pork liver hash and vegan greens with “anchovy”

Hi! Again will try to make this short since I’m supposed to be doing Formulas & Food Costs word problems. Dinner last night was good though! I’m happy to have made one nice meal inspired by my last trip to South Carolina.

Since I didn’t get any hash that actually had liver while I was there, that was one of my first plans for when I got home. I used the Buxton Hall recipe, using pulled pork that Stacy Reed gave me at her last Bull+Dagger BBQ pop-up, and ground pork liver in place of the chicken liver. I used a bottle of True Made Foods’ Carolina Gold BBQ Sauce instead of doing the bbq sauce plus mustard (Andronico’s on Shattuck carries it). This turned out good, and I’d make it the same again, although maybe up the liver from 1/3 to 1/2. It’s hard to tell it’s there with everything else going on.

The ribs are also thanks to Bull+Dagger! Reed offers them frozen so you can just put them in a water bath when ready.

For the greens, I wanted to try a vegan batch inspired by Amethyst Ganaway’s stewed collards and tomato with smoked fish. I started, as with many recent meals, by caramelizing ~2lbs yellow onions with ~6T of Julia Tausch’s vegan anchovy paste. I thought I had a pint of Happy Girl Kitchen crushed tomatoes… it ended up being a pint of tomato juice, so I added that in the last quarter of the two hours that I cooked the onions. After that, I added 2t Burlap & Barrel cobanero chili, 3 cloves garlic, and 10g preserved lemon (trying to add more layers of funk to get it closer to dried seafood). Then I added 3 bunches collards, and smothered (uncovering every 10 minutes to stir) for 40 min. On the downside, there was no pot likker, but I really like the concentrated flavor of smothering.

I’m happy with how the greens came out, but want to keep experimenting to see how I can layer the fish-like ingredients more to create more realistic fish taste. (Like layering eyebrow products! Um anyway.) Preserved lemons improve everything imo, but they weren’t the exact thing I was looking for this time. Rereading Tausch’s Consider the Anchovy, there are lots of great suggestions beyond the veg anchovy paste, including pointing to Andrea Nguyen’s piece on storebought and homemade nước mắm, and Afia Amoako’s vegan shito. I’m definitely going to look for the vegetarian fish sauces that Nguyen suggests next time I’m in Sun Hop Fat getting preserved tofu for the vegan anchovy paste!