Broward Palm Beach Food Blog

ieatishootipost.sg

​If Palm Beach is known for anything its as an enclave for the rich and powerful, a place where the Rush Limbaughs of the world can duck into their mansions like shells on a crab's back. But halfway across the world, Palm Beach is known as the birthplace of one of Singapore's most unique dishes, chilli crab.

I've never eaten a chilli crab, but based on the reports from Singapore-based blog ieatishootipost.sg, it's a dish I'm dying to try. It's made from hard-back mud crabs that are stewed in a spicy tomato sauce that sometimes has sambal, egg, and crab roe as well. It looks exceptionally delicious, if a little difficult to eat. (It's also given me the idea to ask a Singaporan how to eat Bamboo Fire Cafe's curry crab and stay clean.)

The Singapore Palm Beach is actually a restaurant that started as a shack on the Kallang River in 1956 by Cher Yam Tian and her husband Lim Choon Ngee. The couple named the place "Palm Beach Seafood" for the for the coconut palms that lined the beach nearby.

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Last week, I took some much needed vacation time and made the three-and-a-half-hour drive down to Key West for a bit of R and R, Conch-style. And what a great trip. I hadn't been to the Keys in nearly 10 years, which is far too long an time for any self-respecting South Floridian with liver intact. But driving down that two-lane strip of US-1, past roadside shacks promising the "world's best Key lime pie" and hand-drawn signs promising whole lobsters for less than $5 a pound, it felt like the Keys hadn't changed at all in my absence. Aside from the construction entering Largo (and what a maddening experience it is to get stuck behind someone going 25 on that stretch), the drive is idyllic and untouched. You pass in and out of these small islands, and the scenery changes constantly, from the Shell Worlds and mega-hotels of Largo to the sleepy docks of Marathon and the long, isolating expanse of the Seven Mile Bridge. Through it all, that sense of Old Florida remains the sole constant -- the leathered, booze soaked vibe that seems to get hauled onto the docks alongside mountains of bountiful sea life. For someone used to heading north through the boring flatlands near the Turnpike, it was a welcome change.

Arriving in Key West, we were determined to hit up all the old stops we missed so: The Southernmost Point, a short step from our eponymous hotel down the road, which overlooked Duval's South Beach. The Hemingway House, where it's impossible not to be in awe of a man, a writer, who understood life as equal parts high adventure and simple pleasure. And the restaurants, a collection of eateries inspired by the wonders of fresh seafood, joie de vivre, and a healthy dose of oddball quirk.

Flickr user: DOliphant

This is caviar compared to airport food.

It was 6 p.m. the night before a long weekend, and so far my getaway trip was going smoothly. I'd made it through the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport security screening line with half an hour to spare before boarding time. Now, I was starving. But where the hell could I eat?

I was stranded in Terminal 2, the unfortunate outpost for Northwest flights. My options were: burger, hot dog, or greasy sub, a prepackaged, refrigerated turkey sandwich, or a stomach-turning personal pizza, which looked and smelled exactly like the microwaved, congealed-cheese variety they used to serve in my junior high school cafeteria. Each choice was more nauseating than the last. I noticed a few other passengers making the same bewildered circle around the tiny terminal that I was, unable to accept that these were their only options.

In one corner, there was a tantalizing sign for cuban sandwiches and ropa vieja. But alas, the bakery that put out the sign was dark, closed except for a few muffins in a display case. Was this some kind of punishment for flying north during the off-season?

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.

Isn't that Paradise Hot Dogs?

Picking right back up from yesterday's post on my weeklong eating adventure in New Orleans, I'm going to talk a little bit about sammiches, a foodstuff that's well-respected and well-represented in the Crescent City. While some cities can claim to have contributed one sandwich to the national culinary landscape -- Philadelphia has the cheese steak; Chicago the Italian beef; New England, Boston, and New York have grinders, submarines, and heroes -- New Orleans has two: the po-boy, or poor boy, and the muffuletta.

John Linn

We rolled into town like birds of prey and had to be rolled out like over-stuffed roasters. Three friends and myself spent last week devouring our way through the vibrant culinary city of New Orleans. And what a trip it was: we must have ravaged whole sea beds, made scarce the supply of French bread for poor boy sandwiches, and forced law makers to consider raising taxes on chicory-imbued cafe au lait. When we were done there, clothes no longer fit - shame was the heaviest garment we wore. One thing is for sure, though. They knew our names. Those Katrina shirts hanging in gift shop windows may soon find company garments sporting our pictures.

Sure, we did other things in New Orleans too. We went to museums, zoos, and bars. But one of my dining compatriots may have said it best as we stumbled from one restaurant only to find ourselves in another soon after: "It feels like the only thing we're doing is killing time waiting to eat again." Going in, I knew this city had a reputation for special food. It's a tradition born of America's most unique and original cuisines, Creole and Cajun, each difficult to define and harder to peg down. But after this trip, if anyone asked me what American food really is, I'd tell them it's boiled crawfish - also, spicy gumbo, overstuffed po-boys, and glistening, raw oysters. Oh, so many, many oysters.

What follows is a brief pictoral account of a week of stuffing my face in the Big Sleazy.

They'll have it their way.

If you've somehow missed Burger King's hilarious not funny at all new marketing campaign, where they bring Whoppers to Hmong villagers in remote Thailand, the Inuit of Greenland, and a Transylvanian town in Romania, you have to check this out. Although the campaign generates a seriously sinking feeling (it's only a matter of time before these folks and their descendants give up hand-embroidering their clothing and turn to playing Wii), the ironies abound. For one thing, the Whopper doesn't look like recognizable food, so people have no idea how to eat it. And it doesn't taste nearly as good as seal meat. But we already knew that.

I'm going to wrap up this short little porthole into Costa Rican cuisine talking a little bit about everything -- probably in a very rambling, tangential sort of way. Just a fair warning.

Native fruit is definitely one of the more unique aspects of eating in Costa Rica. You've got your average tropical fair, of course, including bananas and oranges and mangos and guayaba (guava). but then you've got oddities like this:

That disgusting looking spewdum of goo and seeds is a granadilla, and it's perhaps one of the most nectary-sweet, delicious fruits you're going to find in Costa Rica. Yes, it feels like half-melted Jello in your mouth; like the forest's answer to raw quail egg. But there is something faintly, well...erotic about supping on the life-giving goo within the fruit. Obviously someone else thought so too: the granadilla is just one very-ugly-but-tasty variety of what's referred to as passiflora ligularis, or passion fruit.

Jump for more...

Yesterday I talked a little bit about Costa Rica's plato tipical, casado - and more specifically, rice and beans. Now, when you're producing rice and beans in such quantities as to make it the central aspect of a plate, you're bound to have some leftovers. Like cold pizza or breakfast burritos, Costa Ricans adapt these heaps of leftovers into gallo pinto: a saute of black beans and rice along with cilantro, onion, and pepper. It basically becomes a flavorful sort of fried rice, turned black or light brown by the natural sauce of the beans. Gallo pinto is served primarily for desayuno (breakfast), but I did find it later in the day at a few places.

We hiked through rainforests and gasped at volcanoes, lounged on white sand beaches and wound our way around perilous mountain passes. Oh yes, we also ate. I just returned from six days in Costa Rica, one of the many ecological jewels of Central America, and aside from taking in an almost unfathomable level of sheer natural beauty we ate our weight in tropical fruits, fresh ceviche, and, of course, rice and beans.

Hit the jump for more.

We loved everything about M Restaurant (Kertész u. 48), including the goose leg gobbled in the photo above. We’d arrived into the city at dusk, showered, and headed out a bit weary after a very long ride in a van (from Skopje). We were going to eat at Carmel Pince, which was close by, but we were turned away at the door -- it was Sabbath, and pre-reservations were necessary. We asked a passerby for advice, and he steered us across town to what turned out to be a stretch of numerous outdoor cafes lined up one after another. A few of the places looked all right, but it was too touristy a spot. So we stopped a couple who looked like they might be a Hungarian version of us, and explained that we were looking for a regular place, where locals go, and where the food was authentic and tasty. To the couple’s credit they took quite a bit of time deciding, discussing among themselves pros and cons of various places, and eventually came up with M -- which was right by where we’d just walked from. It turned out to be exactly what we were looking for.

We were in the city for just four days, but that was long enough to pick up an obvious vibe: Budapest is happening. It is young. It is hip. It is, along with places such as Berlin and Barcelona, part of a new world order of cities worth traveling to; roll over New York, and tell Paris the news.

On this stretch of the trip, in a tiny fishing village tucked into a pristine corner of Lake Ohrid (one of the oldest, deepest lakes in the world), we ate almost every meal at “home” -- meaning prepared on a small two-burner electric oven outdoors, on a patio of our house situated right upon the lake and privy to views such as the sunset above. The mountains you see are close-by Albania, but that’s the only detail I’ll give on the location; it’s just too unspoiled a spot to spoil with attention.

It was half-past midnight, and folks in the photo above were lining up for late-night street snacks. Actually, they pretty much queue up day and night at this bakery that has been operating for over one hundred years, and now is one of just a few Macedonian-owned businesses in this Albanian side of town.

Friends in Skopje, Macedonia, and in nearby Dracevo, are like family to my wife and I; we’ve been here quite a few times over the years. So many people invite us to their homes for dinner that it becomes a rare occasion to eat in restaurants. We did dine at some, which I’ll get to tomorrow, but our favorite foods always seem to come from the kitchens of those we know.

In the first few days we sampled Mimi’s turli-tava, a stew stocked with beef, pork, lamb, okra and a slew of other vegetables. This photo doesn’t do it justice.

We stayed on a houseboat a bit outside the city, rode rented bicycles all over the place, and enjoyed Belgrade immensely -- but truth be told, this particular leg of the journey wasn’t culinarily oriented. Generally our lunches were crafted from goods we’d buy at the market (pictured below). Serbians we spoke with boasted of how delicious their tomatoes were (and I have to agree), but admitted that Macedonia’s were even better (I agree with this, too).

A stopover for lunch in New York; three days on a houseboat in Belgrade, Serbia; a week with friends in Skopje, Macedonia; eight days in a house, with many many kids, right upon Lake Ohrid, also in Macedonia; four days in Budapest, Hungary; an overnight stopover in Paris. Twenty-two days of blissful vacation, and about a hundred meals -- or so it felt. What follows in the days ahead will be photos of the gastronomic highlights. But allow me to start with the low point, which would be the meal Continental Airlines tried to pass off as chicken with pasta: