Hey, ya’ll. The weather’s finally warming up and it’s time to get outside to do some cooking. I have a great recipe (she said modestly) for blackened catfish using my trusty black-iron skillet on the grill. It’s posted on the Char-Broil site and if you would be so kind as to hop over there and take a look I’d be in your debt. Just click the link. Go ahead. Click it. Thank you.
I am torn as to the theme of this post. Using things up or stuff I always have on hand. Let’s vote. Who wants using things up? Anyone? Anyone? Well, alrighty then. It’s stuff I always have on hand.
I am very proud to say that of the 14 ingredients in this recipe I only had to buy three – tilapia filets (it’s never wise to always have fish on hand), cilantro and a lime. Everything else was already happily residing in my fridge or pantry. I always keep mayonnaise on hand, but that’s not unusual in the South. We use mayonnaise, preferably Duke’s, on everything. I hope I don’t get diabetes like poor old Paula Deen. I always have sour cream on hand because it’s a key ingredient in my mashed potatoes, which I make about every third day 
because who doesn’t like mashed potatoes? Cabbage – from the farmer’s market and it keeps for like two years in the fridge. Mexican melting cheese. A must have for quick quesadillas. Buttermilk. Buttermilk? Who keeps buttermilk on hand? Well, do you fry? Do you? Raise your hand. If you fry, you must dredge and if you dredge you must have a liquid vehicle for the flour/cornmeal to adhere to. Thank you. Have buttermilk on hand. Don’t drink it, of course. It’s nasty.
And cornmeal. Not cornmeal flour. Actual cornmeal. I keep mine in the freezer. It’s an old habit born of living in Florida where critters can invade your cornmeal and flour. There’s nothing more disgusting, except for cockroaches.
So I am pretty proud of this recipe. My original intent was to make tradition fish tacos with a beer batter. But then I decided to bread the fish with cornmeal. Good call. And if you are of the (old) school that fish and cheese don’t go together, you are just slap wrong. Just consider lobster mac and cheese. Or a McDonald’s filet o’ fish sandwich. I rest my case. And if you didn’t know that some serious foodies have a thing about fish and cheese then I’m sorry I brought it up.
Southern Fried Fish Tacos
1 cup mayonnaise
1 cup sour cream
2 tablespoons chopped cilantro
Juice of one lime
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon cumin
Peanut oil
4 tilapia filets
1 cup buttermilk
Cornmeal
Salt
8 small tortillas
2 cups shredded cabbage
2 cups shredded Mexican melting cheese (or any type you like)
Combine the first six ingredients in a small bowl and let chill in the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes.
Heat about a half inch of peanut oil to 350 degrees or until it bubbles immediately when you put the handle of a wooden spoon in the pan.
Cut the tilapia filets lengthwise to separate the thick and thin portions. Then cut each piece in half widthwise. Place the buttermilk in one bowl and the cornmeal in another. Soak the filets in buttermilk and then dredge in the cornmeal.
Fry the tilapia until golden brown on both sides. Drain on a wire rack and immediately sprinkle with salt. Heat the tortillas wrapped in paper towels in the microwave for about 20 seconds.
Top the tortillas with the fish, cabbage, cheese and sauce.
My friend, Mary Ann, goes on a mission from time to time to empty her entire freezer, refrigerator and pantry of all food objects – finding a way to make them into some kind of meal. I admire this. When you look in the freezer and there are unidentifiable objects that you cannot remember putting in the freezer, that is a bad sign.
I have a few. I have bags of Thomas Keller’s beef stock that I made, oh, more than a year ago. It was a torturous process making that damn stock so I value those bags far more than I should. Perhaps I can sell them on E-Bay. I have cornmeal that I got at a BBQ contest in 2009. Does cornmeal go bad in the freezer? I don’t think so, but I don’t really know. I have meatloaf mix that is tinged with those telltale frost crystals that mean it has frost burn. But I am too cheap to throw it out. Plus it would mean thawing the meatloaf out so that I, being extremely cheap, could wash the disposable plastic container it is housed in.
So for the past week or so I’ve been trying to honor Mary Ann and just cook from the ingredients I already have. To be completely honest, I have more ingredients than most. Do you have miso sitting in the refrigerator? Do you even know what it is? How about fish sauce, sumac and za’atar? Oh, I could put some links in here, but I think you need to look them up. The exotic stuff, plus the usual such as pizza dough, an array of vegetables, canned everything, a gross of rice, barley and pasta, frozen chicken, pork tenderloin, ground beef and sausages from West Wind Farms (I will give them a plug because they are the best sausages on the planet and you need to give Ralph and Kimberlie Cole some love and order some) would feed Mark and I for at least a month.
Which led me to shrimp scampi (scampi is really a name for a type of small lobster but, of course, we’ve 
screwed this up in the United States and what it means here is shrimp in a butter and lemon sauce – we’re so uncivilized). My poor shrimp had been frozen so long that ice crystals were forming on them. So that’s what Mark got tonight. Shrimp scampi with thin spaghetti, of which I have at least 10 boxes because I cannot pass up the “buy one, get one free” sales at the Publix.
If you can find wild American shrimp, please spend the extra few pennies to get them. They’re better for the environment, they’re caught off Southern waters and they sustain our precious fishermen.
Shrimp scampi
1 pound shrimp, preferably wild-caught American
1/3 cup butter
Juice of one lemon
¼ cup dry white wine
3 cloves garlic, chopped
¼ cup minced parsley
Shell and devein shrimp. Melt butter in a skillet over medium heat. Add the lemon juice, white wine and garlic. Saute garlic for about one minute. Add the shrimp. Salt and pepper to taste. Saute the shrimp for about one minute on each side until they turn pink but are still plump. Sprinkle with parsley.
Serve over buttered pasta.
O.K., ya’ll. This is brave new territory for me and I need some help. A few months ago, Char-Broil asked me to blog for them. Actually, they asked me and 29 other food bloggers. But I’m pretty happy with those numbers.
My first blog is up on their site and one of the things they ask is that I not re-post those blogs here. I get that. The idea is to drive traffic to their site, which is quite entertaining I must say. So I am hoping you will wander on over to their site and read about grilled shrimp with Comeback Sauce, which you should because it’s delicious. And if you want to leave a comment on their site, that would help me out, too.
I’m going to blog for Char-Broil every month or so and I’ll send you on over there when I do. But most of my time will still be spent right here. I have to say that for the past few days I’ve been sick as a dog and not at all hungry for anything, which makes food blogging hard. And poor Mark. He’s almost been reduced to eating cat food. So thanks for hanging in and staying tuned.
Now get on over there to the Char-Broil site. Just come back after. OK?
Filed under seafood
It would be unseemly to boast about the exceptional quality of the funeral food that arrived at Bunny’s house after the passing of my father-in-law. That would indicate there is a pecking order in the desirability of funeral food, which there decidedly is not. Just as the pawns lie down with the kings in death, the pimento cheese stands proudly next to the triple chocolate bundt cake in the funeral food hierarchy.
However, I will say that the ladies of Knoxville displayed a certain level of brilliance. Funeral food begins arriving the second the 
departed has been carted off to the funeral home, or in this case off to the University of Tennessee Medical Center where Paul donated his body to science. Bunny barely made it back to the house before the knocks at the back door began. Here came beer-braised beef, cheese grits casserole and creamed spinach. Here came the much beloved pimento cheese, chicken salad and apple cake. Here came the curried artichoke rice salad, the cream cheese coffee cake and, in a tour de force, the chocolate chip cookies with both crushed malted milk balls and Ovaltine. It is very difficult for the bereaved to pick at their food in the South.
Bunny does not lose control of her kitchen lightly. And it lasted about one day. Saturday morning, she cracked. “We’re going to have at least 20 people here tonight for supper,” she said. “I am going to make shrimp salad, pasta salad, deviled eggs and tuna salad.” Please keep in mind that there is enough food in the house to feed the entire University of Tennessee football team for the entire season.
Horrified, her sister, Brenda, stepmother Sandra and I stepped in. “You are to do no such thing!” we said. “Just let us take care of everything.” Daggers. If Bunny could send daggers from her eyes directly to our hearts she would have. But we are also wise
Brenda, Bunny and Sandra in food therapy
Southern women and it did not take a second to realize that a food therapy session was about to begin. Bunny needed to make something. She needed some small measure of control. Shrimp salad was control. We stepped back. We couldn’t help ourselves. We started to laugh. Laughter through tears is our favorite emotion. We had a good laugh. A belly cruncher.
Well, just let me say that the knocks at the back door didn’t stop all weekend. And neither did the friends of Paul and Susan who stopped by to offer a hug, lend a shoulder and provide more Kleenex when appropriate. Somehow in the South, funerals can be oddly life affirming. They are gatherings of family and friends, sharing beloved memories of the departed and copious amounts of food.
By Monday, we were on to hamburgers on a grill that Paul had 
probably not used in five years. Brenda’s husband, Jim, fixed what was broken, got more propane, fired it up in the rain and grilled his heart out. I need to pause here to say that the single best grilled beef tenderloin I have ever eaten came off that grill at the hands of Paul Harbin. It was good to have the grill back in action.
I am fairly certain that I gained five pounds in four days. And I can say with certainty that we ate better than at any four-star restaurant in New York City. A huge part of honoring the dead in the South is to nourish those left behind, both spiritually and literally. A knock at the door. A casserole dish. Funeral food.
Cheese Grits
Cook according to package directions:
1 cup grits, quick (not instant!)
4 cups water
1 teaspoon salt
Add:
1 roll garlic cheese (Kraft)
1 stick butter
Stir until melted.
Mix in another bowl:
2 beaten eggs
¼ cup milk
Salt to taste
Pepper to taste
Red pepper to taste
Add to grits mixture
Put in a 1.5 quart casserole and bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes to an hour.
(Note: Inexplicably, Kraft stopped making the garlic cheese rolls, although I include it in the recipe delivered to the back door in case any of you are hoarding it. If you cannot find it, substitute 1 cup grated sharp Cheddar cheese and 2 tablespoons sauteed minced garlic.)
They say it was a brave man who first ate an oyster. I have known a few brave men in my life. The first was my father, who taught me to eat oysters. The second and third are my husband and son, who love them. The last is Paul Harbin, who taught numbers two and three how to pop that hard shell open with an oyster knife and slide that living, briny wonderful mollusk down their gullets.
Tonight we will speak of oysters. And grief.
Of course, there is much more to a relationship than oysters. But it will suffice for tonight. When Paul and Bunny came into my life, I was a stranger, not even a daughter-in-law yet. No need for them to like or accept me. But they did. Immediately and unconditionally. The oysters started much later when Bunny started hosting Thanksgiving dinners and I insisted on making our family’s recipe for Scalloped Oysters. Bunny hates oysters. But Paul loved them. And eventually I stopped buying the oysters in Brentwood and waited until I got to Knoxville so Paul and I could go buy them together.
Mark, Noah and Paul
So for years, the two of us would set off for The Shrimp Dock to buy our oysters, already shucked. And one year, it occurred to us that we could buy them in the shell and start a new ritual of eating fresh oysters on Thanksgiving. Which we did. We had to take them out on the deck because Bunny was having none of this in her kitchen. Mark would mix up the cocktail sauce fresh. And out we would go, into the cold, with our oysters, sauce and saltine crackers. When Noah was old enough, we invited him outside. I am proud to say he accepted the invitation.
The last time I saw Paul was about three weeks ago. Shrunken and dazed by Alzheimer’s, he sat in his wheelchair at his care facility, gamely trying to down a lunch of a turkey patty and soft cauliflower. Paul was well taken care of and I am not in any way criticizing the cuisine. It was what it was. But it wasn’t an oyster on the half shell with homemade cocktail sauce.
When we left, I leaned over, kissed him and hugged him hard. “It will be fine,” I told him. “It really will. I love you.” Today, it was fine. Spared the possible years of debilitation and robbed memory, he passed. My father-in-law was many things to many people. He cared for the poor, he adopted Hurricane Katrina refugees, he was a father figure to countless people, many related to him only by love. He was a philanthropist, a proud Optimist and played a mean game of golf. And, in the end, he made light of his disease as best he could. He called until he could no longer remember the number. And I think he knew us all up until the end.
It was a brave man who first ate an oyster. A brave man, indeed.
Filed under seafood, Uncategorized
Waste not, want not. That’s the mantra of the Southern cook. Which is how fried green tomatoes came into being. There are two schools of thought on why frying green tomatoes ever got started in the first place. One school has it that tomato vines would become so heavy in the summer that gardeners would pick some of the tomatoes green to lighten up the vine.
I do not subscribe to that theory. I think the more likely scenario was that at the end of the growing season, when the first frost was about to hit, 
that thrifty gardeners picked the unripe tomatoes rather than letting them freeze on the vine. Some of them could go into relishes or pies. But the best and highest use of a green tomato is to fry it.
Somewhere along the way, fried green tomatoes met up with remoulade sauce. I actually looked up the translation of remoulade and do you know what it is? Tartar sauce! The birthplace of this combination seems to be New Orleans, where Southern meets French and it comes out Cajun. And, of course, adding shrimp just gilds the lily, which is what those people in New Orleans love to do anyway.
If you, like me, hate to buy a bottle of something for just one recipe then you can substitute ketchup for chili sauce in this recipe. But just let me warn you that you’re going to need that chili sauce for the blue moon sandwiches you don’t you’re going to make yet, but which you surely will. Chili sauce keeps for something like 346 years in the icebox, so don’t worry. You’ll use it up.
Shrimp remoulade with fried green tomatoes
1 cup mayonnaise
The juice of ½ large lemon
1 tablespoon chili sauce
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1 tablespoon capers
1 tablespoon parsley, roughly chopped
½ pound raw peeled shrimp
2 large green tomatoes
Whole milk
Cornmeal
Salt and pepper
Vegetable oil
Mix together the first seven ingredients and let sit in the refrigerator. Boil the shrimp until just pink and rinse in cold water to stop the cooking. Mix the shrimp and remoulade sauce and continue refrigerating.
Slice the tomatoes into 1/3-inch slices. Dip in milk and then in cornmeal. Season with salt and pepper. Heat oil in a heavy skillet and fry tomatoes until golden brown.
Serve shrimp remoulade on top of tomatoes.
Filed under salads, seafood, sides, Uncategorized, veggies
Oh, yes. What else is there to say?
Back before I got married, I did a lot of traveling by myself. I liked it. And one of my favorite places to go was Maine. Fly into the Boston airport, rent a car, drive an hour north and start hitting the lobster shacks all the way up the coast. Whole lobsters were, of course, the first object of the exercise – my favorite shack was in Kittery on the water and the menu included just three things: steamed lobster, clams and corn on the cob. Period.
But after a few (dozen) whole lobsters, I would then migrate to the lobster roll, probably the most decadent yet simple 
sandwich ever invented. It is comprised entirely of large chunks of lobster dressed in mayonnaise, salt and pepper (some places add in diced celery but that’s just completely unnecessary) nestled in a special bun that is brushed with butter and grilled. The bun resembles a hot dog bun but with the sides cut off.
I have been thinking about lobster rolls quite a bit lately although I don’t know why (or, perhaps, the better question is why not?) and completely gave in to temptation when I saw whole cooked “chicken” lobsters (one pounders) in the seafood case at my beloved Publix the other day.
I will now briefly digress to tell you that, yes, it had occurred to me that I could just buy a couple of live lobsters at any time and cook them. But then I remembered a rather unfortunate occurrence during my last foray into live lobster cooking. It involved scratching, shall we say. From the inside of the pot.
So, this was a better alternative. You can make a lobster roll using only tail meat and it would be perfectly acceptable, but adding the claw meat really takes it over the top. I suppose you could also make it with crab meat for a slightly different take. But the bun is really the thing and I can’t find lobster roll buns down here, which is where I think of myself in relation to Maine. So what I did was buy a loaf of soft French bread and slice the sides off before applying liberal amounts of butter and popping them into the skillet. It was not authentic. But it was serviceable.
So, there’s no recipe here. Just a procedure. Procure your lobster meat and boil it, if not cooked, just until the shell turns red. Chop it into large chunks, add the mayonnaise, salt and pepper. Refrigerate for an hour or so. Then grill your bun, apply the lobster and devour.
Filed under seafood
I don’t know where to begin, so I will just start. I had one of the greatest meals of my life today. Of my life.
It is Day Three of the Southern Foodways Alliance symposium and I am about to eat Michelle Bernstein’s food. If you do not know who 
Michelle Bernstein is then you need to get yourself some education. She is a James Beard award winner and, more importantly, she beat Bobby Flay on Iron Chef. And that takes some doing, let me tell you. She is cute as a bug, which of course doesn’t get you anywhere in the kitchen. As I will find out shortly, she has the singular ability to change one’s life. Namely mine.
So we sit down to lunch and amazingly, for a Southern Foodways event, I am actually hungry. From here on out, I will just talk about the food because, really, what else is there to say?
The first course of Michelle’s (if I can call her that, which I just did) “Miami Reverie” menu is Icebox Fried Chicken for the Table. It is a humble opener requested by SFA president John T. Edge, but it is the perfect opener because a piece of fried chicken to a Southerner is like diamonds to Elizabeth Taylor. The crust on the chicken is shatteringly crisp and the chicken within is abundantly moist. There is barely the bone left when I am done.
Then comes what may be one of the top three things I have ever eaten, and I can’t even think of the other two. It is a Shrimp and Sweet Potato Ceviche, but it is so much more than the name implies. The shrimp are beautifully cooked in the most ambrosial marinade or broth, really, that I have ever consumed. It is napped with a shrimp reduction and topped with tiny pieces of popcorn. I am not embarrassed to tell you that I took a spoon and ate the broth after I finished the ceviche. I will never have this in my life again and I am already pretty sad about that.
However, more joy is on the way in the form of Braised Oxtail Stew with Gnocchi. 
I later find out that Michelle hand cut 4,000 pieces of gnocchi for this dish. The oxtail is meltingly tender, the gnocchi are light as pillows and the sauce, well I can’t even explain how stinkin’ good the sauce is. I am so happy right now, I don’t even need dessert. Or at least I don’t think I do. But I am wrong.
I need Banana Tres Leches Tian. It is Michelle’s sophisticated take on Banana Pudding.
It is a layer of banana bread moistened with three kinds of milk, with bananas, custard and whipped cream on top. Michelle crumbles Vanilla Wafers over it to mimic a traditional Banana Pudding. I intend to take one bite. Of course, I do not stop and before I know it, the dish is empty.
So here’s the thing. Two things, actually. The first is that it is tremendously pressure inducing to cook for members of the Southern Foodways Alliance who expect excellence. Add additional pressure when you plan a menu for which there are no shortcuts. The fried chicken has to be perfect. The ceviche transforming. The oxtail beyond tender and the gnocchi ethereal. And banana pudding reinvented? Iron Chef indeed.
The second thing is this. In a group conversation with Michelle after lunch, she tells us that even though she was born and raised in Miami, she feels the need to become more Southern, as in the parts of the South that include biscuits and gravy, collards and mashed sweet potatoes. The South is a place, yes, but it is also a state of mind. It is a state of mind that includes many indigenous cuisines from very different places, as I have learned this weekend. It is not an exclusive geographic club, it is an inclusive universe of food. And Michelle Bernstein is definately a part of that universe.
I know, I know. This is a blog about Southern food and I am going to talk to you about Pad Thai. Some people think all we eat down here are collard greens, fried fish and macaroni and cheese. But we do go out to eat once in a blue moon, you know. And for some reason that I’m not entirely sure of, immigrants from other countries have found their way to Nashville and they have brought their food with them, thank goodness. I can tell you when we moved here in 1993, it was a dry and dusty food landscape. Now we have Vietnamese and Cuban and Ethiopian and, thank the Lord, Thai.
So, driving home from Knoxville after dropping Noah off to college, I got caught up on my food podcasts and there was Mark Bittman from the New York Times whipping up a batch of Pad Thai, which is basically the national dish of Thailand. And not to be indelicate, but Mark and I had packed away the Metts and Beans and cheeseburgers for a bit too long and we needed something just a tad lighter.
So here it is and I can report to you that it was pretty darn delicious. Now I know there are going to be two questions you will have when you read the recipe. Where do I get tamarind paste and why would I even buy fish sauce? You get the tamarind paste at an Asian market. It’s like buying ketchup. No big deal. And you want the fish sauce. It’s that taste you get when you eat Thai or Vietnamese food that makes you go, “yum.”
Mark Bittman’s Pad Thai
4 ounces fettuccine-width rice stick noodles
1/4 cup peanut oil
2 to 4 tablespoons tamarind paste
1/4 cup fish sauce (nam pla)
1/3 cup honey
2 tablespoons rice vinegar
1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes, or to taste
1/4 cup chopped scallions
1 garlic clove, minced
2 eggs
1 small head Napa cabbage, shredded (about 4 cups)
1 cup mung bean sprouts
1/2 pound peeled shrimp, pressed tofu or a combination
1/2 cup roasted peanuts, chopped
1/4 cup chopped fresh cilantro
2 limes, quartered.
1. Put noodles in a large bowl and add boiling water to cover. Let sit until noodles are just tender; check every 5 minutes or so to make sure they do not get too soft. Drain, drizzle with one tablespoon peanut oil to keep from sticking and set aside. Meanwhile, put tamarind paste, fish sauce, honey and vinegar in a small saucepan over medium-low heat and bring just to a simmer. Stir in red pepper flakes and set aside.
2. Put remaining 3 tablespoons oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat; when oil shimmers, add scallions and garlic and cook for about a minute. Add eggs to pan; once they begin to set, scramble them until just done. Add cabbage and bean sprouts and continue to cook until cabbage begins to wilt, then add shrimp or tofu (or both).
3. When shrimp begin to turn pink and tofu begins to brown, add drained noodles to pan along with sauce. Toss everything together to coat with tamarind sauce and combine well. When noodles are warmed through, serve, sprinkling each dish with peanuts and garnishing with cilantro and lime wedges.
Yield: 4 servings.
the south in my mouth 