What's it Really Like to Be The Chef?

Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Considering how often intermediate-to-advanced home cooking can be hit or miss for me, chefs are a reassuring presence, especially chefs as talented as the Wrecking Bar’s Terry Koval. His Baby Collard Kimchi is a gift to us all, and his menu overfloweth with food from some of the area’s best farms, so I was thrilled to see him featured on the Be the Chef series. His Pork Chops over Field Peas & Carrots with Coffee BBQ Sauce & Chow Chow is a wonderful combination of earthy, sweet, and vinegar-y flavors. 

These CARROTS, you guys. I usually only like them when they’ve been boiled into oblivion within the murky, brothy waters of a vegetable soup but these carrots were 1) adorable, 2) grown at Truly Living Well, a real jewel in Atlanta’s urban agricultural crown, and 3) incredible flavorful when roasted as SUGGESTED. Plus I got a bunch of cute little carrot tops to throw into my vegetable scrap bag for stock! (If you’re not keeping a vegetable scrap bag, welcome to a new, enlightened age! Save your veggie scraps in a ziplock bag in the freezer. Next time you want to make homemade soup - dump that bag in a pot and you're on your way to homemade stock heaven.)

The rest of the ingredients were also top-notch: pork chop from Riverview Farms, peas from Southeast Georgia farmer/superhuman Relinda Walker of Walker Organic Farm, onions from D & A Farm—some mighty talented farmers made this meal great, no doubt.

Despite a redneck culinary lineage that spans many types of vegetables suspended in brine, I’d never had Chow Chow, and Doux South’s was a slightly sweet, flavorful way to start. Even the coffee in the barbecue sauce, from Octane was local! But #realtalk I was a little nervous about the coffee BBQ sauce, because I’m not always the most avant-garde eater. And guess what? It was really, really good and complemented the sweetness in the sauce perfectly. Which highlights another reason for relying on the experts at Garnish & Gather: they know what they’re doing. I never would have put all this stuff together, and it was great.
A few nights later, Danielle and I went to the Wrecking Bar to see how the pork on Koval’s menu compared to the meal from earlier in the week. And between you and me, I’m going to give Koval the edge on cooking pork—I’m still a newbie to the art of the sear. But the sauce was just as flavorful, and makes an excellent addition to a perfectly roasted carrot. Trust me.