Snakes on a Plane for Dinner

WARNING: Every single thing mentioned in this post is not for the faint of heart. As in, everything that follows is potentially bad for - could STOP - your heart, cold. Read on at your own risk!

Maybe you managed to resist the impulse to see that certain movie starring Samuel L. Jackson he claims he participated in on the strength of the title alone... "Snakes - On a Plane!".

The cinematic equivalent of a TV commercial hawker promising breathlessly, incredulously, "But wait - there's MORE!!", the phrase "snakes on a plane" quickly morphed into family shorthand for "over the top".

This could be over the top bad, as in "wait - it gets worse, he didn't just wreck his car...", or over the top good. That honor used to go to the phrase "poison tigers" which was old and tired and ready to rest. (You're welcome, poison tigers!)

Certainly for every one of the (very) many who watched the movie because they thought nothing could be worse than being trapped inside an airplane with dozens of poisonous snakes there was somebody else who watched it with a shiver of delight because hell yeah!, nothing beats snakes - on a plane, baby!! (except snakes on a plane battled by the iconic Samuel L. Jackson).

What you are legitimately wondering now, does this have to do with food or fun?  Sit tight my children and I will tell you.

Cheese Grits! But wait, there's more!!

Cheese Grits with Shrimp!

Worth the ride right there, sure, but hold on - I am not finished yet.

Cheese Grits. With Shrimp... Cooked.......

in......

BACON FAT!!!!If that thud I just heard was your jaw hitting the keyboard, I feel you. I saw this recipe in the Serious Eats "Dinner Tonight" column by Nick Kindelsperger and realized that whether or not I already had most of the ingredients on hand (which I did - go figure!) I would be making this for dinner and, PRONTO!So I did.  It did not disappoint dear hearts. It most certainly did not.

The original recipe calls for cooking bacon then using the "oil" (seriously - we are pretending that stuff coming out of cooking bacon is oil and not fat?) to cook shrimp in right before you throw the shrimp, the crumbled bacon and some chopped scallions back on top of the (had me at cheese) grits.

I didn't actually have bacon handy but honey chile, my Momma grew up in Virginia, OK? As in "Yes, Virginia, we DO all have a jar with bacon fat sitting in our refrigerator".  And I do.  When I want to quick sizzle something extra delicious style I have the best sizzle maker there is readily available - bacon fat.I followed the recipe as written with the exception of actually cooking bacon to get my "oil" which also meant no crumbled bacon to throw back on top. Maybe because I was already delirious at the prospect of bacon fat cooked shrimp for dinner, I tossed a few red pepper flakes into the hot "oil" right before I put the shrimp in to cook. 

And, yes, whatever you call it, once you use bacon fat/grease/drippings/oil to cook something, you elevate that something to an entirely new, over the top, snakes on a plane level of rich sumptious porky fat goodness.  When you are already talking about something as delicious as shrimp, sugar, now you got yourself a little somethin' somethin' goin' on, you hear?

Yuppers, this dinner would have been celestial alignment delicious with the crumbled bacon pieces added on top but trust me when I tell you it didn't even need to go there. What we ended up with was one of the most delicious and inexpensive dinners we've shared hereabouts. This bowl of shrimpy, cheesy, bacony goodness prompted a spontaneous "You can fix this for dinner any time you want" from the Hub.

No higher praise than that.

Granted, he had to speak up to be heard over the sounds of our arteries slapping shut, but nothing's perfect.We had a lovely salad, dressed up with gorgeous organic grapefruit sections, alongside the grits. The salad also features scallions and arugula from our own garden but more on that in a moment. We can eat salad for a week after to make up for this bit of cardiac clogging, ok? Ok! (note I state we "can" eat salad for a week, not that we "will". Just stating the possible, not making any promises...).

A couple of notes before I close. Long ago and far away I got a tip from Andrea Meyers, Instructional Designer, Education Consultant, Mom, blogger and cook extraordinaire, about taking the root tips of the scallions you buy at the store and planting them in your garden rather than tossing them on the compost pile. I have been carefully doing so for a while now, and have several stands of scallions in the back garden beds. Now when I want a pile of yummy green oniony tops for a dish?I just haul myself out back with the shears and smugly get to clipping. I hear you can do the same with leeks although I haven't successfully pulled that off yet (or else I've lost track of where I planted that leek root...things are getting a little busy back there true enough.).I also harvested arugula we planted earlier this Fall for our salad. Anything for another opportunity to say "It doesn't get much more fresh or local than this!"*. That also means this dinner with the two dishes using scallions and the salad using both scallions and arugula grown in our garden, qualifies to be featured in Andrea's Grow Your Own Roundup for February. You can get the details about GYO here.

[*Yes. I am that person. Deal with it.]

Do give this wickedly simple and decidedly delicious dish a try on your own. Maybe even while watching "Snakes on a Plane". Just be careful about having a spoonful in your hand in case watching the movie makes you jump. You won't want to lose one iota. For those of you who are sure your cholesterol numbers are low, I can be all business too. Here is a suitable-for-printing version of the original recipe:Shrimp and Grits with Bacon  - serves 4 -
 

Ingredients
1 tablespoon butter
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 large onion, finely diced
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
2 cups milk
3 cups water
1 cup grits
1 1/2 cups cheddar cheese, finely grated
8 ounces bacon, chopped
20 medium to large shrimp, peeled and deveined
1/4 cup scallion, chopped
Salt and pepper
Procedure

1. Add the butter and olive oil to a saucepan set over medium heat. When the butter has melted, add the onion and cook until soft. Add the garlic and cook for another minute. Turn the heat to high and pour in the milk and water. Bring to a boil and slowly whisk in the grits. Turn the heat to medium-low and cook, stirring occasionally, for 15 to 20 minutes. When done, dump in the cheese and stir until it is melted. Season with salt and pepper and set aside.

2. Add the bacon to a large skillet set over medium-high heat. Cook until golden browned and crisp. Remove and drain on paper towels. Pour out all but 3 tablespoons of the oil.

3. Set the skillet back over medium-high heat and when nearly smoking, add the shrimp. Cook until pink, about 1 1/2 minutes per side.

4. Scoop some of the cheese grits into a bowl and top with the shrimp, chopped bacon, and scallions. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Home Groan

Recently the folks at the Central Texas Gardener (a local PBS gardening show) interviewed and took a garden tour with one of the Austin American Statesman's (our local newspaper) popular garden columnist/bloggers.What struck me in this Television looks at Print looks back at Television gardeners love fest, was a statement made by Renee Studebaker of Renee's Roots (The Garden of an Urban Farm Girl), when she recalled seeing a photo of herself sitting in her grandmother's garden, in her diapers, "helping".

I hear this time and time again, that folks just have gardening, especially growing food for the table, "in their blood". They learned at a mother or grandmother or grandfather's knee, getting first hand tutelage in the art of coaxing food out of soil.

And every single time I hear or read of this, I experience pangs of grand/parent garden envy.

I never knew any of my grandparents. Long stories there, but bottom line is both my parents were older than average to begin with, one was estranged from their extended family, and I simply never had any of those doted upon moments where I was shown how to grow anything in a grandparent's garden.

My Dad enjoyed growing tomatoes. But he wasn't an experienced gardener. He grew tomatoes for love all right, but not love of tomatoes.

My father actually couldn't stand eating tomatoes. He developed an aversion to them (or so he said) while serving in the military in the Canal Zone during WWII. To hear him tell it, they all but force fed the troops tomatoes to prevent scurvy and he had to eat so many tomatoes during the war that he lost his appreciation for their flavor forever.

My Mom on the other hand, love love loved eating home grown tomatoes. She enjoyed them sliced with salt and pepper, no further embellishment required.

As much as she liked to eat them however, my Mother would not be cajoled, convinced or coerced into helping work the dirt to produce any. My Mom simply refused to get soil under her fingernails. Period.It was as if she somehow internalized the scene from her favorite movie "Gone With The Wind" where Scarlett, after scrabbling in the dirt for a turnip, was it? states "As God is my witness, as God is my witness they're not going to lick me. I'm going to live through this and when it's all over, I'll never be hungry again. No, nor any of my folk. If I have to lie, steal, cheat or kill. As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again.".

Only with my Mom you would sub in the words "and when it's all over," (it being the Depression), "I'll never work in a garden again. No, nor any of my folk.".

Although that is taking it a bit far. My Mom was OK with my Dad growing her tomatoes.She was just not one of those Earth Mommies out teaching my brother and I about the Great Circle of Life by growing carrots or beans or whatever.

So when it comes to growing food now for Hub and myself, I still have many, many lessons to learn.Some things I have learned in the past couple of months include that in a serious drought, if you do not supplementally water your radishes a lot more than I did, they may come out of the ground ropey and tough.

Another lesson learned is that broccolli waits for no woman. When harvesting broccoli, the developed floret you see is essentially the floret you will get.No need putting off harvesting to see if you will get a set of developed side shoots or a large head of florets more similar to the ones in the grocery store produce section.


Nope, waiting to harvest a head of broccoli too long leads to a striking illustration of why they call them "florets" in the first place.  To wit...

After a week of being distracted by other pressing matters, I turned my attention back to the garden beds where I fully intended to stride out and harvest me some broccolli by golly, only to be stopped in my tracks. My vegetables were in full bloom.

I was originally disgusted with myself, feeling that I had somehow failed a test and wasted an opportunity. Then I took a closer look.Those broccolli flowers were absolutely crawling with bees. Happy busy bees, apparently grateful to have something in full bloom in this fairly stark January between spells of cold and of dry.

Bees, as if you didn't already know this, are in a lot of trouble, and scientists still aren't sure what the causes are. Colony collapse disorder, their fancy term for the mysterious die off of thousands of bees, still poses a "why?" that we cannot answer.

In light of that, I feel a lot better about providing our local bees with some winter blooms to visit. Without the bees my chances of growing anything range from slim to none. And, turns out there is plenty of broccolli to go around. So while all my broccolli plants won't be feeding the Hub and me directly, I am happy to donate their pollen to the cause of sustaining my neighborhood bees.

I even figure from now on, to try to remember to put in a couple of extra broccolli plants so my bees can have some bright yellow flowers to visit when everything else has pretty much packed it in for the winter.

Odds are, I am not your Mom or your GrandMom. Nonetheless I am happy to share this lesson, learned at Mother Nature's knee if you will, about how plants do what they do whether you are ready or not, which usually includes feeding somebody, some way.

Reproduced

I am one of those (obnoxiously) proud Mommies. I'll own that flat out. The way I see it, I have every reason to be proud of my offspring. They are great. Case in point:

Recently on his food blog my son (the chef!) wrote about some killer fish tacos he'd made.After the teensiest recurrent seethe over why the kid couldn't have demonstrated this flair for producing fabulous food while he still lived at home, I took a good look at the Salsa Verde recipe he'd posted as part of the meal and thought to myself "I could do that". It would be a great way to use up a few of our garden's bounty of tomatillos.Yes, we have no tomatoes (or at least very few and far in between) this year. And yes, our jalapeño plants have been sparse producers, but our tomatillo plants have pretty much done right by us this season.

This means at the moment I have more tomatillos than I have uses for them, so a new recipe to put them into play was just the ticket. I'd bought an organic avocado at Wheatsville on Sunday figuring I'd be working the salsa into our dinner lineup later this week. It was a little firm, so I put it out with a tomato and a Meyer lemon I was allowing to ripen under a glass dome to share the wealth ethylene gas wise, and when I checked on it this morning, I noted it was just right.

I'm going to blame what happened next on "not enough coffee yet" clutziness. As I was moving the avocado from the counter to the refrigerator, I dropped it on our tile floor.Smash-o. It was indeed perfectly ripe demonstrated by splitting the skin topside on impact and promptly oozing a bit of avocado green goodness out the cracks. Earlier menu plans aside, I knew I'd have to use that avocado right up. Today. So I printed out the salsa recipe.

Salsa Verde:
2 tomatillos, husked and roasted (Green Chiles are a viable alternative for this recipe, or even try using both)
1 habanero, roasted then seeded
1/2 avocado, peeled and pitted
2 T. sour cream
1/2 cup cilantro
2 limes, juiced
Salt

Roast tomatillos and peppers (I like heat, I used a habanero, you could use serranos or jalapenos if you prefer) until skins are discolored. Remove seeds from pepper (or leave if you want more heat.)
Combine the remaining ingredients with the tomatillos/peppers in your blender and puree.

My son writes in a somewhat terse style (that must skip a generation?). His recipes do not provide overly much in the way of chefly hand holding. When it comes to somebody with years of experience in the kitchen and yet relatively little formalized training like me, this means after reading his instructions I am often left with a few unanswered questions.

So before I got started today I v-e-r-y c-a-s-u-a-l-l-y worked a couple of what I considered reasonable questions about how to prepare the salsa into a telephone conversation with him.

He had used tomatillos from the grocery store which, last time I shopped, looked like Eastern European Olympic gymnasts of old compared to my sweet little homegrown gals. Did he think four of five of my little darlings would be equivalent to two store sized tomatillos? He did.

I had a past the prime wrinkled jalapeño plus most of a serrano chile on hand. Could I use the wrinkled jalapeño (also from our garden) seeing as I was going to roast it anyway? I could, though he reminded me I'd want to keep an eye out on how many seeds I kept in depending upon the heat I desired.OK. I placed the recipe on the counter, gathered the rest of my ingredients and was good to go.Deciding to roast the tomatillos and peppers stove top rather than in the oven, I got them started and juiced my limes. After opening the container, upon inspection I noted that my organic sour cream had been engaged in some sort of extracurricular growth activities on its surface.Seeing as I wasn't going to cook the salsa, I demurred from introducing a potential new antibiotic to our gastronomic systems and pinch substituted an equivalent amount of organic cream cheese in its stead. I figured what the hell...cream cheese has a bit more texture to it perhaps but pureéd is pureéd, so it all ought to come out yummy in the end.

I whacked up the cilantro a bit to assure I wasn't using too many stems, and unceremoniously dumped the ingredients into the blender. Whirrrrrrrrrr

I tasted, decided to pop in a few slices of pickled jalapeño to up the heat quotient a bit, (yes, yes, I wussed out and didn't keep in enough seeds) re-whirilated it all in the blender and hey presto, here you go.My Son's Salsa Verde. Green, isn't it! It tastes just as fresh as it looks.

It is creamy and delicious and reproducible by even a less than ambitious type home cook such as my own self.I'd asked my son previously why there was a need to roast the tomatillos. I have several other recipes for tomatillo salsas and they mostly required some sort of cooking, but I'd never seen anything calling for them to be roasted prior to this.

He told me the point was to bring out the natural sweetness of the fruit, which would then contrast nicely with the acidity of the sour cream and the lime and yet still provide a bit of acidity all its own to counter the creaminess of the avocado.

Oh.

It does all that and more. I actually ate one extra roasted tomatillo as soon as it was cool enough and the roasting had indeed brought forward an amazingly complex blend of acidity and sweetness. Who knew?

I figure to feature this salsa verde in some soft tacos of my own for dinner tonight.

I have plans to season and grill some boneless skinless chicken breasts, shred them slightly, toss them with some of the salsa, add sauteéd onion and arugula, fold them into a flour tortilla then top them with some chopped heirloom tomato and maybe some crumbled cotija.

It should be muy muy sabrosa. Maybe I'll even throw together some Vinho Verde white sangria to go with. No reason Wednesday night dinner can't be a little festive. Salud!

Thanks kid. It was fun for me to be trying out one of your recipes and it will be even more fun sharing the delicious results with your Dad at dinner tonight. Keep em' coming!