Charcuterie plate
Steak Diane: Certified Angus Beef®, wild mushrooms, Gruyère potato fondue, truffle peppercorn cream
Grilled Bavette Steak: Certified Angus Beef®, crab, squash, corn, chanterelles, sage brown butter
Tahitian Vanilla Crème Brûlée
Charleston Eats: Three Little Birds Cafe
Smoked salmon and goat cheese omelette
Mixed berry challah french toast
BBQ road trip
Had the opportunity to join my friends Michael, Andra and her husband Michael on a road trip to Scott’s Bar-B-Que up in Hemingway, SC, about 90 minutes north-ish from Charleston. We also met Andra’s dad there, who in the grand tradition of southern gentlemen, will quite happily tell stories and talk your ear off .
Like all the decent BBQ places, Scott’s isn’t much to look at, only open three days a week and is quite popular. Oh, and if you decide to go, bring cash. They don’t take debit or credit cards.
After an uneventful drive up SC 41, we arrived at this blue and white kind of dilapidated looking building with bins of watermelons for sale out front and the smell of smoke in the air.
Inside, there are drink coolers to the left, a few tables and the counter where you place your order to the right. Large metal buckets containing ziplock bags of fried pork skins tempt you while you stand in line to order.
At the counter, you can place your order by the pound or by the hog. You can even BYOH (Bring Your Own Hog) and they’ll smoke it for you. They do turkey and chicken too in case you don’t do pork. Lunch plates are available too, with coleslaw and baked beans.
I ordered one of the BBQ pork plates to eat there and two pounds of pork and a few chicken leg quarters to bring home with me for later. If you order the plate, you’ll get a lot of pork. The BBQ is tasty and their BBQ sauce is vinegary and spicy. Not quite as smoky as I thought it might be, but still very good. The BBQ pork was so good even the normally vegetarian Michael Maher dug in.
We stayed for about an hour or so enjoying BBQ, listening to Andra’s dad tell stories and watching the line of people coming to get BBQ get longer. Eventually it was time to hit the road and head on back. On the way back, Michael, who is a big railroad fan, decided to stop at an old train bridge to get some pictures. It made for a nice little photo op and I came away with some pretty decent shots.
Check out the rest of my pictures from our little BBQ road trip adventure.
Adventures in Coffeeland
I have never really been much of a coffee drinker. Cafeteria coffee got me through exam week all-nighters and thesis writing during undergrad and grad school, but aside from that, drinking coffee was just a very rare thing I did when other primary caffeine sources were unavailable (or too much work to obtain).
Lately, driven mainly by late nights staying up trying to write papers, the easy availability of freshly roasted coffee beans (as in still-warm-from-roasting fresh), a recent introduction to the Aeropress and my usual curiosity, I’ve taken to experimenting with coffee the same way I experiment with new food recipes.
Having a couple of coffee shops within walking distance of the house hasn’t helped either.
I’m still pretty much a coffee noob. For the most part, there really aren’t a whole lot of differences between different beans or roasts at this point. Depending on how long this current coffee fixation lasts, that will probably change.
The latest thing I’ve been playing with is iced coffee, and the Aeropress makes it super easy to do. Following the coffee:water proportions used in the CoffeeGeek guide produced a pretty decent cup. Add chocolate milk and it’s a cup full of yum. Perfect for those hot days.
I also experimented with a small batch of cold brewed coffee yesterday. It was about 60 g of a fairly dark roast coffee to 250 mL water that I used for my first batch. Put it into a jar, stirred it a few times and let it sit for about 12 hours. Ended up with a pretty potent brew that had me buzzing for most of the morning, but wasn’t too bad. A little bit of bitterness from the dark roast, but not horrible.
Now I’m out of coffee beans and need to restock before I can experiment some more.
Charleston Eats: The return of Steak-Out
When I first started working at MUSC, deliveries from a place called Steak-Out were pretty common. I’d see someone making a delivery almost daily to some place in the hospital. Seemed pretty popular.
And then it stopped. Don’t recall when it happened, but one day the deliveries just stopped and their location on Savannah Highway (near Andolini’s) went dark. That little building served as home to a few different businesses over the intervening years, including a BBQ joint and a little catering/take-out operation.
Now it appears they’re back, and (I think) in the same building. After a friend mentioned it was there, I drove by to look. Couldn’t tell if it was actually open yet, and the website doesn’t list it as a location so it may not be officially open (or just hasn’t made it to the website yet).
Maybe the Steak-Out delivery guy will become a fixture at MUSC again.