Cooking

So, lately this has kinda been a cooking blog. Christey and I are working on a couple projects, and I'm using this as a testbed, then we're duplicating at our food-only blog: http://www.fotocuisine.com

Been busy when it comes to real life. Taxes suck, job is great, kids are fun (yet exhausting), I have entire rundowns about the pros and cons of modern politics and the best and worst shows on the Noggin channel, yet I lack the time to post them. Soon.

I'll be in Boston again in a couple weeks, where it will undoubtedly be cooler than here, though today's high was 72, and it's supposed to dip to 45 tonight (which I doubt, given our water proximity).

Next post, more food! I'll try to bring in some real life soon.

Florida Grouper, with Peri Peri Beurre Blanc

I am distantly South African on my father's side, through Capetown great-grandparents. It's never been much more than an entry on my family tree, which is an opalescent moving target. Depending on wars, shifting European borders, bloodlines, religion, and territorial disputes, I can be considered 100% Polish in one perspective, or as splintered as American, Polish, German, South African, Russian, Latvian, and Jewish.

When I lived in Atlanta, I lived near a South African restaurant (the webpage is here: http://www.10degreessouth.com/ but it was a hole in the wall when I first found it). I went there so often, the owners, South African brothers, got to know me well. I fell in foodie love with the spicy peri peri sauce that accompanied the Chef's fish dishes. I hinted and guessed and beat around, but he would never tell me how he made it. He did, however, once give me a quarter-cup of peri peri powder to experiment with -- something the bartender told me he never gave to any customer in the history of the restaurant.

The closest American pepper to the African bird's eye pepper is probably cayenne, though there's a pleasant lemony brightness to peri peri that cayenne's sweetness doesn't quite reach. After I moved to Florida, I found a supplier in Tampa, though there are mail order sites as well.

I never was able to duplicate the Chef's sauce, but the closest I have come is with a basic French beurre blanc, steeped with peri peri powder. The restaurant serves the sauce with a cold water fish like Cape Capensis or Hake. I find it goes well with warm water fish like grouper or snapper, or other thick, white-fleshed fish of any climate, such as halibut. If you can't find peri peri, use cayenne -- South African culinary purists would laugh at my attempts anyway.



( Grouper and Beurre Blanc )