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…

Living in the subtropics of Florida, I have a luscious affection for warm-water fish. Grouper, snapper, seriously big creatures that may approach or exceed the weight of the fisherman that brought them in. Northern fishermen have their own trophies — halibut or cod get to similar sizes, and sometimes I find that fillets from these fish can work just as well in a recipe as fish to which I’m more accustomed. The fish itself may not be as important as the size of the muscle grain, or the tenderness of the fillet.

I was in a Latin mood, and grouper was fresh at my market, but if I were in a zanier world-spanning mood, it would have been interesting to do a southwestern salsa verde with a halibut or hake fillet — neither of which exist within 3000 miles of Mexico, but both approach grouper in texture and savor. When in a regional mood, the sauce itself, and the seasonings, may matter more than the species of the protein.

However, the grouper was there, and I grabbed it.

tangy spicy goodness follows…

The March issue of Gourmet had a little recipe for steak béarnaise, with fried matchstick potatoes. It was kinda tucked in the middle, among all the other interesting French rustic meals hither and yon. How classic can you get? Meat and béarnaise, with fried potatoes. Steak frites with a twist.

Since March, I’ve probably made this recipe four times. I’ve made it more than any other idea from that magazine since I got my subscription this year.

Of course, I’ve personalized it a bit.

Mmmmm steak

I am distantly South African on my father’s side, through Capetown great-grandparents. It’s never been much more than an entry on my family tree, which is an opalescent moving target. Depending on wars, shifting European borders, bloodlines, religion, and territorial disputes, I can be considered 100% Polish in one perspective, or as splintered as American, Polish, German, South African, Russian, Latvian, and Jewish.

When I lived in Atlanta, I lived near a South African restaurant (the webpage is here: 10degreessouth.com but it was a hole in the wall when I first found it). I went there so often, the owners, South African brothers, got to know me well. I fell in foodie love with the spicy peri peri sauce that accompanied the Chef’s fish dishes. I hinted and guessed and beat around, but he would never tell me how he made it. He did, however, once give me a quarter-cup of peri peri powder to experiment with — something the bartender told me he never gave to any customer in the history of the restaurant.

The closest American pepper to the African bird’s eye pepper is probably cayenne, though there’s a pleasant lemony brightness to peri peri that cayenne’s sweetness doesn’t quite reach. After I moved to Florida, I found a supplier in Tampa, though there are mail order sites as well.

I never was able to duplicate the Chef’s sauce, but the closest I have come is with a basic French beurre blanc, steeped with peri peri powder. The restaurant serves the sauce with a cold water fish like Cape Capensis or Hake. I find it goes well with warm water fish like grouper or snapper, or other thick, white-fleshed fish of any climate, such as halibut. If you can’t find peri peri, use cayenne — South African culinary purists would laugh at my attempts anyway.

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