Christey and I met in St Pete Beach, Florida. We both lived in the area and a friend of a friend of both of us was in town, and we all met for drinks and dinner at Sloppy Joe’s, on the beach.
Yeah, it’s Hemingway’s Sloppy Joes, except the one in Key West that’s named Sloppy Joes isn’t the one Hemingway went to. Sloppy Joes either moved, or got bought out, I don’t remember which, nor do I know why they decided to put another on the Gulf Coast in Tampa Bay, but the sunsets are pretty and the beaches are white and powdery.
Sloppy Joes has a grouper sandwich on the menu, of course. Almost every restaurant on the Gulf Coast of Florida does, from the dingiest dive (where the grouper is most likely not grouper, but basa), to the high end resorts. One of my favorite grouper sandwiches was at south Clearwater Beach at the Bellevue Biltmore Beach Resort. They took the classic fried grouper, red onion, lettuce, and tomato, and substituted a chipotle aioli for the mayo.
Tonight, I made a beer-batter fried grouper sandwich, with a cajun spice and jalapeno aioli, on a toasted bun. A summer beach classic, and nostalgic for us both.
Can you hear the surf?
 Last night, I finished work late and didn’t want to go to the store, so I kinda whipped something up based on what ingredients I just happened to have in the house. It worked out in the end, but there were a few back-and-forth ideas, and one side that just didn’t work out.
I had: boneless-skinless chicken breasts, celery, onion, roasted red bell peppers (in a jar), a single egg, olive oil, butter, one large potato, risotto rice, homemade chicken stock, half a bottle of sparkling wine, sour cream, some key limes left over from the pompano, and a lot of spices.
The original plan was a cajun chicken over a crisped potato pancake, but I tried to be healthy and used egg white instead of a whole egg to bind the potato, and it just fell into a mess trying to fry it up in a pan. I’ve had potato pancakes most of my life (Polish/German background not to mention I was raised Catholic — good meatless Lent dish), and I’ve made them zillions of times, but things were just not binding last night. So, instead of salvaging a soupy mess of scorched pan/liquid potato-oil for something that was just going to be dressed with the main course, I changed tack and decided to make a semi-instant risotto thing I do.
The basis of most Cajun food is a “trinity”, similar to a French mirepoix. I once heard that the French Acadians substituted bell pepper for carrots after settling in Louisiana because it was tough to grow carrots in the warm, swampy soil. I don’t know how true that is, but trinity is onion, celery, and bell pepper, diced or chopped. I like using roasted red bells instead of green because they’re sweeter, and they look prettier.
More Pictures and recipe here
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