Welcome to the Cooking with C.C. Blog. I will be discussing all things food and travel related. Be sure to join me for information from recipes, cookbooks, restaurants and places to visit. I look forward to hearing from you!
Huntsville Highlights May and June 2016
Since our last highlights post, we've visited a few other places in town that I wanted to let you know our thoughts. This is in addition to the new menu items at Bravo that I wrote about. Domaine South: Some big wine people we know told me about the Domaine South wine shop, so I had to go check it out. It's a really small place, but don't let the size fool you. They have a great selection of wines. It's located on Cleveland St., just off Meridian in the AM Booth Lumberyard complex. They host a tasting every Saturday afternoon from 2-4PM. We tried two different weeks (the first week, I didn't have the camera with me, so, gosh darn it, I had to go back to get pictures). The tastings are free and both that I have been to have had a wide variety of very good wines. They also have a number of gift items. It's worth checking out. Below the Radar: We don't get downtown for dinner that often, so when we were in the area, we decided to stop in at Below the Radar for dinner. It has been a while for us and Chef…
New Menu Items at Bravo
I was invited to a new menu preview at Bravo at Bridge Street Monday night. It's been a while since I've been to Bravo and the last time I wrote about visiting there was over a year ago (See previous blog post). The new menu starts Tuesday June 7th. I had the chance to speak with James Luhring the General Manager of the Huntsville Bravo about the changes. He told me that they update the menu about twice a year, however, these changes are more extensive than usual. Besides the standard menu change, Bravo is also adding a new bar menu featuring $5 items. The menu includes $5 cocktails, wine, beer and bar bites. We didn't sample those, so I'll have to go back and try them another time. On to what we did sample.... We started with two new appetizers - Zucchini and Eggplant Fritti and Ricotta and Ciabatta. The Fritti were lightly breaded and fried. IT was served with a lemon aioli and a tomato pomodoro sauce. The sauces complemented to fried vegetables very well. The Ricotta was served warm in a small cast iron skillet on the larger plate. The plate included marinated red peppers, sopressata, arugula,…
Dinner at Blackberry Farm and Lunch by Tim Love
As I wrote in my last blog post, I recently attended the Southern Food Writers Conference as part of the International Biscuit Festival. When I looked at the schedule of the conference, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Blackberry Farm was hosting the conference dinner on Thursday night. Since I could not attend this year's International Association of Culinary Professionals conference in Los Angeles, I decided to attend the SFWC - yes, the opportunity to have dinner at Blackberry Farm was a really big factor! If you aren't familiar with Blackberry Farm, it is considered one of the top destination resorts in the southeast if not the eastern half of the US. They have won multiple James Beard Awards and have one of the top wine lists as well. I've looked at visiting Blackberry Farm, but could not afford a stay there. With dinner included in the price of the conference, I was in. The farm is up in the hills of East Tennessee not far from the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. It was about a 1 1/4 hour drive from downtown Knoxville. (Here's a link to a map showing where it is.) When we arrived, we had…
Knoxville and International Biscuit Festival
I had an opportunity to attend the Southern Food Writers Conference in Knoxville, TN last week (May 12-14). It is hosted as part of the International Biscuit Festival which was on Saturday May 14. It was a gathering of a few people I already knew and many more that I met as part of the conference. Of course, besides food writing, food was the center of attention for the three days. Our morning breakfasts were provided by the chefs of Willa Jean bakery from New Orleans. Their biscuits were excellent and with the jams provided by the Fresh Market, made for a great start of the day. On Friday, they also made us shrimp and grits with some wonderful cheese grits. The speakers were fascinating and covered a variety of topics. Tina Antolini spoke about turning the edible into audible sounds. Tina currently produces the Gravy podcast for the Southern Foodways Alliance. A key point she made is looking for a larger story and being able to tell it through the lens of food. She played several clips of the Gravy podcast. The pictures she was able to communicate through only audio surprised me since I tend to be a…