Dinner and dessert are handled with these three Southern products.
Heat-and-eat mains
Rusty Bowers’ Pine Street Market, which opened 16 years ago in Avondale Estates, offers fresh cuts and grinds of beef, pork, poultry and lamb, and produces tantalizing bacon, sausage and charcuterie. Look under the Specialty Provisions tab on the website and you’ll also find items that simplify your dinner preparations. Our guests enjoyed the pork and beef meatballs, roasted and then packaged in a tomato-basil broth — perfect for quick, hearty meatball subs. For the duck confit, the butchers cure each leg with coriander, star anise, white pepper and herbs and then slow-simmer them overnight in duck fat. At home, the legs with their fat go into a hot oven for less than 10 minutes while the cook prepares a pan sauce of butter, cream and Dijon mustard. It makes a very impressive dinner.
$12 per 13-ounce package of pork and beef meatballs or one confit duck leg. Available at 4A Pine St., Avondale Estates or pinestreetmarket.com.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Southern flat dumplings
If you’ve been wanting to make old-fashioned Southern chicken and dumplings — where the dumplings are flat like pastry and not dropped like a biscuit — this product is for you. McLib’s Southern Dumplings in Pendleton, South Carolina, has been making flat, Southern-style dumplings since 1985. The dumplings are sold dried, so you can keep them in your pantry for up to a year, then make chicken and dumplings whenever the mood strikes. We started with the chicken and dumplings on the box but then saw the recipe for peach cobbler there. McLib’s dumplings turned our peaches into the most perfect pan of cobbler we ever have served. We are stocking up on these.
$26 per pack of five 8-ounce boxes. Available at Piggly Wiggly and mclibsdumplings.com.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Caramel pecan paws
Time to think about dessert. Carolina Chocolate Co. in Clover, South Carolina, sells an assortment of handcrafted chocolates, from bars to barks. We opted for pecan paws. Each perfectly formed paw had a base of dark chocolate topped with three roasted pecans, a dollop of creamy caramel, and then a topping of more dark chocolate. It covered all the required food groups for sweets — chocolate, caramel and nuts.
$15 per six-piece box. Available at carolinachocolatecompany.com.
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