Michelle, at Thursday Night Smackdown threw a smackdown challenge: Pick a recipe or technique you’ve never tried before, and do it. Christey and I took the challenge to another level, and switched roles. She cooked, and I shot the pictures.(Snarky comments in italics are Christey’s)

Christey cooked 40 clove garlic chicken (yes, 40 cloves of garlic), with a side of fettuccine carbonara. I struggled with a macro lens and had to have my white-balance and strobes set up for me (and film speed, shutter speed, and fstop, but who’s counting ). Between the two of us, we created this:

Garlic and bacon, what’s not to like?

It’s been summer in Florida for a few months now (in season, if not by calendar), but nothing says summer like ribs.

I lived in Atlanta for a decade, and barbecue always means pig in Georgia. There are heated debates about wet (sauce-slathered) ribs vs. dry (spice-rubbed) ribs, and a couple hundred years of heavily regional cuisine hasn’t solved the debate….though dry ribs seem to edge out wet in Northern Georgia.

I’ve never been accepted as a Southerner by native Southerners because I was born in California (on an Army base), my family is from Nebraska, and have actually lived chunks of my childhood in the North, from Connecticut to Washington, DC. I went to college in upstate New York, which is heresy to the college-sport loving South. I’ve lived in Florida more than anywhere else in my life, but most of that was in middle and southern Florida, which true Southerners consider to be the North with more humidity. I have no Southern cred with the people who truly inhabit the South.

So, with my lack of qualifications, how do I solve the wet-dry dilemma? I dodge it, and do both.

Baby back pork ribs, with a guava barbecue sauce, with a side of fried plantain chips.

wet, dry, it’s all pig

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?

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

There’s a yin-yang shininess to what is termed “comfort food” — the yin of simplicity and familiarity, balanced with the yang of the excitement of refined techniques.

Roasted chicken, with giblet gravy.

Yeah, Grandma cooked this dish every week of her 103-year life, but there’s also a reason she cooked it the way she did…the distillation over generations down to the essence of what it takes to cook a chicken well, married with the extravagance of what else gets thrown in…what she knew would tickle the palate of the fickle tastes of her particular family. Show me a family’s favorite roasted chicken, and I am sure I could cook virtually anything else, and that family would like it.

I may sound like I’m waxing far too poetic for such a simple dish, but for American/European cooking, the roasted chicken may be the perfect example of a meal itself. It’s easy to over-think this dish. Teriaki or buffalo style, drowning in butter or too crunchy with rosemary. It needs enough attention not to overcook to dryness, or to undercook just enough to make the FDA start tapping the table nervously.

Here I shift to Thomas Keller, perhaps the best American chef of French style in the States today. His yang-cookbook “The French Laundry” is a seriously interesting look into veering culinary techniques. His yin-cookbook “Bouchon”, is based on his more bistro/mom-and-pop comfort-food techniques of what chefs might eat (as he implies) when they get off work.

The very first recipe in Keller’s “Bouchon” is a roasted chicken. It’s in the introduction, not even in the actual list of recipes, which actually has another recipe of roasted chicken using different techniques.

In keeping with my yin-yang view of comfort food, I absolutely love his astonishingly simple technique for roasting a chicken. However, his butter-mustard serving partnership is too mild for me. I prefer a robust chicken giblet gravy. His shallot-haricot vert make a great side for this dish, but again, I love his minimalist technique, but jack it up his green beans with feta and sautéed almonds. Maybe it was the way I was raised. But here we go anyway:

The saga continues…

Living in the subtropics of Florida, I have a luscious affection for warm-water fish. Grouper, snapper, seriously big creatures that may approach or exceed the weight of the fisherman that brought them in. Northern fishermen have their own trophies — halibut or cod get to similar sizes, and sometimes I find that fillets from these fish can work just as well in a recipe as fish to which I’m more accustomed. The fish itself may not be as important as the size of the muscle grain, or the tenderness of the fillet.

I was in a Latin mood, and grouper was fresh at my market, but if I were in a zanier world-spanning mood, it would have been interesting to do a southwestern salsa verde with a halibut or hake fillet — neither of which exist within 3000 miles of Mexico, but both approach grouper in texture and savor. When in a regional mood, the sauce itself, and the seasonings, may matter more than the species of the protein.

However, the grouper was there, and I grabbed it.

tangy spicy goodness follows…