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?

Before I get to the food, there’s a lot of buzz in the foodie blogsphere about the experience Melissa at Alosha’s Kitchen had recently concerning recipe copyrights, especially when it comes to adapting, or being inspired by, someone else’s recipe. The whole post is here: http://aloshaskitchen.blogspot.com/2008/07/illegal-or-not.html

It’s an interesting read. Many of us foodies, as well as professional chefs, are constantly inspired by the works of others, from professional chefs to an ancient grandmother in some remote patch of the globe. If we post someone’s recipe or adaptation, with or without changes of our own, does it violate copyright law? After all, not only can I not post an MP3 of a popular song on my blog, I can’t even post an MP3 of me performing a popular song, even if I changed it up a bit.

However, copyright law in the States specifically excludes lists of ingredients from protection, and unless there’s something uniquely personal or unique in the description, the “process” of cooking is usually not covered, either. In fact, an idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery is specifically not copyrightable (though some of these may be covered by patent). The idea is that works of art, such as music, is the work itself — the song is the product. A recipe, on the other hand, creates something else — a generic recipe isn’t the product, the dish the recipe creates is the product. A slightly legalese description, with good examples, can be found here: http://smallbusiness.findlaw.com/copyright/copyright-realworld/recipe-copyrighting.html

If reposting recipes is relatively legal, there does seem to be a balance in that there seems to be a communal culinary etiquette which generously tries to attribute the original concept or inspiration (and comes down pretty hard on those cooks who don’t). Personally, I try to link back to the original recipe, or at least name the city and restaurant that inspired me, if not the name of the chef. To me, the only recourse Melissa’s nemesis would have is to ask her to remove the attribution, lest it “pollute” the reputation of their “perfected” recipe. Instead, many of us in the foodie blogosphere are now considering our current and future subscriptions.

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Okay, on to more palatable subjects: Cuban Steak. One of Christey’s favorite Disney meals is the steak mojo at Bongos (Gloria Estefan’s place) in Downtown Disney. I was looking up mojo recipes when I happened upon an recipe from Bon Appétit magazine. I was intrigued by a recipe that takes two days (yes, two days) to make a steak. So, here is my adaptation of Chef Rodriguez’s riff on vaca frita, which can be found right here at Epicurious.

carne delicioso

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

This is a pork-only weekend. We haven’t posted any food in a week, life and work getting in the way. So I wanted to do as much as I could over the weekend, and if we’re doing a double header, why not concentrate on pork?

I have wanted to do a pork loin dish for a while, and there are a lot of marinades using Coke and fruit juices, but Christey found an espresso maker at a garage sale for $2, so why not inaugurate that? After sterilizing and de-calcifying, I figured it was a good chance to break it in.

I made an espresso-pineapple marinated pork-loin, with grilled pineapple and an espresso-pineapple-cream sauce. Bitter, sweet, pork, and cream. Oh yeah, there’s bacon, too.

Here, piggy piggy piggy

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…

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?

For those who haven’t seen the post, Christey sprained her right foot over the weekend.. So, she’s not climbing ladders, shooting over my shoulder, or dancing and weaving around getting shots. I think these turned out great, but they’re more planned than our usual impromptu cooking candid documentation. Photojournalism will resume in roughly 3-6 weeks.

Last Thanksgiving, our family and friends had an epic meal with close to 20 adults, and over 10 kids. I was responsible for the sweet potato dish. Now, I actually do kinda like the marshmallow and oven-browned sweet potato thing (though I almost think you could put marshmallows on foie gras and it would be good…). But, I was looking for something different, so I brought my mandoline (that wonderful, yet blood-sucking, infernal tool), and sliced up a dozen sweet potatoes paper-thin, deep fried them, and sprinkled them with feta. The feta on the sweet potato chips almost looked like marshmallows, which is kinda what I was going for. They turned out pretty good, but Thanksgiving in Florida was rainy and 78 degrees, so the crispiness definitely fell off as the dinner progressed.

The other day, Jonathan, from the wonderful food blog We Are Never Full commented on my roasted chicken with feta green beans, and that reminded me that I haven’t made sweet potato chips with feta in a long while. So, I did, with some grilled lamb loin chops.

boil and bubble

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…

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

MMMmmmmmm, Tuna. So, the whole seared tuna thing is about as cliche as you can get these days. Even Nebraska steak houses have a seared tuna appetizer, and there’s not much originality you can present with the fish these days.

On the other hand, why is that different from a steak bearnaise or a shellfish bisque? It’s relatively new, but it is somewhat of a fusion classic in modern cuisine. It could be worse — it could be fried mozerella sticks or something.

My favorite restaurant in South Beach Miami is Nemo’s (which opened long before Pixar). One of their signature dishes is a softball-sized chunk of tuna, rolled in nori seaweed, seared, and presented with a sesame seared rice-ball. It’s too good for words.

Today, one of my fish suppliers had AAA-grade sashimi yellowfin tuna on sale, ruby-red and glistening, and the muscle grains were tight and compact. So, I did my part to riff off of the Nemo’s.

I made a honey-lime-soy glaze, and served the tuna over a glaze-wasabi stir fry of vegetables and pad thai noodles.

toooooooona