01 Jul 2010 Baked Halibut with Yogurt Sauce

Every month, Jenn, the Leftover Queen hosts the friendliest cooking contest on the web: The Royal Foodie Joust! Three ingredients are chosen, and foodies and food bloggers from around the world compete for the coveted trophies of Best Picture, Most Unique, and Best Overall dish using those three ingredients.

If you haven’t Jousted, I seriously encourage you to try. It’s a fun, low-pressure way to stretch your culinary chops and see how three ingredients can spawn amazingly different recipes each month!

This month, the ingredients were yogurt, nuts, and mushrooms. I made a baked halibut, with a greek yogurt/sour cream sauce sprinkled with crushed macadamia nuts, sitting on a bed of thinly sliced criminis and shallots.
Recipe and more pics inside

08 Jun 2010 Skirt Steak Salsa Verde
 |  Category: Recipes  | 7 Comments

It may not be technically summer yet, but you wouldn’t know that in central Florida. It has been summer for over a month now with high-80s temperatures and daily booming thunderstorms. Summer, even in the tropics, means cooking outdoors — and for a good chunk of America, cooking outdoors means steak.

Beef has more variety than perhaps any food animal, save the pig. Forget the braised short-ribs and oven roasts of the colder months, what’s your favorite summer must-have on the grill? The tender thickness of filet mignon? The classic bone-in NY Strip? The assertive beefiness of sirloin? The juicy chuck 1/2 pound hamburger? The macho inch-thick T-bone? The slow cooked spare-ribs? The upscale elegance of ribeye? Texas-style pulled-beef brisket? Or the modern discovered treasure of the flat-iron steak?

Yeah, yeah, all good, but one cut of beef that has been long favored outside of America is starting to be respected by the backyard weekend warrior — outside skirt steak.

I made a skirt steak on the grill, but instead of the common (yet drool-worthy) chimichurri, I made a roasted salsa verde with fresh tomatillos.

sizzle sizzle inside….

30 May 2010 Foodbuzz 24×24: Grass Fed Beef Tasting

The folks at Foodbuzz run a monthly feature called 24×24. Each month, they pick 24 food bloggers to plan a meal on a specific day. In 24 hours, 24 meals are enjoyed around the world, and then blogged.

This month, Foodbuzz picked Saturday, May 29th as the day, and Christey and I were selected as one of the 24 hosts.

The meal we submitted was based on an idea I have been mulling over since Christey and I were at Foodbuzz’s Blogger Festival in San Francisco last year. While there, one of the seminars was co-hosted by Brian Kenny, head rancher at Hearst Ranch. The Hearst family (of publishing fame) own tens of thousands of acres of land and only raise grass-fed, free-range beef.

Almost all beef raised in America is “feedlot” beef — cattle either raised entirely on corn, or finished on corn to fatten them up prior to slaughter. Because of their close contact and lack of exercise, there are concerns about the hormones, antibiotics and health of the cattle, how many of these products are passed through to humans, and how the environment is affected.

On one hand, there’s something to be said for capitalism, that McDonalds can deliver half a person’s daily calories for half an hour of minimum wage. On the other hand, while starvation and malnutrition have been reduced, a wide spectrum of other medical problems are now prevalent, from obesity to cancer.

Most of this is covered in Michael Pollans’ excellent (and now legendary) book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Pollan not only wrestles with the ideas of sustainability, health, and the environment, but also explores economics and “class” issues (yuppyism) of eating sustainable and organic foods.

Hearst is the anti-feedlot. Their cattle is hormone-free, antibiotic-free (they almost never require antibiotics and when one does, it doesn’t get slaughtered with the rest). They have the luxury of roaming around the California countryside, eating grass, pretty much doing what cows evolved to do. They take a bit of a hit in terms of production — cattle is slaughtered after two years instead of 14 months, and they’re a little smaller — but grass-fed beef is much higher in Omega-3 and beta carotene and many other important nutrients.

Putting all the benefits and abstractions aside, my main question was how the taste stacked up. Some describe it as more subtle, while others think it tastes more naturally beefy, as opposed to a more artificial feedlot “punch” of flavor. We were able to sample some Hearst ground beef in Chef Arenstam’s gourmet meatballs and they tasted fantastic, but that’s also an issue I’ve wondered about. Usually, chefs or home cooks proudly advertise that a meal is made with grass-fed beef — the taster knows exactly what he or she is eating. Some taste tests involve a naked bite of steak on a white plate. Most of us don’t eat beef that way at home or in a restaurant.

Which led me to the beef tasting idea for Foodbuzz’s 24×24. Gather a bunch of foodies, and cook beef in traditional ways, accompanied with sauces and side dishes, just like a restaurant or dinner party. Serve a Hearst beef dish and a cut of grain-fed beef from a quality butcher, side-by-side. However, the tasting would be done blind, with only the cook (me) knowing which is which.

In other words, instead of a piece of beef on a toothpick, the diners can compare and contrast beef samples covered with béarnaise sauce, after eating a variety of appetizers. Would there be an obvious difference in taste and texture? For fun, the dinner guests were given ballots to rate taste and texture, as well as offer comments.

The menu would be filet mignon with béarnaise, skirt steak chimichurri, and mini hamburger “sliders” with a demi-glace mushroom sauce, along with appetizers and sides.

Foodbuzz donated $250 to cover the costs of the meal. Brian Kenny of Hearst was also kind enough to comp the skirt steaks, something they usually only sell as part of their cattle-share program.

Beef inside!

04 May 2010 Lemon Lime Chicken (and a giveaway!)
 |  Category: Recipes  | 17 Comments

(Read to the end for another giveaway sponsored by A Cork Above!)

Citrus and chicken go well together in many cuisines. Many southeast Asian areas, Latin America, and the Caribbean cook or marinade chicken with citrus, and there’s always the American suburban grill classic of lemon pepper chicken. I went Asian/Latin with the concept for this dish, with some classic French techniques thrown in for some refinement.

The chicken was sauteed and oven roasted with ginger, garlic, and shallots, and the sauce was a gastrique of sugar and rice vinegar with lemon/lime zest and juice, cilantro, chives, and red jalapenos. I served the chicken with some quick-fried tortilla strips for some crunch, similar to Asian-American chow mein noodles.

Fresh and Herby inside

05 Apr 2010 Roasted Tomato Basil Strawberry Grouper
 |  Category: Recipes  | 5 Comments

It’s Spring in Florida. Uncharacteristically, Spring hit us around the first day of Spring, instead of a month before. It has been a brutally cold winter for us, at least for this area, with several hard freezes. Our coconut trees survived, but they have been dropping their fronds and lost every one of their fruit — maybe 40 or 50 in some stage of growth.

The warm days are here at last, though. I started my herb garden on the kitchen windowsill. At the store, the strawberries are plump and red. Florida provides about 15% of the country’s strawberries, but at this time of year, before California’s crop hits, Florida provides most of the non-hothouse strawberries. In November, a pound of strawberries was $5.00. Now, I see them priced at $4.00 for five pounds.

At the store yesterday, I smelled those strawberries, and thought of the strawberry basil martinis we had at the Foodbuzz Festival in San Francisco. Though tomatoes aren’t in season yet, I was also thinking of my newly planted basil with roasted tomatoes. It kind of hit me all at once — a pan-roasted grouper with a roasted tomato, basil, strawberry sauce with cream and some creamy goat cheese.
Strawberries? And fish? Read more…

20 Feb 2010 Pork Charcutière (and a giveaway!)
 |  Category: Recipes, demi glace, pork, roasted, sauces, savory  | 8 Comments

A few posts back, I documented the three day epic of demi glace. The technique I used was adapted from one of my culinary idols, James Peterson, writing in Saveur magazine. In the same article he provided a handful of sauce recipes using demi glace, including a derivation of the classic pork Sauce Robert, called Sauce Charcutière.

I wanted to try this with some mustard and herb crusted roast pork tenderloin, and man was it a good match. Read to the end for our next giveaway!
Pork and Demi Glace inside…

20 Jan 2010 Shrimp Skewers with Red Curry Sauce and a Giveaway

Congratulations to Jess at Hungry For Seconds for winning our last giveaway! Your San Francisco goodie package will be on its way as soon as I hit the post office! Also, read to the end for another giveaway and a sponsor announcement!

Last week, Central Florida had four hard freezes in six days. Normally, the rest of the county will have a frost and we stay slightly above since we’re close to the water. Not last week — mid-20s even where we were, and there was a skim of slushy ice on our canal.

We’re not used to weather like that, but more than our comfort, I was actually worried about my coconut trees. They usually can’t take a hard freeze, and even though it warmed above freezing in the middle of the day, four freezes a week made it a pretty tough week for them.

We’ve been getting a good harvest of coconuts this last month, even before the freeze. I thought I’d take advantage of them to make a red curry sauce. Christey wanted some skewered shrimp cooked on the grill, and they paired up nicely.

No lime in this coconut…(read more)

15 Jan 2010 San Francisco: The Last Day

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This post is mostly pictures, as the last day of the Foodbuzz Blogger Festival consisted of a brunch and then we were left to explore the beautiful city on our own.
San Francisco inside…

14 Jan 2010 The Basics: Demi-Glace

(Don’t forget to check out our giveaway at the bottom of our Christmas Dinner post!)

Sauces are my favorite part of cooking, from ketchup to béarnaise. Since I love (and aspire to) French techniques, a good chunk of the sauces out there are based on some form of stock — vegetable stock, chicken, fish, beef, veal, lobster, lamb, duck, and so forth.

Making stock is usually a pretty simple thing to do, but there’s a technique used to take a certain type of stock to the next level of culinary refinement — demi glace.
The journey begins…

10 Jan 2010 Christmas 2009 and a Giveaway!

(Read to the end for a FotoCuisine Giveaway!)

Every year, I do a four-course Christmas dinner for family. The number of guests range from 10 to 20 depending on the year, and to which cities family members are traveling over the holidays.

Each year, I do a theme. One year it was “wrapped” foods, one year was green and red. One year we had four hurricanes in Florida, so I picked courses based on the names of the hurricanes (Charley, Francis, Ivan, and Jeanne). Last year, I did an Iron Chef theme where guests picked the ingredient a week in advance.

This year, I struggled with a theme. Work and life pressure has been intense this year, like a good chunk of America. Both of my brothers and their families would be away this year, visiting in-laws, so the guest list was smaller than usual. My mother half suggested Christmas-on-a-budget, and it immediately resonated with me.

I wanted to still do a four course meal, but I wanted to keep it refined, yet inexpensive. We would have six adults this year, so I planned a meal under $100. Cooking staples already present in my parents’ house (flour, mustard, olive oil, sugar, etc…) wouldn’t count in the ingredient cost. I surprised myself when I planned the meal, went shopping, and ended up with a bill of $79.

Menu inside…