This is my entry for this month’s Royal Foodie Joust from Jenn, the Leftover Queen.

Kittie won last month (congratulations Kittie) and her choices for this month’s joust were:
*Whole Grain
*Ginger
*Citrus

I made a crystallized ginger and lemon rind wheat bread with bulgar (whole wheat), and a hot and sour soup with ginger, lemon juice, garnished with popcorn (another whole grain). I formed the bread into a bowl and used it to hold the soup.

Soup soup soup!

This is July’s entry for The Royal Foodie Joust, from Jenn, The Leftover Queen.

Last month, Peter over at Kalofagas won the joust and selected the ingredients: Seafood, Cilantro, and Sesame in any form.

I could think of a few Latin seafood/cilantro recipes, or Asian seafood/sesame recipes, but the cilantro and sesame together made me scratch my head a bit. I definitely wanted to skip sesame as a garnish and wanted to use the taste, but sesame oil and cilantro can both be strong, assertive ingredients. I needed an assertive seafood to make a triad, I thought, or use a very little sauce.

Oysters popped into mind for both reasons. This will be a love-it-or-hate-it recipe, because in my experience, oysters on the half-shell have strong proponents and opponents. In fact, I only converted into the pro-oyster camp about a year and a half ago, now I can’t get enough of them.

A traditional garnish/sauce for oysters is the mignonette, a mix of wine vinegar, shallots, and cracked black pepper. I made a faux-mignonette using lime-juice as the acid, with sesame oil, shallots, salt, pepper, and cilantro. Just a drizzle of sauce, and yum:

open wide

Jenn, The Leftover Queen, has a monthly Royal Foodie Joust. This month, the ingredients are: apricots, ginger, butter.

I made a pan seared duck breast, served it over stewed apricot slices, and made a ginger and apricot sauce with shallots and chives. When the duck breast had finished cooking, I fried long potato crisps in the duck fat to serve as a garnish.

Let the jousting commence…