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.”

For more, head here.

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 11^th 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 3 COURSE
MEAT DINNER FOR 2 -$18.77

APPETIZER: BEEF TIPS
MAIN COURSE: FLANK STEAK BOCA
DESSERT: BROWNIES

APPETIZER Ingredients

8 Oz. Beef Tips
1/8 Cup (1/4 stick) unsalted butter
1/2 Cup strong brewed Coffee
1 Cube Beef Bouillon (diluted in 1/4 Cup Water)
1/2 mini bottle Coffee liqueur e.g. Kahlua
1/4 tsp dried Sage
Salt and Pepper to Taste
5 Oz. Mixed Greens

In a large pan melt the butter over medium heat, add the beef tips, saute until nicely browned, add the coffee, bouillon, coffee liqueur, sage and salt and pepper to taste. stir until slightly thickened, about 3-4 minutes. Divide the mixed greens between 2 plates, top with the beef tips and coffee glaze.

MAIN COURSE Ingredients

1/2 Cup Vegetable Oil
12 Oz. Flank Steak
4 Oz. Chimichurri Sauce (Badia)
1/4 tsp Red Pepper flakes
1 Lemon, juiced
1/2 tsp Dried parsley
1 large Sweet Potato, (1 inch cubes)
2 Cups Green beans
1 tsp Marjoram
Salt and Pepper

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Bring water in pot to boil, add pinch of salt and add green beans, cook till tender, drain and add the marjoram. Salt and Pepper the Flank steak. In large oven proof saute pan heat 1/4 Cup vegetable oil, add the Flank, brown on both sides, then place in oven for 3-4 minutes for rare (2 more minutes for Medium).
In another pan heat the remaining vegetable oil and place the diced sweet potato, add some salt and pepper and parsley, saute till cooked through (4-5 minutes), stirring occasionally. Remove the flank from the oven and let rest.
Pour the chimichurri in a small pan and add the red pepper flakes, lemon juice and parsley, heat over medium heat. Slice the Flank against the grain and divide amongst the 2 plates, fanning out the slices, top with the chimichurri, serve with the sweet home fried potatoes & green beans.

DESSERT Ingredients

Nonstick vegetable oil spray
3 Oz. unsweetened chocolate, chopped finely
3 Oz. semisweet chocolate, chopped finely
1/2 stick unsalted butter
1/4 Cup Sugar
1/2 mini bottle Coffee liqueur e.g. Kahlua
2 Large eggs
1/8 Oz. Vanilla Extract
1/4 cup All purpose flour
1/8 tsp Salt

Preheat oven to 350 degrees, spray a 5″ x 7″ loaf pan with non stick spray. Combine the chocolate and butter in a heavy saucepan, stirring over low heat till melted. Cool 2-3 minutes. In an electric mixer beat sugar,coffee liqueur, eggs, vanilla till thickened and fully incorporated (about 3 minutes), then add the flour and salt, finally the melted chocolate. Transfer the mixture to loaf pan. Bake brownies for 15 minutes or until a knife inserted in the center comes out semi dry. Let cool for 15 minutes, invert unto a plate and slice into 4 squares. 2 for dinner and 2 for breakfast.

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.

ELEMENTS GLOBAL CUISINE’S 3 COURSE VEGETARIAN DINNER FOR 2

APPETIZER: MUSHROOM MEDLEY
MAIN COURSE: CHEESE RAVIOLI
DESSERT: APPLE TARTLET

Mushroom Medley

4 oz sliced exotic mushrooms (porcini, portobello, button)
2 tbs unsalted butter
1/4 tsp dried thyme
1/2 cup red wine
1 sheet frozen puff pastry, thawed
1/2 tsp dried parsley
Salt and pepper

Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees.
Take one sheet of thawed puff pastry (you can save the second piece in the freezer) and cut into 6 rectangular pieces. Place 4 pieces of puff pastry on a cookie sheet and bake.
15 minutes untill browned (you will use the remaining 2 pieces for dessert). Remove from oven and let cool.
Meanwhile over medium heat, in sauté pan, melt butter, add mushroom slices, salt, pepper, thyme and 3/4 of the dried parsley. Add wine, stir and let the liquid reduce by half (about 5 minutes).
Place a cooked puff pastry rectangle on each plate, top with the mushrooms and place a second puff pastry at an angle over the mushroom, use the rest of the chopped parsley to decorate the plate.

Cheese Ravioli

12 cheese ravioli
7 oz coconut milk
1/4 granny smith apple, diced
1 tbs curry powder (yellow)
3 oz raisins
3 oz heavy whipping cream
Salt and pepper to taste
1/4 oz dried parsley

Bring a pot of water to a boil, add a pinch of salt and ravioli. Cook until al dente, don’t overcook.
Meanwhile, in a large sauté pan, combine 1/2 of the coconut milk, curry powder, diced apple, raisins, cream, salt and pepper. Heat the ingredients over medium heat, stirring frequently until liquid has reduced by half.
Drain the ravioli and add to the liquid.
Divide the ravioli among 2 plates and decorate with the parsley.
(For an extra $2 you can buy vegetable ravioli instead of cheese.)

Apple Tartlet

8 oz puff pastry
1 3/4 granny smith apple, sliced thin
2 oz raisins
2 tbs sugar
1/8 oz vanilla
3 oz heavy whipping cream

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Roll out the 2 puff pastry rectangles till each one measures 9×6 inches, then crimp the edges inward to form a border. Each rectangle of puff pastry should now measure 6×3 inches. Place 8 slices of apple on each rectangle of puff pastry, overlapping slightly; sprinkle with the sugar and raisins. Place in oven for 15 minutes.
Meanwhile whip the cream with vanilla. Remove tartlets and serve with the whipped vanilla cream.

3 tips for smore preparation and construction after the break.

Smore Tip #1 -Plain heat will soften a marshmallow a bit, but you can’t achieve that prized toasty, blistered crust and custardy interior without fire. We added some new charcoal to the ashen coals and piled on a bunch of small kindling we picked up off the ground until a nice blaze sprang up, then waited just a few seconds for the impregnated lighter fluid to burn off. Hold the skewered marshmallow just above the flames for a bit, spin it slowly, then dip it into the flames until it catches and pull back. Let the little nugget burn to your desired shade of brown, or black, then blow the flames out and prepare for glory.

Smore Tip #2 – Leave the chocolate out before you make the smores. Chocolate bars are too damn thick to melt properly, even when sandwiched with a molten marshmallow, so it’s important to give Hershey’s finest a head start by letting them sit outside for an hour or two, in the sun if the day isn’t too blistering. Of course, that’s not a problem if you’re really camping.

Smore Tip #3 – Make them bite-sized. Or maybe two-bite sized. Those big graham crackers need to be broken down to small rectangles in order to maximize marshmallow coverage and minimize oozing outflow during the first bite.

Truthfully, though, I don’t need any of these rules. My marshmallows rarely make it more than a couple of feet before the gooey treats are in my mouth and I’m reaching for the bag to reload my stick. And all the kids scrambling about in the dirt preferred their marshmallows and chocolate straight from the bags. Maybe a real campfire would have lent the treats a bit more oomph.

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?

• Coolio -”I’m gonna take a dime bag of seasoning salt…” College kid – “Can I get that on any street corner?”
• Coolio – “While D-Rez cuts up them bell peppers, I’m gonna hit you with this garlic bread.”
• Coolio – “Of course, we ghetto so we don’t have a top to our Pyrex dish, so we gonna use some aluminum foil … and a lot of people do that.”

It’s also hard to argue with a man who puts a jar of mayonnaise in his garlic bread spread. Sure looks tasty, though.

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!”

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.

The response to Omnivore was mixed. There were accolades galore, to be sure, but also a shit-storm of criticism. His uncompromising critique of industrial meat production, factory farming and processed foods came across as elitist to many; others thought it didn’t go far enough: Reviewer and Atlantic editor B.R. Myers called it “a record of the gourmet’s ongoing failure to think in moral terms.”

Pollan’s aim in that book was to follow the “natural history of four meals” — not to examine the overall American diet. He focused on the ingredients of those meals, although his digressions into the production and culture of food proved to be the more intriguing parts of the narrative. What Myers, and many other critics, disliked was that he failed to take a stand about our diet.

That is not a failing of In Defense of Food. From the beginning pages, Pollan’s goal is to convince the reader, and society by transmission, to change the way they eat. And from the get-go, it’s persuasive.

First come the body blows aimed more at the why than the what of eating, beginning with a trend started around the turn of the 20th century (and adopted wholeheartedly by the government in the 1970s) that reduced the study of food and diets to component nutrients. So the discussion changed from meat and bread to protein and carbohydrates.

According to Pollan, this “nutritionism” gave free reign to the food industry, diet gurus and, ahem, food journalists to replace Western society’s traditional eating habits with dietary crusades and nutrients of the week. Food, it turns out, is more complicated than we thought. And Pollan has a convincing argument that science isn’t up to the task of figuring it out.

His most striking example is the war against fat that has had America by the gullet for decades. Rising rates of heart disease prompted the government to step in and tell people to eat more low-fat foods 40 years ago. Simple, decent advice. We followed it a bit too well.

Now, we’re still eating about the same amount of fat as in the ’70s (albeit less of it saturated) and, following the letter of that government dictum, we eat a lot more low-fat foods, resulting in an average consumption of 300 more daily calories than four decades ago. Most of that comes from simple, processed carbohydrates and sugar. On average, Americans now get more than 20 percent of their calories from soy oil and 10 percent from corn-based sweeteners.

Know when obesity levels started their inexorable rise to present-day crisis levels? Yep, the ’70s. And recent research indicates that low-fat diets don’t necessarily combat heart disease. Food, as Pollan continually stresses, is complicated.

His antidote is straightforward enough to placate some of his critics and confound others. In fact, the first few sentences lay out the manifesto’s mantra: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

The crux of the Defense “diet” lies in the author’s definition of food. Products that contain ingredients that are unfamiliar, unpronounceable, more than five in number or which include high-fructose corn syrup don’t make the grade. That leaves the products populating the interior aisles of Publix pretty much off limits.

“Mostly plants” is largely self-explanatory, although Pollan stresses that a widely varied diet of plants is vitally important to maximize the healthful aspects of, for instance, anti-oxidants, which spur the body to clean out toxins.

Along with this comes a lot of homey, practical advice that has a point while bordering on motherly henpecking. Drink wine with dinner; don’t eat at the gas station; try to meet the folks who raise your food. It’s all so obvious that it’s easy to ignore, no matter how valuable. Then again, maybe that’s just my modern, dysfunctional attitude, looking for a panacea to fix my diet when common sense should suffice.

Criticism — especially of those folksy aphorisms — will still roll in from both sides of the debate. By Pollan’s own admission, this style of eating is tough for everyone and even tougher for people who have less time or money to devote to the procurement and cooking of food, let alone visiting farmer’s markets or planting a home garden.

And those who wanted Pollan to rally the troops for a fight against big agro-business will find that In Defense of Food is more a plea for self-improvement than a cry for political action. He also still shies away from drawing moral judgments about food, disregarding the nigh-religious beliefs of food cults from vegetarianism to locavores, preferring to deal solely with the practical effect of those diets.

Although no dietary magic bullet, In Defense of Food is like the first blast of a defibrillator, shocking our diseased food culture — which has drowned for a hundred years in corn syrup and white flour — back to life. It’s not going to cure any longstanding ills, but for some people the shock will be enough to spur a little personal change.

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.