Broward Palm Beach Food Blog

B. Citara

​You don't need a weatherman to know the wind is blowing the rich, beefy aromas of hamburgers sizzling on the grill all over the country. Upscaling the humble burger is more popular than straight white teeth and money in the bank nowadays, as even recession-shafted diners can pry a few nickels out of their pockets to enjoy a gold-plated version of the Big Mac at some chi-chi local restaurant. 

Or you can make your own. And with that, Clean Plate Charlie presents the. . .  

Rich Person's Prime Burger with Truffle Aioli, Arugula, Grilled Onion and Portobello Mushroom 

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Has one of the country's most iconic foods become as American as. . . tacos al carbon? In a word, yes. Clean Plate Charlie was scanning the NY Times food section a couple weeks back and came across this piece by John T. Edge, a real scholar of American and Southern cookery and an awfully nice guy to boot. 

It was all about the Mexican (or Sonoran) hot dog, a bacon-wrapped wiener slathered with typically Mexican accouterments that's sold out of street carts and cafes throughout the American Southwest. No one's really sure who first came up with the idea or why Mexican cooks (and eaters) took it up, but adding bacon to anything can only be an excellent idea.

Along with bacon the usual garnishes are pinto beans (whole, not refried), chopped tomato and onion, jalapeno sauce, mayo, and mustard; though other variations include radishes, cucumbers, guacamole, and even crushed potato chips. The roll is usually a bolillo roll, a soft Mexican roll that's split down the middle but left connected at the ends so it forms a sort of hot dog boat. 

The more Charlie thought about it, the better it sounded.

Photo by Flickr user taminsea

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Bill Citara

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When John Montagu, First Lord of the Admiralty and avowed Satanist (!), asked his valet to slap a hunk of meat between two slices of bread in 1762, the Fourth Earl of Sandwich could hardly have known that almost 250 years later a restaurant in Boca Raton would nestle a juicy slab of grilled tuna inside a bun smeared with teriyaki aioli, then top it with a crunchy, Asian-style slaw in much the same the manner as the pulled pork sandwiches of the American South. 

Like, duh. . . 

Anyway, that's what Max's Grille in Boca's sprawling Mizner Park did, and though it's no longer on the menu, it's still a damn good sammie--easy to make, not too heavy, and tasty as hell. So give it a try. 

I'm a sucker for Anthony's Coal Fired Pizza's meatball and ricotta pie. The combination of the thin, crisp, slightly charred, and bubbled crust with a simple tomato sauce, a little mozzarella, tiny meatballs, and blobs of rich ricotta is hard to resist when the urge for takeout pizza strikes. 

But sometimes I just don't feel like getting in the car and making the trek to Anthony's; the closest one to my house is in Boynton Beach, which usually means a rush-hour crawl on I-95 and a cruise into a town that's a notorious speed trap. So I figured I should pick up the challenge and see if I could replicate my favorite pie at home -- without spending most of the day

John Linn

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I'm a sucker for poor boys of all types: hulking sandwiches filled with fried catfish, oysters, and shrimp and beefier equivalents stuffed with sopping-wet roast beef or hot Italian sausage. No matter the filling, I prefer them served with crusty French bread and gobs of spicy remoulade, with a smattering of shredded lettuce and slices of fresh tomato. So when I decided to put together some poor boys on Saturday night, that's the exact formula I followed. Only, I didn't have all night to slow-cook a hunk of round, rendering it into the shredded slurry of meat and gravy emblematic of N'awlins roast beef poor boys. Instead, I opted for a quick alternative, briefly marinating two inch-thick top sirloin steaks and grilling them to a vibrant-red medium rare alongside a half-dozen spicy sausages. Here's how it went down:

(Click any picture for a high-res version)

Photo by Bill Citara

All hail the humble taco, a perfect marriage of starch, protein, fruit, vegetable, and appetite, a triumph of down-home Mexican gastronomy, a thing of rare culinary beauty. 

Of course, that's a taco made with fresh, quality ingredients by someone who knows and loves authentic Mexican food. That's where Mark Miller comes in. 

Like so many chefs who stood American cuisine on its ear during the 1980s and 1990s, Miller made his culinary bones as chef at Alice Waters' seminal Chez Panisse. A student of the cuisine and culture of Mexico and the American Southwest, he went on to open restaurants in that idiom in the San Francisco Bay Area, then moved to Sante Fe and opened Coyote Café, in its day one of the most important restaurants in the country. (Miller recently sold off his share of the restaurant.) 

So much for history. What Miller's got now is one of the best cookbooks Clean Plate Charlie has ever stained with tomato sauce, pureed chilies and chopped cilantro. It's called, appropriately enough, Tacos, and while Charlie hasn't cooked through all 75 of the unspeakably delicious-sounding meals-in-a-tortilla, the half-dozen or so he has are, well . . . unspeakably delicious. 

Clean Plate Charlie is obsessed with burgers. Hey, it's better than sneaking out of the governor's mansion to rub the bacon with former Argentine TV reporters or performing unnatural acts on small farm animals.  

Charlie's burger fetish plays itself out by coming up with patties that channel the tastes, textures, and ingredients of cuisines in which the burger is more American curiosity than one of the three basic food groups (the other two being French fries and beer). In an earlier post, Clean Plate Charlie experimented with the banh mi burger, a riff on the classic Vietnamese banh mi sandwich. Today, because he's just as obsessed with the food and wine of Spain, it manifests itself as a burger gilded with chorizo, olives, manchego, and saffron.

Charlie thinks it tastes damn good. But that's just Charlie.  

SPANISH CHICKEN-CHORIZO BURGER
Burger:
1 lb. ground chicken
1 4-inch length Spanish chorizo, minced with a very sharp knife
2 garlic cloves, grated on a microplaner or finely minced
Salt and pepper to taste Burger buns 

Oyster beds in Cape Cod.

There's a certain kind of man who never fails to impress me, a guy who does things (apart from the obvious) that I could never do. Vacationing in Cape Cod last week, I met one of them: the contractor who was renovating the upstairs loft in my sister's new house in Chatham. After a full day of putting up sheetrock, this 60-something specimen showed up for dinner freshly showered in a nicely ironed pair of jeans and a black shirt, lugging a cooler full of oysters and clams that he had RAISED in his OWN BEDS, and proceeded to shuck them and serve half raw with a squeeze of lemon and the other half briefly broiled in the toaster oven with a crisp bacon topping.

*Sigh*?!?

Coincidentally, a tome called The Stag Cook Book fell into my hands recently, a charming, testosterone-fueled bible penned in 1922 "For Men by Men." [You can download the PDF here, and I highly recommend it]. Wives will have to swallow both their distaste for silly rhymes and their feminist ire at the opening ditty:

At range and at oven (whisper it) still,
Man is undoubtedly Master;
His cooking is done with an air and a skill,
He's sure as a woman -- and faster!

Well, messier, anyway, right, ladies? But it's hard to stay mad at the sweet lugs (the contributors include Houdini -- deviled eggs; Charlie Chaplin -- steak and kidney pie; Rube Goldberg -- hash; and Douglas Fairbanks -- bread tart) when they've gone to such trouble to write down their homespun recipes for chowders and welsh rabbit and baked beans and -- yes -- cornflakes.

In honor of the good men of Cape Cod, hit the jump for a very simple stag codfish recipe.

Photos by Bill Citara

OK, so if you tried out last week's little lesson on pork-stuffed shrimp, you've got three-fourths of a pound of ground pork, rather assertively seasoned with black pepper, garlic, cilantro, and fish sauce. What do you do with all that pig? Well, you could freeze it for cramming into some monstro-shrimp at a later date; you could roll it into meatballs and serve them with pad Thai noodles tossed with the same sweet Thai chili sauce meant for the shrimp.  

Or you could channel two of the world's great sandwiches -- the all-American burger and the classic Vietnamese banh mi -- into one damned tasty and ridiculously easy meal. Since you've got a mound of seasoned pork, most of the work is already done. Just form it into a couple of thick patties and throw them on the grill, toast some hamburger buns, apply a couple of easy-as-apple-pie garnishes (the recipes after the jump), and scarf away, You multiculti chef, you.

The only good pompano is an incinerated pompano

Dear Insufferable Know-It-Alls:

Grilling fresh local fish outside on the old Weber is my own private Waterloo, except unlike Napoleon's humiliating defeat by Wellington and the Prussians, mine keeps happening over and over like a recurring nightmare -- the only thing that changes are which guests are witnessing the battle and having to pretend to swallow the resulting cinders. I have tried grilling many types of seafood of many different cuts (pompano, grouper, snapper, cobia, wahoo) -- in all kinds of weather, on grills searingly hot to rather cool, but the one common denominator at the end is that they are all inedible. Please help, as the list of people I can persuade to come to my house for dinner has grown alarmingly short. I'm starting to think that the only good fish is a fried fish.

Signed,
It All Turns to Ashes in My Mouth

Dear Ashes, 

Here's a foolproof way to grill fish:
 
Grease the grill. Get half of the grill blazing hot. Cook the fish for a minute or two each side, or until there's a light char on the outside. Then move the fish to the side of the grill with no burners on -- or better yet, no charcoal. Then you can finish it off with indirect heat. Fish is tricky because of its density, so I always use a meat thermometer along the way to see when it's done.

Now, go change out of those overalls and pour yourself a margarita.
 

Clean Plate Charlie had this really cool idea. Take one of your favorite dishes from one of your favorite restaurants and, applying a little time, a few tablespoons of culinary knowledge, and a willingness to eat the inevitable mistakes, attempt to re-create it at home.

Since Charlie absolutely adores Thai cuisine and -- sadly -- most Thai cuisine in these parts is hardly worthy of adoration, he reached back to a dish his taste buds still pine for from one of his favorite restaurants in the San Francisco Bay area. There's nothing too difficult or complicated about it; the only (slightly) tricky part is the cooking -- just remember to be gentle and pay attention. Maybe Charlie's cool idea will be yours too.

PORK-STUFFED SHRIMP WITH SWEET THAI CHILI SAUCE
For the pork:
1 lb. ground pork
6 T. cilantro, roots, stems and leaves chopped
8 garlic cloves, chopped
3 T. fish sauce (Tiparos is a good brand)
2 t. black peppercorns, whole
1 T. salt
1 T. sugar
8 jumbo shrimp (U-8 count)
Peanut oil for basting
8 bamboo skewers, soaked in water for at least half an hour 

And you thought the best thing about Mother's Day was the satisfaction you get from making your mom feel like the most special lady on Earth, for at least the course of one homemade brunch. Actually, the best part is the leftover bacon -- enough fatty, crispy slices of swine so as to be able to create the World's Most Perfect Sandwich only hours after gorging oneself on omelets and French toast. I'm talking, of course, about the BLT.

Is there anything better than a bacon sandwich, all salty and smoky and fatty, topped with crunchy, grassy romaine lettuce, thin slices of tart tomatoes, and laced with a generous swath of creamy mayonnaise? Until the day when we all have personal robot chefs who can duplicate to a T the cooking of world-class chefs in our own kitchens (and slightly before the Great Robot Uprising to follow), that answer is no.