Charleston, SC: Day Two

You know, all this internal blather about what I'm going to do with my life was put into perspective pretty effectively today. I got up early this morning and decided to go exploring. I walked around for a couple of hours, taking pictures of various interesting buildings and fauna. I heard a middle-aged Southern lady in a hat exclaim about taking pictures of window boxes, and I secretly laughed at her--until I realized I, too, was wearing a hat. And taking pictures of window boxes. Anyway, I started to wonder why the attraction. Charleston is pretty and all, but there didn't seem to be much of a scene (restaurant/nightlife/cultural). A city that builds its reputation on the past usually has little regard for its future: Appomattox is a classic illustration. Old houses and window boxes are nice and all, but I wasn't particularly excited by the city.

Until I found all the things that make Jenny really, really happy. To wit: food and booze. I didn't go to the aquarium, or Fort Sumter, or take any plantation tours. What did I do in Charleston? I took a cooking class and bought bourbon-aged beer and about twenty metric tons of gourmet salt. Yes, folks. I went to Charleston and bought salt.

As I was walking around, I stumbled across S.N.O.B. (Slightly North of Broad), a new restaurant and foodie haven. They have a kitchen store right next door. I went in, bought tea-smoked salt, green tomato pickles and dried cowpeas (like black-eyed peas, but smaller and darker) and discovered they were also offering a cooking class in lowcountry classics--pecan-crusted catfish, cowpea succotash and chocolate chess pie--for $25. Of course I signed up. I went back to wandering, to kill time before the class started, and stumbled across The Spice and Tea Exchange, where I bought applewood-smoked salt, alderwood-smoked salt, hickory-smoked salt, lime coconut-smoked salt, a great big rock of pink Himalayan salt (you pass it around the table and shave the salt off of it with a microplane grater) and a big pink salt brick, which can be heated and used to sear things like scallops right at the table, or chilled and used to serve sorbets, or simply used as a neat serving platter. Then I found the Charleston Beer Exchange--they did not let me exchange empties for full ones--where I discovered Allagash Curieaux, an ale that's been aged in old bourbon barrels. As far as I'm concerned, anything can be improved with the addition of either bourbon or bacon. Anything. Case in point: I learned in the cooking class that when baking anything with chocolate, bourbon can be substituted for vanilla, as bourbon makes chocolate taste more chocolatey.

I was so excited by my purchases that I went back to S.N.O.B. for a late lunch of shrimp n' grits and peach pie, complemented by a 2007 Oyster Bay Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand and a 2008 Hughes Picpoul de Pinet from Languedoc. Then as I was hauling my twenty metric tons of salt and beer back to the hostel, I stopped in at O'Hara and Flynn Wine Bar for a glass of Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc. It was a terribly hot day, after all.

I got tired of trying to upload all my pictures. You can see them all at Flickr, under Two Blind Cats.