Fotocuisine

Even though we live in a semi-tropical area, guava isn’t a huge part of the Floridian diet. Almost any fruit, especially the astonishingly huge variety of citrus, are used everywhere, but not much guava.

I’ve used the paste for barbecue sauce, but I’ve only had a surreal experience with the raw fruit. I was horseback riding in the Costa Rican rainforest, when our 17-year-old guide shouted out to a guest:
“No no! Don’t let him [the horse] eat the guava fruits!” (Guava fruit were dotting the trail for miles and the horses would lunge for them)

“Why? Is it poisonous?” she asked.

“No,” he said, “it gives the horses gas. And the stables are right next to the house.”

This wouldn’t normally bode well for experimenting with tropical fruit, but herbivores and omnivores are two different beasts, and Christey found these thai guava fruits in my favorite produce place. So, since it’s August and we may have the outskirts of a hurricane to deal with this week, we decided to play around with some tropical drinks.

Now, I was a bartender in college, but my main gig was a wine and beer pub on campus. My off-campus mixed drink career was limited to college staples like sloe gin fizzes, white russians, the perfect kamikaze, and a few drinks that couldn’t be said in polite company.

My roommate and I would experiment with the odd combination to see if we could pull it off. We were on the quest to create a “stoplight” — a layered drink that was red on top, then yellow, then green on the bottom. I found a pretty good stoplight that was upside-down: midori(green melon) on top, orange juice in the middle, grenadine on the bottom. Not too alcoholic, but it tasted good and the densities made a nice set of layers. The only successful stoplight I made in color was sloe gin (red) on top, orange juice (yellow) and creme-de-menthe (green) sinking to the bottom. Perfectly layered. OhMyGawdAwful in taste.

I felt a little like that with the guava. These days I can make a fabulous vodka martini, and a drop-dead cosmopolitan. But when it comes to new drink creations, I don’t think I’m there yet.

In any case, here are two attempts with thai guava fruit. A rum based “Thai Sunset” and a champagne based “Sunrise Mimosa”

sunrise, sunset, as long as there’s sun

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