TGICFS.

CFS and eggs at Arkie's Grill. © Ryan Schierling

Traditionally, TGICFS has been a weekend installment here at Foie Gras Hot Dog. There's just nothing better than clearing Sunday morning cobwebs with a cup of black coffee – and if I have my way – comforting the belly with a plate of chicken-fried steak and eggs.

I've been wanting to try the CFS at Arkie's Grill for a while now. The problem is, they're not bloody open on Sundays.

So, I took a mid-week morning for myself and snuck off after Julie went to work, just to give Arkie's a shot.

Situated in a well-worn Eastside neighborhood and surrounded by automotive, junk and machine shops, Arkie's Grill is an old-school, truck stop-type diner of the best sort. It looks like not much has been changed since they opened 64 years ago, and the menu offers tried and true classics – burgers, fried chicken, and daily specials with your choice of three out of four available sides (hint, you tell your waitress the one you don't want). Arkie's breakfast offering is what I came for, and while the chicken-fried steak doesn't best the Blanco Bowling Club Cafe for my number one spot, it is by far the tastiest CFS and eggs I've had in Austin proper.

Wiz Khalifa got
nothing on the table like
old school brown and white.

Give me your ugly, your lumpy, your misshapen...

Root vegetable-creamed linguini with bacon and parsley. © Ryan Schierling

…and I will make soup of them. Now, I realize you might be thinking "Wait a minute. That's not a picture of soup at all, it looks like some creamy, cheese-drenched pasta with bacon on it." You would be partially correct. It is not soup.

But it was.

Some of the best soups in my repertoire are straight from Crescent Dragonwagon's Dairy Hollow House Soup & Bread Cookbook. Her Spanish-style split pea is one of my all-time favorites, and along with Hungarian Green Bean and Potato, and Cuban Black Bean, I could easily be soup-satiated all winter long. Problem is, there hasn't really been a winter this year in Austin. Sure, it's dipped into the 30s for a day or two, but most of January we enjoyed mild 70-degree days. While our friends in Seattle were getting eight inches of snow last week, we were wearing t-shirts and flip-flops, harvesting lettuce and spinach from our garden. But this month's Snowmageddon in the Pacific Northwest made me remember another Seattle snow day... oh, way back in January of ought-seven.

"With flurries predicted for the following day, I made a list before I went to bed.

Fancy pants humble pie.

Galette with carrots, potatoes and spinach. © Ryan Schierling

This one time, I got an idea for a recipe... Yeah, sometimes talking about it feels a little less exciting after you've had a couple days of space from the process. But when you are in the midst of innovation, immersed in an idea and its possible variants and unable to shut off the running dialogue as you craft your dish, every little choice is a small thrill on top of the rush of simply making something new.

So, what's the story? I was possessed by the desire to make something kinda post-holidays thrifty, beautiful, vegetarian and main-dish worthy. Those poor veggies; they really do get short shrift sometimes when it comes to prime time on the plate. A true "entree" featuring vegetables is a tricky one to pull off without resorting to some form of a casserole. One elegant attempt that comes to mind all too clearly was a mixed vegetable pave I was once served for dinner on a wine train excursion. It was over a decade ago, but I remember it well because as lovely an idea as it was, it tasted terrible. I'm not sure exactly what was in it, but there were suspicions that it included some poorly-seasoned okra. The idea, however, was interesting to me.

Last year Ryan pulled out the mandolin and made a wonderful potato pave. I loved the structure of the layered potatoes, but I was thinking of something a little more rustic that incorporated more colorful vegetables – carrots and spinach – and that wasn't quite so time intensive.

Elements. © Ryan Schierling

The recipe below will flush out the technical details, but I want to note a few things that were important to me in the making of this galette. I could have used any kind of dough, but I wanted it to be distinctly savory, so I made it with 1/4 dark rye flour. It was actually the rye flour that inspired the cream cheese on top. (That and the fact that we had a copious quantity of it still in the fridge left over from the holidays.) Cream cheese and rye are a brilliant flavor combination. The tang of cream cheese also turns out to be a nice complement to the sweetness of the vegetables, and we found ourselves realizing more, not less, was the way to go.

The quality of the carrots makes a huge difference in a dish like this, so the best organic specimens you can find will be well worth it.

I've made this twice, now. The first time I used a recipe from our 1961 copy of Gourmet's Basic French Cookbook as a guide on the pie dough recipe.The second time I was considering using a pastry recipe intended for galettes that includes eggs, but I was so happy with how the first one turned out, I stuck with it. (One of these days I'll try it that way, though.) This is a relatively tall galette, however, and when you fold pastry dough full of butter like this over those high edges, it has a tendency to melt and slide down the sides a little before firming up. The second time I made it I wanted to go even taller, so I used the ring portion of a spring-form pan to support the sides through the first half of baking time. It was a little tricky, but worked out pretty nicely in the end to allow for a tall, if not a little more uniform around the edges, rustic pie.

Yeah, there are a couple of "fancy gadgets" I put to good use... But we're thrifty – both our food processor and mandolin were used finds we paid a fraction to acquire. The ingredients are downright elemental. This will easily serve 6-8 and shouldn't set you back more than about ten bucks.

Tasty hot or cold, I hope you enjoy this as much as we do.

Streak of lean.

The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Cookery © Ryan Schierling

The beginning of a new year is a devilishly potent time for reassessment. First, after the whirlwind that is the holidays, it's finally time to take a breath, reevaluate and regroup. Second, it's the one time of year you are forced to look back at your finances (if for no other reason, to file your taxes), consider your actions and examine your priorities for the coming year. If you keep record of your income and expenses using a computer, you may run reports which either highlight your budget achievements, or glaringly expose your weaknesses.

Little surprise, but our weakness is food. We are bad planners when it comes to meals, too. We indulge our cravings, and when we are inspired to cook something, we try to capitalize on that creative energy as immediately as possible. We don't typically buy expensive ingredients, but this habit of following our whim often prevents us from making best use of leftover ingredients. Too often we are on to the next fun thing before we've finished what we just made, and there are times our refrigerator looks like six people live here and cook completely independently.

Our disparate schedules further inhibit our ability to plan. We don't have your typical work week with regular weekends off together. In fact, it can be a week-to-week surprise. The one day we usually have free together is a day we would rather go out and play than plan detailed menus and budget for the week ahead.

When we long for more time to accomplish it all, we recognize in ourselves how deeply we value the traditional arts of homemaking or homesteading. Some things – like saving money by doing everything from scratch – have inherent rewards, but they really do take more time, availability and patience to fully commit to in an ongoing way. For example, we would love to have chickens and would enjoy stretching into more complex baking, but we limit ourselves to what we are confident we can do justice. Right now that means simply tending a generous but very low-maintenance herb garden, several pea-patch sized raised beds for vegetables and an old-school compost heap we call Marjorie. It is these simple connections we've cultivated which elevate our experience of food with little time and expense.

This week seemed the right time to pull our 1984 paperback edition of The Firefox Book of Appalachian Cookery off the shelf and take a few moments for a mental "reset." This is one of my most treasured cookbooks. Not so much for the recipes – though there is a recipe for vinegar pie that I'm planning to try – but for the stories. It is simply a wonderful read. Personal accounts of generations-old ways of growing, preserving and bringing food to the table are refreshingly told in their own words. I envy the riches of time and intimacy with these seasonal food preparations inherent in this way of life. And I am in awe of the tremendous work and unique skills required to get it right every year. The very thought of having a season's labor spoil is heartbreaking.

Thank you.

It's been a great year. © Ryan Schierling

2011 was our first full calendar year at Foie Gras Hot Dog, and what a fantastic year it was.

We ate bunny for Easter. I compared Rick Bayless to "Jenny from the Block." Our favorite chilaquiles were found at a gas station. We gussied up shit on a shingle and gleefully defiled potato pave. Julie regaled sugar cookies with rosewater. But most of all, we truly had a lot of fun.

(And, at the end of March, CNN's Eatocracy featured Foie Gras Hot Dog in their "blogger spotlight," allowing us to finally really get that photo of us drinking 40s on the curb out there. Our parents are SO proud.)

Here are the five most popular posts from last year, as determined by you, the readers. Thank you for everything, we truly appreciate it.

1. Olive Fillet. "At the intersection of family tradition and food culture, the occasional recipe oddity finds notable staying power. In my family that recipe is called 'Olive Fillet.'"

2. Chips, dips and dorks. "Your mother might tell you to get a dry packet of Knorr's or Lipton Onion Soup Mix and stir it up with some sour cream and mayonnaise, and I would promptly tell your mother to get bent."

3. Neapolitan Casatiello. "No, it is not Easter – and I am not Neapolitan – so, I have taken the liberty of re-appropriating this recipe for the New Year. Our Austin neighbors may be eating bowls full of black-eyed peas for good luck in 2011, but we are sticking to our tradition of eating eggs."

4. The Maximilian Affair. "The earthy heartiness of the blue corn tortillas, the sweet creaminess of the white refritos, the tangy richness of the tender chicken drenched in beurre blanc, and the textures and flavors of the white asparagus two ways... over the top? Absolument."

5. Bitchin' Bacon & Beef Bombs™."Bacon-wrapped stuffed jalapeños have been around since chest-thumping caveman times and there's no shortage of self-proclaimed brilliant recipes out there, with just about every filling incarnation you can think of – some type of soft cheese with... chives, crab, deviled ham, pimientos, pickled garlic, sundried tomatoes, Ortolan... whew."