Fotocuisine

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…

Oysters at the Blue Mermaid Chowder House.

I feel like I am so far behind, everyone is posting their great updates on the past weekend with the 1st Annual Foodbuzz Blogger Festival (like Oldways Table ,High/Low Food/Drink, A Little Bit of Spain in Iowa and a gazillion more… ), and I have only made it through Friday, and not even to the actual event, only the things Peter and I did before it. So I figured I would start there.

This for me was a weekend where i would again open up myself to the food world. Before I met Peter, I was a basic meat and potatoes girl with a few other exceptions. After Peter, I started trying things instantly. I would have him order my meals when we went out, surprising me with so many new and wonderful foods. Now that I have broaden my food horizon considerably, I have fallen back into the routine of not trying anything because ‘I don’t like it’ when really, I hadn’t tried it since my tastes have changed. So I decided that this blogger fest I would be open to try anything and everything (within reason, insects and organ meats would have to wait). Even simple things like raw tomatoes, which I have never liked. I apparently do now. Go figure.

This post and the few after it will have an enormous amount of photographs as I have a hard time limiting myself when it comes to new places, foods, and people.

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Christey and I were excited to go to the 1st Annual Foodbuzz Blogger Festival in San Francisco next month. We were even more excited to hear that Bertolli Sauces was sponsoring 10 foodie bloggers, providing airfare and hotel to the festival in exchange for developing an appetizer or main course menu item using Bertolli sauces.

For our entry, Christey and I were batting around main course ideas. I was leaning toward using the Bertolli vodka sauce, and Christey suggested stuffed shells. I thought the two would match well, especially with a filling rich in roasted garlic, crimini mushrooms, and asiago cheese.

Well, our menu item worked out nicely in two ways. It was a really tasty combination (I had it for leftovers the next two days), and it won free airfare and hotel for one of us!

For the next few days, Foodbuzz will ask members to vote on their favorite menu items. The three winners will serve their food to guests at the Festival! So, starting later today, head over to the Bertolli Sauces page at Foodbuzz and vote for FotoCuisine to see Peter dish out some Bertolli Sauce shells!
Click on this link: http://www.foodbuzz.com/blogs/us/florida/1519710-bertolli-sauce-menu-item-asiago-roasted-garlic-and-mushroom-stuffed-shells and click on the “buzz it” icon (with green check mark by it) to cast your vote

Our last post was an entry for The Royal Foodie Joust hosted by Jenn, the Leftover Queen.

For Memorial Day weekend here in the States, there were wonderful sales on steak, so my reboot of this month’s entry is a filet stuffed with rice, roasted tomatoes, herbs, and bacon, with a similar tomato basil aurore sauce (since it was so good from the last post). Oh, and feta. Can’t forget the feta.

Memorial Day Jousting…

I found some nice lamb loin chops the other day, and I decided to try another bit of regional swapping. I love taking a technique or recipe from one part of the planet, and mixing it up with a completely different part of the planet. I think the foodie word “fusion” leans a little bit to the Asian/Western combination, but that’s sort of what I’m shooting for — combining what works in one culture’s food with what works in another culture’s.

Sometimes, this may be reinventing the wheel. Similar methods of meal creation pop up all over the globe, independently from any cultural link. For example, many cultures have discovered the basics of food fermentation separately, from kimchi in Asia to the preparation of chocolate beans in South America. Other cultures have relied on connections, sometimes roundabout connections, and have adapted ingredients to their own culture — Mexican cuisine uses the Middle-Eastern cumin, and Italy uses the South American tomato.

Therefore, I’m not entirely sure there’s not a Greek equivalent to the Argentinian technique of creating chimichurri sauce — which itself has been described as something of a Patagonian pesto. Heavy on the herbs, with some olive oil, vinegar, some vegetables…generally local stuff blended and chopped together into a chunky, pasty, loose sauce.

In any case, that’s what I thought of when I saw the lamb. A nice marinade for flavor, grilled nicely, then a chimichurri-like sauce with classically Aegean ingredients.

More lamb inside

Lamb is one of those traditional ingredients of spring. These days, world-wide distribution and modern farming methods allow lamb to be available year round (for better or worse), but for many years, lamb was only available in the springtime.

Lamb is a great meat to use with pomegranate juice — it’s often paired with sweet condiments like mint jelly, and the complex pomegranate flavors go well with the earthiness of the meat. For this month’s POM blogger entry, I wanted to use a part of lamb that isn’t as familiar as chops. Lamb shank is economical, and is very tasty. Served pulled over linguine, with vegetables and fresh herbs, and this meal delivers a lot of flavor, but is very easy to cook.

spring on in

Christey and I started blogging about food on LiveJournal, just as a fun way to shoot what we would occassionally have for dinner. When I decided to step up my cooking, and Christey decided to step up her food photography, we realized we needed something a little more robust than LJ. We moved to WordPress’s site, then eventually to our own server using WordPress software. One year ago on April 1st, we bought the domain FotoCuisine.com (PhotoCuisine.com was taken, ironically on several levels, by a French company) and linked it to our WordPress site. The lines of where our food blogging started are a little blurry, but buying the domain is a pretty good line in the sand, so welcome to the second year of FotoCuisine!

Christey and I thank you very much for your support, comments, links, suggestions, and all-around fellow-foodieness!

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When I lived in Atlanta, I made a lot of gumbo. I haven’t made it in a while, though, and when I saw Top Chef’s New Orleans episode a few weeks back, I told myself I had to make it again soon.

There are factions within the gumbo world that I don’t pretend to fully comprehend. Just like wet vs. dry barbecue, if your family hasn’t made their particular version for a century or so, you’re pretty much dismissed to the sidelines of the argument. One of the biggest gumbo controversies is okra vs. file as a thickener. Personally, I annoy both sides, because I like both about equally. But, when I make it myself, I almost always use file. And, when you get right down to it, the thickener isn’t really what makes gumbo a good gumbo. If there’s any agreement at all about gumbo it’s this one fact: it’s all about the roux.

gumbo gumbo

This meal and post was inspired by an online community I read called Trashy Eats. It is well know that I, Christey, am not the cook that Peter is, nor have the interest in doing the crazy French sauces that he wants to perfect. I used to, but he is so good at it, I will let him do it and I will eat it.

I do know how to cook, as much as I let on that I don’t. Not crazy fancy stuff, but a lot of basic things. A long time ago, though, I did not. I knew some very very basic things to do with stuff that got me by when I could not stop at a fast food joint, or convince some one to make me something. The good thing, is my palate was that basic as well, cheese (Velveeta and American only), bacon, steak, mac and cheese (only the kind in the box and then, only Kraft) and potatoes. Oh! And creamed corn out of the can.

My dad’s mother, Mildred, used to make this for me all the time when I was a child and visiting her for the summer. My mom later told me exactly what it was (as I was not paying much attention, and could care less) and from that point on, I would make it all the time.

I made this once when I had first met Peter, he laughed at my silly little lunch and said ‘That’s Bangers and Mash… sorta’ I instantly felt fancy with a fancy name for my own lil’ trashy eats.

Peter is at my mother’s this evening, trying to fix her water well so she can have water again and not have to stay at our house again. (Not that we don’t like her to stay here, really! It just seems such a pain in the bottom for her to lug her stuff and annoying pleasant dog over here.) We were going to shoot Peter making his March pomegranate recipe tonight, but by the time he fixes her water and drives back home, I would be so starving that I might have already chewed my arms off.  We don’t want that. So I was on my own tonight. That brings me to this:

Trashilicious

This just happens to be the 100th post on FotoCuisine.com. It also happens to use some ingredients given to us by our favorite foodie friends, Jenn and Roberto, from The Leftover Queen during their visit with us recently.

Jenn has some friends who send her spices from all over the world, and when Jenn and Roberto visited us, she gave me a sample stash from her larger stash. Most of the spices seemed to originate from the Indonesian area of the world, and even in storage, their fragrance is still amazing every time I open the cabinet door!

I wanted to make a red curry shrimp, but I fusioned it with some French techniques. I actually have some homemade coconut milk, but instead, I decided to make a sauce supreme (basically a velouté with cream) infused with red curry powder. In a sense, it’s like the cream Cajun or Mexican sauces common in American restaurants — stock, spices, cream, and roux — with a subcontinent/southern-Asian inspiration.

Feel the heat

On the 14th of June, 1800, in the Northern Italian town of Marengo, Napoleon’s troops were hit with a surprise attack from the Austrian forces, commanded by General Michael von Melas. Napoleon figured the Austrians were retreating from Italy, and spread his army widely to try to cut them off. Instead, von Melas attacked directly, with a much larger force. Napoleon was forced to fall back. Some of the French outliers were able to reach and join up with Napoleon’s main force, and a counter-attack by the French regained the battleground and scattered the Austrian army, thus winning the Battle of Marengo. By the next day, the Austrians negotiated a retreat from Northern Italy.

Hungry after the long day (over 12 hours of combat), Napoleon commanded his chef to make something in a hurry. The chef was forced to scrounge the countryside and found herbs, chicken, tomatoes, garlic, wine, olives, and appropriated some of Napoleon’s personal stash of cognac. With these foraged ingredients, the chef whipped up a meal so tasty, Napoleon considered it his “lucky meal” and requested it before many future battles.

So goes the legend of Chicken Marengo. Though Napoleon ordered that the dish never be altered, many have done so over the last couple centuries. My basic “source” recipe came from The Joy of Cooking, and I’ve gone back and forth over several years altering and changing the recipe, from making almost a casserole version, to a more traditional approach. This version leans toward traditional.

March on in…