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!

Sausage of the cruel and ironic kind: who gets the shaft?

Please connect the point to the fletching

I voted this weekend, as in early voting, in Florida.

The actual experience pretty much fits the national stereotype of voting in Florida.

Palm Beach County only opened 10 locations. Mind you, this county has a population of 1.3 million people. TEN locations. From the moment I got in line until I left, I was in line for 2 hours, 35 minutes.

On my feet, at Delray Beach City Hall, Halloween weekend. Yea?

Just before I get to the voting room, I'm handed a clipboard with a form: fill out the top three lines.

Name, address, date of birth.

Once in the voting room, I sit in front of a volunteer with a laptop. He takes my voter's info and sends me to the blue tape in the middle of the room. Stand here.

I get handed a paper ballot. Two big pieces of paper, (they don't do electronic in Florida).

Of course. What else is new?

I'm okay with the long wait. I don't get that a county this big just provides 10 locations, but I'm in good health. Some citizens gave up, they couldn't deal with the wait.

So, two paper ballots. And I'm looking at these ballots for the first time. I did my research. I knew how I was going to vote. I just didn't have the actual mechanics down.

There's a black marker pen. And beside each candidate and referendum is the point of an arrow (the head), and the fletching. The middle is missing.

You make your choice by making the shaft. The symbolism was so immediately apparent to me that I thought to myself, "You have got to be kidding me. Is this a joke?"

Yes, maybe I'm reading too much into this. I get that. Still.

Jesus!

So, I got on Twitter, and I came up with this haiku:

"Early voting in Delray Beach FL. 2.5 Hrs, paper ballot. Method: Link point of arrow to fletching. U make the shaft! Need I say more?"

It just seems so symbolically sinister that I thought this had to be deliberate design, like George Carlin was given the responsibility of designing the ballot. He would get it!

Who am I making the shaft for? Given the fact that I'm already hopelessly skeptical about the usefulness of the whole voting process?

Am I giving someone the shaft?

Am I giving myself the shaft?

This feels like being directed to dig your own grave.

Heating up Halloween

I took a walk into downtown Delray Beach today and quickly realized that I left my cell phone back at the condo, this flash of recollection occuring right when I saw a mother pushing baby carriage, mom dressed in full Xena Warrior Princess costume.

Yes, I'm serious.

There were so many things I wanted to take a picture of, for instance the Atlantic Ocean from the public beach at Delray Beach at the end of Altantic Avenue. It turns out Delray Beach has a very nice public beach.

I guess the name of the town gave it away, but I was still surprised.

Before the adults take over (driving your car this close to the beach after 3 p.m. is a challenge), the day time is the right time for the kiddies. All the boutique shops that line Atlantic Avenue - leading to and away from the Halloween festival at Veteran's Park - give out candy. And the kids get more candy at the festival.

My one other indelible encounter with Halloween day mommies was the oriental mom I passed on the sidewalk who with daughter in tow - inquiring as to when she could eat candy and which candy - and mom in full zombie-robot monotone voice said:

E A T   O N E

E A T

L  O  L  L  I  P  O  P

You had to be there, but it was scary. I am a wuss around frazzled Halloween mothers.

As the day wears on, the boutique shops run out of candy, or the hired help tires of giving candy, and little white paper signs get taped to the entrance with phrases like: "We are out of candy," or "No more candy," or "Get your own damn candy!"

Made up the last one.

I would like to say I found something great to eat. There are so many cafés near the beach. But like every place else down here the food is overpriced. The nicer places were asking in the neighborhood of $20 to $30 for a meal with drink and tip. I ended up at Doc's All American, a locally famous burger/hot dog/gyro/fish sandwich place.

I went for a patty melt combo that involved a hamburger patty with cheese and grilled onion, mushrooms on Texas toast, with fries and a small soda for $8.18. Maybe it was the phrase 'Texas toast' that swayed me, but that sounded like an appetizing deal meal!

But there is a little sign by the cashier window that explains meat is cooked well-done because they don't want to risk giving you an e-coli infection.

Turns out that means they are going to char-black burn your frickin patty. Yeah! And the Texas toast is literally put in a toaster. It's not grilled on butter.

And that small soda. This ain't Texas. When they say small here, they really mean it!

There is no indoor seating at Doc's All American. The burger joint has a big blue cabana cover and plastic tables and chairs and people are fine with it. In fact, everywhere you go on this touristy section of Atlantic Avenue, there is outdoor seating.

Enough about that. The meal I did enjoy today was this morning in my kitchen. Since I started this blog, I haven't really got into spicy hot dishes. Some of the previous meals had poblano pepper ingredients, but poblano is usually mild (sometimes you'll get a really hot one - not often).

I'm laying out a serrano pepper here with onion and tomato; these three get chopped fine on the cutting board. There is some Herdez Salsa Verde, a Mexican chorizo (that Los Cerritos brand of unknown origin), and two eggs.

Should you have occasion to see a taco menu board, the most items you're likely to find with Mexican chorizo ingredients is three. This would be chorizo with eggs, chorizo with potato, and chorizo with beans.

I'm making chorizo with eggs. But my mama taught me to eat my veggies and I never cared for the plain chorizo with eggs. It is customary to get a small plastic cup condiment size serving of hot green sauce with your tacos and I usually used it on the chorizo and eggs.

And since I'm in the kitchen and I'm not limited to that, I'm adding onion, serrano and tomato. These three ingredients go in the hot skillet with butter. I want to stir them until the onion starts to brown just at the edges. This length of time also helps bring out and spread the heat from the serrano.

Then I add the chorizo and mash and stir it in to mix with the garden goods. I poured the salsa verde over this mess and started cracking open eggs. Once the egg cooks through, swish it all over to your plate.

Hot peppers are a little unpredictable. The serranos I have today are mild. Sometimes, they're really hot. If you're not into a lot of heat, you might want to chop half of a pepper and leave the rest for another day. Mine was enough to add some heat to the meal, but I didn't really notice it until I started into the second taco. It can take awhile for the effect to kick in, which is a good sign it's not going to be too strong.


A word about chorizo, salsa and salt. Chorizo has salt and so does salsa. Don't add salt. In fact, go light on the salsa. And you may notice I usually use chorizo as an ingredient. To me, it's a meat and a seasoning. Like I said before, a little goes a long ways.

A tip on heating tortillas. I put a small sliver of butter on the hot spot where they'll get warmed. I take the three or four tortillas I'm going to heat and lightly, quickly swipe each side of each tortilla over the melted butter.

Otherwise, you put the first tortilla on your heat and it soaks up all the butter. If they all get swiped first before you go back and heat them, none stick to the surface and they all heat evenly.

A hot, hearty, Halloween breakfast

Buen provecho!

Los Tres Chanchitos (The Three Little Pigs)

Mmmm! I am so glad I made enough for seconds. I'm taking my leftovers to the office tomorrow for lunch.

When's the last time you said that?

I call this The Three Little Pigs because I use three kinds of pork. There's a slice of pork loin here getting diced into little cubes. We have some Murciana Brand Chorizo Nica, and pork rinds.

A word about pork rinds and Mexicans. This is not just a snack food. A lot of Mexican cafés that serve up a respectable taco menu have chicharròn on the menu board. Chicharròn is Spanish for pork rinds.

You'll find a big steel bowl of it swimming in a tomato sauce, often with some jalapeños thrown in.

In this dish, the pork rinds are not going to skate around the skillet with the pork loin and Nicaraguan sausage. They'll be helping out the sweet potato.

Sweet potato, a Native American staple, is one of these foods that has an edginess to it. It can get a little too sweet and a little too bitter when its cooked. I want to round out its taste so it will go better with the two grilled pork meats.

I dice a sweet potato and put it in a pot with a clove of finely chopped garlic, salt, pepper, butter, some chopped ancho flake and just enough water to cover the bottom to about a half-inch. Cover the sweet potato and turn up the heat.

No pork rinds, yet. Just leave the pork rind bag on the counter. Okay, you can munch on a few, but don't ruin your appetite.

Hmm, how can pork rinds ruin your appetite? Worthy of debate.

Here's a look at some of our raw ingredients:

Now for the two meats. butter a hot skillet. Brown your piggies. Pour in a handful of pepitas (unsalted pumpkin seed), and stir. Open a can of Herdez Salsa Verde and pour in enough to get the whole skillet wet. Add a little salt and stir.

You don't need much salt, if any, with the meat. That Chorizo Nica should be enough. But I added a little.

Once cooked, take your meat off the heat.

Now about that sweet potato. If it's diced well, a little water will steam cook through fairly quick. Maybe 10 minutes? Check on it, don't let it go dry and don't add much water. Mash it into something like mashed sweet potato, pour in a couple handfuls of pork rind, put the lid on and leave it on the heat for one more minute.

You just want to soften the pork rinds to where they're a little rubbery.

Couple your sweet potato with the two pork meats on a plate. Now you've got Three Little Pigs. And that sweet potato is going to go very well with the two-meat entreé.

I don't normally suggest what drink to pair meals with, because I drink a dark beer with just about everything. But if I were choosing a wine, I'd suggest a dry white.

The Three Little Pigs

Buen Provecho!