Southern Quarter-Centennial Birthday

Emily celebrated her 25^th birthday at the beginning of September.  I like to break out all the stops for a birthday meal for her.  Last year I made “birthday pasta,” which is still her favorite.  How hard is it to fill a bowl with made-from-scratch pasta and pounds of fresh seafood and it not be good?  This year I decided to go a little different route.  I’m somewhat skeptical of any fresh seafood we can get in a landlocked desert state bordering on Mexico.  I wanted to tackle some official southern cuisine.  I lived in South Carolina, worked at a southern seafood restaurant, and I know who Paula Dean is.  In hindsight I found this to be a pretty rad decision as it was the highlight of Emily’s birthday.  This may seem to be an egotistical statement, but my competition was a 17.5 hour journey across the country, a missed dinner reservation, not 1 but 2 stops at Waffle House (within 3 hours of each other), failure to see most of her hometown, and a trip to an auto mechanic.  It’s the type of game I like to play. 

The difficulty with my chosen assignment is that making southern food delicious and good for you is kind of like rooting for the Yankees and the Red Sox.  It’s not possible, and if you think it is, you don’t know anything about baseball or different philosophical principles of life.  Most of the reason for this is that after the Civil War was won (by the north for my southern readers), despite the governments best intentions of reconstruction, they did not allow public health research or information south of the Mason-Dixon line.  Thus, southerners have only discovered that items such as butter, tobacco, and heavy cream are not good for you only 10-15 years ago.  I do not have the experience to handle such a difficult situation at this point, so I did what I could, but focused more on making things authentically.

I have another pet peeve to share this week.  I hate pansy waiters.  Emily and I had happy hour at a wine bar with some friends from work.  It was good times and great conversation.  At the end we asked our waiter to split our checks.  He was immediately confused, because it’s “very difficult” to figure out what 4 people ate and ordered.  He then offered up his advice that next time, we should let him know ahead of time if we want separate checks.  Was he telling us how to go out to eat?  How about you be average at your job before you whine about having to do something that might take more than 30 seconds of your life.  Please.  Take your sophistication and put it in your man-apron pocket. 

Salad: Spring greens with candied almonds and “Sexy” dressing

Meal: Blackened Alaskan Cod with Charleston sauce, collards, and jalapeno cheese grits

I made a dinner for some friends of ours the night before this, but I failed to take pictures, which is unfortunate, because I was really, really happy with the entire turnout.  I made this salad the night before and got such reviews from my 4 star reviewer, that I made it again the next night and took pictures.  The salad had greens, cherry tomatoes, the almonds, red onion, figs, and gorgonzola cheese.  The dressing is what I like the best.  One our friends who came out for dinner the night before primarily drinks champagne.  I wanted to incorporate champagne into the meal in somewhat, so I decided to use champagne in the salad dressing.  Then I got the idea to use strawberries in the dressing, so it was a combo of sexy staples, strawberries and champagne.  I thought about crumbling up some dark chocolate into the salad, but was afraid with all those romantic elements, things would have gotten really weird during dinner with our friends.  I didn’t think those 2 would go together perfectly without a 3^rd element, so I used some mint to even it out. 

I’m going to throw this idea into my overall repertoire to use at later times too.  It turned out really well. 

The collards took the most time to prepare, because you have to boil the ham hocks for a while to get the right juice to cook the collards in and the collards need to cook for a long time to be tender. 

Collards were originally used to fan white women in the southern heat until they found out that if you rip them, boil them in delicious flavors for hours, they’re good to eat.  This was my first opportunity to cook with ham hocks.  Hocks are not necessarily the most appealing part of a pig.  I’m actually not sure which part it is, and I don’t think I want to know, but they do make delicious collards.  After a few hours of boiling the hocks, it was time to rip up and add the collards. 

Steinamite Hockeyes

If you recall my earlier comment about not really trying to make anything healthy, I have now turned the corner and used my cooking this meal as an excuse to make things as delicious and horrible for you as possible.  Why not just blacken fish in butter, when you can do the same thing with blackened shrimp and andouille sausage?  And I didn’t want to throw out the heavy cream I bought for dinner the night before, so I might as well use that too. 

The result was Charleston sauce – something we had at my old restaurant.  I assumed that this was a southern specialty served at all fine dining establishments.  Then as I went to other establishments, I found that no one had ever heard of Charleston sauce…ever.  I’m now bringing this cuisine to Pima County.  It’s essentially shellfish, garlic, wine, and cream sauce.  I had a few tips of salmon from the night before, so I put those in too to give a little more flavor. 

The grits were an interesting phenomenon.  Emily told me to make sure I add them in slowly and stir so that they don’t turn into a large matzah ball clump and are ruined.  I did as she told me to and that was fine.  The problem was that for some reason in my mind, I assumed the grits naturally turned into rice and should be cooked the exact same way.  This was incorrect.  After waiting patiently, I wanted to know why my grits essentially looked like a milkshake.  A quick stir revealed the 5 inches of thick grits at the bottom of the pan.  Fortunately, only ¾ inch was burned an unuseable, nothing some cheese and jalepenos couldn’t fix.  The grits were somewhat healthier than normal, but only because I forgot to put in extra butter at the end. 

Blackening fish is a fascinatingly horrible way to cook food.  I made my own blackened spice (I sound like I’m turning into that guy who sounds like he’s getting ready to join a commune and raise his own root vegetables for income).  This grocery store down the road has like 75 spices that you can get as much as you want.  When you can get a new flavor for $.35, you can have this kind of fun. 

Anyway, blackening food is a pretty healthy way to cook, because there’s not butter or oil for the most part, just spice.  Although, to do it so the spice actually turns black requires copious amounts of butter. 

There you have it.  The Charleston sauce was a little less saucy than I would like, but I’m fairly sure that was due to poor timing.  It was finger lickin’ good time that reminded me of when I was in the navy in Savannah. 

Leftover BBQ

I have been completely slacking lately, at least, as far as blogging goes.  I’ve been traveling all over the most fantastic destinations of the southwest searching for 5 minutes of rest.  Can you blame me though?  If you were in the suburbs of Dallas or Albuquerque, you would be completely mesmerized too.  I have 2 new meals ready to blog about and 2 new meals that will happen this weekend, so I need to get cracking.  Not to mention that in my old age, I can barely remember what I was thinking about 2 hours ago, let alone 2 weeks ago.  This meal is for everyone who reads and says “great, this looks delicious, but I have WAY better things to do than spend 30 minutes scouring the grocery store and an hour cutting up vegetables.”  As much as I would like to have all the time in the world to do that, I’m still 32 years, 218 days, and 17 hours away from retirement.  If the market continues in its current trajectory, that number jumps to 84 years and some change. 

Because this is a quick meal, we decided to utilize the community grill.  Ironically, it’s difficult to grill out in AZ, or at least in our apartment complex.  We usually get a thunderstorm right around dinnertime and I don’t have any recipes that are improved by rain water.  I also tried to use some of the leftovers from previous meals to make things tasty and easy.

Main Dish: Peppercorn and bourbon-marinated chicken breast

Sides: Grilled Vegetables with chili-cream sauce and wild rice with goat cheese

Dessert: Grilled chili spiced mangoes and ice cream

The chicken sounds delicious and I would like to tell you that I scientifically crafted and selected the ingredients, but it’s actually a store-bought marinade that cost $1.50.  I cut the chicken breasts up and put it in the marinade for about an hour and a half before we grilled out.  The secret to this chicken is actually the charcoal.  As tasty as grilling over charcoal is, it’s really a pain.  I feel like I need use an entire day’s worth of coal just to get the fire hot enough to cook.  Cooking chicken over charcoal is difficult for me, because you want the coals hot, but not so hot that it will char the outside of the chicken before the middle cooks.  Medium rare chicken is not nearly as good as medium rare beef.  I got my pyramid shaped charcoal, added a little lighter fluid, then added a little bit more, lit the charcoal, then like all men need to do to prove their manhood, drenched the fire with more lighter fluid pretending that my life could actually be in danger. 

The vegetables were a little bit of a risk.  We had some mushrooms and zucchini in the refrigerator, so I wanted to season and skewer the vegetables to grill.  I put about a tablespoon of olive oil over the mixed veggies with some cumin, salt and pepper, but there was definitely not enough moisture to handle all the spices.  I didn’t want to add any more oil (still trying to keep it real and healthy here), so I thought, let’s turn to the ole’ standby and threw in a few spoonfuls of Greek yogurt.  I’ve never done this or even heard about it before, but how bad could it turn out?  I got all that mixed together and then skewered the vegetables to get ready to grill.

I had a decent amount of the red chili enchilada sauce leftover from my previous meal.  I had Emily mix the rest of that with more Greek yogurt to make the chili-cream sauce.  So in 2 minutes, we had a spicy, flavorful, fat-free cream sauce to spoon over the vegetables.

The wild rice is pretty straightforward.  Measure out water, put in chicken bouillon cubes, boil, add rice, simmer, fluff, eat.  My mother reads my blog, so I won’t make any jokes about that series of verbs.  I don’t understand why wild rice is so much more expensive than normal rice.  Was the rice wild, did something stupid and got arrested so that you have to pay for its time in prison and parole?  I buy it though, because it has more flavor and it’s more “fibrous” than white rice, meaning that it takes longer to break down the carbs.  Think Wonder Bread vs. raw oat bran with a slight chicken flavor.  Once it was done, we sprinkled a little goat cheese on it, mixed it in, and it was ready. 

The meal turned out really good (and fast). 

We don’t normally eat dessert, but we decided to really live it up on that Friday night and go on a date to the grocery store to get some light vanilla ice cream.  Don’t be jealous of my life.  Emily bought some mangoes earlier in the week, so they were ripe and ready to eat.  She cut them up and we used the ancient Boy Scout art of wrapping them in aluminum foil to grill.  That’s actually true, well, not the ancient part.  I was in cub scouts at one point in my life.  My parents thought it was a cheap babysitting option.  Besides catching the largest fish in a polluted lake in upstate New York, I also learned the aluminum foil trick.  Basically, when you have something small or cut up you want to grill, you put it in aluminum foil, add some spices and a little liquid, and throw it on the grill or in the campfire for a few minutes to cook.  So we added brown sugar and chili pepper to the mangoes and threw them on the grill.  They turned out really tender in this sweet, thick slightly spiced sugar sauce. 

We poured that over the ice cream and I ground up some peanuts to put on top.  I talked Emily into turning back the clock to her sexy barista days and making us some espresso to go with dessert.  It was a perfect combo (and less than 225 calories).