See what this does for your taste buds – Smoked Scallops, Smoked Cheddar Bourbon Soup, and artisanal smoked pancetta, all brought together as part of a larger smoked, bourbon tasting menu.

Yeah, my tastebuds almost fainted, I almost fainted, my family was inarticulate as they simply scarfed their share of our samples.

Brian Treitman, of BT’s Smokehouse, who you know I have blogged about before (An improbable meat nirvana in a BBQ wasteland, Criminally Good Smoked Salmon and Bacon – B.T.’s Smokehouse, Food Photo 101: Shooting BBQ) shared a delightful sneak taste of this scallop dish recently when I stopped by for my latest fix of his smoked salmon.

Wine connoisseurs speak of terroir – the notion that a particular wine has a unique taste that is gained from the ecology of a very specific location.

The wiki defines it as such:

Terroir (/t̪εʁwaʁ/ in French) (Spanish: terruño, pago) was originally a French term in wine, coffee and tea used to denote the special characteristics that geography bestowed upon them. It can be very loosely translated as “a sense of place” which is embodied in certain qualities, and the sum of the effects that the local environment has had on the manufacture of the product.

I am sure that this concept is nothing new to most of you.

Today I would like to suggest that there is another sort of terroir, one which is more complex in some ways, more fascinating to me (perhaps because I do not drink wine and I DO eat BBQ).

I think that each well-seasoned and well-used smokehouse smoker has its own distinct terroir. If you get close to the gaping maw of Brian Treitman’s smoker you will notice the build up of solid smoke and smoked meat essence.

It coats the interior and the racks.

Brian uses applewood from the MANY orchards that surround us in this region. He does a dry rub on many if not most of the meats (and tofu!) that he smokes. The smoke and the slowly cooking meat react and meld in a way that seasons the smoker to its own unique terroir.

This terroir is the lively organic memory of the many ribs and chickens and pork butts and bacons and salmons and turkeys of the past.

You can choose to utterly submerge yourself in a tongue electrifying miasma of smoke as you nibble on the bark of a long smoked pork butt.

You can get a wholly different but BT Smokehouse specific smoke essence when you eat one of the smoked scallops shown in this post.

This particular assembly of ingredients can be a part of a larger tasting that Brian can provide to foodies in the Massachusetts area. He works with you to identify a seasonal menu that also leverages the unique terroir of his smoker as well as local microbrew beers and smoke-friendly spirits like bourbon.

You can call Brian at 1-617-251-6398 to talk about your tasting. There is a minimum of 8-10 people, likely max up to 50 depending on your home situation. There is a 2-4 week lead time so plan ahead.

Here are the salacious details of this fantastic dish.

Moist plump scallops were cured in Brian’s spice rub and brown sugar for 4 hours and then cold smoked with applewood. You can special order these and their price is pegged to the scallop market price. Call in to get the details.

The soup is made with a sharp white cheddar cheese that he smoked as a block and then spiked the soup with bourbon. This alone would delight you in its mixture of the smoky terroir and the bourbon. He sells this at $8/pint.

The pancetta was cured for 5 days, lightly smoked, and then dried for 4 months. This goes for $10/lb.

The soup and the scallop, while both smoked, have a distinct flavor from one another. It may come from the lack of cure on the cheese, it offers a lovely layering of differentiation.

This is such a fantastic variation from the heavier beef and pork BBQ. I am just in love with it and I hope that you get a chance to work with Brian to bring a tasting that includes this offering to you and your loved ones this holiday season!

Five year old KD really enjoyed it all, could hardly wait for the shoot to be over. Notice that super mod hair cut? Yeah, she got a hold of some scissors and decided she needed to do the do.

Reach Brian at 1-617-251-6398 (Tell him Nika sent you)

Related Sites:

• B.T.’s Smokehouse – Southern Style BBQ

Related Posts:

• An improbable meat nirvana in a BBQ wasteland
• Criminally Good Smoked Salmon and Bacon – B.T.’s Smokehouse
• Food Photo 101: Shooting BBQ

Q turned 11 this last weekend and we feasted, as we always do on her birthdays, on steamed lobsters.

This is what it looked like last year’s party.

This year the party got started so late it was just not worthwhile to shoot it all in the darkness. I really do need better lighting in the dining area but what can you do!

I also had substantial cake failures due to the fact that Q wanted a DRAGON cake and my attempt to make dragon cupcakes just withered under gravitational forces. I shot none of those ill-fated pumpkin muffins. We ended up simply making spider cupcakes with chocolate frosting and chocolate twizzlers for legs.

I went a bit Halloween with the decor this year but the best I could do was shoot two of the kids outside in the costumes they wore.

Q is a bit goth with her awesome skull goblet and wig and black wings!

KD is a lovely little faerie.

Technorati Tags: feasted, birthday, steamed, lobster, chocolate twizzler, Halloween, decor, costume, goth, skull, goblet, wig, black, wings, faerie

If you love oysters you likely have your own way of describing the experience of eating them. If you don’t like them, you probably have a more vivid description. If you have never eaten a raw oyster but are the sort to give new things a try, a description may do you some good.

I will try to keep this g-rated but it will be hard because the experience of eating a raw oyster is an adult advanced topic. I will also ask your indulgence because I KNOW that this has been written about so much in mundane food writing that it can become cliched.

For me, eating an oyster is a transcendent and inherently frustrating experience. If you are positively inclined toward the family Ostreidae, looking upon their delicate membranes, laid bare, is almost more than one can tolerate in polite company. Their plump bodies repose in pearlescent beds surrounded by an incongruent rough outer shell. The naked and disturbing (revolting?) truth of their morphology creates a rigid tension as it plays against the pleasurable memories of previous oysters.

Each new oyster represents a new choice: Do I slurp it off the shell? Do I spear it with a tiny fork? Do I gulp it down? Or do I allow it to fill my mouth completely and do I chew all its different textures?

Until recently, I would gulp them down, but the gulping leads to frustration, mostly because that makes a dozen seem like nothing.

The odd juxtaposition between full and empty that you feel when gulping oysters – full tummy but the short and insufficiently experienced oysters – lead me to find a more intense experience. That is how I ended up plopping large dollops of extra spicy red sauce on the oyster which I had balanced on a crispy saltine. When all of THAT is gulped, well, its a much more satiating experience. But its not really about the oyster then, is it.

As a poor but hungry student in New Orleans, I would eat a dozen but then continue with the free red sauce and saltines, not REALLY missing the oyster (lots of cheap beer helps, but that would help just about anything in New Orleans in the hot humid summer, and, OK, hot humid winter too).

However, to chew the oyster is to be honest about what you are eating. What the heck does honesty have to do with eating oysters? I guess as I grow older, honesty becomes more urgent because missed opportunities and numb experiences waste what little time there remains.

To chew an oyster is to pop and crunch and swish and swirl all the jiggly “icky” oyster bits around your mouth. All these things blossom in your mouth, one of the most intimate zones we have. While that can be an adult experience, I really think it goes deeper, back into the oral phase we all pass through as little ones, just as my 8 month old baby boy is now.

To chew, you do not use jarred oysters from the grocery store. To chew, you get the oyster on the half-shell as I did recently at the fantastic “Feast in the Field” Les Dames d’Escoffier- Boston Fund-raiser held this last Saturday at the Allandale Farm, the last working farm in Boston.

I am going to share more photos and details on that beautiful event in another post but today, I will share with you the story of a collective of 12 farmers called Island Creek Oysters who obviously LOVE oysters and who grow simply fantastic little creatures for you to either gulp or chew.

I learned about Island Creek Oysters first in the Spring issue of Edible Boston, a fantastic foodie magazine here in New England (obviously a part of the Edible Communities magazine empire but it was founded and is run by the driven and brave Ilene Bezahler, read more about her here).

Subscribe to Edible Boston! (I get nothing if you do, beside the fact that I get to share this with you)

You can read about Island Creek Oysters in the article “DUXBURY PEARLS: ISLAND CREEK OYSTERS” (PDF) in the Spring Issue by Michael Kirkpatrick with the awesome photographs by Michael Piazza. A lot of the information I share with you below, I learned from that article.

Skip Bennet first swam into the aquaculture biz back in 1992 by seeding quahogs and razor clams into his little part of Island Creek in Duxbury, MA. Three years later and after so much hard work cultivating and marketing these two species, the quahogs were decimated by an epidemic of QPX (Quahog Parasite Unknown). Many of us would find this perhaps too much of a loss to go on with the risks of establishing a new clam bed, Bennet chose to switch species and grow oysters instead. He teamed up with fellow aqua-dude Christian Horne and they formed Island Creek in 1997. Boston area chefs embraced Island Creek oysters and the business has grown. Chefs further afield choose Island Creek oysters, try Thomas Keller of The French Laundry and Per Se. Not bad clientele, huh?. It seems that Per Se serves something like 1,200 to 1,500 Island Creek oysters A WEEK. These lovely bivalves have even made their appearance on plates at the White House.

My experience with Skip, his guys, and Island Creek Oysters was not so coiffed, I got to see them in action and taste some of their oysters in the open air in a green field on Allandale Farm in Boston.

One of their trucks.

They were the nicest guys and they were literally shucking as fast as they could and ALL AFTERNOON. There were some people who stood at the cute little boat filled with ice and ate oysters the entire time, eating dozens upon dozens of oysters.

Hey, it WAS a foodie event.

This would be the equivalent of an open bar of the finest years of wine for a wine lover.

I think their motto is a wonderful thing: “Eat all you want … We’ll grow more!”

Sites of Interest:

• Edible Boston
• Island Creek Oysters
• Allandale Farm

Technorati Tags: oyster, eat, raw oyster, indulgence, Ostreidae, membrane, plump, red sauce, saltine, New Orleans, beer, Feast in the Field, Les Dames d’Escoffier- Boston, Allandale Farm, Boston, Island Creek Oysters, Edible Boston, foodie, New England, Edible Communities, magazine, Ilene Bezahler, DUXBURY PEARLS: ISLAND CREEK OYSTERS, Michael Kirkpatrick, Michael Piazza, Skip Bennet, aquaculture, quahog, razor clam, Duxbury, QPX, Quahog Parasite Unknown, Christian Horne, Thomas Keller, The French Laundry, Per Se, bivalve, White House, shuck

I found these really cute sushi soaps at The Paper Source and thought I would share.

One day, I spent a couple of hours driving around looking for some guest soaps for the bathroom and find NONE! I was so darn frustrated.

With these soaps you can satisfy the need to spiffy up the bathroom for yourself or guests and have a bit of fun while your at it.

This is a link to the sushi soap page at The Paper Source sit, where it says:

Yum, we love this keen sushi soap. They even come with kamaboko and wasabi soap. Scent free, these glycerine soaps are naturally moisturizing so they won’t dry your skin out and, no animal testing is involved. They make such a wonderful thank you for a hostess and a clever welcome gift for any visitors who drop by. So realistic you could just eat them up, but don’t do it!

Includes one of each soap:
Tamago
Ikura
Kamaboko
Wasabi

I also really like their tag line, “Do something creative every day.” I think it would be nice to be able to do that but, like many ideals, it is not a trivial task!

[Note: I get nothing if you click these links, this is all just for fun!]

If you can believe it, I have even more photos from the IBSS. This set today is from a cooking demonstration at the cooking theater that day. The Phillips Seafood Company had some of their corporate chefs cooking up some of their products. My feet were screaming for a rest and there was simply no better place to take a break, watch some entertaining cooking, and eat some delicious seafood, brought right to you. You can’t beat that!

I did not catch the names of the various chefs so this is not really hard-boiled journalism (as if it ever is!). Just enjoy it for the food.

The chef here is actually cooking a different dish but I thought I would share anyways.

The tuna steaks, seasoned and ready for the pan.

Here is a shot of the steaks from the mirror above the cooktop.

Tuna steaks hitting the hot saute pan, hot oil and tuna goodness sparkling up into the air.

Here the chefs are portioning out samples for the crowd.

Succulent delicious barely cooked tuna. Fantastic. See another view at the top of this page.

All the pics here are mine. I am flying without photoshop right now so I am not yet up to speed on watermarking the images. All photos – all rights reserved.

Technorati Tags: IBSS, cooking, demonstration, Phillips, corporate chef, seafood, tuna, steak, saute, pan

There was a sense of manifest destiny around this dish when it came together for me the other day. I was coming off my seafood high from the International Boston Seafood Show, I had found some huge super jumbo raw shrimp on sale for $9.99/lb (thats good around here), and I had been hankering for Paula Deen‘s Shrimp Grits that I had seen in the Best of the Best cookbook I got last year from Food & Wine Magazine.

The source cookbook was Paula Deen & Friends: Living It Up, Southern Style.

Leite’s Culinaria has done a beautiful job of spotlighting this recipe so I won’t do the same. What I will do instead is show you the recipe for my adaptation, which is really quite different than what Miss Paula did.

Before I get started, please let me emphasize that you can NOT use second rate instant grits. There is no use to even starting out if thats what you are going to use. Having lived in the south a long time, I can appreciate a good grit and let me tell you, the best has always been stone-ground. I used Bob’s Red Mill Corn Grits (not sure they need to say “corn,” are there other types of grits?). Fantastic flavor and texture, I can not rave enough about Bob’s Red Mill anything.

Nika’s Ginger Sesame Key Lime Shrimp Grits

Serves four for lunch

Ingredients:

• 1 C Bob’s Red Mill Corn Grits
• 5 C water
• 1/2 tsp sea salt
• 1/8 stick unsalted butter
• 1 C cheddar cheese, very finely grated
• 1 lb jumbo shrimp, raw and de-veined
• 2 green onions, diced
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 1/2 tsp ginger, minced
• handful of cilantro, chopped
• 3 tablespoons Nellie & Joe’s Key West Lime Juice
• 3 tablespoons Sesame Seed Oil
• Olive Oil, as needed to saute (add a pat of butter if desired)
• Coarse Ground Sea Salt to season
• Toasted sesame seeds to garnish

Directions:

Bring 5 C of fresh cold water, 1/2 tsp sea salt, and a dash of roasted sesame seed oil to a boil.

Add 1 C grits, bring it back to a boil, turn down to a simmer, and cook over low heat for 15 – 20 minutes, stirring diligently. Beware of any splattering grits during this time. Those flying wet grit splashes hurt like the dickens if they get on you. Make sure to keep kids and pets away while making this.

Turn off the heat and add the 1/8 stick butter and a cup of the finely shredded cheese, mix, and cover the pot. Put it at the back of the stove while you do the rest of the recipe, making sure there is no heat under the pot.

Rinse and pat the shrimp dry and select two to be minced into tiny pieces. Put the rest of the whole shrimp aside, on ice or in the fridge.

Over medium heat in a small pan, sweat the minced garlic and ginger in about one tablespoon of olive oil, a pat of unsalted butter, a pinch of sea salt, and 1/8 teaspoon roasted sesame seed oil. Do not use high heat as the garlic will become bitter. If your pan is large, you may need to add more of the oils and butter, up to you.

Add minced shrimp, green onions, key lime juice, and cilantro (save some raw to garnish) and cook until just soft and the shrimp mince is releasing its juicy goodness.

Making sure that the heat is on medium low (just barely enough to cook at all), add the shrimp to the pan and slowly cook until just barely pink. You want the shrimp to be still a bit raw and wonderfully crunchy. I know that some of you need to go to a complete cooked shrimp, thats ok. This is really about they way you like your shrimp. Shrimp is the focus in this dish so take care to make the best shrimp you can.

Portion out the still hot grits (they are amazing in their heat holding capacity), add a small handful of finely shredded cheese, a slight dribble of sesame seed oil, a sprinkle of sea salt, and top with the shrimp. The carry-over heat of the shrimp and the grits will take them to completion. Make sure to serve all the juices in the pan too.

Garnish with fresh cilantro and sesame seeds. You may want to add a fresh dash of key lime juice now if you really like the citrus bang like I do.

Enjoy!

Let me know if you make this recipe and if you liked it.

I made an soy based sauce because I like that flavor (others in my family do not so they were happy without it).

Mix: Ponzu citric flavored soy sauce, sesame seed oil, minced ginger, tiny amount of minced garlic, and minced cilantro.

When I was looking for props for these shots, I pulled out one of the several Asian teapots I have (bought off of eBay ages ago). When I looked at it more closely, I realized that it was adorned with shrimp! Talk about 1) serendipity and 2) my inattention to detail .

Resources for Ingredients:

• Bob’s Red Mill Corn Grits
• Nellie & Joe’s Key West Lime Juice
• Sesame Seed Oil
• Ponzu citric flavored soy sauce

Books of Interest:

• Food & Wine’s Best of the Best cookbook
• Paula Deen & Friends: Living It Up, Southern Style

Related Posts:

• International Boston Seafood Show 2007: Mantis Shrimp
• International Boston Seafood Show 2007: Frozen Sushi from Polar Seas – Delicious!
• Post Preview: International Boston Seafood Show 2007
• International Boston Seafood Show 2007
• Fishing for some clarity – Well Fed Network article
• Auto-design that has gone to the fishes
• Ducktrap orgy
• Ichthyological super models
• King of Crabs

Technorati Tags: manifest destiny, seafood, International Boston Seafood Show, jumbo, raw, shrimp, Paula Deen, Shrimp Grits, Best of the Best cookbook, Food & Wine Magazine, Paula Deen & Friends: Living It Up, Southern Style, Leite’s Culinaria, adaptation, instant grits, stone-ground, Bob’s Red Mill Corn Grits, Nika’s Ginger Sesame Key Lime Shrimp Grits, sea salt, cheddar cheese, green onion, garlic, ginger, cilantro, Nellie & Joe’s Key West Lime Juice, Sesame Seed Oil, Toasted sesame seeds, garnish, grits

What is a Mantis Shrimp?

Well, you are looking at three of them in the photo above. I was walking through the IBSS and came across some Southeast Asian seafood purveyors who had some interesting displays, this one included. These animals are much larger than most shrimp, you would likely need two hands to hold one of them. They tend to be about 30 cm (11.8 inches) in length but have been known to grow to 38 cm (15 inches).

While they are referred to as shrimp and are in the crustacea subphylum, they are not actually shrimp at all. Their name comes from the fact that they look like a cross between a praying mantis (terrestrial) and a shrimp. They are also much more intelligent and fierce than your average shrimp. Their odd looking appendages in the front are not just funky eye candy. No, the mantis shrimp can use these claws to attack prey and predator (including fishermen’s fingers), with great force.

Pet mantis shrimp are so tough they can even break through the double glass walls of an aquarium.

“A truly pugnacious stomatopod (ed: mantis shrimp) can threaten not only aquarium fish but also the aquarium itself. In 1998, a 4-inch mantis shrimp at the Sea Life Centre in Norfolk, England, shattered the quarter-inch-thick glass of its aquarium. The power puncher was promptly christened “Tyson.” ” Source = NWF

Yikes, this guy is not going to be added to any aquarium I have!

One other interesting fact about these curious sea creatures is that their eyes are the most complex eye structures known in nature. They are the only animals to have something called “hyperspectral color vision.”

“ “Mantis shrimp have the world’s most complex color vision system,” according to Justin Marshall of the University of Queensland. “These lowly crustaceans possess four times as many color receptors as humans, four of which sample the ultraviolet, a region of the spectrum to which we are blind.” Stomatopods also can see polarized light. Marshall believes that for a mantis shrimp, polarized vision may be as rich a sensory experience as color vision.” Source = NWF

Ok, one more neat fact and then I will get on the the meat of the matter. These mantis shrimp are not only wily and throw their back into their battles, they are able to create balls of fire in their claws. Remember I said they can break an aquarium wall? Well, with those fierce claws, they can flick them out to attack their prey or tormentor. When the claw is flicked out, a “cavitation bubble” forms (a void that is left behind by the rapid displacement of the claw). Things on this micro-scale (and nano-scale) are non-intuitive for us. We would not expect that this cavitation bubble would flash with light, heat as hot as the surface of the sun, and pop to produce sonic wavefronts that travel away from the mantis shrimp at high speeds (called sonoluminescence).

You can try to view a video of this activity at this link (I could not open the mov file, but thats just me, hope it works for you) – This video was found on this page and they give these credits – “Courtesy of Sheila Patek, Wyatt Korff and Roy Caldwell/UC Berkeley.”

For far more information on this and other aspects of Mantis Shrimp visit “Shrimp spring into shattering action” by April Holladay, a science journalist for USATODAY.com. I have borrowed a few resource links from her excellent article and put them at the bottom of this post.

Good eating, if you can get a hold of it that is.

They taste less like shrimp and more like lobster. The Japanese call it “shako” and eat it raw and tempura fried. The Italians eat it as a stewed dish called “canocie in busara” (stewed mantis shrimp) (found in “Cofanetto cucina del Bel Paese“). The Chinese eat them a million different ways, to be sure. You can visit one off-the-beaten path restaurant in Hong Kong to get your Mantis Shrimp fix, fried, combined with pepper and its own roe. The Spanish call them “galera” and boil them in salt water. They probably serve them as a tapas in some seaside locations.

I hope you have learned something interesting about these odd creatures. I sure have. I am not sure I will be eating them any time soon as they are rarely found in any market I go to and I hear they are quite expensive.

Have you eaten these? Where did you find them? How were they cooked? Did you like them? Share if you can.

Resources for learning more:

• University of California: Secrets of the Stomatopod by Roy Caldwell
• Wikipedia: Pistol shrimp and shrimpoluminescence
• UC Berkeley News: Mantis shrimp may have swiftest kick in the animal kingdom by Robert Sanders.
• Edge-of-Reef.com: Peacock mantis shrimp Odontactylus scyllarus

Books of Interest:

• Cofanetto cucina del Bel Paese

Technorati Tags: Mantis Shrimp, Southeast Asian, seafood, animal, praying mantis, terrestrial, appendage, mantis, shrimp, aquarium, complex eye structure, claw, cavitation bubble, sonoluminescence, video, April Holladay, lobster, tempura, galera, expensive

[This post will appear on the Growers and Grocers blog, a member of the Well Fed Network]

This last Monday when I attended the 2007 International Boston Seafood Show, I got to sample quite a few products. Let me assure you, I had to pace myself because there were so many tempting foods.

One product that I sampled toward the end of the day was the frozen sushi by Polar Seas (a PDF of their products), a collaborative product of Brooklyn, NY, based True World foods and Kyokuyo Co. in Japan.

I tried it with some trepidation because I have had some fantastically bad chilled (frozen?) sushi at grocery stores and I am still scarred. I have never bought sushi frozen in a box for that reason.

But I had to give it a try, mostly because I felt like I would be able to tell whether it was at least edible. Most of the other samples I had that day were fried, lots of masking.

Good sushi is based on fresh fish but perhaps more importantly, in terms of where it can go horribly wrong, good sushi MUST have GOOD RICE, period.

Frozen or chilled sushi rice can be vile and nauseating: mushy, watery, and revolting on the tongue. Can you tell I feel pretty strongly about the sushi rice? Just a bit.

We taste tested three different types of Polar Seas frozen sushi (images below from product PDF):

Spicy Tuna roll:

Tuna Nigiri:

Shrimp Nigiri:

The shrimp didn’t taste like eggs like a lot of frozen shrimp does, thank goodness. It tasted like a natural non-preserved shrimp.

The samples were flying off the trays (the crowd was a couple people deep around the display) so when we asked for Tuna Nigiri they said there was none thawed but some that was frozen. They gave us a frozen piece and we walked away with it on a plate. It thawed rapidly and before we expected it, we were enjoying a delicious tuna nigiri. Additionally, the tuna tasted fresher than what we have had in sushi restaurants.

Makes you wonder about the possibility of using this frozen product in an ice-packed lunch box. Put the pieces in frozen, put in your ice packs, and then allow them to thaw right before eating. I would have to test that concept out a bit before recommending it.

The spicy tuna roll was flavorful and quite satisfying. We also tried several unagi nigiri (BBQed eel) but do not have photos to share. We could not get enough of it, so delish.

But the rice..

Oh, the rice was spot on. It wasn’t gummy, it was tasty, it was good sushi rice, and it was a pleasant surprise.

Technorati Tags: 2007 International Boston Seafood Show, Kathy Maister, startcooking.com, stephencooks.com, food, New England, food blogger, Boston, Growers and Grocers, Well Fed Network, frozen, sushi, Polar Seas, Brooklyn, True World foods, Kyokuyo Co, Japan, rice, Spicy Tuna roll, Tuna Nigiri, Shrimp Nigiri, shrimp, Tuna, Nigiri, spicy, unagi nigiri

(Source: Hoffman Media, click image to go to magazine order page)

I watch only a few shows on the Food Network, two of those being Alton Brown‘s “Good Eats” and Paula Deen‘s “Home Cooking“. I do not watch the “Paula’s Party” show though, something about that show makes me feel uneasy. I am positively inclined toward Ms. Deen but am not what you would call a fan. I am only a fan of the Japanese Iron Chef, other than that, I watch without much fan-like adoration.

I am also not the sort to buy cooking magazines because I am not in the habit of buying in the “women’s magazine” genre. When I was a kid, I did have a subscription to Bon Appetit (I know, wierd, I was an odd one to say the least) but not to any of the pop culture teen mags. Thus, I am not jaded by other “women’s” genre food magazines. I get Food & Wine and Saveur but I did not compare them to this magazine, different concept.

When I opened this magazine, I wasnt really paying attention to the fact that it was a special edition. I was astounded that a food magazine would have zero interstitial ads. The only ads you will find are on the back and front cover. What you get instead is bombarded by page after page of simply delicious recipes, appetizing and dynamic food photography, and a huge dose of Paula’s personality.

This issue boasts 85 recipes, 20 complete menus (and they ARE, I got full just reading them, honest) and photographic suggestions of inviting table settings and decorations. In the back, you can find all sorts of high quality kitchenalia and dining room related objects carefully chosen from artists in Savanna and other people and places relevant to Paula’s universe.

Each of the seven recipe chapters starts with a nifty little box outlining the menu and then provides recipes. With no ads, they really pack quite a few recipes in on each page.

• Wake Up Sunshine – Ham and Cheese Quiche with Potato Crust
• Lunch Bunch – Molto Muffeletta (Paula’s vegetarian version of the resplendent New Orleans sandwich, too much bread and too little Italian cold cuts in my mind)
• Special Suppers – None of the protein dishes attracted me but the Lime Blueberry Tiramasu calls my name like a siren.
• Dinner from the Grill – Bourbon Beef Tenderloin with Sweet Bourbon Sauce and Sweet Potato Cheesecake with Streusel Topping (Pinch me, I think this sounds fantastic! When my grill thaws out, I will be trying this for certain)
• Casual Evenings – New York Strip Steaks with Terragon Melting sauce, Herbed Monkey Bread and pornographic Easy Chocolate-Cherry Cake
• Game Time Tonight – Mini Bratwurst Sandwiches (cute things. Little = eat more!) and Queen of Hearts Brownies (dainty decadence)
• After Dinner Delights – Hot Carmel Apple Cider

In the last chapter, “Quick and Classy Tabletops“, the table setups are so colorful and very textural.

All that said, I do not see how these could be considered quick! The time I would have to spend in Pier One just buying all the stuff would be hours. Note – I will use any excuse to spend hours there, my toddler cries when she sees the Pier One sign though.

The tabletops are classy, certainly, but super complex. I think I would need a Masters in Design to accomplish this on my own. I am sure there are many readers here who have the desire and talent to do this (it is just beautiful) but I dont see my doing it any time soon. Its likely that one of my kids would either pull the tablecloth off with little flair or light a bonfire with candles and fancy linens.

I have only three beefs with this magazine:

1. I gained 3 pounds just reading the thing
2. I honestly felt lonely after putting it down because Paula looks like she has SO MUCH FUN
3. Paula’s photos can be a bit disconcerting at times because some of the shots make her look like she has a 1000 yard stare and her blue eyes are a bit too retouched to look natural. Note to Paula’s photographer, keep her giggling, catch her happy smiles and forget the Hello Kitty vapid look, it is a disservice to Miss Paula.

I can not recommend this Special Collector’s Issue ENOUGH.

If you see it on the news stand, grab it.

It will be out until May and sells for

• $7.99 US
• $8.99 CAN

Technorati Tags: Hoffman Media, Food Network, Alton Brown, Paula Deen, Home Cooking, Paula’s Party, Iron Chef, cooking magazine, genre, Bon Appetit, Food & Wine, Saveur, magazine, special edition, recipe, appetizing, food photography, menu, Savanna, chapter, Quiche, Muffeletta, Lime, Blueberry, Tiramasu, Tenderloin, Bourbon, Cheesecake, Streusel, Strip Steak, Chocolate, Cherry, Cake, Bratwurst, Sandwiche, Brownie, Carmel, Tabletops, Pier One

I am now processing some of the photos I took at the International Boston Seafood Show of 2007.

Here are a couple fun shots of a motorcycle tricked out to look sorta like a shark and fish.

Its sorta reminiscent of the fish car I shot at last year’s show.

Much more later.

Technorati Tags: International Boston Seafood Show, motorcycle, shark, fish, fish car