Fotocuisine

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…

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…