This is a pork-only weekend. We haven’t posted any food in a week, life and work getting in the way. So I wanted to do as much as I could over the weekend, and if we’re doing a double header, why not concentrate on pork?

I have wanted to do a pork loin dish for a while, and there are a lot of marinades using Coke and fruit juices, but Christey found an espresso maker at a garage sale for $2, so why not inaugurate that? After sterilizing and de-calcifying, I figured it was a good chance to break it in.

I made an espresso-pineapple marinated pork-loin, with grilled pineapple and an espresso-pineapple-cream sauce. Bitter, sweet, pork, and cream. Oh yeah, there’s bacon, too.

Here, piggy piggy piggy

Jenn, The Leftover Queen, has a monthly Royal Foodie Joust. This month, the ingredients are: apricots, ginger, butter.

I made a pan seared duck breast, served it over stewed apricot slices, and made a ginger and apricot sauce with shallots and chives. When the duck breast had finished cooking, I fried long potato crisps in the duck fat to serve as a garnish.

Let the jousting commence…

For the past, oh, 6 months this word has been the one word that has been most prevalent in my head; “CAKE!!!”

I have been on a Just-Had-2-Kids-in-2-Years-and-Want-My-Body-Back Diet, for the past 6 months (lost 26 lbs, have 9 more to go ). Because of this, my head yells ‘CAKE!!!’ at me way too often.
Seriously, you have no idea.

So far I have been able to silent this, but today I started looking at that chocolate chip muffin recipe I took off a blog (I really wish I knew whose), printed out and stuck on the refrigerator to make for the kids (yeah, the kids. The same kids that made me fat). I then started to hit the pantry and hidden places for ingredients for, first the muffins, but then I found the white cake mix box (!!!!), but no frosting.

However, I married into, not only a cooking family, but a baking family as well.
JACKPOT!
Peter’s grandmother has made everyone’s wedding cakes from scratch for years, she even made ours.
The frosting is to DIE for. Seriously. I never knew that frosting was so simple, or consisted of so. much. fat.

So I pulled out the family cookbook and looked up her frosting recipe and then asked Peter to make it for me if I make the cake (cause it is really easy, but I do not have patience to read the whole damn recipe, so I glanced it over and begged Peter, I’m like that.)

This is what I ended up with:

Sweet sweet heaven, I tell ya.
The cake, even though white and I was really looking forward to chocolate, but I am not that close with the pantry gods, so this is all they provided me (and I am very grateful, i promise), was soo good and fluffy. The frosting was SUPER fluffy and mocha chocolately (we followed the chocolate frosting part).

I am now very very stuffed and I think I have had my cake fix for the next two years. Except there is an entire cake still sitting here to eat. So I guess I have to finish it up for dinner and breakfast and lunch tomorrow. There is no reason for that kind of waste.

cakey goodness recipe

Grouper is not the only ingredient that’s seasonal in Florida right now. You can’t walk the neighborhood without a mango hitting you on the head. When I lived on the beach in the Tampa Bay area, my neighbor had a mango tree over the fence that divided our property. In June, I’d find dozens of mangoes (I don’t personally believe that mangoes ends in ‘es’ — where did that ‘e’ come from? Does one write of tangoes with one’s amigoes? But my spell-checker, and wikipedia says it’s so, therefore who am I to debate spelling) sitting in my lawn. My current neighbors aren’t as well stocked with mango trees, so I bought a few from my local market. I also found some local scallops on sale, U-12s, so I grabbed a few of those. Mango and scallops might be considered Caribbean, but I wanted to do some Asian spice, so I went for a sriracha-glaze, with a mango-bacon risotto.

As fate would have it, What’s For Lunch Honey is having a mango-themed challenge until July 14th, which is actually Bastille Day in another coincidence which is probably completely irrelevant to mangoes. But, it’s enough coincidence that we’ll play along and have a lot of fun.

Is Mango the next Tango?

Christey joins a for-fun photo expo every month on Flickr where food is the subject. This month is a diptych, “From the market to the table”. The idea is a picture of food at the store (or soon after), and a picture of a prepared meal using that food ingredient. There are bonus bragging rights for getting the ingredient from your backyard.

So, I immediately thought of something with blue crab (because my tomatoes are still green, and my jalapeño plants are still tiny because I planted them too late, and my French herbs are refusing to grow in the Florida sun), so I threw the trap in the canal. I was already thinking of the crab as a rich sauce, using the shells for a brief stock. It’s firmly grouper season in Florida — you can’t go to any fish market without tripping over a dozen grouper heads — so I used that as the main fish. As usual, though, I think the sauce would go well with any large white fish, like halibut or maybe cod, or one of my favorites (and fiendishly hard to get in Florida) hake. Given the blue crab theme, it would probably go pretty nicely with a nice striped bass, too.

I made a sauce supreme from the crab stock, used some roasted red jalapeños and cilantro and lime to kick it a little Caribbean, served it with pan-seared grouper with the crab meat as a garnish, and crispy plantain bits over the top for some texture and fun.

Who needs Top Chef when there’s a photo expo involved?

So, wanna know what I have been working on?

Go here (yeah that is Peter in a video we did a month or so back) and click on either general mixers, martini mixers, margarita/daiquiri mixers, or rimming sugars and salts.
And then click on any of the individual pics. I did those and the group shots.
and now they are up, so if you want some good mixers or rimming sugar/salts, there ya go!

We will be back with food very very soon, it’s just I kinda took over the kitchen and dining area with all my photo equipment and styling stuff for a million and one product shots BUT I cleaned it all up as of today, so back to some yummy food soon. I hope.
-Christey

Lemon Drop, taken while working on some product shooting today, but I kinda styled this one without the products just for this special Click entry.

I’ve been thinking about the concept of this one for a few days, ever since I found some Sicilian moro blood oranges at a produce store. I knew I wanted to do a blood orange martini, and then a ceviche-type side, with a good fish as an entrée. I found whole lane snapper at a fish place and had the fishmonger remove the scales and gills so I could cook it in one piece.

Lane snapper are related to red snapper, and this was in great, fresh shape (if not fresh, lane snapper can get a little mushy). I was hoping for whole yellowtail, which is my favorite, but I couldn’t find any, just some mangled fillets at one store. Really, though, all snapper tastes similar and I don’t think there’s a bad snapper out there, especially if it’s fresh.

I was also thinking of doing a real fish or shellfish ceviche, but decided to carve up a jicama and use that in place of meat. Jicama is a starchy, carby root, so it wouldn’t really get chemically “cooked” as the proteins in fish would through the ceviche, but jicama is pretty good raw — sort of like a moist potato taste with the texture of an apple. It probably tastes and feels closer to daikon radish than anything else, but maybe a bit sweeter. With the citrus and cilantro, I think it worked really well, even though calling it “ceviche” was a bit of a conceit on my part.

Look inside, and the main course may look right back at you

For those who haven’t seen the post, Christey sprained her right foot over the weekend.. So, she’s not climbing ladders, shooting over my shoulder, or dancing and weaving around getting shots. I think these turned out great, but they’re more planned than our usual impromptu cooking candid documentation. Photojournalism will resume in roughly 3-6 weeks.

Last Thanksgiving, our family and friends had an epic meal with close to 20 adults, and over 10 kids. I was responsible for the sweet potato dish. Now, I actually do kinda like the marshmallow and oven-browned sweet potato thing (though I almost think you could put marshmallows on foie gras and it would be good…). But, I was looking for something different, so I brought my mandoline (that wonderful, yet blood-sucking, infernal tool), and sliced up a dozen sweet potatoes paper-thin, deep fried them, and sprinkled them with feta. The feta on the sweet potato chips almost looked like marshmallows, which is kinda what I was going for. They turned out pretty good, but Thanksgiving in Florida was rainy and 78 degrees, so the crispiness definitely fell off as the dinner progressed.

The other day, Jonathan, from the wonderful food blog We Are Never Full commented on my roasted chicken with feta green beans, and that reminded me that I haven’t made sweet potato chips with feta in a long while. So, I did, with some grilled lamb loin chops.

boil and bubble