I'm continuing in my search of better southern food than I can cook in my own kitchen. Yep, I'm still looking....
This is really more of a cafeteria than a restaurant. They have a menu, but certain items are only available on certain days of the week. As in, don't come asking for turkey wings on Friday because they are served on Thursday. So you sort of need "to know" what they are serving on any given day.
On this day, they had meatloaf, spaghetti with meat sauce, smothered pork chops, neck bones and baked chicken. I haven't had a smothered pork chop in YEARS so I went for that.
A smothered pork chop, IMHO, is a pork chop that has been lightly breaded and pan fried. You make a pan gravy using flour and some of the oil from the pork chop. My mama would throw in some onion, too. You can use water, milk, or broth to thin out the flour/oil mix. You must cook the flour/oil mixture to cook the flour. And how you season your gravy depends on how you seasoned your pork chop. Served with rice and seasoned adequately this can be a small piece of southern heaven. It was not.
I'll say this over and over. If the pork chop is BLAND when it is fried, it will be equally BLAND when it is smothered. Fat alone is not seasoning. I can honestly say I ate a pork chop that had no discernible flavor profile. It wasn't salty, it wasn't greasy, it was ... well, meat. And not good meat either. I ate less than half of my pork chop because calories are too hard to burn to waste them on bad food.
So the server makes it a point to correct me on calling her beans "butter beans". They are lima beans. Now, I looked this up and according to the Georgia Cooperative Extension the term "lima" and "butter" beans are interchangeable. People tend to call the small beans "butter" and the larger fordhook variety "lima". Your beans were butter beans. But it doesn't really matter what you call them because they were cooked within an inch of their life. You could have smashed those with a cheap plastic spoon and served them to a baby. And the baby probably would have spit them out. They were bland, mushy and like the pork chop lacked any discernible taste. I like my butter beans cooked with okra and having a little bite. Unless I'm spreading it on a taco, I'm not into mushy beans.
Now the collard greens were good and that little corn cake was very tasty. If I ever return, I'll just order a large side of greens with cornbread.
So there you have it. Another $11 spent in my search of what the ATL calls food like your Grandma would make. Both my grandma's would have thrown in the towel and just gotten in the kitchen and started cooking by now... read more