Half your meal is on us
It’s hard not to love the New Yorker’s Shouts & Murmurs — erudite humor that speaks to the, well, you know, the more-than-common man.
This week features a culinary guide to passive aggressive appetizers perfect for any gathering. Best snippet: “Have you ever noticed how sun-dried tomatoes and top-grade peyote look exactly the same? Not a suggestion, really. Just saying.”
From our wine maven Taylor Eason comes inexpensive wines with our inexpensive menus (bolded wines will work for the whole menu, if you don’t want to go with course-by-course wines):
David Miller, Savant Fine Dining:
Sweet Potato Soup: Big Fire 2006 Pinot Gris, $15
Heirloom Tomato Salad: Columbia Crest 2007 Two Vines Rose, $10
Braised Lamb in Peach Gastrique with Sweet Potato Scallops and Baby Eggplant: Jaboulet 2005 “Parallele 45” Cotes du Rhone, $15
Fabrizio Schenardi, Pelagia Trattoria:
Polenta with Sauteed Mushrooms: St. Francis 2004 Red, $12
Open-Faced Ravioli: Masi 2006 Masianco Venezie, $15
Seared Salmon with Green Beans: Beringer 2006 Pinot Noir, $20
Fruit Crepes: Banfi 2007 Rosa Regale, $18
Seble Gizaw, Queen of Sheba:
Mashed Potato Salad: Bonny Doon 2005 Le Cigare Blanc California, $20
Lentil Soup: 7 Deadly Zins 2004 Zinfandel, $13
Lamb Tibs: Onix 2006 Priorat, $12
Grass Root Tofu Scramble: Sokol Blosser Evolution #9 11th Edition
Elements, vegetarian menu:
Mushroom Medley: whatever red wine you use in the recipe OR Campo Viejo 2004 Rioja Crianza, $12
Ravioli: S.A. Prum 2006 Riesling, $12
Elements Global Cuisine — my new heroes of frugal cooking — have another $20 Menu Challenge dinner to serve up. This time, beef-eaters can get their nosh on, all for less than a double sawbuck. Recipes after the break: (more…)
In honor of this week’s upcoming Food Issue — The $20 Menu Challenge — EatMyFlorida will have a recipe o’ the day for the next ten days.
Our challenge to local chefs: Create at least three courses of wonderful food for two and keep the ingredients to under $20. Not too difficult for a home cook, maybe, but we wanted more. We wanted meals that are restaurant quality for all those being pinched by the economy who can’t afford as many nights out at the bistro as they could a few years ago. Exquisite food, light on the wallet. Turns out, that wasn’t too hard for most of the accomplished chefs who participated, either.
Today’s offering is from Elements Global Cuisine in Gulfport. Chef/owners Catherine and Jose Luis Pawelek went the extra mile by creating four menus, one for vegetarians, and three for meat and seafood eaters. Most of the dishes are not only easy for the home cook, they’re quick, with a lot of prepared ingredients bought from the supermarket. After the break is the first menu from Elements, an entirely vegetarian feast. (more…)
During a Memorial Day weekend packed with wholesome family activities, most taking place in the great outdoors, I reconnected with smores, that gooey fireside treat. Problem is, we were hanging out at the cabins in Myakka Park, where the AC blasts in the bedroom and the only fire comes from the charcoal grill cemented into the dirt out back. We all know that meat cooks best over glowing white coals, but marshmallows? That’s another story.
3 tips for smore preparation and construction after the break. (more…)
Shaka Zulu! It’s Week 2!
I’m not sure how much longer I’ll maintain this weekly re-cap of Cooking with Coolio (check out Week 1), but with lines like this, how can I resist?
It’s also hard to argue with a man who puts a jar of mayonnaise in his garlic bread spread. Sure looks tasty, though.
“Is your girlfriend one of them salad eatin’ bitches” and you need just the right recipe to get her to “drop them panties?” Coolio’s got your back.
Cooking with Coolio debuted this week on My Damn Channel (a new video aggregator starring long-lost and b-list celebs), where he demonstrates his culinary chops with the Coolio Caprese Salad. Don’t let his maple cabinetry and stainless steel appliances fool you, Coolio is still from the streets. When he needs salt, one of his buxom female assistants pulls a little baggy from her cleavage. His sous chef is also his hype-man. Coolio can slice and dice, although a chef’s knife may not be his favorite tool: “I’m pretty good with this knife, and I’m pretty good with a sword, nunchucks and a pistol.”
With lines like “an oily salad ain’t shit” and ” that looks better than you momma’s titties,” Coolio could even start competing for my job.
The recipe itself is nothing to get excited about, although he does toss on some diced onion and sprinkles a mystery ingredient at the end. Raw onion will get her to drop them panties? Maybe Coolio and I hand out with different hoes.
Coolio’s cooking sessions will be a weekly offering on My Damn Channel, at least until Weird Al starts mocking one of his recipes and Coolio disappears into another decade-long funk.
“Shaka Zulu, motherfucker!”
Appearing later this week in lieu of the weekly restaurant review:
This space is usually devoted to appraising the kinds of food that we eat pretty much every day, served by people who
devote their lives and livelihoods to its preparation. Rarely do I delve into the nitty-gritty of America’s relationship with food. It’s a complex subject, easy to ignore in the face of so many damn fine things to eat.
In some ways, 2006’s Omnivore’s Dilemma — arguably the best food book of the decade — changed all of that, at least for me. In Omnivore, author Michael Pollan broadly set the scene for dietary self-examination, detailing the history of our unhealthy relationship with corn and soy and lamenting the distance (both physical and psychological) between our plates and the sources of our food. In the process, he fleetingly raises a couple of troublesome questions: Why do we eat what we eat? And, perhaps more important: What should we eat?
In Defense of Food, Pollan’s latest book, is his answer.
He’s written some of the most evocative books about chefs around (Reach, Making, and Soul Of A Chef), devoted an entire glorious cookbook to Charcuterie, and allows Anthony Bourdain to post on his blog. Yeah, he’s pretty cool.
As a companion to his new book — Elements Of Cooking — Ruhlman has added another blog to his portfolio. Like the book, it explores “what is fundamental to the act of cooking,” including in-depth discussion of the uses of ingredients, techniques and foundational recipes. Anyone who is interested more in the background of cooking (the why of technique) than in following recipes should check it out.
Sarasota’s Creative Loafing has a weekly podcast (subscribe now, yo) and this week I was rhapsodic about cooking a tasty turkey. You can find the podcast and recipe at the941, Sarasota CL’s blog. There’ s nothing new for the experienced Thanksgiving chef, but new turkey wranglers might pick up a tip or two.
The James Beard Foundation Book Awards C
ommittee just released their list of 20 “essential” cookbooks and, on the whole, I can get behind it. Sarasota’s own Marcella Hazan gets a nod with her classic Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking and there is a fine spread between omnibus compilations (Bittman’s How To Cook Everything, Silver Palate) and a smattering of ethnic specialties (especially Bayless’ Authentic Mexican). In my opinion, though, there are two glaring omissions.
The New Best Recipe, Cooks Illustrated — Cooks Illustrated is known for their exhaustive recipe testing, simplification without sacrifice of flavor and focus on home cooking techniques. Each of the more than 1000 recipes comes with a detailed essay explaining the reasoning — based on that extensive testing — behind the important steps in the cooking process. More than just a cookbook, Best Recipe can be a no-nonsense, mythbusting education in how to cook. And just about every one of the 100’s of recipes I’ve cooked out of the book have been successful, with enough information provided that the even a schmoe like me can 
fiddle without screwing things up. It’s a necessity in any kitchen.
The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, Peter Reinhart — Yet again, this is a book that combines recipes that are relatively simple to follow with detailed and engaging explanations of why the steps work the way they do. Reinhart also made a “breakthrough” in explaining a process of slow, cold fermentation of dough that results in incredible flavor. Anyone intrested in the process of bread baking should have this book.
Check out the full Beard Foundation list after the jump and let me know if there are any of your favorites missing.
This weekend is the 10th annual Sarasota Reading Festival and, as usual, they’ve lined up a nice list of authors hawking new books, from immigrant-hatin’ Lou Dobbs to serial killer lovin’ Jeff Lindsay (of Dexter fame).
On the undercard are a whole slew of cookbook authors worth coming out to see, including Barbara Kafka, Robert Santibanez and, lo and behold, Robert Irvine (who I recently mentioned in this very blog). Most of the cookbook authors will be doing cooking demos on Saturday — I’ll be there trying to nail Irvine down about Ooze and Schmooze.
Use the stylus to write your love (or hate) notes, insert bread and the message gets burned onto the bread.
What would you write on your morning toast?
via Cooking Gadgets
I understand that we don’t live in one of the big cities, but sometimes there are certain, uhm, amenities that I find myself craving with an intensity that scares my wife. Would I move to San Francisco just to have local salumi delivered to my door? I’m thinking about it.
Cured pork is all the rage across the country, with a lot of chefs getting into the act, but Chris Cosentino of
Incanto Restaurant in San Francisco has taken things one step farther. He plans on operating his personal curing operation — Boccalone – like a CSA. Yep, join the club and every week you’ll be eligible for a box full of “tasty salted pig parts”, perhaps the four most appetizing words in our language.
Ok, so maybe I can resign myself to the fact that the local salumi craze likely won’t hit the Bay area for a decade or so, if we follow our normal culinary trend adoption timeline, but surely there must be some old and new local pork lovers out there going elbow deep in the lardo for fun and profit? Anyone know where I can find them, to tide me over?
Homemade pizza is not nearly as difficult or time consuming as you might think. I use a dough recipe from Peter Reinhart’s Bread Baker’s Apprentice (the best bread book around). Simple process - yeast, water, flour, oil; knead; refrigerate overnight to allow for fermentation and flavor development; proof, sort of; top and bake. In all, enough incredible dough to make 6 respectable Neapolitan-esque pies takes less than 15 minutes of actual effort, although there is a lot of letting it sit around.
The biggest challenge is teasing my elderly and decrepit oven to maintain a respectable heat. The widely known trick is to pre-heat the oven for at least an hour - it takes that long for a pizza stone to come to temp. I also cycle between broil and bake, opening the oven door every so often to trick the thermostat and get the elements heating again.
Below is the reward for my efforts (not to mention the 5 other dough balls waiting in my fridge and freezer). Looks beautiful, even though I used crappy part skim mozzarella and jarred pasta sauce, doesn’t it?
Yeah, the locavore eating trend is hitting its stride, as evidenced by the massive interest in books like Plenty and Animal, Vegetable, Mineral (as well as this piece in the Times).
But, as we all know, eating local takes work. The easiest way to take advantage of our local growing season is by joining an area CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) Farm. If you’re new to CSA’s, here’s how they work: Once a year you purchase a share in the farm. That share entitles you to a selection of free produce every week throughout the growing season. You never know what you’ll get until it shows up in your box.
I wrote about Geraldson Farm a little over a year ago, when the Manatee County-owned CSA project was just getting started. Now, the crops are going into the ground and it’s time to pony up for local produce. This week, Geraldson Farm began taking $50 deposits to reserve one of the 180 shares they have available for the next growing season, with the actual share cost predicted to run between $450-500. From November to May, you can pick up your organically-grown fruits and veggies at the farm in northwest Bradenton, or have them delivered to community pick-up sites in Palmetto, St. Petersburg and Sarasota.
In Tampa, there’s always Sweetwater Organic — a Florida CSA pioneer — where memberships run $615 whole/$315 half, but they fill up quick and you need to pick up at the farm (which, admittedly, is a lot of fun). Down in Punta Gorda is Worden Farm ($600/$350); they deliver to the Downtown Sarasota Farmers’ Market.
The great thing about a CSA is that veggies are forced into your life — fresh, local and organic — and you just have to figure out what to do with them. You’ll have to get creative, but you can always email me for a passel of recipes involving kale.
Every time my dad heads back to our ancestral grounds in Ohio, I inevitably end up with a pound or two of Glier’s Goetta. It’s a taste treat that somehow has never made it outside the Ohio-Kentucky corridor, the blend of pork, beef, oats and spices languishing in Midwest obscurity.
Think sausage, but, well, chewy (those oats keep their texture even when ground, processed and fried). 
This pic shows the classic serving method - thick slices fried crisp on the outside, left creamy and chewy on the inside - but I prefer to mash the stuff in the pan and give every last grain some of that caramelized crunch, then drop a couple of lightly poached eggs right on top, the yolks oozing into the sausage. There’s nothing quite like it.
