Homegrown Michelin Stars

Tuesday was something of a busy day of closing up the beach place, running errands and packing the needs for two or three weeks in Louisiana. By mid-afternoon all was ready and with the car packed I headed for my sister’s home in Maitland, about an hour’s drive west. The plan was to have dinner there with family, spend the night in my mother and father’s old bed and head off early Wednesday morning for the charms of my old hometown, Baton Rouge. Long way between central Florida and there, a drive of at least eleven hours.

But before those long hours behind the wheel there was another grand dinner of my sister’s cooking. I’ve mentioned before that her skills with cookery would garner a few Michelin stars. I asked what was on the menu, suggesting that I put up a description and a few photos here, but a part of that was hard for the cook, since she doesn’t follow recipes and has to guess at the measures to include in a list of ingredients, I had to wrestle the amounts out of her. She makes everything by taste and has to think hard to explain exactly how much of this or that. Nothing elaborate about the name ‘seafood pasta’ but it would surprise me to find a seafood pasta as delicious as this one in places outside my sister’s dining room. Here’s a try at her recipe…

Seafood Pasta (serves 6-8)

INGREDIENTS:

2 pounds of uncooked shrimp

1 pound of mahi-mahi cut into bite-sized pieces

4 cups chopped sweet onion

2 cups green pepper chopped

1 cup sweet red pepper chopped

½ cup sweet yellow pepper chopped

4 cloves garlic finely chopped

1 bunch chopped green onion with tops

1 box angel hair pasta

Sauté the chopped vegetables in ¼ cup of olive oil starting with the sweet onions. Allow the onions to cook about three minutes, holding the tomatoes aside, add the other vegetables sautéing an additional five minutes.

½ jar of sun dried tomatoes in olive oil

½ jar pimento stuffed olives drained

½ jar Greek Calamata olives drained

2 medium tomatoes chopped, the seeds removed

¾ cup toasted pine nuts

Holding the pine nuts and tomatoes aside, add the other three ingredients to the sautéed onions and peppers. Next add the mahi-mahi and cook about four minutes. Add the shrimp and the chopped tomatoes cooking another three minutes seasoning generously with Zatarain’s Creole Seasoning. Just before serving toss in the toasted pine nuts.

Serve over angel hair pasta cooked al dente. Garnish each plate with freshly grated Parmesan cheese and a sprig of parsley. Serve with a green salad and hard rolls.

Bon appétit!

One of the Finest Things

I am grateful today for the company of lifetime friends, for the joy of long memories, the chance to spend time together reliving some of the halcyon moments and hours of another time. We’ve done a lot over the past several days, but really, for these kinds of times there is never enough. On Wednesday evening the three of us drove over to a town fifty miles west of the beach, Maitland, and enjoyed the company of my sister and brother-in-law over dinner. Today’s post is by R visiting from Louisiana with his wife D—My friends.

Much has been said about hospitality in the South, in the Old World South, the mannered dinner with its bounty of food, the courses one after another of homemade dishes that tease the palette until the inevitable questions about the recipe and if it is a family one handed down over the years. Now, with the fast pace of living, of heaping plates directly from the stove and retiring to a chair or couch in the den (perhaps to watch the news or whatever game might be on), the art of the leisurely meal and conversation only has (sadly) gone out of style for so many. Easier to pick up burgers or fried chicken or pizza or some ready-made meal from the deli than it is to cook with the idea of the meal as entertainment.

Vacations would seem to be the very thing for those fast food or quick-trip supermarket meals, leaving more time to explore the sights and experience environs other than the one so familiar. And there have been fine hamburger meals on stools positioned at windows facing the ocean, but an unexpected pleasure to be treated to a sit-down dinner (even with jeans as an okay form of dress) and to experience a meal in courses with candles burning among a table centerpiece of the season. More than worth the drive to another city in Florida. And here’s the thing about Southern styled hospitality—whether transplanted from Louisiana to Florida or to any other state or country: it travels well. Stepping into someone’s kitchen complete with small blackboard sign and welcoming message is a fine beginning to a truly enjoyable evening. Matters not that a good friend’s sister and brother-in-law haven’t been seen in half a century; there are hugs all around like long lost cousins.

Wine? Beer? Something harder? Try one of these.

Oh, my goodness. Delicious. What is it?

Just an oven-baked date wrapped in bacon.

I’ll have another.

No twelve course meal but just a few—maybe four including desert. And the pictures speak for themselves. A meal that starts with a soup called Beverly's Glory Collard Green Soup. So tasty, thoughts are immediately of future meals at home with just the soup and bread hot from the oven. A fine green salad with all the good things that are good for you. A main course called Country Captain, a chicken curry dish one adds toppings as if at the corner ice cream stand: peanuts, toasted and shredded coconut and inviting, green pickled tomatoes, homemade chutney. And the meal ending with offered coffee and scoops of vanilla ice cream next to apple ginger ale turnovers. And the easy talk only adds to the comfort of true hospitality, about family members and relatives no longer alive, about grandchildren and how they are making their way in the world, even talk about other grand meals and the good times so associated with food in the South.

So sit down dinners with courses served may be even more rare in the time to come, but for those of us who got a leftover taste of true Southern hospitality from the 1940s or 1950s or even into the 1960s, that taste of the genteel time will always linger—when families made time to eat together, when questions could be asked across the table while looking into the eyes of someone else and some sense of honestly wanting to hear the answer being communicated, of being able to touch someone’s arm for emphasis instead of yelling for them to turn down the television. True hospitality—Southern or otherwise, even within families—is something to be valued and used and given out because it is one of the finest things that can inherited.

Chicken Soup for the Lazy

Once upon a time grandma made chicken soup almost good enough to cure cancer. It had a flavor that made you think it was distilled from everything in the world good, and if you had to, you could live off of it and nothing else. But these days few have the time to make such time consuming soups. I’m neither a devoted cook, nor one with the accumulated skills of a grandmother who has never heard of ‘instant.’ There are things I won’t even attempt to cook because they take too long, or involve tedious preparations. But at the same time, I like to prepare fresh and healthy meals as often as possible.

Today I had a hankering for chicken soup, but didn’t get home in time to prepare the soup one-hundred percent from scratch, starting with raw chicken and a pot of water. Grandma is probably shouting “No! No!” from her kitchen six feet under, but I decided to make what I call chicken soup for the lazy.

INGREDIENTS:

5 carrots

3 stalks of celery with the tops

1 large onion

1 zucchini

2-3 cloves of garlic

1 can of navy beans

2 thirty-two ounce cartons of Progresso chicken broth

½ of a cooked chicken

4 cups of filtered water

3 tablespoons of olive oil

salt

pepper

Zatarain’s Cajun Seasoning

PREPARATION:

Chop the onion, celery and carrots roughly. Slice the zucchini lengthwise, then into ¼ inch pieces. Heat the olive oil in a large soup pot. Add the onion, celery, carrots and garlic to the pot and stir well. Allow the vegetables to cook for 7-8 minutes, stirring often. Pour the chicken broth over the vegetables and raise the heat a notch. Add the can of navy beans and the chicken. I prefer to leave the chicken in good sized chunks, a couple pieces still on the bone. Season with salt, pepper and a good sprinkle or two of the Zatarain’s. Put a lid on the pot, but not a complete seal. Let it simmer for about 30 minutes before adding the zucchini slices. Cook the soup for another 30 to 45 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Serve over Jasmine rice. This soup is good with garlic toast, but French bread might also be a good match.