Dirty Work: Spiking Our Limeade and Making Perfect Autumn Salad with Vivian Howard

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Dirty Work: Spiking Our Limeade and Making Perfect Autumn Salad with Vivian Howard

"I think that historically, Southern food is really about being frugal and stretching and not wasting," Vivian said. "Being inventive."
Hilary Pollack
Los Angeles, US

Welcome back to Dirty Work, our series of dispatches from the MUNCHIES Garden. We're inviting chefs, bartenders, and personalities in the world of food and drink to explore our edible playground and make whatever the hell inspires them with our rooftop produce. In our latest installment, North Carolina chef Vivian Howard stops by to show us the softer side of Southern cooking.

"Okra plant is the most sexual, weird, phallic penis thing," said chef, cookbook author, and A Chef's Life star Vivian Howard as she rifled through the vegetable patch in garden. "You should grow some out here next year. It would be a definite topic of conversation."

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Peppy and curious, Vivian Howard is replete with Southern charm, and is a total natural when it comes to sourcing ingredients straight from the garden. At her Kinston, North Carolina restaurants Chef & the Farmer and Boiler Room, her M.O. is to reintroduce people to the concept of eating local produce from small family farms in the state. The underlying objective: to transform North Carolina's tobacco fields into successful farms that instead provide food to nearby towns and cities.

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All photos by Farideh Sadeghin

"That's really been our big mission. In order to do that, we kind of just have to roll with what they have," Vivian told me after gathering turnips, two different types of cucumbers, shishito peppers, and a few tiny heirloom strawberries. "At any point, we might have tons of squash, or tons of cucumbers, and not a whole lot of anything else. So when the selection's limited, you work to get creative with it."

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Sounds like a Dirty Work mission to us.

Vivian had plans for her bounty from the get-go. "I'll make a cucumber ginger limeade and a little salad with this, and I'll blanche the greens. Some herbs on top. Simple. I like juicy stuff. "

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When you think of Southern food, you probably imagine heaping plates of fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes, and collard greens. But Vivian hopes to show the rest of the country—or the world, because why not—that this stereotype isn't a full or accurate depiction of the foods that many Southerners eat growing up, especially in the Carolinas.

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"For me, Southern food never was super heavy. I grew up in a house where my mother never made fried chicken," Vivian explained. "Our meals were based around vegetables and grains. I had rice with every meal; we had greens with a little bit of meat in them. We used meat more as a condiment growing up. This message that Southern food is all about heavy meats and macaroni and cheese and all of these things is a relatively new stereotype."

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Deep Run Roots: Stories and Recipes from My Corner of the South

In her new cookbook, which was released earlier this month, you won't find a fried chicken recipe anywhere in its 570 pages. Yes, she explained, fried chicken is a popular food in the South, but not just because it tastes good.

"I think that historically, Southern food is really about being frugal and stretching and not wasting," Vivian said. "Being inventive. That fried chicken might be something they would have once a week, Sunday lunch, and the rest of the week it might be one piece of cured pork stretched over a pot of greens, or reheated over a pot of rice. Those are not the things we necessarily think about when we think about Southern food. "

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But Vivian has the opportunity to redefine the cuisine of her region with Deep Run Roots. Every chapter is an ingredient, with the first recipe in each section highlighting the quintessential way that Vivian sees it prepared. Then, the rest of the chapter allows for more creativity and ingenuity.

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Take, for instance, the cucumber limeade that she started preparing using the massive cucumbers she pulled from the garden. She peeled each cuke with a knife while making a ginger-lime simple syrup on the stove simultaneously. Some cucumbers are "kind of too big to serve as an edible thing," but at her restaurants, she may want to purchase cucumbers like them from a farmer to help their business grow. So instead, she'll juice them. "We look at things that are maybe not perfect, and try to figure out how to use them," she said.

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At the same time, she peeled oranges and sliced turnips to make into a simple salad, blanching their greens, too.

"Some of [our food] is very traditionally Southern and some of it's not," she noted. "This is very representative—eating roots and greens together."

She also quickly blistered the shishito peppers and sprinkled them with salt for us to snack on while she finished her other dishes. "We serve those—they're a great finger food. So easy and surprising for people."

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The turnip salad will make a perfect dish for autumn, with both turnips and citrus readily available. "These are awesome with, say, a piece of fish," she said as she retrieved them from their marinade of orange, ginger, garlic, honey, soy sauce, scallions, and rice vinegar.

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A topping of toasted pine nuts completed the pretty dish.

RECIPE: Marinated Turnips with Orange and Pine Nuts

And of course, we didn't forget about the limeade. And yes, all you boozehounds—it can definitely be spiked. "You could put tequila or something in it. I'd do that. I love gin, and I actually suggest gin in here. "

Well, if you insist.

RECIPE: Cucumber Ginger Limeade

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Now that's what we call Southern hospitality.