This is a fantastic recipe for crawfish etouffee, it is a traditional roux based etouffee recipe that does not contain any tomato. The one place that this recipe diverges from most traditional recipes is the inclusion of Dry Sack, a Spanish dry Sherry. The Sherry gives the etouffee a great base flavor that just can't be replicated with stock. You never see wine in etouffee recipes, I am betting it is the "secret ingredient" in some of the best recipes for etouffee you will find - it certainly is in mine.
Summer in Laramie, Wyoming is fickle at best ~ and by the second snow in June it can seem downright elusive. This year, our first in Laramie, winter has seemed particularly dogged in it's cling to our thin air, but in the last 10 days, daytime warmth and the sudden greening of the plains seems to be announcing that summer has at last arrived.
Peranakan or Nonya cuisine, and curry laksa haven't really be discovered in United States, that is until recently. Laksa has begun to sporadically appear on The Food Network, the Travel Channel and other foodie programs and networks. Laksa made it's most recent appearance on last nights episode (episode 11) of Top Chef on Bravo, with a shrimp laksa made by one of the contestants. Bourdain, evidently judged the Laksa to smoky for his taste, after announcing that he "took his laksa seriously". Interestingly, it might be noted that Bourdain presumably had his first laksa two seasons back on his traveling foodie show "No Reservations".
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Once reserved exclusively for Moroccan royalty and their most important guests, Medjool dates were considered a precious confection and for many remain so today.
Almost two years ago I wrote up an article on a series of experiments I was doing smoking salt. At the time I promised a follow up article posting my results in a "couple of weeks". Clearly it has taken me longer to get here than a couple of weeks, but I didn't want to post on the subject again until I sorted out some of the details and techniques and had a chance to do some research.
Some of you may have noticed our absence the last several months. Naomi and I made some big changes not to long ago - and decided to sell the boat and find a new home on land.
This is a dish that I came up with after some experimentation I have been doing with asian spice broths. I wanted to combine four distinct spice flavors in a broth or stock base that would not overpower the subtleties of flavor and aromatics offered by the seasonings; ginger, lemongrass, star anise and Thai chile.
For the last year I have been posting principally on chiles and the art of smoking, leading me to explore moles, the magic of New Mexico Chiles, the wonders of slow cooked smoked meats, and a number of renditions of American style barbecue.
That said, over the last several months I have found that my cooking has begun to change focus. This evolution has been quite natural, but has been moving me steadily away from the focus that Chilefire has traditionally held. It has been partly this that has led me to post less often as winter has made smoking more difficult, and the role of chiles in my cooking has changed - from a showcase to a more complimentary role.
After smoke drying a load of Hatch green chiles earlier this fall, I decided that I wanted to try make some other smoked spices. I have smoked salt and smoke stewed tomatoes, but the idea of smoking garlic didn't hit me until I found a recipe for dehydrating garlic in the box of my Nesco dehydrator.
Already having a freezer full of roasted chiles we needed to find some other things to do with our chiles. I made a small batch of sweet chile jam last year when Naomi's mother was in town, and wanted to try to make a batch with the chiles we grew here on our boat.
