Broward Palm Beach Food Blog

​Now that stone crab season is upon us, you gotta see the Captain. It's Florida lobster season too, so you gotta see the Captain. And if you want live softshell crabs, fresh Cape Canaveral shrimp, pumpkin swordfish, spear-caught hog snapper and more, you gotta see the Captain. 

"The Captain" would be Capt. Frank's Seafood Market, an unassuming little place just off I-95 in Boynton Beach that, in an age when chain everythings swallow independent operators like a Great White with a mile-long tapeworm, refuses to be swept out with the tide. 

There was, in fact, a Capt. Frank. He was the grandfather of market founder Richard Parsons, who opened the Boynton location--the sister market to the original in New York--in 1986.

Courtesy of WPB Greenmarket.

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If you've been making do with brown lettuce and rock-hard tomatoes from your local giant-mega-supermarket and counting the days until you could buy produce with real flavor from the people who actually grow it, you have only a few more days to check off.  Most Palm Beach County greenmarkets will reopen for the season by the end of October, so there's no excuse to be dining on potato chips and Lean Cuisine because you don't want to waste precious dollars on sad-looking, over-priced crap. 

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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.

​An economy that's gone from filet mignon to meat loaf faster than you can say "greedy Wall Street bastards" has got the attention of even high-flying steak houses. 

One of them, Ruth's Chris, last night unveiled a new "bistro menu" of apps, sushi, soups, salads and sammies priced from $9 to $19, not exactly McCheapskate but a lot less than that USDA Prime porterhouse for two. The lounge of the West Palm/CityPlace RC, one of only four in the country to get this test rollout, was packed with invitees sucking down free cosmos and chardonnay, while waiters bearing bistro tidbits passed them around the room and a guy on electric piano did creditable renditions of jazz standards. 

What's that in the coffee cake? Yep, it's cardamom.

​The only thing painful about Le Petit Pain is deciding which of its luscious breads, pastries, cookies, tarts, and other confections to take home with you. 

But one pain that's pure pleasure is a breakfast bread that, if you're not of Scandinavian descent, you've probably never seen before. "Scandinavian coffee cake" is how Le Petit's co-owner (with wife Gaelle) Tom Tchernia describes it, though at his tiny Lantana bakery, it goes by the more prosaic name of "cardamom-raisin bread." 

Yeah, that's cardamom, one of the stalwart spices of Indian cuisine but also a player in the cuisines of the various Scandinavian countries, where it arrived from

​If you are or have ever been a cubicle slave, you know a good, cheap lunch that isn't one more ham-and-cheese or tuna sandwich can bring a tiny speck of light into the daily grind of pounding big rocks into little rocks for The Man. 

Of course, you don't have to be a cubicle slave or desk drone to appreciate the arepas at Richard Klein's new Arepera on Clematis Street in West Palm Beach, though the folks who live and work in the general vicinity are obvious targets of the modest little eatery on the ground floor of the Via Jardin building. 

Arepas, if you don't know, are the national sandwich of Venezuela, small, chewy rounds of corn-flour dough that are sliced in half and filled with just about anything you want. They're also the focus of the short menu at Arepera (like, duh), though you can also get a salad and a handful of sides and desserts.

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

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Sure Chili's is a mega-chain restaurant, something we normally shy away from and turn our noses at. But sometimes hitting up a chain is a necessity, like when you're stuck at an airport for an hour long layover or when you're dining with unadventurous family members who refuse to eat anywhere they don't recognize. If you're going to hit up a mega-chain restaurant, you might as well shoot right to the top and go with Chili's, especially with their three courses for $20 special designed for two and all day two for one happy hour.

My Girlfriend Hollie and I drove out to the nearest Chili's (5363 Sheridan Street in Hollywood) to give the special a shot. We breezed past the hostess to sit at the bar for two reasons: the first being the lack of a wait time for a table, the second being close proximity to the never ending fountain of two for one drinks flowing from the bar. A few glossy menus sat at the table advertising the special we were seeking. We're instructed to pick one starter to share, two entrees, and a dessert and assured the bill for the food will not exceed $20.

Photos by Bill Citara

Marylea Moffat was in a pickle. 

The trucking company she and her husband ran had crashed and burned. Her marriage too. And getting a new job? Well, the way things are nowadays, good luck with that. 

What she did have was a lifetime of family recipes for pickling just about everything that came out of their garden. "We'd do something with it," she said of their bounty. "Nothing went to waste."  

Add a love of cooking and the need to make a living and the result was Pickled Pink, her own line of pickled just about anything, from dills and half-sours to vanilla-infused beets and green beans to killer relishes, like my favorite, a snappy heirloom tomato relish with crispy chunks of onion, celery, and peppers along with chopped tomatoes, sugar, vinegar, salt, and spices. It's good enough to eat right out of the jar, but it also makes an excellent accompaniment to hot dogs, burgers, grilled or roasted pork, or even rich, creamy cheeses like Brie and Camembert. 

Moffat, who lives in West Palm, began selling her pickles late last year at Lake Worth's Oceanside farmers' market, and now that the market has moved downtown for the summer (every Saturday from 8 a.m. to noon), she's there too, selling (and offering samples of) a hand-made product that makes the mass-produced stuff sold at your local gigamarket taste like... well, like mass-produced stuff sold at your local gigamarket. 

Pickled Pink heirloom tomato relish sells for $5.50, with the rest of the line going from $5.50 to $7.50. It's not only local, it's really good. Find the Oceanside market at "J" Street and Lake Avenue in Lake Worth every Saturday from 8 a.m. to noon.

John Linn

A little bit of perspective. Click any pic for a high-res version.

For years we've praised the deli counter sandwiches made at Fort Lauderdale's My Market, a convenience store/bodega with a thriving sub shop attached. And for good reason: each of the fifty-some varieties are made with bread baked fresh daily, quality deli meat (what's not Boar's Head is usually made in house), vibrant vegetables and herbs, and fruity olive oil. No other sandwich there is more exemplary of this commitment than the prosciutto roma, a hulking tank of a sub slathered with a pungent cascade of sliced prosciutto, thick wedges of fragrant tomato, sweet slices of fresh mozzarella, floral basil leaves, and streams of olive oil and Balsamic vinegar. The kicker, though, is the chewy, hard-crusted ciabatta bread, a starch so hearty it works your jaw out harder than a Richard Simmons tape. This loaf is a beast - nearly half-a-foot wide and almost two inches thick, it takes a mean appetite to down it in one sitting. The small portion is also a steal at $7.99: it's over six inches long, and every last spec of doughy real estate is crammed with buttery, tender prosciutto, all meaty and salty and sweet. The large feeds two or more hungry folk at just $13.99. With as much meat and fresh cheese as My Market pumps into this beast, you'd probably pay way more just buying the fixins' at another deli. But that's just another bit of beauty about My Market: you don't necessarily pay premium prices for premium goods.

After the jump, the hot, hot money shots.

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. 

Photos by Eric Barton

I'll take the key lime pie. Now go long.

The server was explaining this and that about the dessert tray at Truluck's in Fort Lauderdale when I made some comment about how perfect they all looked. "They're not real," he said. Then he slapped the chocolate cake. It made a sound like smacking a basketball.

I swear, I had no idea. My wife and I, dining there recently to write a review for Thursday's New Times, started poking the carrot cake and key lime pie. Sure enough, it had the feel of a Nerf football.

A couple of days later, I called back to Truluck's to see what's up with their dessert display. I've seen plastic desserts at places like cheap Chinese food joints, but they've always looked like something that might pop out of a Fisher Price oven.

Truluck's gave away its secret.

Photo by Bill Citara

I stopped by the Lake Worth farmers' market recently and ran into Jodi Swank, whose (with husband Darrin) Swank Specialty Produce is to the trash at your local supermarket what a Bugatti Veyron is to skateboarding with square wheels. 

She'll be at the market on J Street at Lucerne Avenue for another two weeks before shutting down to ramp up for next season's production, and if you haven't sampled the picture-perfect (and poison-free) produce used by the likes of James Dean Max (3030 Ocean) and Michael Wagner (Lola's on Harrison), then you're missing out on something really special. The mixed Asian greens, which can include everything from Chinese mallow and Japanese red mustard to tatsoi and mizuna, make the most amazing salads.

Jodi also had a couple of interesting bits of news. One, she and Darrin will double the size of the Loxahatchee farm by October, when Swank will be at its regular booth at the West Palm Beach Greenmarket. After that market closes in April, Swank will head back to Lake Worth. Look for more of all the good stuff the Swanks normally produce, plus more varieties of tomato and veggies like broccoli, cauliflower, and Brussels sprouts. 

The second bit of expansion is of Swank's Community Supported Agriculture program, which for $40 a week (with an eight-week minimum) gets you weekly or biweekly baskets of fresh from the farm produce. With a $320 up-front commitment, it's not exactly cheap, but if you go in with another couple-three foodies, it becomes a lot more affordable, not to mention a helluva lot cheaper than eating the same pristine produce at some hoity local restaurant. Jodi's looking for another 25 to 30 members (about all the farm can handle), so if you're interested, give her a call at 561-202-5648 or email her by clicking here. 

Your greens will make your friends green with envy.

Photos by Bill Citara

The world's most omnivorous, omnipresent purveyor of junk food is now crashing the rather more upscale salons of junque cuisine. 

That would be McDonald's, which last week spat up a trio of 100 percent Angus beef burgers. Launched to compete with the tonier patties of eateries like Five Guys, Fuddruckers, and Cheeburger Cheeburger, the Angus burgers feature a "premium" braided sesame seed bun and various toppings intended to be more life-like than the DOA garnishes of its proletarian cousins. The third-of-a-pound burgers come in Deluxe, Mushroom & Swiss, and Bacon & Cheese guises and will set you back $3.99. They will also contribute from 750 to 790 calories to your steadily expanding gut or thighs, 350 to 360 of those calories from fat. 

So what does the damned thing taste like?

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 

915 in Key West is home to some amazing Fries with aioli.

The Food Network has a new show called The Best Thing I Ever Ate (9 and 9:30 p.m. tonight), and it features the usual roster of the network's chefs and celebrity foodies running down the best things they've stuffed in their constantly yapping mouths. In the first show, "Totally Fried," Bobby Flay flogs his favorite french fries, Giada De Laurentiis does decadent donuts, and Duff from Ace of Cakes goes down on some fried shrimp heads. The second episode features the best barbecue as per Flay again (doesn't this guy ever take a breath?), Tyler Florence, and Ted Allen. 

I'll be tuning in myself, at least because I know some of the places they'll be talking about. And it got me to thinking: We've all got memories of something so wickedly, fabulously, excruciatingly delicious that we wake up in the middle of the night with drool soaking our pillows and our stomachs growling like a pack of rabid wolverines. So why don't we, like, share. I'll go first, but feel free to pile on.

FRIED
Seafood-stuffed softshell crab, K-Paul's Louisiana Kitchen, New Orleans. Big Easy chefs are to deep-frying what Michelangelo was to painting church ceilings, and this infantile crustacean stuffed with what's basically a seafood mousseline is so unconscionably rich and unspeakably tasty you'll be fighting to chow down the last bite as the paramedics come to roll you away. 

Honorable mention:
Fries with aioli, 915, Key West
Fried chicken, Fran's Chicken Haven, Boca Raton 

BARBECUE
Pork ribs (dry), Bar-B-Q Shop, Memphis. The best damn ribs in Memphis, which to some people is like saying the best damn ribs on the planet. How good are the Shop's ribs? Well, last time we were there we devoured an entire rack sitting in the car parked out front, then went back in for another to take on a picnic. Oh, yeah, we ate that one too. 

Honorable mention:
Baby back ribs (wet), Foothill Café, Napa
Barbecued shrimp, Mr. B's, New Orleans.

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.

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 

Who's Yurmami?

We're all familiar with the four primary tastes we experience on our tongues: sweet, salty, bitter, and sour. Food scientists and restaurant critics desperate for novel terms have also added two more semi-tastes: astringent, and spicy. But a century ago the Japanese identified a fifth primary taste -- "umami" -- which can be roughly translated as "deliciousness." Writers and scientists have had a hard time describing exactly what umami is -- not a flavor, not quite a sensation. Many people agree that when you encounter it in food, umami imparts a feeling of fullness, roundness, savoriness, or yumminess.

Umami comes from glutamate (yes, as in MSG, which is glutamate in a shaker. MSG has been mostly given a bum rap, but that's another story). Glutamate is an amino acid that is found in many foods. One of the great challenges for chefs in both the East and the West is finding ways to combine foods to get the biggest glutamate punch, because the more umami a dish has, the more likely customers and stray food critics are to fall into ecstasies of devotion. Umami is probably the main reason why spaghetti & meatballs is so universally loved.

Wanna guess which of the foods pictured below contain glutamate? PS: If you're really an umami devotee, as I am, you can join the Umami Information Center, and learn all about the fun conferences and symposia and seminars they sponsor around the world.

*the photo above is from hoosierburgerboy.com, a great blog about all things burger.

Hit the jump to identify yer umami.

File this under: "Amazing things people do for no reason at all." But I'm not sure I'd want to eat this pizza after he was done with it.

The World's Six Most Expensive Foods Are:

1. A part of a flower.
2. A nut.
3. An animal cell.
4. A fungus.
5. A berry.
6. A tuber.

Can you guess what they are without Googling? Hit the jump to find out.

Located in Hollywood, Sonny's Famous Steak Hogies gets a lot of buzz amongst cheese steak aficionados. Since they don't call them Philly cheese steaks, they're excused from using Cheez Whiz. Instead, they'll use mozzarella, provolone, or American to top their hogies. Check back Monday for a review.

How do you spell Eeeeew? Check out Tracy O'Connor's blog, I Hate My Message Board, where she bravely goes to a place you'd have to drag me kicking and screaming: Sweet Sue's Chicken in a Can.

Boca Bubble Tea from MiamiNewTimesBlogs on Vimeo.

Boca Bubble Tea is an informal festival operation run by the Ward family. Bubble Tea is flavored sugar water with tapioca pearls at the bottom. Listen to Mr. Ward tell you about it.

Viet Style from MiamiNewTimesBlogs on Vimeo.

Take a table-top tour of authentic Vietnamese cuisine featuring a rice and wonton noodle and vegetable dish, fried rice with Chinese sausage and vegetables, Vietnamese egg rolls, and a jelly dessert with tapioca pearl.

Island Stylee from MiamiNewTimesBlogs on Vimeo.   

   

It's Like Coconut from MiamiNewTimesBlogs on Vimeo.

Here's an authentic Thai dessert, the name of which I can't pronounce (or find on the Internet). If anybody in the world knows what it is, leave a comment. It's delicious and fun to watch being made.

Sophia's Thai and Korean from MiamiNewTimesBlogs on Vimeo.

Sophia's Thai and Korean has been a vendor at the Asian Culture Festival for 18 years. This year, Sophia was serving some fine foods including a spicy bamboo-strip dish, chicken wings, mixed vegetables, the great-tasting fish on a stick (AKA Thai catfish) and a special Louisiana crawfish.

You can catch Sophia's in the flesh at Wat Miami's Songkran Festival (water festival) and Thai New Year celebration on April 12, 2009. Wat Miami is a Thai Buddhist temple in Homestead officially called Wat Buddharangsi, and it houses a 23-foot-tall golden Buddha. Check it out.

Asian Fusion Cuisine from Miami New Times on Vimeo.

Pancit, Turron, Chicken Adobo -- these are all traditional Filipino dishes, and they were all  presented by a family catering company called Asian Fusion Cuisine at the Asian Culture Festival on March 7, 2009. Those interested in Asian Fusion Cuisine should call 954-200-9726.