Fotocuisine

(Read through to the end for the first FotoCuisine giveaway!)

The lychee fruit is an Asian fruit, usually grown from China to India. They are commonly found canned in a syrup, and offered as desserts at a variety of Asian restaurants.

Bill Mee, from Lychees Online, runs a lychee orchard in South Florida, and he was kind enough to send us a batch of Mauritius lychees (I’ve since been informed that we were shipped Sweetheart Lychees — a South Florida variety with a large fruit and small seed that is rapidly becoming a major breed) fresh from the tree. You might expect fresh, ripe lychees to be better than the canned kind, and you would be right — there just is no comparison. The aroma, the flavor, the juiciness dripping out of every fruit, is something very unique to the Western diet.

Lychees taste like lychees, of course, but the closest flavors I can come up with are a bit of peach mixed with grape. The combination works pretty well. My 12-year old stepson doesn’t like peach, but really liked the fresh lychees.

There are a lot of sweet lychee recipes, as well as savory sauces with an Indian or Asian influence. I wanted to use lychees in a savory recipe, but I wanted to do something classic in technique, mixed with Western ingredients. Since fruit always goes well with grouper (or halibut if you prefer a similar texture of fish from northern waters), I made a pan-roasted grouper with a chicken stock velouté flavored with pureed lychee and New Mexico chiles.

More lychees

The folks at FoodBuzz were kind enough to send us a sample of Buitoni’s new Riserva Pasta line. We got a sample of the Buitoni Wild Mushroom Agnolotti — a folded semolina ravioli-like pasta containing portabello, crimini and roasted garlic with padano and parmesan cheeses.

The semolina, mushroom, cheese mixture just jumped out with its earthiness, so I was mulling over choices for sauce. I came up with a champagne cream sauce, with some New Mexico red chiles, with fresh oregano and lemon juice. I was shooting for the idea of an alfredo, matched with just a very little bit of smoky chile zing, with some greenness and sharpness from the herbs and citrus. It turned out to be a pretty good mix of flavors.

Simmer Simmer

I’m not a strict locovore, but I do try to keep things local when I have a choice. It makes sense for a lot of reasons: sustainability, shipping costs (monetary and carbon), supporting local economies in general, and our local farmers and fishermen in particular. It’s a good thing Christey and I love seafood, citrus, and chilies — items very common to Florida. I don’t know what we’d do if we lived in Needles, Arizona. Eat a lot of javelina, I suppose.

I don’t go overboard with locovarianism, though. I think regions and cultures from around the country or around the world can teach us a lot through cuisine. If “you are what you eat”, then sampling other cultures, especially through cuisine, can only help bring other people and cultures just that much closer. Technology has given us foodies a way to sample the entire world in ways that could not have been possible even when my parents were my age.

I’m self-taught when it comes to cooking. I’ve studied primarily French techniques (not out of any superiority of the French when it comes to cuisine, but Escoffier and his followers have made the art of cuisine approachable, teachable, and marketable). As a foodie, though, I will happily ingest the world. I’ve noticed within the last year or two that if I have a personal cooking style, I like to take a technique, ingredient, or recipe from one part of the world, and fusion it with another (or three or four). In one sense, it’s surprising how often this actually works. In another sense, food and cuisine were created by people, and we’re all just people, no matter what our origin.

Last night, I fused a lot of areas into one great meal. I took local grouper, covered it in sauteed criminis and shallots, tossed on some green chilis and red jalapeños, and some sharp cheddar. I covered in phyllo, baked, then served over baby spinach with a brown butter noisette, with toasted almonds.

Fuse on inside…