Grouper is not the only ingredient that’s seasonal in Florida right now. You can’t walk the neighborhood without a mango hitting you on the head. When I lived on the beach in the Tampa Bay area, my neighbor had a mango tree over the fence that divided our property. In June, I’d find dozens of mangoes (I don’t personally believe that mangoes ends in ‘es’ — where did that ‘e’ come from? Does one write of tangoes with one’s amigoes? But my spell-checker, and wikipedia says it’s so, therefore who am I to debate spelling) sitting in my lawn. My current neighbors aren’t as well stocked with mango trees, so I bought a few from my local market. I also found some local scallops on sale, U-12s, so I grabbed a few of those. Mango and scallops might be considered Caribbean, but I wanted to do some Asian spice, so I went for a sriracha-glaze, with a mango-bacon risotto.

As fate would have it, What’s For Lunch Honey is having a mango-themed challenge until July 14th, which is actually Bastille Day in another coincidence which is probably completely irrelevant to mangoes. But, it’s enough coincidence that we’ll play along and have a lot of fun.

Is Mango the next Tango?

Christey joins a for-fun photo expo every month on Flickr where food is the subject. This month is a diptych, “From the market to the table”. The idea is a picture of food at the store (or soon after), and a picture of a prepared meal using that food ingredient. There are bonus bragging rights for getting the ingredient from your backyard.

So, I immediately thought of something with blue crab (because my tomatoes are still green, and my jalapeño plants are still tiny because I planted them too late, and my French herbs are refusing to grow in the Florida sun), so I threw the trap in the canal. I was already thinking of the crab as a rich sauce, using the shells for a brief stock. It’s firmly grouper season in Florida — you can’t go to any fish market without tripping over a dozen grouper heads — so I used that as the main fish. As usual, though, I think the sauce would go well with any large white fish, like halibut or maybe cod, or one of my favorites (and fiendishly hard to get in Florida) hake. Given the blue crab theme, it would probably go pretty nicely with a nice striped bass, too.

I made a sauce supreme from the crab stock, used some roasted red jalapeños and cilantro and lime to kick it a little Caribbean, served it with pan-seared grouper with the crab meat as a garnish, and crispy plantain bits over the top for some texture and fun.

Who needs Top Chef when there’s a photo expo involved?

Ten years ago, I had a client in Phoenix, Arizona. About a week a month, I’d shuttle out to the desert from Atlanta, do some biz, see some sights, and eat some food. I was really starting my foodie-ness about then, and at one restaurant, I was stunned to taste the best Hawaiian ahi tuna I’d ever had in my life. In Phoenix. More than 5000 miles away from the seas where that fish was caught.

I’m a fan of cooking local; supporting local farms or fishermen or using local ingredients. I think it’s a good thing to do for cuisine, a good thing for the environment, a good thing for local economies.

However, one of my culinary quirks is taking an established cuisine or technique, then throwing in something from halfway around the world. I think part of this comes from that time in Phoenix, where I could nibble on fresh tuna when it was still 105 degrees outside at 8pm. The world still has a lot of problems, but I think there are times where the internet and FedEx have brought ideas and physical chunks of the planet to places which may not have otherwise experienced them. And that can be a good thing.

All of this philosophy is too lofty for last night’s meal, though. I wanted to go a little crazy and throw together far-flung techniques and food, and jam them into one dish with, I hope, a little elegance and extravagance.

So, I made pan-roasted Maine lobster, put it in a corn tortilla nest, covered it with a French-influenced sauce Supreme/Mornay, with plenty of New Mexican Red Chile. And we ate it here — Spring in Florida.

Live lobstah await their fate

I wanted to cook some lamb loin chops tonight, and had some crab left over from the other day, so decided to do a crab dip appetizer for the lamb.

Oddly, there was no stove used in this meal. The lamb was marinated and done on the grill, and the crab was already cooked.

More pictures and food

We live on a canal, which in turn feeds into the mouth of a river, which then feeds into a lagoon, which makes its way to the Atlantic. Which is a roundabout way of saying I could sail around the world from my backyard and return, except I don’t think our canal is deep enough to take the draft of a world-cruising sailboat, even if I could afford one. Our canal does, however, host plenty of salt water blue crab, free for the eating.

I love making a more or less classic bisque, from fresh caught crab straight through to the plate. The many steps involved just kind of make it more real.

Blue Crab Bisque and Shrimp Stir Fry follow. And yes, crabs have been boiled alive to create this post