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Food Thread: Pigs Feet For The Win!

That might look a bit weird, but damn! It was delicious. It is a block of pâté made from pigs feet that was breaded very lightly and then pan-fried. That other stuff is a horseradish cream that went perfectly with the rich meat.

Wow. I ordered it not knowing whether it was going to be glorious, or a cold blob of pork jelly with a trotter in the middle of it. Which I have seen!

The best thing about this dish is that it isn't particularly complicated. Making a pâté is surprisingly easy, and frying it is simple. The horseradish cream is also straightforward, but what makes this dish special is that somebody A) thought of it, and 2. executed it extremely well.

That's what most good cooking is...attention to detail and a bit of imagination.

Simple!

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The small restaurant group that runs Fallow and a few other restaurants in London is run by a pair of English chefs (along with a money guy) who are talented in the kitchen and surprisingly good at making cooking videos. Their successful restaurants allow them the flexibility to do all sorts of fun videos, and this one, dedicated to the best chicken fricassee one can make, is a hoot!
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Aside from the uncomfortable reality that I can eat a couple of massive bowls of beans and rice at one sitting, it is a glorious food! My preference is black beans, but red beans will work quite well thank you very much! Red Beans And Rice With Pickled Pork sounds very interesting, especially since I have no idea what pickled pork is!
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Most people don't obsess over wine, and that is healthy and wise. It is, after all, just a drink. You know...like the .45ACP is just a cartridge.

But if you do obsess, and that is my personal recommendation, expanding your horizons is going to pay off quite well indeed. It's easy to fall into the rut of buying the big names in wine grapes: Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay and Pinot Noir and Zinfandel and Sauvignon Blanc and few others. Chosen well they are very good wines, and at the top of the wine game they can be absolutely incredible.

But most people don't drink the top wines very often, especially on a hectic Tuesday night eating a quick meal before you take one of the brats to his travel game or have Back-To-School night.

That's when looking bast the big names is a good plan. Those grapes may make excellent wine, but they carry a premium because of their fame, and at the low end of the range they can be thoroughly mediocre, soulless wines that are just a step above crap cooking wine. Sadly, that evaluation often extends into the pricier ones!

Trying a less well-known grape can pay dividends, because the grapes themselves are less expensive, and since the grapes are only a part of the total cost of the wine, the winemaker often gets better quality grapes and still brings the wine in at a competitive price. So the $15 Cabernet that is made from mass-market grapes grown on an industrial scale can't compete with a supposedly lesser grape that is nonetheless higher quality.

Give it a shot!

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I want to like eggplant. Really! But aside from baba ghanoush, I find it sort of...meh. Oh, I'll eat it in Eggplant Parmigiana or Chicken Sorrentino or crispy fried with some tasty sauce. But it's just not that exciting!

So, while I really want to think that Crispy, Oven-Fried Eggplant is going to change the way I see eggplant, I doubt very much that it is anything other than a small evolution of a boring food.

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The great garlic experiment of 2025-2026 was a resounding...meh. Send all of your excellent home-grown garlic to: cbd dot aoshq at gmail dot com.

About the Bourbon Bubble...I think it has burst, but the category is also suffering from the inflation that affected everything else (Thanks Biden!). I think the sweet spot is still $40-$60 for excellent and interesting bottles, and bumping that to $100 gets you an incremental improvement in quality, but nothing mind-blowing. More than that and I think you are paying for hype and rarity, which may look good in your liquor cabinet, but doesn't translate to more quality in the bottle.

The problem...or the solution...is to buy lots of bourbon, take tasting notes, and eventually arrive at your favorites! It should take forty or fifty years, but it is worth it!