I knew this soup was going to be good, but I was unprepared for how incredibly delicious it actually was. For being so simple to make it had a surprising depth of flavor.

It's thick and creamy, slightly sweet with just enough heat from the curry to add a lovely complexity. It's topped with a drizzle of cilantro oil (just cilantro and olive oil blended together with a pinch of kosher salt) for a little bit of additional freshness. The key is using fresh ingredients and a high quality curry paste - not a powder, a paste. I like Mae Ploy's pastes and I used the yellow curry paste in this soup. They're often available in Asian supermarkets. I order mine in bulk off Amazon.

I've been seeing how I can model my meals around main ingredients from Carolina Grown (see this post for more details). Mostly because I enjoy eating locally grown, fresh ingredients and I absolutely love the idea of being able to support local farmers as much as I possibly can - but also because planning a menu and sticking with it is a great way to save money.

I already allocate more money to food that most people I know, but I'm still interested in spending as little as possible for the highest quality ingredients I can get my hands on.

Because it's still winter the produce options at CG are limited, but they've got some lovely root vegetables available - including these Carolina Ruby sweet potatoes.

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A fresh breeze to ruffle the feathers, sun to warm them, freedom to run about and peck at whatever they should choose. Delicious vegetarian feed and a life free of antibiotics and hormones. That's how chickens should be raised.  Not in cages or factory farms where they never see the outdoors a moment of their lives. Not where they crawl with bugs and peck each other to death out of fear, anxiety, and a blind attempt at self preservation.

It's not a very appetizing thought, is it? Sadly, it's the reality of commercial farms, the predominant source of meat throughout the US.

It can be difficult to find an alternative to factory farmed meat, though, and the difficulty often outweighs one's conscious. It's so easy to just pop over to the neighborhood supermarket and pick up a pound or two of chicken for dinner and not think about where it came from.

It's an issue that's plagued me significantly since moving to North Carolina. In California it was so easy to find humanely raised meats at nearly any market, but in North Carolina it's been impossible - at least until last week.

Carolina Grown, a relatively new business in central NC, is offering an amazing new service. Produce, dairy, and meat from solely NC growers delivered directly to your door for a surprisingly reasonable flat fee.

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Once relegated to the scrap heap, trendy restaurants all over have revamped the short rib and transformed it into contemporary rustic cuisine. After marinating some in red wine for two days and braising them nice and slow for a few hours I can definitely see why.

Short ribs have long received the same bad wrap as the Boston butt roast (pork shoulder), but that's due in large part to people who have been cooking them improperly. These fat marbled, cartilage ridden cuts of meat require a nice, long, low-heat bath to slowly transform all that greasy fat and yuck into meltingly decadent, fork tender meat that quite literally falls of the bone with the merest of touches.

These are a great weekend meal because they do require attention every 45 minutes for turning - in total about 3 hours or so of braising. But, braising is great because even though it does take a significant amount of time to cook, most of that time is hands off. 

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This has definitely become one of my favorite preparations for duck breast. I first tried it in DC over the holidays at my MiL's house, but both of us had difficulties with the prescribed cooking time. I botched it twice, and with the price of boneless duck breasts I was about to give up on the recipe entirely.

I gave it a couple more shots and I've come away from it very pleased. Turns out if you use a duck breast twice the size of the one the recipe calls for it's going to take a little longer to cook.

The five spice combination of star anise, clove, cinnamon, anise seed, and Sichuan peppercorn is the perfect accompaniment to the richness of the duck breast. The sesame noodles are flavored just enough to please, but simply enough to complement the rich, aggressive flavor of the duck.

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