(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
by petermarcus | April 27, 2009 | In Friends, Photography, Recipes, TNS, food, mushrooms, sauces, scallops, shellfish, veloute
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1 Comment
Christey and I have done a guest-smackdown for Michelle over at Thursday Night Smackdown. We tackled Thomas Keller’s Coquilles St. Jacques, from his Bouchon cookbook.
Check out our post — and if you’ve never been to TNS before, it’s refreshingly PG-13 due to honest adult language.
by petermarcus | April 23, 2009 | In Contests, Photography, Recipes, champagne cream sauce, chili, mushrooms, pasta, ravioli, sauces, supreme, veloute
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2 Comments
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
by petermarcus | March 7, 2009 | In Friends, Photography, Recipes, The Left Over Queen, asian, curry, dinners, food, risotto, sauces, shellfish, shrimp, veloute
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13 Comments
This just happens to be the 100th post on FotoCuisine.com. It also happens to use some ingredients given to us by our favorite foodie friends, Jenn and Roberto, from The Leftover Queen during their visit with us recently.
Jenn has some friends who send her spices from all over the world, and when Jenn and Roberto visited us, she gave me a sample stash from her larger stash. Most of the spices seemed to originate from the Indonesian area of the world, and even in storage, their fragrance is still amazing every time I open the cabinet door!
I wanted to make a red curry shrimp, but I fusioned it with some French techniques. I actually have some homemade coconut milk, but instead, I decided to make a sauce supreme (basically a velouté with cream) infused with red curry powder. In a sense, it’s like the cream Cajun or Mexican sauces common in American restaurants — stock, spices, cream, and roux — with a subcontinent/southern-Asian inspiration.
Feel the heat
