Biscuits and Gravy is such a classically Southern dish. It was a staple at my house growing up and whenever I am around it now, I unabashedly ask for seconds. Recently, I have been enamored with all things bacon and thought that Bacon Gravy might just be divine!
When I set out to write this recipe, I knew that I wanted it to stand out among other bacon gravy recipes and I wanted it to be elegant enough to entertain. I started playing with different flavor profiles and found foodie bliss in Maple Bourbon Bacon Gravy. The bacon is salty and the maple and bourbon play off its smokiness. The half and half adds an elegant touch and leaves you with a gravy that is creamy and decadently delicious.
Ingredients
1 LB Maple Bacon
4 Tablespoons of your favorite bourbon
1 Tablespoon of Salted butter
1 Tablespoon of Flour
2 Pints of Fat Free Half and Half
Instructions
Start with your essentials; Bacon, Bourbon, Butter, Flour, Half and Half and a Maker’s and Diet in J Charles monogrammed glass.
Cut 1lb of maple bacon into lardoons and cook until crisp.
Remove bacon from Pan and drain bacon fat.
Return pan to heat and deglaze with 2 tablespoons of bourbon. Once it has reduced slightly, return bacon to pan and add the last two tablespoons of bourbon. Cook until all bourbon is absorbed by bacon and remove from pan.
In same pan, add 1 tablespoon of salted butter at a medium heat.
Once butter has melted, add 1 tablespoon of flour and stir for 1-2 minutes until flour is cooked through.
After flour is cooked, slowly add your pints of Fat Free half and half, while stirring.
Simmer half and half over medium heat until it is reduced by half. About 10 – 15 minutes. If it over reduces, add a little milk and it should thin out.
Add bacon, stir and serve over your grandma's homemade biscuits!
Ina Garten is a girl after my own heart. Her recipes are
elegant, delicious and possess a wow factor that can make any southern hostess
look like a master chef.
Photo credit www.amazon.com
While I was living in New York City, I had the opportunity to attend the
book signing for her new cookbook Foolproof. At the book signing, we were
treated to an hour long conversation where she discussed flavor profiles, frying latkes in clarified butter, Union Square Cafe (it IS as amazing as they say) and her fabulous new cookbook! Ina is even more adorable in
person and her friends from her show, Barefoot Contessa, were there to cheer
her on; it was so sweet!
Please excuse the grainy picture.
Ina's signature
While this is not a southern cookbook, it centers around
entertaining which southerners love to do! With recipes like Cosmos with fresh
sour mix and Crab Strudel, you will have your guests impressed for weeks! She also includes a cake that features Maker’s Mark bourbon in this cookbook...did I mention she was a
girl after my own heart?
Some of her recipes could even be considered southern! For an
updated twist on a southern BBQ staple, give her Lobster & Potato Salad a
try. You could also turn her Jalapeno Cheddar Crackers into cheese straws, a southern cocktail party favorite. And why not try frying your fried green tomatoes in clarified butter for an added touch of glamour and elegance?
Her recipes are always simple, easy to follow and full of fresh
ingredients and the recipes featured in Foolproof are no exception. To gild the lily, Ina provides foolproof menus, tips for cooking and elegant table settings. I recommend this cookbook to all who love entertaining.
As the weather heats up and the colors get brighter, I'm feeling inspired by all thing summer, particularly those little pieces of the season that are distinctively Southern or distinctively Kentucky.
Recently,
I found myself working on a piece of fiction. For reasons that aren't really important, a
small portion of the prologue took place in Atlanta. I found myself struggling, because while I
have been to that city several times, I don't really "know" it.
Part of me said that I should just keep
plugging along, because the setting itself didn't really have any bearing on
the plot of the piece. I could email one of a dozen friends -- a few of
whom even contribute to this blog-- and familiarize myself enough with the
neighborhood bars/restaurants/boutiques that I would need to populate the pages
of the story. And yet, it didn’t feel
authentic. It wasn’t set in a city like
Nashville or Louisville – someplace where I had lived and that I knew well. It wasn’t set in a city like
Lexington—someplace that I had grown up visiting so many times that I didn’t
need a map when I finally moved there.
The entire scene just felt flat, and I soon abandoned that portion of
the story.
I
am a writer. I am from Kentucky. Does that make me a “Kentucky writer”? Does that mean that I need to give all my
essays and short stories a Kentucky setting? I’ve
struggled with variants of this question for years. Is it absolutely crucial for me, as a writer,
to limit my writing to Kentucky or the South?
Often,
I think, a writer, painter, or songwriter’s incorporation of a region into her
work is crucial to the work itself. The August/September issue
of Garden and Gun magazine was devoted to Southern Women. It was a charming retrospective of the role
of the postmodern Southern Belle. As I
thumbed through the pages of this issue, I noticed a portrait of a couple of
Southern-based artists whose work I happen to know quite well. There was Joy Williams, the female voice in
the Nashville-based duo The Civil Wars,
and Emily Giffin, the litigator-turned-chick
lit-maven, who lives in Atlanta. Because
I enjoy the work of both Ms. Williams and Ms. Giffin quite a bit, I found
myself a little perplexed. Ms. Williams
is a California-born singer. Ms. Giffin is
from Illinois, and lived for many years in New York and London. Yet, I would classify Ms. Williams’ roots-Americana sound as perfectly in keeping with the funky, post-country ethos of her adopted
hometown of East Nashville. On the other
hand, while Ms. Giffin attended some of the finest schools in the South and currently
lives in Atlanta, her novels are generally set in New York, Boston or
London. Her only novel with a Southern
setting is told from the point of view of a character who generally hates the
South. While I truly enjoy Ms. Giffin’s
fun and romantic stories, this hardly seems the work of a “Southern Belle” to me. At the very least, she's hardly the Southern writer that Kathryn Stockett (also featured in this article) is.
A
few weeks ago, University
of Kentucky professor Nikky Finney
was honored with the National Book Award for poetry. Her powerful acceptance speech referencing
the advances made by African-Americans in the South in recent decades has become
something of an online phenomenon, and rightly so. As an alumna of the University, I was
thrilled to see such an incredible award being presented to such a wonderfully
deserving talent. Ms. Finney’s works evoke
the memories of her coastal Carolina childhood far more than her Lexington
professorship. Stories of shrimpers and
tides are far from the Bluegrass landscape.
And yet, Ms. Finney plays a driving role in Kentucky’s current literary
landscape.
As
I look at the previous four paragraphs on my computer screen, I wonder if I
sound like a hopeless pedant. (That
particular aspersion, believe it or not, has been cast my way a time or two…) The labels “Southern” or “Kentuckian” really
don’t matter as much as establishing a connection with one’s reader. I’ve never been to Northern Sweden, and yet, Stig Larsson’s work is my guilty
literary pleasure. I’ve never lived in a
North London council flat with an array of immigrant families, yet I adore the
work of Zadie Smith. On the other hand, as a writer, I’m far more
comfortable with creating characters who work in big law firms (as both my beau
and I have) or who live in the Kentucky and Tennessee towns where I have lived. Maybe the key really is the old cliché of writing
what you know. Or, just maybe, it’s a
blend of writing what one knows and writing something engaging enough to
transcend setting or experience.
Do y’all think a writer needs a connection to the place she writes about?
