spain. I couldn't fly. Neither my tending physician nor my overall comfort would allow the 8+ hour flight. Plus driving, walking and general mobility were an issue, since I was on crutches. Did I mention heavy drugs and a major loss of appetite yet? Well, anyway, almost 2 years later, most of those problems have been remedied.

We flew into Barcelona on a Saturday morning. I hadn't slept a wink, and Rebecca got some shut-eye, but I don't think it could be called good sleep. We gathered our baggage and took a bus into town and found the apartment we rented. We spent the next 48 hours there eating tapas, drinking large cups of cafe con leche and small glasses of cerveza, touring the mercados and trying to communicate as well as we could since neither of us speak español.

One of many walls of ham in a Barcelona ham shop

Brined, Rubbed & Smoked Pork Rack

It might be funny to announce that about eight or nine years ago I gave up on eating pork (I should note that this excluded bacon and ham). It was the chops, shoulder steaks and other boring, white, dry and tasteless stuff. It wasn't any political move, a statement or anything of that nature. I had simply had enough of the crap. It was never juicy, tasty or good when unadorned. My mother was a busy woman and had never put much effort into going beyond the basic stuff that her mother had done: salt, pepper and a bottled sauce (A1 my favorite, BBQ, etc). But in 2003 I gained my first education on what CAN be done with pork. I saw marinades, brines and aggressive seasoning bring an aspect to the other, more boring white meat, that I had not experienced. The following year I spent most of a year in Western France and got to experience even more ways of treating this fabulous meat to give me an even larger repertoire of tastiness.

From across the room.

My maternal grandfather was a cook in the US Army. I never really asked him anything about it while he was alive. He'd occasionally make a crack about peeling potatoes, but that was all I really remember about him relating to food except for a few things I knew he loved to eat. He loved the fried catfish at Barney's, the BBQ at the Caboose, Buffalo Wings at Schooners (who doesn't love these?!), the Fried Chicken from the Grand Hotel and fried livers and gizzards, but I don't remember where he got those. But he didn't cook much at home. I do remember loving his huge batches of hamburger hash cooked up in an ancient seeming cast-iron skillet, something I always pictured him cooking for the ranks back during The War. Since I spent a lot of time at their place during the summers, there are two very distinct foods that always accompanied his quart of Busch as he swore at Andre Dawson or cheered on Ryne Sandburg (OK, we all know it was mostly swearing as any die-hard Cubs fan does, a lot). They were salted, roasted-in-the-shell peanuts and pork rinds. If you heard a bag being opened in the kitchen, you knew a small snack was at hand. But unless you were paying attention you didn't know which it was until Charlie took his first bite. And if it was pork rinds, you knew it from across the room.

These bizarrely shaped super-crunchy curls of deliciousness always intrigued me.
"What is a rind?"
"What part does it come from?"
"This can't really be the skin."

These days, when you buy a bag at the store a lot of them come with a small packet of hot-sauce. Clearly an influence of our central American population and their treatment of the "chicharron," though this wasn't the case back when I first started eating them. But as with so many things that once just had its place, the crispy bits of often discarded deliciousness, pork rinds seem to have been moved to a new status. Being seen on pork-centric and gastro-pub menus across the country, they are perhaps almost, chic? But I assure you, that with his white t-shirt and fatigue pants driving down the street in a woody-station-wagon, Charlie was not looking to set any trends!