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Ugly and also delicious – Pickled Pepper Pull-Apart Beef sandwich

Many people who grew up outside the South think that all Southern food is the same. But this is far from the truth. You can live one county away and your food experience and your definition of Southern food is completely different. Sheri Castle is my favorite Southern cook of that nature. I have known Sheri for many years. She is a fellow North Carolinian. She is a generous person and cook with a wry sense of humor and an extensive food knowledge of her Southern foodways. And those Southern food traditions differ in many respects from my southern food experience. One day, we are going ...

Forget the mess: This shepherd’s pie uses only one skillet

Despite its status as a classic comfort food, there's nothing comforting about the many steps and piles of dirty dishes that shepherd's pie usually requires. Using the cast-iron skillet as our sauteing, baking, and serving pan streamlined the process. We used ground beef as our base and added tomato paste, garlic, and thyme to bump up the flavor. Flour, chicken broth, and Worcestershire sauce were all that we needed to create a rich gravy, and a final addition of green peas added a pop of freshness. To give our potato topping necessary structure, we added milk, butter, and an egg. We ...

Discover the secret ingredient for creating a great chili

Ground beef chili is way more convenient than chili made with whole chunks of meat, but a truly great version requires a few tricks. To keep the meat moist and tender, we treated it with salt and baking soda. Both ingredients helped the meat hold on to moisture, so it stayed juicy and didn't shed liquid during cooking, which would water down the chili. We also simmered the meat for 90 minutes to fully tenderize it. We made a simple but deeply flavored homemade chili powder, bolstered that with canned chipotles, and cooked both in the fat rendered by the beef to bloom the flavors of ...

Our turkey meatloaf offers a lighter take on the classic

Don't overlook the benefits of a good meatloaf; though humble, it can be just the thing for a comforting meal, and leftovers make great sandwiches. Turkey meatloaf offers a lighter take on the classic, but because store-bought ground turkey is fine and pasty, it often comes out dense and mushy. To fix this, we exchanged the usual bread panade for quick oats, which added some chew and opened up the loaf's texture. Cornstarch, Parmesan, butter, and egg yolks enriched the turkey's thin juices and added more body. Because turkey's mild flavor is easily overwhelmed, we kept the other ...

Our creamy scalloped potatoes has a browned, cheesy crust

In our experience, most recipes for scalloped potatoes take hours of work yet still produce unevenly cooked potatoes in a heavy, curdled sauce. This version is faster than most and produces layer upon layer of thinly sliced, tender potatoes, creamy sauce, and nicely browned, cheesy crust. Simmering the potatoes briefly in heavy cream thinned out with milk before moving the production into a baking dish cut the cooking time significantly while also eliminating the risk of raw potatoes in the finished dish. A sprinkling of cheddar cheese and a mere 20 minutes in the oven were enough to ...

Cauliflower shows its versatility with Cauliflower Tots

There is no question that cauliflower has been having a long, popular moment. I was already a cauliflower fan, even a cauliflower lover, mostly favoring sliced and broken chunks of cauliflower tossed with a generous amount of olive oil, sprinkled with a liberal amount of salt, and roasted to a deep caramelized brown in a fairly high oven. My family can eat a baking sheet of that before dinner even hits the table. But geez, once people started realizing you could "rice" cauliflower — e.g., chop it into tiny rice-sized pieces — it blossomed into a true "thing." It can be used in stir ...