Brian Abner Culinary, Grosse Pointe, MI (2026)

Name: Brian Abner Culinary
Address: Grosse Pointe, MI, 48230, US
Telephone: +13135304302

www.brianabnerculinary.com

10/02/2026

Good Friday Afternoon All!

Let’s be frank.

We’re heading into our fourth week of football. Hockey season has started. Our windows have been closed at night—and most of the day—for weeks now. Halloween decorations are beginning to garnish the front yards, and the calendar officially reads October.

There is no longer any denying it.

It is fall.

Fortunately, this week’s menu appears to have accepted that reality more enthusiastically than some of us have.

Our Egg Bites contain sausage, caramelized onion, cheddar and sage. Because while eggs may occasionally tolerate tomatoes, spinach and feta during the warmer months, once October arrives, they clearly want sausage and sage.

Frankly, don’t we all?

The same seasonal logic applies to potatoes.

Warm, creamy, cheesy Potato Gratin should probably be regarded as a cornerstone of a balanced autumn diet—not merely a luxurious side dish. We’re not sure exactly where it belongs on the traditional food pyramid, but we’re confident it occupies very large sections near the top, middle, and bottom.

In line with FDA recommendations, we’ll be serving it as both a standalone side and alongside our Fire-Roasted Pork Loin.

For the pork, we’ll be firing up our massive 275-gallon smoker. The woodpile is fully stocked for our fall-weather smoking escapades. This summer’s storms brought down plenty of trees, and local tree-removal crews were happy to provide us with usable logs.

Yes, we really do use locally downed wood, which we split and age ourselves for the smoker.

Talk about hyperlocal.

This began several years ago when DTE was trimming trees in Chef Brian’s yard. The crew noticed the enormous smoker and accompanying woodpile and offered to cut the tree into usable logs and leave them behind for us.

Yes, please!

Ever since, we’ve relied on locally downed trees to fuel the smoker. There is now a small—but very real—possibility that the wood used to smoke this week’s pork loin came from a tree that once stood in your yard.

We’re also continuing our international orange-chicken exchange program.

Last week’s Orange Chicken took us to Asia—or at least to the American takeout interpretation of Asia. This week’s Chicken Breast à l’Orange takes us to France.

Two interpretations of the same basic idea from two of the world’s greatest cuisines.

Perhaps one of history’s only genuinely acceptable examples of “separate but equal.”

This week’s French-inspired version is a direct riff on classic Duck à l’Orange: pan-roasted chicken breast with fresh orange, brandy and a savory citrus pan sauce, served with toasted-almond rice pilaf and broccoli.

We’ve simply removed the duck and most of the pomp and circumstance. We briefly considered acquiring an enormous brass duck press, but apparently that belongs to an entirely different French duck preparation. The French do not lack for duck-related ceremony.

It is still classical French cooking, however, which means it has already undergone several centuries of rigorous testing. Its deliciousness may therefore be accepted as scientific fact.

“Maurice” Ham Salad should largely speak for itself.

Everyone seemed to love our Ham Salad a few weeks ago. We decided that the only possible improvement would be to give it the full Maurice treatment: sweet pickles, chopped green olives, hard-boiled eggs and Maurice dressing instead of straight mayonnaise.

Short of packing it in 24-karat gold to-go containers, having it served to you by sc****ly clad ladies or spiking it with wonderfully illicit drugs, we’re not sure how it could get any better.

Basically, the entire Wednesday-delivery side of the menu is the culinary equivalent of putting on your most comfortable sweater, sitting in front of a fire and sipping a good glass of red w**e.

Seasonal.

Comforting.

Warming.

Enjoyable.

Chicken Pot Pie Soup. Chicken Parmesan. Mustard and Brown Sugar Glazed Brisket. Corn and Sweet Potato Cakes with cider-braised kale, applesauce and sour cream.

Even the tomato soup has been warmed up with curry spices and basmati rice.

And just when Curried Tomato Soup begins to look like the strange outlier, consider this: many of the warming spices found in curry blends—ginger, cinnamon, cloves, cardamom and nutmeg, depending upon the blend—are the same spices doing the heavy lifting in your Pumpkin Spice Latte.

It seems improbable.

Possibly even wrong.

But the overlap is very real.

For those wishing to continue their overseas adventure, our Italian Antipasto Pasta Salad contains rotini, salami, cheeses, roasted peppers, olives, pepperoncini, herbs and red-w**e vinaigrette.

Here in Grosse Pointe, we realize pepperoncini serve as both a garnish and a warning.

Dessert this week is a Maple-Pecan Blondie.

Maple and pecans are about as conclusively autumnal as two ingredients can be. If they were running for the Senate, they would destroy both the smart Muslim guy and the comfortable-sounding white guy in any fall election.

Maple and Pecan: the rare unity ticket capable of sweeping every county in Michigan.

For anyone unfamiliar with the term “blondie”—outside of the great 1970s and ’80s band featuring the remarkably attractive Debbie Harry—it is essentially a brownie that isn’t brown.

Thus, blondie.

Ours is rich and buttery, made with brown sugar, real maple syrup and plenty of toasted pecans.

Also, if anyone happens to know Debbie Harry and can persuade her to stop by, we would be extremely interested in that as well.

Fall has arrived.

We might as well eat accordingly.

Have a wonderful weekend!
The BAC Team

Email from Brian Abner Culinary Good Friday Afternoon All! Let’s be frank. We’re heading into our fourth week of football. Hockey season has started. Our windows have been closed at night—and mo

09/25/2026

Good Friday Afternoon All!

Early fall has arrived in Michigan.

The days are still pleasant, the windows can remain open during the day, and the truly determined among us can occasionally pretend it is still summer.

The evenings, however, are getting cool.

The brief back-to-school excitement has also faded right on schedule. New shoes, fresh notebooks and the novelty of seeing friends again bought us perhaps two cheerful weeks.

We have now returned to the traditional daily interview:

“How was your day at school?”

“Fine.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing.”

“How much homework do you have?”

“I dunno.”

A less successful day may earn the slightly more descriptive response of “stupid.”

Meanwhile, summer is quietly being dismantled around us. Lawn mowers are being powered down, leaf blowers are being fired up, and summer toys are beginning their long journey into garages, basements and sheds.

Even the finest madras shorts are starting to lose their argument against long pants.

Sad face.

Fortunately, fall does offer compensation: football, bonfires, comfy sweaters and a completely legitimate reason to start eating hearty things covered in gravy.

And chili.

If we must wear pants, there should be chili.

If we must endure the Lions, there should be chili.

This week we’re making a classic Beef and Bean Chili with plenty of ground beef, tomatoes, peppers, kidney beans, garlic, warm spices and just enough jalapeño and chipotle to keep things interesting. It is exactly what chili should be during football season: thick, hearty and entirely capable of becoming dinner.

The comfort-food theme continues with our new Cheesy Hash Brown Bake: shredded potatoes baked with sour cream, cheddar, caramelized onions and scallions, then topped and baked until golden. It comes in our usual generous 4”×4” piece and should make a crisp autumn evening a bit warmer.

Or morning or afternoon, for that matter...

The first delivery of the week also brings Swedish Meatballs in a rich gravy finished with caramelized onions and a hint of sour cream, served over twisty egg noodles with green vegetables. They’re warm, comforting and completely irresistible—or, as the world’s most famous Swedish Chef from The Muppets might put it:

“Hurdy-gurdy, bork, bork, bork, bork, bork!”

Even the chickens are getting dressed for fall.

Just a few weeks ago, they were adorned in wildly colored pestos and summer vegetables. For this week’s Chicken Saltimbocca, they’re bundling up a bit in prosciutto and sage, with white w**e sauce and linguine to keep them warm like a cozy blanket.

Likewise, our Beef Enchiladas have snuggled themselves into flour tortillas before being covered with house-made chili sauce and plenty of cheese.

Our vegetarian dinners are pure fall: a Truffled Roasted Cauliflower, Caramelized Onion and Cheese Tart with braised greens and white beans, and a creamy Spinach, Wild Rice and Mushroom Casserole with roasted sweet potatoes.

As fall as it gets without having to rake the leaves off your plate.

Here’s to pleasant afternoons, cool evenings, bonfires, football and extracting at least one complete sentence from a child before Thanksgiving.

Want to get the kids talking? Bribe them with one of our freshly baked Chocolate Chunk Cookies.

Content to leave the kids quiet and grumpy in their rooms? Enjoy the cookies all to yourself.

Have a wonderful weekend!
The BAC Team

Email from Brian Abner Culinary Good Friday Afternoon All! Early fall has arrived in Michigan. The days are still pleasant, the windows can remain open during the day, and the truly determined a

09/18/2026

Good Friday Afternoon All!

It is beginning to feel like fall in Michigan.

Not rake-the-leaves, turn-on-the-furnace fall just yet—but the early version. Cool mornings, comfortable afternoons, open windows, and the first entirely reasonable excuses to start eating apples, mushrooms, slow-roasted pork and things covered in gravy.

Naturally, the menu followed.

Michigan apples are beginning to arrive, and we’re leaning into them properly.

Dessert this week is a Michigan Apple Spice Cake made with loads of diced fresh apples, cinnamon and warm baking spices. This is not a delicate cake decorated with three carefully arranged apple slices. The apples are baked throughout, where they keep the cake especially moist and where apples belong. Each generous piece comes with our housemade cinnamon whipped cream.

Local Apples make another appearance in our Overnight Oats with Michigan Apples, Raisins and Cinnamon, as well as our new Autumn Chicken Salad.

The Autumn Chicken Salad is a creamy, scoopable chicken salad made with gently poached chicken, crisp Michigan apples, dried cranberries, toasted walnuts, celery, green onions and fresh herbs. Excellent by itself, over greens or piled unreasonably high onto good bread.

Once we leave Michigan apple country, this week’s menu becomes a little geographically restless. We begin in France, meander through Germany and America, visit Maryland by way of New Orleans, and ultimately find ourselves right back in Burgundy.

Apparently, no matter where we intended to go, we kept returning to the mecca of all things good food: France.

There are worse travel problems to have.

Our first stop is French Onion Chicken.

We marinate lean chicken breast with garlic and thyme, pan-sear it, and serve it with a rich gravy loaded with deeply caramelized onions.

But the real trouble began when we started thinking about what should go beside it.

Everybody knows the best part of a crock of French onion soup: the bread that absorbs the broth beneath that bubbling, deeply browned layer of cheese.

So we turned that part into an entire casserole.

Our Four Cheese Strata starts with cubed artisanal bread soaked in a savory milk-and-egg custard, mixed with sautéed onions, parsley and four cheeses, then baked until crisp and golden on top while remaining soft and rich inside.

Basically, it’s an irresistible savory, cheesy bread pudding.

Enjoy it alongside the French Onion Chicken, or indulge in a second generous helping, sold separately for $9.

Warm it in the oven for breakfast. Slice it and sear it in a buttered pan, then serve it with eggs. Put it beside practically anything for an effortless midweek dinner. Or eat it standing at the kitchen counter around midnight with a tall glass of w**e in an incident your spouse need never know occurred.

From France, we wander over to Germany for Oktoberfest—which, somewhat confusingly, takes place mostly in September.

In its honor, we’re making Schweinbraten: pork delicately seasoned with caraway, clove, paprika and Düsseldorf mustard, then roasted low and slow until exceptionally tender. It’s sliced and served with little potato dumplings, onion-mustard gravy and braised cabbage.

We’ve kept the dumplings small—about gnocchi size—so they catch plenty of butter and gravy without becoming enormous potato cannonballs.

We’re also making Classic German Potato Salad with tender potatoes, bacon, sautéed onions, carrots, celery; and parsley in a warm whole-grain mustard and cider-vinegar dressing. Rich and vibrant with bacon, mustard and vinegar, this classic needs no mayonnaise. It is equally good served warm, chilled or somewhere in between—and excellent beside roasted pork, chicken, sausages, eggs, or absolutely nothing but a fork and an open refrigerator door.

And, if we’re being completely honest, after watching those German barmaids carrying impossible numbers of full b**r steins in traditional garb, I’m buying whatever they’re selling.

Our trip through America begins with three large Western Egg Bites made with Dearborn ham, sautéed onions, bell peppers and cheddar cheese.

It then brings us to Classic Chicken Noodle Soup, made with the short, thin noodles you remember.

There is no need to mess with a classic. Just prepare it very well.

We simmer our chicken stock in-house for hours, add fresh chicken, carrots, celery, onions, parsley and herbs, and naturally include a generous splash of white w**e. We may be in America, but we still tend to cook a little Frenchish.

Incidentally, fancy restaurants are currently putting those same little noodles onto elegant plates and calling them by their proper name, "fideo". Even on a fancy plate, they still look like chicken noodles to us.

Wednesday brings the return of Golden Mushroom Soup.

I had the good fortune to work at The Golden Mushroom, and as saucier I personally prepared the restaurant’s namesake soup many times. Our version is made as I prepared it there: loads of fresh mushrooms sautéed with onion, garlic and herbs, dried porcini mushrooms, housemade stock, a generous splash of Madeira and a little cream.

Mushroom season is undoubtedly Golden Mushroom Soup season.

For a lighter, brothy, and especially wholesome option, we’re also making White Bean and Autumn Vegetable Soup. Tender white beans are simmered with Dearborn ham, carrots, celery, onions, parsnips, sweet potatoes and cabbage in housemade stock with white w**e.

The Wednesday entrée lineup is particularly dangerous. Wednesday’s vegetarian entrée is back to Pure Michigan. A roasted butternut squash seasoned with cinnamon and nutmeg, then filled with quinoa, brown rice, wild rice, dried cranberries and toasted pumpkin seeds. It’s finished with an apple-brown butter drizzle and served with roasted cauliflower and a side salad.

Our Maryland-Style Crab Cakes are gently mixed with sautéed onion, celery, red bell pepper, parsley and seasonings, coated in cracker crumbs and pan-fried until golden. They’re served with New Orleans remoulade, lemon-parsley rice pilaf, and green beans sautéed with sweet corn and cabbage.

Finally, we return to France for Traditional Beef Burgundy.

The beef is flash-seared in a smoking-hot pan, then slowly simmered with bacon, mushrooms, aromatic vegetables, plenty of red w**e and stock until fall-apart tender. The braising liquids become the sauce, and the Burgundy is served with herb-roasted potatoes, green beans with corn and cabbage, and a side salad.

The menu may have traveled a bit this week, but it arrived exactly where early Michigan fall seems to be pointing us: apples, mushrooms, good soup, slow roasts, browned cheese, red w**e and plenty of gravy.

Not a bad place to end up.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Brian & the BAC Team

Email from Brian Abner Culinary Good Friday Afternoon All! It is beginning to feel like fall in Michigan. Not rake-the-leaves, turn-on-the-furnace fall just yet—but the early version. Cool morni

09/11/2026

Good Friday Afternoon All!

Our menu this week has a more comforting, back-to-school feel. A happy accident, really.

Much of this week’s menu somehow flowed from last week’s Dolly Parton Bread Pudding. Apparently Dolly is still doing good work.

The bread pudding got everyone in the kitchen talking about old-school desserts—the things almost everybody remembers, almost everybody likes, and, for some reason, you just don’t see very often anymore.

Coconut Cream Pie came up.

The response was pretty much unanimous: everybody loves a GOOD coconut cream pie. Unfortunately, “good” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. When you do stumble across one these days, there’s a fair chance the crust is soggy, the filling tastes like it came out of a bucket, and the coconut has been sitting around since the Carter administration.

So we made ours a Coconut Cream Pie Cup.

You get the important parts: buttery graham cracker crumbs, rich housemade coconut-vanilla cream, plenty of lightly sweetened whipped cream, and toasted coconut. But because it’s built in a cup rather than sliced and driven around Grosse Pointe in the back of a delivery vehicle, there’s no soggy bottom crust, no collapsed slice, and no cream pie slowly migrating to one side of a box.

Sometimes changing the format actually makes the old thing work better.

Once we started down the old-school-food rabbit hole, the kitchen suggestions kept coming all week.

Naturally, old-school Tuna Noodle Salad made its presence known.

And we mean the real, old-fashioned kind: little pasta shells, tuna, celery, peas, scallions, parsley, mayonnaise, Dijon, and just a little pickle for brightness. Pretty much the way you remember it—except made by people who have spent many years cooking in professional kitchens rather than by a commissary somewhere in Ohio filling five-gallon tubs for grocery-store delis throughout the Midwest.

The flavors remain. We’ve simply paid a little more attention to them.

Of course, once a kitchen full of cooks starts talking about tuna and noodles, the next great American word is never far behind:

Casserole.

One tuna-and-noodle situation seemed sufficient for a single menu, but by then we couldn’t shake the casserole thoughts. So we landed on a Bacon, Cheddar & Scallion Potato Casserole.

Excellent with eggs for breakfast, perfectly happy standing alone as a side, and perhaps happiest cozied up to our Brined Pork Loin Chop with Caramelized Onion-Sherry Gravy.

And not to be forgotten, we have the Kind and Gentle Grandmother of old-school American classics:

Traditional Split Pea and Ham Soup.

Made in our case with proper Dearborn ham.

Now let this serve as your reminder that it has probably been too long since you called your mother or grandmother.

If Split Pea Soup is the Gentle Grandma you had better not forget, then Beef Tenderloin Tips with Mashed Potatoes and Chicken Piccata are the leather-jacket James Deans of comfort food.

You don’t need a reminder. They’re already on your mind. You have them on speed dial.

Sticking with our increasingly rebellious—and, let’s be frank, fun and exciting—imagery, consider our Chesapeake Chicken Chowder the 1970s Norton Commando 850 of this week’s menu.

Fast. Full of personality. A little dangerous. Possibly a little more excitement than the surrounding engineering was prepared to accommodate.

(It’s a British bike. Insufficient engineering is to be expected.)

Now, don’t think heavy New England clam chowder. This is chicken, sweet corn, potatoes, and summer vegetables in a lighter, savory broth, finished with just enough Old Bay to give it that unmistakable Chesapeake character and a splash of cream to remind your cardiologist that he’s not the boss of you.

Thankfully, our chowder delivers the full rush of flavor from the safety of your kitchen table. No scorched calves from the exhaust pipe, and nobody has to discover at 100 mph that the motorcycle would prefer not to turn.

From there, our comfort-food tour wanders across the Atlantic.

We’re making Chicken Paprikash, one of the great comfort dishes of Hungary. For this one, we specifically seek out real Hungarian paprika. Years ago, a friend brought some back from Hungary for us, and the difference was enough that we’ve been willing to track down the real thing ever since.

We keep the dish mostly traditional, although we do sneak in just a pinch of smoked paprika for a little extra depth.

Because this is America, and we can do what we want.

And while we’re already wandering around Central Europe, we’re considering the Paprikash our little warm-up to Oktoberfest—which, despite the name, takes place largely in September.

Nutty Germans.

And because America has always been at its culinary best when we start borrowing everybody else’s food, we’ve also brought back our popular Asian Cashew Chicken Salad, along with Hearty Santa Fe Chicken & Bean Chili for a little international flair.

Yes, we know. Santa Fe is in America.

Possibly soon to be located in the newly renamed state of New America.

The name was intentional because it fits nicely with this week’s largely mom-and-apple-pie American theme. The flavors, however, are decidedly south of the border—as though the recipe were smuggled to us through an elaborate series of tunnels running beneath the Rio Grande.

Add in Broccoli & Cheddar Egg Bites as Michigan broccoli begins coming into season, Chicken Lemon Rice Soup for something lighter and brothy, and our Portabella Mushroom Ravioli with Madeira Sauce, and somehow what began with Dolly Parton and a conversation about forgotten desserts turned into an entire week of food.

We’re not entirely sure how we got here.

But we’re pretty happy with where we ended up.

Have a Great Weekend,
Brian and The BAC Team

Email from Brian Abner Culinary Good Friday Afternoon All! Our menu this week has a more comforting, back-to-school feel. A happy accident, really. Much of this week’s menu somehow flowed from l

09/11/2026

Good Friday Afternoon All!

Our menu this week has a more comforting, back-to-school feel. A happy accident, really.

Much of this week’s menu somehow flowed from last week’s Dolly Parton Bread Pudding. Apparently Dolly is still doing good work.

The bread pudding got everyone in the kitchen talking about old-school desserts—the things almost everybody remembers, almost everybody likes, and, for some reason, you just don’t see very often anymore.

Coconut Cream Pie came up.

The response was pretty much unanimous: everybody loves a GOOD coconut cream pie. Unfortunately, “good” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. When you do stumble across one these days, there’s a fair chance the crust is soggy, the filling tastes like it came out of a bucket, and the coconut has been sitting around since the Carter administration.

So we made ours a Coconut Cream Pie Cup.

You get the important parts: buttery graham cracker crumbs, rich housemade coconut-vanilla cream, plenty of lightly sweetened whipped cream, and toasted coconut. But because it’s built in a cup rather than sliced and driven around Grosse Pointe in the back of a delivery vehicle, there’s no soggy bottom crust, no collapsed slice, and no cream pie slowly migrating to one side of a box.

Sometimes changing the format actually makes the old thing work better.

Once we started down the old-school-food rabbit hole, the kitchen suggestions kept coming all week.

Naturally, old-school Tuna Noodle Salad made its presence known.

And we mean the real, old-fashioned kind: little pasta shells, tuna, celery, peas, scallions, parsley, mayonnaise, Dijon, and just a little pickle for brightness. Pretty much the way you remember it—except made by people who have spent many years cooking in professional kitchens rather than by a commissary somewhere in Ohio filling five-gallon tubs for grocery-store delis throughout the Midwest.

The flavors remain. We’ve simply paid a little more attention to them.

Of course, once a kitchen full of cooks starts talking about tuna and noodles, the next great American word is never far behind:

Casserole.

One tuna-and-noodle situation seemed sufficient for a single menu, but by then we couldn’t shake the casserole thoughts. So we landed on a Bacon, Cheddar & Scallion Potato Casserole.

Excellent with eggs for breakfast, perfectly happy standing alone as a side, and perhaps happiest cozied up to our Brined Pork Loin Chop with Caramelized Onion-Sherry Gravy.

And not to be forgotten, we have the Kind and Gentle Grandmother of old-school American classics:

Traditional Split Pea and Ham Soup.

Made in our case with proper Dearborn ham.

Now let this serve as your reminder that it has probably been too long since you called your mother or grandmother.

If Split Pea Soup is the Gentle Grandma you had better not forget, then Beef Tenderloin Tips with Mashed Potatoes and Chicken Piccata are the leather-jacket James Deans of comfort food.

You don’t need a reminder. They’re already on your mind. You have them on speed dial.

Sticking with our increasingly rebellious—and, let’s be frank, fun and exciting—imagery, consider our Chesapeake Chicken Chowder the 1970s Norton Commando 850 of this week’s menu.

Fast. Full of personality. A little dangerous. Possibly a little more excitement than the surrounding engineering was prepared to accommodate.

(It’s a British bike. Insufficient engineering is to be expected.)

Now, don’t think heavy New England clam chowder. This is chicken, sweet corn, potatoes, and summer vegetables in a lighter, savory broth, finished with just enough Old Bay to give it that unmistakable Chesapeake character and a splash of cream to remind your cardiologist that he’s not the boss of you.

Thankfully, our chowder delivers the full rush of flavor from the safety of your kitchen table. No scorched calves from the exhaust pipe, and nobody has to discover at 100 mph that the motorcycle would prefer not to turn.

From there, our comfort-food tour wanders across the Atlantic.

We’re making Chicken Paprikash, one of the great comfort dishes of Hungary. For this one, we specifically seek out real Hungarian paprika. Years ago, a friend brought some back from Hungary for us, and the difference was enough that we’ve been willing to track down the real thing ever since.

We keep the dish mostly traditional, although we do sneak in just a pinch of smoked paprika for a little extra depth.

Because this is America, and we can do what we want.

And while we’re already wandering around Central Europe, we’re considering the Paprikash our little warm-up to Oktoberfest—which, despite the name, takes place largely in September.

Nutty Germans.

And because America has always been at its culinary best when we start borrowing everybody else’s food, we’ve also brought back our popular Asian Cashew Chicken Salad, along with Hearty Santa Fe Chicken & Bean Chili for a little international flair.

Yes, we know. Santa Fe is in America.

Possibly soon to be located in the newly renamed state of New America.

The name was intentional because it fits nicely with this week’s largely mom-and-apple-pie American theme. The flavors, however, are decidedly south of the border—as though the recipe were smuggled to us through an elaborate series of tunnels running beneath the Rio Grande.

Add in Broccoli & Cheddar Egg Bites as Michigan broccoli begins coming into season, Chicken Lemon Rice Soup for something lighter and brothy, and our Portabella Mushroom Ravioli with Madeira Sauce, and somehow what began with Dolly Parton and a conversation about forgotten desserts turned into an entire week of food.

We’re not entirely sure how we got here.

But we’re pretty happy with where we ended up.

Have a Great Weekend,
Brian and The BAC Team

Email from Brian Abner Culinary Good Friday Afternoon All! Our menu this week has a more comforting, back-to-school feel. A happy accident, really. Much of this week’s menu somehow flowed from l

09/06/2026

Good Friday Afternoon All!

This week, we’re giving some credence to the old saying, “Life is unpredictable—eat dessert first,” and beginning with exactly that.
Specifically, Dolly Parton’s Banana Bread Pudding, our dessert this week.
We should admit that no one in our kitchen is especially familiar with Dolly’s music. Most of us know little beyond “9 to 5.” A few know “Coat of Many Colors,” largely because if you listen to NPR long enough, it is somehow going to come up in conversation.
But over the past week, we heard story after story about the sheer decency of the lady—and all of us were struck by them. So when one of those stories mentioned Dolly’s banana bread pudding, there was an immediate and unanimous “Yup” in the kitchen.
It also fits the end-of-summer Labor Day holiday and our slightly Americana-leaning menu. More importantly, a luscious, custardy banana bread pudding is precisely the sort of thing we’re happy to prepare.
Then we heard the recipe…
So, with all due respect and affection, we’ll be making Dolly Parton’s Banana Bread Pudding—in spirit, rather than to a tee: a proper bread pudding of custard-soaked baguette baked with ripe bananas and a touch of cinnamon, served with rum crème anglaise.
Given her kind nature and Southern charm, we think Dolly would forgive us—but probably still talk about us after church.
Having eaten dessert first, we can return to the more conventional order of things—and to Labor Day. As we do for the summer holidays, we’re firing up the smoker.
This Labor Day, we’re making pulled pork as it should be made: lightly rubbed and smoked for many hours, until it decides it’s done. There’s nothing much more American than serving it with macaroni and cheese and fresh broccoli salad, especially as locally grown broccoli is beginning to come in.
Perhaps even more American is drowning that lovingly smoked pork with a whole bunch of sauce.
We believe the pig and the smoke speak quite nicely for themselves. But as a hedge, we’re including a mustardy, vinegary Carolina-style sauce with just a hint of sweetness.
Our Monday soups this week will include the not-entirely-American-yet-adored-stateside Gazpacho. America is a melting pot anyway, correct?
And, on the more cynical side, Senate White Bean Soup. Last week’s Maurice Salad left us a holdover gift: the Dearborn ham bones. Perfect, perfect, perfect for bean soup—and no tour of Americana would be complete without politicians somehow inserting themselves.
We retain our well-earned distaste for the species, but the soup itself is blameless: white beans and ham slowly simmered with onions, celery, carrots and herbs until rich and comforting.
Admittedly, Coconut Shrimp feel a little more Caribbean than Americana. But there’s a reason they’ve appeared on the menu of nearly every Ruby Whatever and TGI Stupid in America: Americans love them.
There will, however, be one important difference. Ours will be hand-breaded using proper, substantial shrimp. You’ll be eating shrimp coated with coconut—not a wad of coconut breading constructed around a single molecule of shrimp.
We’ll serve them with sweet mango-chipotle dipping sauce, scallion-lime jasmine rice and garlic-sautéed green beans with red peppers.
And then summer rather abruptly crash-lands into the school year.
On Monday, we’re eating smoked pork, coconut shrimp and banana bread pudding and enjoying one final summer holiday. On Tuesday morning, the local public schools reopen, and we return immediately to the unpleasant realities of early-morning negotiations with children who refuse to get out of bed—typically preceded eight hours earlier by negotiations with those same children who refused to go to bed.
Fortunately, our Ham, Swiss, Spinach and Caramelized Onion Egg Bites are nearly instant breakfast food. Warm one briefly, throw it in the general direction of your child’s face, and continue forcefully shoving them out the door. Breakfast handled.
Then begins the nonstop hounding about unfinished homework, followed by the endless chauffeuring to sports, clubs, lessons and every imaginable extracurricular activity. Apparently, the children must be educated, enriched, exercised and transported. Constantly.
We thought Wednesday called for a substantial dose of back-to-school comfort.
That means Classic Chicken Noodle Soup and Mushroom, Beef and Barley Soup, either of which would be perfect when poured into a thermos and tucked inside a lunch pail—if children still carried such things. We suspect both have been replaced by high-fashion insulated stainless-steel vessels engineered to survive atmospheric reentry and used primarily as fashion statements.
We’re also making Tarragon Chicken Salad with Grapes and Toasted Almonds, equally suited to a grown-up lunch or an after-school sandwich; Classic Meatloaf—honestly, other than metal detectors and armed school “resource officers,” does anything say back to school more than a well-made meatloaf?—cheesy Chicken Enchiladas with rice, pinto beans and fresh pico de gallo; and a comforting Summer Vegetable Casserole with roasted corn and grape tomato salad.
Summer may be nearly over, but at least no one needs to worry about dinner.

Have a Great Weekend,
Brian and The BAC Team

Email from Brian Abner Culinary Good Friday Afternoon All! This week, we’re giving some credence to the old saying, “Life is unpredictable—eat dessert first,” and beginning with exactly that.

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Grosse Pointe, MI
48230

Telephone

+13135304302

Website

http://www.brianabnerculinary.com/

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