A Barbecue Primer in the Key of G

You can read a ton of books about barbecue and all its regional variations. But here's all you really need to know:



Thanks to Kevin Johnson of Anson for the tip.

New(ish) Blogs

Matt Bolus, who recently bought Red Sky out on Seabrook Island, has a four-month-old blog called Thyme for Food.

David Heiser, the film and restaurant critic for the George Street Observer, the College of Charleston's campus newspaper, has been blogging for a while now over at DavidGHeiser.com.

Garden & Gun

I've been rather impressed by the relatively-new periodical Garden & Gun, which was launched last year by the parent company of the Charleston Post & Courier newspaper. While it's not specifically food-focused, there are plenty of culinary features and sidebars, like a recipe from Donald Link of Herbsaint and Cochon restaurants in New Orleans for a Bloody Mary that includes (that's right!) pork broth. Or, a feature on mail order Southern products that includes two of my personal favorites--Anson Mills grits from Columbia and Benton's bacon from Madisonville, Tennessee.

There are some heavy hitters writing for this outfit, like Rick Bragg, Clyde Edgerton, Reynolds Price, Jack Hitt, and a guy named Jimmy Buffett, who I think also moonlights as a singer/songwriter. And there's a fine meditation by Roy Blount, Jr. on corn. Any one who quotes old Hee Haw jokes is good in my book.

Fake Restaurants

By my count, there are at least two national TV commercials in which some lowbrow fast-food joint fakes having a "nice restaurant" that serves its food. First it was Hardees, with their "FakeRestaurant.com" bit, where they try to dupe innocent patrons into shelling out $14 for a cut-rate Hardees Thickburger. Hot on their heels, Pizza Hut pretended to serve its pasta at a white tablecloth bistro and captured diners' reactions on film.

Pizza Hut's version turns out to be even more complicated--a triple-fake-out that involves at least three different restaurant names, as explicated over at Population Statistics.

Not to be outdone by its fastfood rivals in mocking hapless consumers on air, Burger King has released as series of "Whopper Freakout" commercials where the restaurant isn't fake, but innocent patrons are lied to on camera just to catch their reaction.

But this trend isn't limited to U.S. restaurant chains. Wine writer Robin Goldstein recently staged a fake Italian restaurant in order to gull Wine Spectator into a questionable award-for-pay brouhaha.

And then Ruby Tuesday's faked blowing up a fake restaurant that they pretended they thought was a Ruby Tuesday's.

Get real, fellas.

Palmetto Pit BBQ

Moneyhun's Oink out on Clement's Ferry Road had some pretty darn good barbecue, but apparently it wasn't cutting it on the business side. After a brief closure, the spot has reopened under new management and the name "Palmetto Pit."

The basic setup remains the same, and the barbecue and sauces are a little different but still pretty good. I do miss Moneyhun's sweet onion slaw and fresh-made barbecue beans, though.

The Palmetto Pit is open just for lunch for now, and starting Sept. 15th they'll be going to an all-you-can-eat buffet approach. Let's hope they can make a go of it: Charleston can use all the good barbecue joints it can get!

More Food History Graphs

I'm a sucker for historical food consumption data. Beyond Blueberries has a nice selection of data from the recently-updated USDA Economic Research Service's Food Availability (Per Capita) Data System.

Capsule summary: meat's up, grain's down, and fats and oils just keep on rising.

Pig Cuttin'

For those of you who aren't freaked out by seeing food in a close-to-natural state, Sean Brock has some great pics of his crew butchering and curing a 260-pound Spotted Poland China pig down at McCrady's.

Lost in the Icebox

My refrigerator is generally pretty orderly, since I tend to throw out food when the expiration date is passed and/or it's starting to look mushy, fuzzy, or dangerous. (This is not native behavior, The Wife will attest, but a result of domestication.)

The freezer is a different story. It's an icy Sargasso Sea of old leftover meals, odd chunks of variety meat, vegetables, tubs of duck fat, and bags of heirloom grains. I know it's impossible, since we moved into this house just a year ago, but some of the meat looks downright prehistoric.

So, today, out it all came onto the kitchen counter for a good sifting and sorting:



About a third of it went into trash, and the rest is now back in the freezer, fussily arranged on the little racks (it's one of those side-by-side models with four wire basket/racks). Meat on the bottom, vegetables and grains next, then premade food and leftovers, and miscellaneous stuff like bread and sauces on the top.

The good news: I discovered I have several weeks worth of meat on hand. The bad news: two weeks from now it will be a complete disaster again.

Workin' Out, Sorta

As soon as I stepped into my room at the Westin Crown Center in Kansas City, I knew there had been a mistake. It was a large room--some sort of suite, so I couldn't complain about that. But the whole broad end of the room by the big plate glass windows was filled with . . . some sort of bizarre, Rube Goldberg-like machinery.



Upon closer inspection I determined that they were not in fact cruel instruments of torture but rather high-tech exercise equipment, of all things: a treadmill, a medicine ball, some adjustable-weight dumbbells, and some sort of big rubber workout ball that I'm not quite sure how one would use. It appeared that I had been booked into some sort of "fitness suite."

Or, as the Westin people call it, the WestinWORKOUT(R) Room, where you can "recharge yourself on your own time, in your own room."

I have no problem with people who follow a rigorous exercise routine when on the road, even if I never quite manage such discipline on my own. Going for a jog in a new city is probably a great way to take in the scenery, and if the weather is bad or you're booked into one of those dreary motels off an Interstate exit, I can see how some laps in the indoor pool or a quick workout on the stairclimber in the hotel gym would go a long way toward keeping off those extra pounds despite three restaurant meals a day.

But isn't having the exercise equipment right there in your room just a tad excessive?

In their delightful 1975 phillipic The Taste of America, John and Karen Hess lamented the "solitary drinking" that seemed an epidemic within the rooms of "hotels that advertise 'free guest ice' on every floor'". It's a marked contrast to the nominally-sociable practice of boozing it up in the hotel bar, where there's at least an outside chance of actually interacting with similarly bored and/or lonely traveling souls.

The WestonWORKOUT(R) room seems the early 21st century's version of solitary hotel-room drinking: solitary hotel-room exercising. A depressing metaphor for the Bowling Alone generation.

I must admit, though, that the treadmill did come in handy. The handrails served quite nicely for hanging my suit pants at the end of the day when I changed into jeans for a visit around the corner to Gates BBQ.

A few hours later, as I lay on the bed stuffed full of hickory-smoked brisket, pork ribs, and ham, I suppose I took some small comfort in knowing that if I woke up at five a.m. with an overwhelming urge to exercise I had a handy treadmill just two steps away.

I woke up at seven, feeling quite fine.

BBQ Odyssey

Two guys from up north are blogging their way through a week-long barbecue odyssey across the South in a rented Toyota Prius. They hit Charleston yesterday and took in Melvin's. Next stop is Macon . . .