Christey and I met in St Pete Beach, Florida. We both lived in the area and a friend of a friend of both of us was in town, and we all met for drinks and dinner at Sloppy Joe’s, on the beach.

Yeah, it’s Hemingway’s Sloppy Joes, except the one in Key West that’s named Sloppy Joes isn’t the one Hemingway went to. Sloppy Joes either moved, or got bought out, I don’t remember which, nor do I know why they decided to put another on the Gulf Coast in Tampa Bay, but the sunsets are pretty and the beaches are white and powdery.

Sloppy Joes has a grouper sandwich on the menu, of course. Almost every restaurant on the Gulf Coast of Florida does, from the dingiest dive (where the grouper is most likely not grouper, but basa), to the high end resorts. One of my favorite grouper sandwiches was at south Clearwater Beach at the Bellevue Biltmore Beach Resort. They took the classic fried grouper, red onion, lettuce, and tomato, and substituted a chipotle aioli for the mayo.

Tonight, I made a beer-batter fried grouper sandwich, with a cajun spice and jalapeno aioli, on a toasted bun. A summer beach classic, and nostalgic for us both.

Can you hear the surf?

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?

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…

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.

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