Collaboration Kitchen with Chef Amy DiBiase

This past Sunday we attended the latest Collaboration Kitchen dinner - a monthly event at Catalina Offshore Products. The "collaboration" is between Catalina (who provide the fish), Specialty Produce (who provide - you guessed it - the produce) and a guest chef who does the cooking. This month the chef was Amy DiBiase, who is now the executive chef at the Cosmopolitan Restaurant in Old Town.

The first dish she and her sous chef prepared was a shrimp ceviche. Unlike many shrimp ceviches which pre-cook the shrimp, this dish was only marinated - but for a longer period of time than is typical. This gave the shrimp a softer, but very pleasant texture. Persian cucumber added crunch, and orange juice and pureed melon rounded out the flavor.



The event was part Catalina Offshore infomercial - but not in a bad way. This is Dan from Catalina talking about the Mano de Leon ("Lion's Paw") sea scallops they sell:



And here is Tommy from Catalina slicing some up for sashimi:



We've gotten these scallops before (see our Dishes with Fishes post from a few weeks back) and they are fantastic. We've done a nice ceviche with them, but had never had them raw before. It was fantastic - even without any seasoning.

Chef DiBiase's second dish featured the Mano de Leon scallops. Here she is searing them up with two pans going at full bore:



And the final dish - served with a salad of zebra potatoes with sugar plums and lovely sprigs of tarragon:



Perfect cook on the scallop, and the potato salad was very good as well.

The next dish was halibut poached in olive oil:



It was served with asparagus, and plated on a brandade and topped with a cream sauce and toasted panko crumbs.



Meanwhile, Tommy was slicing up some raw yellowtail:



The yellowtail was good, but he also cut up some sushi-grade halibut which, drizzled with some soy, might have been my favorite single bite of the evening (sorry, I didn't get a picture).

The final dish was grouper. It had been marinated in citrus:



and was cooked on a flat top grill:



They served the grouper with caponata (which was light on the capers, thankfully).



This last dish was probably our favorite. The grouper was cooked perfectly and the caponata went with it very well.

Overall it was a very fun experience and a fantastic meal. The Catalina team were great hosts and Chef DiBiase and her sous chef did an impressive job of putting out four stellar dishes for about 60 people in just two hours time. Her restaurant may well be worth braving Old Town for.

Avocado Varieties

When I first moved to San Diego, avocado was synonymous for Hass - I wasn't really even aware that there were other kinds. San Diego is avocado central, though, and I've since broadened my exposure to different varieties of the tasty fruit.

Pictured above is this weeks haul from our farmers market. The one on the left is a Nabal. We hadn't heard of the variety before, but we had some for breakfast this morning (with tomato on toast) and it was really, really good - great flavor and super-creamy. The one in the middle is a Fuerte - we've been getting nice versions of these for several months, but they're more of a spring crop and this is the last of them. The big guy on the right is a Reed - I bet we can make a good-sized batch of guacamole with that one alone!

Happy Fourth!

For us, the Fourth of July means sunshine and ribs. While San Diego uncharacteristically let us down on the sunshine front, the ribs definitely shone through.

Happy Fourth!

Jalapeño Bacon

It is hard to believe that it has been almost two years now since we first posted on making bacon. That batch was our first, and it was so good that I ended the post by declaring: "we won't be buying bacon again". And we haven't!

A fun variant on traditional bacon that we've been playing with recently is adding jalapeños to the brining stage. We've been known to enjoy a bit of heat on occasion, so we figured why not add some spice to our homemade bacon?

Our first attempt to do this used fresh chiles. It was very pretty:



But it ended up not doing much. What worked better was using canned jalapeños (you know, the kind that always come with carrot slices). It took a much larger quantity than we expected to get the desired effect, and over the course of multiple batches we noticed that a fattier belly carried the flavor much better than leaner meat.

Here is a belly all zipped up and ready to cure, with some carrot slices added because it seemed like they should be:



I love the way bacon looks hot out of the smoker:



This is the same batch pictured at the top of this post. Once it cools and you cut into it, you get that characteristic bacon look.

It made for a very nice bacon cheeseburger...



You can use this bacon pretty much as you would any other. It is lighter on the sugar than some recipes (we prefer our bacon more salty than sweet). The heat from the jalapeños is definitely present, but subtle.

Jalapeño Bacon

This bacon works best if the belly is somewhat fatty rather than lean.

1 (3-4 pound) slab pork belly, skin on
40 grams (3-4 tablespoons) kosher salt
20 grams (approx. 5 teaspoons) sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons pink salt
4 canned jalapeños in escabeche, plus 1-2 tablespoons of the liquid
4 garlic cloves, sliced or crushed
2 bay leaves, torn into small pieces
1 tablespoon black peppercorns, slightly crushed

Mix together the salt, sugar and pink salt. Sprinkle generously over all sides of the belly, then gently shake off the excess. Place the belly into a non-reactive dish or zip lock bag. Blitz the jalapeno with the pickling liquid in a food processor or blender. In a bowl, stir the garlic, bay leaves and peppercorns into the jalapeño, then add to the belly being sure to coat all sides fairly evenly.

Let cure in the refrigerator 5 to 8 days, turning the belly every other day. The meat is ready once it is reasonably firm when pressed. Remove the belly and rinse off the cure with cool water. Pat dry, place on an oiled rack and return to the refrigerator to dry uncovered, overnight.

Smoke at 150-180 degrees using apple and oak. The bacon is ready once it reaches 150 degrees - usually in about 3 hours.

Some Dishes with Fishes

What with it being Fish! Week next week in San Diego, it seems appropriate to post some pictures of recent fish dinners. For a month or so now, we've been getting fresh, locally caught (primarily from Baja California) fish and shellfish every week from Catalina Offshore Products. The quality has been great, and we've really enjoyed eating more fish, so I fully expect this new tradition to continue.

Mano de Leon scallop. Snap peas, beans and beet green stems. Warm potato salad with bacon.


Sichuan Halibut


Grilled Yellowtail with Blood Orange and Fennel


Grilled Black Sea Bass with Baby Bok Choy


Green Curry with Halibut


Yellowtail Confit Salad


Grouper and Chips

Pizza Port Ocean Beach is Open!

The long, painful wait is over - the Pizza Port Ocean Beach location finally opened its doors to the public last Friday. We weren't going to brave opening weekend crowds (I heard it was crazy), but Sherry had yesterday off and the weather turned unexpected beautiful, so we hopped on our beach cruisers and headed down to OB.

The place was pretty active for a Tuesday afternoon, but not at all crowded. The deal here is just like the other Port locations - one line for beer, and another for pizza. They have a good number of taps (not sure exactly how many) with beers brewed on premises, other Port beers and a selection of guest beers.



They have a tiny bar seating area:



And of course the expected rows of picnic tables:



The prime seating on a warm spring afternoon, however, is their outdoor patio, which is where we made a B line for after grabbing a couple pints of their house IPA - the Jetty IPA.



I liked the Jetty - it is a good west coast IPA. Maybe a bit heavy on the bittering hop versus aromatic for my taste, but still very nice.



Sherry tried their New Break Pale Ale, which is a slightly hoppy pale - a fine beer if that's what you are looking for. Their other current house offerings didn't grab me (Chronic Amber, a honey blonde, a brown and a hefe), so I opted for a Bizon Belgian IPA from Port San Clemente. I found it to be more IPA and less Belgian than is typical of the style, but I enjoyed it.

We didn't get any food, but I expect it is exactly like the other locations. I'm no pizza snob, and I will happily eat Port's, but their beer is the real draw for me. Instead, after lazily enjoying our beers, we walked the block distance to the Ocean Beach Mariscos German truck and split a shrimp quesadilla (basically the same filling as a gobernador taco, but easier to eat). Yum.

All in all, the new OB Port location is a great addition to the beach beer scene. We plan to visit often.

Taco Shop Hot Sauce

Update: A revised recipe is available here. There is nothing at all wrong with this recipe, but the updated version is simpler to make.

The ubiquitous to-go hot sauce container above will be immediately familiar to anyone who lives in an area where taco shops ply their trade. Every place has their own sauce, and while they share a lot in common, each version is a little bit different. This one, however, is not from just any taco shop - it is our own house hot sauce.

If you've been following our blog since 2007 (which you haven't, because nobody was following our blog in 2007...), you may know that we've made hot sauce in the past. But that wasn't taco shop hot sauce - it was more of a Louisiana-style pepper sauce (think Tabasco). Taco shop hot sauce is a different animal entirely. Less vinegar flavor, more chile depth.

In coming up with a hot sauce recipe, I had a few goals in mind:

• Keep it pretty easy to make. Because I'm lazy.
• Get bold, but clean flavors - deep, but not overcomplicated.
• Make it plenty hot, but not so hot that you can't slather on a bunch without completely burning your face off.

Hot sauce was the main reason I started making the chile de arbol paste I posted about a while back - it provides the backbone for my recipe. If you have a batch of that chile paste on hand (and you should), making my hot sauce is easy.

Here is what I do. I take some tomatoes and cloves of garlic (with the skin still on) and toss them into a medium-hot frying pan:



You could probably do this with a pan in the oven, but I'm a stove-top guy. I like to see what's going on and poke and prod. I move things around every so often so they don't just cook on one side.



Once they are nicely charred and getting soft, I take them out to cool (the garlic usually is done earlier than the tomatoes). Let them cool enough to be able to peel them with your fingers without burning yourself. The garlic should pretty much pop out of its skin and the tomato skin should come off easily (and don't worry about getting every last bit off).



Then it is into a blender with some red wine vinegar, Mexican oregano, salt and enough water to loosen it up a bit.

Despite the posed picture at the top of this post, we put our hot sauce into a squeeze bottle for easy delivery. And deliver it we definitely do - we've been going through a ton of the stuff. Particularly at breakfast...



In addition to being great on a breakfast quesadilla, or in a taco, it also works well in other situations. We use it as a base for a killer ranchero sauce (and have also been known to just use it straight-up for that purpose), a little bit of it makes an awesome guacamole even awesomer, and it adds a perfect final touch to a ceviche.

When making hot sauce I've mostly been winging it with the exact quantities (and I encourage you to do the same). I did pay attention the last few times I whipped up a batch, though, so the following recipe is pretty representative of what I do on average.

Taco Shop Hot Sauce

1 pound tomatoes
4 garlic cloves (skin on)
2 tablespoons chile de arbol paste
4 teaspoons red wine vinegar
1/4-1/2 cup water
2 pinches Mexican oregano
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

Put the tomatoes and garlic in a medium-hot frying pan and cook them for 15 to 20 minutes - until they get soft and are charred on the outside.

After cooling for a few minutes until you can safely handle them, peel the skin off of both the tomato and garlic. Remove any hard center bits from the tomatoes.

Add the tomato and garlic to a blender with the chile paste and vinegar and blend until very smooth.

Add water gradually to reach the consistency you want. The amount of water will very greatly depending on how juicy your tomatoes are.

Add oregano and salt to taste.