This is "country" (as in country gumbo, country tacos)

Went out for lunch this past week with the boss. We went to the Shuck 'N Dive on Federal Highway, and no they don't have their own website, either. So, you get this generic link.

If I knew they weren't going to have a website, I would've taken pictures of something besides my bowl of 'country gumbo,' but it's a nice Cajun-style joint with the bar in the middle of the room. This is south Florida, so they had outdoor seating, too, but it was a warm day and Eddie was in a suit so we sat inside at the bar (all the tables were taken).

The walls are covered to the last square inch with trappings from Louisiana: a lot of NFL Saints and LSU momentos. There's paintings that harken to Mardi Gras. You're getting the picture.

Like I said, I ordered a country gumbo. The description on the menu seemed a little off. It consisted of pulled pork, Andouille sausage and okra, and rice in a Cajun spiced rue.

Well, gumbo is normally a seafood soup with okra, shrimp, crab and oysters. It's common for gumbo to include crawdads (crayfish). Then there's chicken gumbo (okra and chicken).

What I got barely had any soup in it. It was a stew and it had a lot of rice. The Andouille was sliced thin. The 'soup' was a reddish, peppery, spicy liquid. It was tasty. It could have used more okra, which was there more for decoration than nourishment.

COUNTRY GUMBO AT THE SHUCK 'N DIVE

All in all, it was alright and reasonably priced. Reasonably priced is something you don't come across often in Fort Lauderdale, so I don't knock it.

The "county" label on the gumbo, I'm sure, had to do with including sausage in the mix. Same thing happens in Texas with tacos. If the cook uses chopped Polish or German sausage with the eggs and tucks this into a taco, you are getting a "country taco."

I threw together a country taco plate this morning. I chopped poblano and serrano peppers with onion and lightly grilled. The pepper doesn't usually go into a country taco at the restaurant, but then again, I wasn't getting a hot sauce; so this was my substitute.

Chop a link of Kiolbassa beef sausage, stir in a couple of eggs, and you've got enough fixings to fill four tacos. Now all I need is a cup of coffee!

Buen provecho!

Extreme multi-tasking: Be the Cook

I agreed to cook for co-worker Julie Kay's birthday. Since I had never cooked for a party before, I had to ramp up more than the quantity of ingredients.

The night of the event was intense. But I was in some kind of zone. The only thing I burned was a tortilla! Considering everything I was orchestrating, that's kind of amazing. I was stirring shrimp in chili sauce in a sauce pan, making rice, making a noodle-slaw salad, grilling brats, keeping an eye on the chicken pot, warming up molé in a crock-pot, flipping tortillas on a hot comal.

But all of this got started at the start of the week.

I sat down a few times to make lists, estimate times, figure out the coordinating steps I would need to perform to pull this off. I had a brief stint as a short-order cook in a Dallas diner in my late teens. I was awful.

This was going to have to come together better, but I had more experience. We expected 15 people and I wanted three entreés and some sides. I started cooking Friday: boiling chicken, separating the broth to make the molé, boiling potatoes.

The chicken molé involved buying chicken and buying a jar of Doña Maria molé. There would be shrimp in a spicy sauce, so I had to get the ingredients for a chili paste.

And just in case I had any folks who had problems with seafood, or who didn't want anything as exotic as an Aztec gravy on their chicken, I brought along Kiolbassa polish sausages and a can of sauerkraut.

As you can see, the sausage went over well.

This was all that was left -->

 The sides. I chopped beets and boiled them. I chopped plantain, but it wasn't as ripe as I had hoped. I've tried this before and it came out great. Grill the plantain in butter then add it to the boiled beats with salt and hot sauce. They turned out okay on this occasion, but the flavor wasn't what I was aiming for. Rats!

I was pairing the beet-plantain side with the chicken molé. I paired the spicy shrimp with a white rice that was cooked with cilantro.

Recipe for the shrimp: http://www.carmensdelacalle.com/recipes.html

I didn't follow the recipe, though. I took the ingredients for the chili paste and threw them in the blender. I was supposed to boil them in water, the sauteé the shrimp in the boiled chili paste. What I ended up doing was boiling water at the party and mixing the paste into that with the shrimp. We ended up with boiled spicy shrimp over rice. It was still pretty good!

There was also a Ramen noodle slaw that I whipped together. Got requests for the recipe. Chop cabbage. Crush noodles and sprinkle them on a cookie sheet with sliced almond and pumpkin seed. Toast in the oven for a minute. Mix the shrimp sauce packets from the noodle packages in vegetable oil, and pour this over the cabbage. Throw in the toasted noodles/almonds/pumpkin seed and add sesame seed. Toss and serve.

I made a Texas-style cornbread. Ingredients included chopped poblano pepper, cream-style corn, graded cheddar cheese.

I made a decent potato salad to go with the sausage and sauerkraut, but honestly, it was overkill. Nobody touched it. There was plenty to eat.

I took over the kitchen, which was really small. So when everything was ready, I had them line up at the door and hand me their plate and tell me what they wanted.

Chaos on the kitchen? No. But I crammed stuff onto every inch of counter space I had.

The party was in Miami and I live in Delray Beach, so all the prepped stuff and ingredients had to go in the trunk and make a 50-mile journey before I could set up again in a kitchen for the home-stretch.

We finished off the shrimp and rice and made a respectable dent in all that chicken.

I'd like to try doing something like this again. It was hard work, but it was fun.

Buen provecho!

Who wants to make meatballs? Not me.

I bought this Italian sausage. -->

It's made by Morrison Meat Packers in Miami, Fla.

If you're not Italian (I'm not), and you're from Texas (I am/or was), the only place you've seen Italian sausage is on a pizza.

But I wanted pasta, with store-bought Italian pasta sauce. And I didn't want to make beef meatballs.

I know. A lot of people don't have a problem with beef, or with making beef meatballs. I just never was fascinated with ground beef - don't like the smell. And why bother adding all the Italian spices if you can get a meat that already has them?

So, I decided to try this sausage. I cooked it on the grill, mashed it into bits and boiled my pasta in a pot. I was hungry so I didn't want to get too imaginative. Let's eat, already!

I put some Winn Dixie Fra Diavolo Spicy Pasta Sauce in a bowl and heated it in the microwave, opened a can of whole, pitted black olives. That was it and this is what it looks like:

Yes, I could have sliced or mashed up the olives, but I didn't want to. Okay?! Call it the little kid in me, but I love munching on olives, so I left them whole so that I would CONTEMPLATE the olive as I ate it.

Remember when you were a little kids and stuffed your mouth with Bazooka Bubble Gum? It's like that.

I had this with a cheap Chilean red wine called Carta Vieja. I have a fondness for Chilean reds.

Buen provecho!

Real meat, Real smoke, Real sausage

This may possibly be too much food

My weakness, when cooking, is adding too many things to the entreé.

The hungrier I am, the more I think about putting stuff on the stove.

Look at this mess! The photograph doesn't do it justice, because photos are two-dimensional. It's hard to get the Himalayan-esque perspective on this heap of potatoes.

I used three small potatoes. Just for me.  If I had four potatoes, I would have used four.

But I didn't have four potatoes. I did, however, have a ripe plantain. So i threw that in, too. I am sure that at some point, Jiminy Cricket chirped in and said, "What are you doing?!"

"I can't look!" Jiminy Cricket

The potatoes: I boiled water with salt and hot sauce (your choice). Once the water was boiling, I added chopped potatoes and chopped poblano. Ground in some pepper and sprinkled in some dried basil. A little more salt.

The plantain was sliced and grilled separately on a grill that shared space with Kiolbassa Beef & Cheddar Smoked Sausage - "Real Meat, Real Smoke, Real Sausage."

See the made in Texas logo? "Go Texan" - most anything made in Texas has that logo somewhere on the packaging. I like to split the sausage sideways. That bleeds out more of the grease. Since it's sprinkled with cheddar cheese, a little cheese melts and burns into the grill, but there's plenty of grease so it doesn't stick too hard. Clean-up's simple enough.

Not yet available in Florida  :(

When I piled all the food on the plate, I told myself, I'll eat it until I'm full and put the rest away. That seems to work in the restaurant.

I ate the whole thing.

I took a break from sausage meals for four days. Last night I decided to have another serving of this same sausage.

Fortunately, I was clean out of potatoes. And I was out of plantains.
But I had boiled up a bunch of red beans in a crock pot the night before. I was going for something a lot simpler. I was trying to be a purist. Sausage and beans with a beer. The red beans were just cooked with salt and a few pork rinds. I grilled two sausage links and  laid them over a serving of re-heated red beans.

I chopped up fresh cold onions and sliced off a small block of cotija cheese and liberally sprinkled that on top. It doesn't show up in the picture, but I had this with one slice of toasted multi-grain bread.

Simple. Tasty. Texan.

Texas beef sausage and red beans

Buen provecho!