Peanuts in Cheerwine?

Here in the sultry section of summer, apparently attention has turned to two Southern traditions: Peanuts in Co'Cola (or RC, or Dr Pepper, or Pepsi), and boiled peanuts.

First, Serious Eats has a blog post up about the great summer treat of pouring salted peanuts in your bottle of soda. They reach a few conclusions: Yes, it has to be a soft drink in a glass bottle; yes, it has to involve pouring in salted, roasted peanuts; and yes, people from areas other than "around here" find this behavior puzzling. Read it here.

Just as we were absorbing that, along came the James Beard Foundation's blog, Delights and Prejudices, featuring a recipe from Charlotte's Marc Jacksina (formerly of Lulu, currently of Halcyon) for boiled peanuts made with Cheerwine, Tabasco and some Asian touches such as star anise and mirin. Here's the blog post, and the recipe is below. (Seaweed in boiled peanuts, chef? I don't even want to know what gave you that idea.)

Cheerwine Boiled Peanuts

From Marc Jacksina of Halcyon Flavors of the Earth, for the James Beard Foundation.

4 cups raw (unroasted peanuts) in the shell
1 (3 by 5 inch) sheet kombu (dried seaweed)
2 tablespoons kosher salt
2 whole star anise
2 cups Cheerwine or other cherry soda
1 teaspoon mirin
1 teaspoon white soy sauce
2 dashes Tabasco

Combine the peanuts, kombu, salt and star anise in a large pot. Cover with water. Bring to a gentle boil and cook for 2 to 3 hours, adding more water as necessary to keep the peanuts covered.

Strain and shell the peanuts. (Discard the kombu and star anise.) You should be left with about 2 cups of peanuts.

In a clean medium pot, combine the shelled peanuts with the Cheerwine, mirin, white soy sauce, and Tabasco. Bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer and cook for 30 to 40 minutes, stirring often, until the liquid has reduced to about 2 tablespoons. Lay the peanuts on a parchment-lined sheet tray and cool. Store in an airtight container for up to 2 weeks.

Serious Eats loves food trucks in the Triangle

Sure, I wish this was a slide show about food trucks here in Charlotte. But we did lag behind for a while, although we have a great crop of food on the roll these days. But the Triangle is certainly ahead of us.

To prove it, the food site Serious Eats has a slide show up featuring food trucks that are mostly around Durham. There's a steamed dumpling food truck called Chirba Chirba (above)? Who knew?

Foodtruck slide show here.

And if the slide show makes you hungry, go here for The Observer's map of food truck locations around Charlotte. (The Tin Kitchen is usually lurking outside my office on Wednesdays. Mm, tacos.)

PHOTO: seriouseats.com

One Great . . . arugula pesto

The basil is jumping up, but it's not knee-high yet. But arugula is living up to its name, rocket. Time to change up your pesto game.

We get so used to pesto made with basil and pine nuts that it's easy to forget you can make it with other things. I spotted an arugula version on www.seriouseats.com last week and started thinking how perfect that would be. Arugula is so peppery that it can be too much in a salad with more delicate greens. But it's just right when it's combined with garlic, Parmesan and walnuts.

What to do with it? Just for starters, I can think of tossing it with pasta, spreading it on grilled chicken, using it as the base for a salad of chilled, cooked green beans or topping grilled baguette slices for bruschetta.

Arugula Pesto
From www.seriouseats.com.

2 cups arugula leaves, packed (I discarded the heavier stems)
1/4 cup walnuts
4 cloves garlic
1/3 cup of olive oil or a little more if needed
1/2 cup finely grated Parmesan
2 teaspoon lemon juice
About 1 teaspoon salt, or to taste

Place the arugula, walnuts and garlic in a food processor and pulse to chop. With motor running, drizzle in olive oil to form a moist paste. Stir in Parmesan, lemon juice and salt. (You might want to skip pepper, since arugula is naturally pretty peppery.)

Cover with a thin film of oil and cover tightly to refrigerate. Keeps about 3 days refrigerated.

Makes about 1 cup.

One Great . . . asparagus salad topping

Do I run too many asparagus recipes in the spring? Guilty as charged. With no apologies: Asparagus is one of those things that tastes fabulous when it's fresh and disappointing when it's frozen or canned. When it's in season, you have to eat your fill because it won't be back in season for 11 months.

Still, eating your way through that much asparagus can get a little repetitive. I've worked my way through several cooking methods -- microwave-steaming, oven-roasting, pan-braising. But what I wanted recently was a new way to top it.

I found just what I wanted on www.seriouseats.com, which in turn adapted it from Jacques Pepin: A really easy dressing with chopped hard-cooked egg. I made it for an impromptu dinner party this weekend and it was tempting to skip the asparagus and eat the dressing with a spoon. (The sauce made a lot, though: You could half the sauce ingredients and only use one or two eggs.)

Asparagus With Dijon Mustard Sauce and Hard-Cooked Egg

3 eggs
2 bunches thick asparagus, bottom ends trimmed or snapped off (about 1 pound)
1 tablespoon minced chives (garnish; optional)
Sauce:
1/2 cup mayonnaise
2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
2 tablespoons water
1 tablespoons red wine vinegar
Pinch of salt and a few grinds of freshly ground black pepper

PLACE the eggs in a saucepan and cover with cold water. Bring to a boil. Cover, remove from heat and let stand 16 minutes. Remove eggs to a boil of ice water or rinse to cool. Peel and roughly chop.

COOK asparagus however you like (it works great with this microwave-steaming method from Alton Brown: www.obsbite.blogspot.com.

MIX mayonnaise, mustard, water and vinegar in a small bowl and whisk to combine. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

ARRANGE asparagus spears on a platter or on salad plates. Spoon the sauce over them. Top with chopped egg and chives (if you're into garnishing).

YIELD: 4 servings.

PHOTO: Serious Eats.

Eating on the fly at Charlotte-Douglas?

If you're traveling during the holidays, the web site Serious Eats has a fun little slide show up, "Airport Food That Doesn't Suck."

It doesn't offer anything really unusual and certainly nothing high-end - One Flew South at Atlanta's Hartsfield didn't make the cut. But the focus here is on fast, cheap and reasonably satisfying, which is usually what most of us need in an airport. And they found picks at both Charlotte-Douglas International Airport and Raleigh-Durham International Airport, which is a nice perk for those flight-delayed days.

Go here to click through their picks. And yes, it's one of those slide shows you have to click through. Which does kind of suck.

Too much zucchini? Keep your cool

File this under "the most interesting recipe I saw before 9 a.m. today":

On Seriouseats.com, Max Falkowitz has a post on a novel way to take your revenge on all those zucchini: Zucchini Bread Ice Cream.

"When you've reached the point of zucchinipocalypse where even baking won't save you from the overrun, there's one last dramatic course of action to take. I'm talking about ice cream. Specifically, zucchini bread ice cream. It's a novelty to bust you out of zucchini malaise, and it's so good you may finally have the weapon you need to repel the invasion of the summer squash."


Falkowitz does not merely make zucchini bread and crumble it into ice cream. His method involves browning grated zucchini in butter, pureeing it with cream and spices and adding a glug of beer - yes, beer - to add that essential baked breadiness.

Sounds to me like the perfect thing to scoop on top of that other great zucchini-hider, the Mock Apple Pie.

Here's a link. And if you make it, please let me know if this idea is a keeper.

What we're reading in the food world

Looking around the online food world this morning:

• Is pimento cheese Southern? Charleston blogger Robert F. Moss offers a good look at the history at Al Forno (www.robertfmoss.com). And blogger Tim the Cheese Man ties the question to The Masters in Augusta. (Thanks to CNN's food web site, Eatocracy, for pointing out that link to the links, and to John T. Edge for tipping me off to Robert Moss.)
• While we're thinking about cheese, how do you make the best grilled cheese sandwich ever? Spread mayonnaise on the bread instead of butter. Francis Lam explains that and other grilled-cheese chef trucs at www.salon.com.
• Raise a toast to the debut of a new site at www.seriouseats: Serious Eats Drinks is dedicated to all things potable, from cocktails, wine and beer to coffee, tea and sodas. Today's offerings include a tasting of cream sodas.
• Where's the orange roughy at your Costco? www.change.org reports that mega-wholesalers Costco has agreed to cooperate with Greenpeace and pull 12 fish species that are fished unsustainably. Get the details here.
• And finally, David Leite wants to start a campaign to change the calendar. His reason: Making our food resolutions in January dooms our diets. See if you agree at www.leitesculinaria.

Serious eating with seriouseats.com

Taking a visitor out to lunch is one thing. Taking New York's Ed Levine out to lunch ought to be titled "Eats, Shoots and Leaves."

In the food writing world, Levine is one of the smart guys who makes the rest of us pay attention. He's a book author ("Pizza: A Slice of Heaven" and "The Young Man and the Sea," with chef David Pasternak, among others) and he used to write occasionally for The New York Times. He has an almost goofy love of anything that smacks of authenticity in food.

In 2006, back when the rest of us were still figuring out how to spell "blog," Ed came up with the idea for a very cool Web site called http://www.seriouseats.com/, which would pull together smart people who were posting all over the Web. He swears he had no idea what he was doing, but it worked. Today, it's a must-check stop in my daily Internet reading.

His experiment has done so well, he has a staff - "with paid health insurance," he says with pride - and now there's a book coming out on Serious Eats food finds all around the country.

Ed came through Charlotte on Friday to start a quick trip through North Carolina for book research. He was bound for Lexington, Chapel Hill and Raleigh. But first he wanted to do a little Charlotte exploring, so I agreed to play tour guide. His stated aims: Fried chicken and banana pudding. I love a man who knows what he wants.

Just before 11 a.m., we pushed through the door at Price's Chicken Coop and ordered up fried chicken, gizzards and cups of very sweet tea. We spread out on the trunk of my car in the parking lot while I did my best to explain the makeup of the SouthEnd neighborhood and the importance of crushed ice in a great cup of sweet tea.

Ed has chronicled his attempts to reconcile weight gain with the life of a food writer, and he is disciplined enough to only pick at his food. I had to save him from making the mistake of closing the Price's box without trying a thigh. He leaned forward to crunch through that crispy skin and erupting juice and made a very happy noise.

"That thigh," he admitted later, "was pretty transcendant."

We jumped back in the car and raced up North Tryon to the Chicken Box, another favorite of mine. His verdict: Great hush puppies, really good fried chicken. Different from the Price's chicken, he decided, but good. Before we could leave, he took pictures of the red rugs on the floor with the Chicken Box Cafe logos. "I just love rugs in restaurants. Don't you?" Actually, that's one aspect of food I had never noticed.

For the banana pudding, we went back downtown to Savor Cafe on Morehead Street. He seemed very happy with the banana pudding -- "so much real banana flavor" -- and the Coca-Cola Cake, but he was fascinated by the Open Kitchen across the street.

He kept admiring the colorful retro look of the place and reading the sign out loud: "The Home of the Pizza Pie." Before we could drive back to my office, we had to pull into the parking lot so he could shoot a picture and run inside for a peek and a menu.

In his heart, that's what Ed really loves in food. It isn't the latest star chef or the most precious bite. It's the real. The real is what he thinks is the best thing about food in America right now. As the economy staggers, what survives is what really makes people happy.

"People recognize places that feel good and are real and have good food," he said over a few careful spoonfuls of banana pudding. "There's more good stuff than bad stuff right now. Food culture in America isn't museum culture. It's a vibrant, living thing."

Creating Serious Eats, he says, has been a blast because it let him find a lot of young, creative people who are crazy in love with food. At 59, he's created a business that lets these young people dig into a whole new way of writing.

"They're eating chicken, they have paid health insurance and they're 25," he said, laughing. "I don't know what they're going to do in the future, but for now, it's pretty great."

Lent is coming faster than a bacon turtle

Just a little inspiration to start your Monday, from the Web site A Hamburger Today, via Serious Eats. You can avert your eyes, or you can find directions for the bacon turtle cheeseburger at http://klg2a.blogspot.com/