Zissou's Buffet of Underwater Delights

I wasn't feeling especially patriotic for the 4th of July this year, but I did take the opportunity to be grateful for my family and take time with them. When I pitched a big seafood boil for the day, the rest of the family got onboard enthusiastically.
I live in the Midwest, where the typical seafood boil is full of fish, corn, and potatoes. There's probably Old Bay seasoning involved (nothing wrong with that). This one has the corn and potatoes, but also an Asian fusion twist. The cooking liquid is loaded with soy sauce, ginger, garlic, chili sauce, and five spice powder. The seafood is a mix of shrimp, clams, mussels, and lobster.

Alton has a method for the layers of ingredients, with the basic goal being that the clams and mussels will be above the liquid line, so that they steam rather than boil. It worked; everything had just the texture we wanted. Plus it smelled great. It was a better day than any parade in DC.

My aaunt gets credit for looking at the whole garlic cloves that were in it and realizing that the best thing to do was squeeze them onto bread as a side.

Difficulty Level: Easy (Seriously, the prep time is minimal and the cooking time is speedy. You can strip the directions down to pile in first batch of ingredients into the pot, bring to boil. Add steamer insert piled with seafood, walk away for 12 minutes. Dump resulting goodness onto platter and eat)

Will It Get Made Again? I don't typically have occasions that call for a seafood boil (and lobster is $$$) but if I have a reason, I wouldn't hesitate to do it again.

Barbecue Pork Butt on a Summer Day

This is the type of recipe that takes some planning, but very little actual effort. You need to brine the pork overnight, and it'll spend most of the day cooking. You'll be rewarded with pork so tender it falls off the bone.

Sometimes the best things come wrapped in foil.

This piece of pork butt spend the night brining in a molasses and salt bath, then got smoked for 4 hours and slow roasted for another 3 and 1/2 hours. As promised, this is gets you pork that will never need a knife to be shredded. I garnished the sandwiches with some local BBQ sauce and pickles. No regrets.

Difficulty Level: Easy

Will It Get Made Again? If I need smoked pork, sure thing.

FabricQuest Gets A Kick In The Pants (Kick-In-The-Pants Smoothies)

Some recipes I need an excuse to make. In this case the excuse I was looking for was a morning craft store run with a friend who was guiding me on a quest for lining fabric for a costume I'm having made. I asked her if we should do this with or without coffee smoothies and got an enthusiastic "with".

Travel smoothies 

If you like chocolate, fruit, and coffee you'll want to make these smoothies. Even non-coffee drinkers like myself liked this one, and my friend Loved it. Plus, I got the lining fabric.

Difficulty Level: Easy*

Will It Get Made Again? My friend is hoping yes, and these are simple enough that it won't be a hard sell to repeat.

*You do need to make the cold brew coffee the night before so that it can steep, but that takes less than 10 minutes to prep

Fish Stories (Garam Masalmon Steaks)

My aunt and uncle go fishing in Alaska every year, and catch their own supply of salmon and halibut. So when we scheduled a winter escape from Wisconsin to their place in Florida for a week (ducking an ice storm as we left) I asked if we could break out some salmon for this project. A large fillet was liberated from their stash.

Note, this isn't actually the cut that the recipe calls for, but when life hands you salmon that you can trace back to the boat it was caught on, you go with the fish less processed.

The fish is rubbed in a homemade spice rub; starting from whole spices, toasting them, then grinding them.

Are you grinding your own spices? Of course you are.

Toss it onto the grill, and voila.

Note the lack of snow in the background...

Dinner

The family was pleasantly surprised by how much they liked the spicing (my uncle was nervous about the fennel). Dinner was declared a success.

Difficulty Level: Medium

Will It Get Made Again? Unlikely. The spice blend is good but not addictive, and salmon is expensive in the Midwest. This is going down as a vacation food, not a staple.

The manatee has nothing to do with the recipe, it's just a cool souvenir photo from swimming with them on the trip.

Happy Thanksgiving (Roasted Thanksgiving Salad)

This year I am grateful that I got a quiet, low-stress holiday. There was plenty of good food, including the thematically named Roasted Thanksgiving Salad.
This salad is full of sweet potatoes, parsnips, red onions, and quinoa (plus a few other things). It's both tasty and pretty healthy, which is a bonus.
Roast your veg, cook the quinoa with some cinnamon, toss with a maple vinaigrette, some apple, and pepitas. Enjoy.

Everything but the turkey and pie in a bowl.

Difficulty Level: Medium

Will It Get Made Again? I've actually made this before (pre-cookbook project), so that's yes. This isn't a super common salad in my house, but it definitely passes muster.

Grits with Shrimp

I sent a group of friends the remaining list of recipes on the project list, and asked them if there was anything they's especially like to try for a party. They picked Grits with Shrimp. I was surprised, but it was a good excuse to make it. It did mean that I was hunting for whole, out-of-season shrimp in the Midwest though. After calling 5 seafood places, I found one that had some.
These are not fast grits. Step one is take your whole shrimp, chop off the heads and tails, peel them, and use the head/tails/shrimp shells to make the stock you're going to cook the grits in. The grits and the now peeled shrimp brine in the shrimp stock for at least 6 hours before cooking.
The final cooking goes much faster. The question was, would it be worth the effort?
The grits were an unqualified hit at the party; everyone loved them, including me. I was impressed, because normally I don't like grits. These however come out super creamy and flavorful, full points to Alton for the technique.

Declared by several people better than restaurant versions.

Difficulty Level: Medium (mostly due to having to peel and de-vein shrimp)
Will It Get Made Again? If I had a special enough occasion, I could be talked into the repeating this. They're really good, but they're also expensive and time-consuming. If I ever move somewhere that shrimp is cheaper, the odds that this would get made more often go up.

Cider House Fondue

When one of my friends decided to throw a fall themed dinner party, I took it as a sign that it was time to make a smoked apple fondue. Enter the origami smoke flower.

The smoke "flower"

The smoking procedure here calls for turning a wok into a smoker by sticking a foil packed of wood chips in it (the foil gets folded origami style to make a wood chip container), stacking on a grill grate, and then sealing it. I wasn't sure how well this work, but it's pretty simple (if you have the equipment) and was very effective. The kitchen had a nice smoky apple smell after they had cooked.

Ironically, I used the grate from indoor smoker, just not the rest of the smoker for this.

Then you pulverize cheese (cheddar and velveeta), half & half, applejack, and a dash cayenne. Interestingly, there's no major heating element. The cheese is being melted by the food processor. 

I heated it a bit more for the party, but can confirm that it stays spreadable without a lot of heat.

Someone had to sample right away before I grabbed the photo.

Difficulty Level: Medium

Will It Get Made Again? My crew didn't find it addictive, so probably not. It was liked but not loved by all who tried it.

The General's Fried Chicken (Plus Waffles)

I decided that if I was going to make fried chicken at home, I might as well make waffles to. The waffle recipe I used isn't in EveryDayCook but it's another Alton recipe, and this one is easily found online.

#brunchboss

The chicken takes some prep. It spends some time marinating in stages (ideally overnight according to the directions, which worked out for my timeline). Then it needs to be breaded, and fried. 

What you get is indeed better than a certain Colonel's chicken.

Stage 1

Stage 2

Stage 3

Difficulty Level: Medium

Will It Get Made Again? Yes, but I'm going to tweak the spices. I'm a fan of spicy fried chicken, and to get closer to my favorite I'm going to up the amount of cayenne in the next batch (and maybe add some paprika).

BBQ Potato Chips

This is one of those things I would never do without some sort of project pushing me to do it. I look at the effort to reward ratio, and I bet that it won't come out as worth it. But that's not the point when the goal is to get through an entire cookbook, so here it is. Homemade potato chips.
These are a pain. You need super thin slices, and my food processor I think was actually too thick, so if I were to do this again I would need to haul out the mandolin. You pre-soak wood chips, so that you can then smoke the potato slices.

There are wood chips under the steamer rack for the smoking process.

 Once you've finally gotten that far, you need to deep fry them in small batches. Then finally toss them in a paper bag and shake with the spice mixture. Eventually, this gets you potato chips.

I would need way more practice to get as good a texture as a commercial chip. I would rather just buy the commercial chips.

Difficulty Level: Hard

Will It Get Made Again? Nope. I was betting this would come out as not worth the effort, and for me that's the case. I do really like the BBQ spice mix, and I'm tempted to put that on roast potatoes, or mix it into mashed potatoes... Just not homemade chips.

Grilled Shishitos

I've never tossed fish flakes on a vegetable before. It does not shock me that Alton Brown would lead me to this place.

The grilled shishitos are very simple. Tossed with olive oil, salt, soy sauce, and Katsuobushi flakes (dried, flaked tuna) and grilled at high heat. It took less than ten minutes. Good? Yes. Addictive? No.

Difficulty level: Easy

Will It Get Made Again? If I need to use up leftover peppers, sure. I'm just unlikely to go out of my way to make them.

Watermelon Campari Sorbet

I thought step one in making this was to make the fruit puree. That was before I googled to find instructions for using the ice cream maker I borrowed from a co-worker (instructions not included); it turns out step one is actually freeze the mixing bowl for 16-24 hours. So I ended with a fruit puree chilling in the fridge for a day while the bowl went through the deep freeze. Good thing I didn't have an event it was going to.

Just starting to chill

Almost there

The watermelon campari combination gives you a bitter offset to sweetness of the fruit and sugar; it's not overpowering and if I liked bitter flavors more I would probably love it. As it is, I like it.

Sorbet

Difficulty level: Medium

Will It Get Made Again? I'd make this again if it was requested, but not for my own self. But now I want to find a recipe to make a cassis sorbet...