About the typography

Google “paragraph spacing +Blogger” and you’ll find a million people wanting to know why their posts look like they were typeset by the demented harpy who once haunted the prepress department of a certain Florida weekly that will remain unnamed.

Too much space between paragraphs. No indenting. Too little. Too much. Do what you will, it still looks amateurish. Try to code the HTML and lose all the formatting when you save it. Look at the Preview, and it’s totally different than the view when published.

Well, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. But I am going to migrate over to Google Chrome and see if working in a different browser makes any difference.

Until then, just pretend you’re reading a carelessly typeset weekly newspaper in a peaceful little Florida fishing village.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

We're winging it here

Grilled hot wings, Corn Maque Choux and Sweet Potato Fries.

Let’s count calories.
Six Buffalo Wild Wings deliver 528, if you don’t lick your fingers.
Ten wings from Zaxby’s contain 732 calories. KFC’s Original Chicken Wings have 140 calories –– and 10 grams of fat –– each. Taco Mac’s Habanero BBQ Wings weigh in at 876 calories and 64 grams of fat per order of 10. Ten Habanero Wings from Bahama Breeze have 920 calories. Outback can top that with 1,160 calories and 75 grams of fat in an order of 10 Kookaburra Wings.
By the time the typical wing joint rolls those fat-skinned little flappers in corn flour and dunks them in the deep fryer, they’re definitely out of the Chicken is a Healthy Food division. The traditional finish is to dump them from the fry basket into a bowl of melted butter and hot sauce. You can gain five pounds watching them wave to you from their little plastic basket. They’ll whisper that the celery sticks are an antidote to your splurge. They won’t mention the blue cheese dressing. We won’t mention the noxious habit of substituting Ranch.
I’m going to stop now. I’m depressing myself. But I’m not going to stop eating wings. The trick is to treat the restaurant offerings as a rare treat, a guilty pleasure if you will. And fix your own at home.

Are they fat-less? Low-calorie? Of course not. They’re wings, and raw and cold in the tray they each have about 63 calories and 4.2 grams of fat. You could cut the skin off and lose a bunch of that, but I’m not sure that would satisfy your wing fix.
But by dispensing with the deep fryer and the butter and the breading, you can keep them this side of criminal, and still serve them proudly. Here’s my method, inspired by trays of wings Publix was blowing out at about half the price it was charging Super Bowl Weekend. I’m guessing they were unsold and frozen for later. Anyway, I grabbed a big tray and got to work.
First I cut the tips off. I could have pulled the little pinfeathers off and tucked them into a freezer bag for adding to stock later but I didn’t. I didn’t feel like messing with any stupid pinfeathers, so I threw the tips away. Martha Stewart would never do that, but then she pays vassals to make her appear perfect. I have blemishes I can’t afford to cover up.
Then I split the wings at the joint, to create the drumsticks and the flats. After washing them, I dropped them into a plastic tub in which I’d dissolved about a half a cup of kosher salt. The formula isn’t precise. I’d guess there was maybe a gallon or so of water in the tub.

Frank’s Hot Sauce, vinegar and olive oil. That’s simple enough.

Then they went in the refrigerator overnight. The next day, I pulled them out of the brine, dumped it, and filled the tub with cold water. I washed the wings and dropped them back in the tub to rinse. Then I poured the water off and added the marinade.

The marinade couldn’t be simpler. Add about a half cup of Frank’s Red Hot Sauce to the bowl. Why Frank’s? Because it’s the best. Cooks Illustrated says so, and I agree. It has a great blend of heat and flavor, like the perfect medium between Tabasco and Crystal or some of the other vinegary types. Then add a couple of tablespoons of olive oil and a cup of vinegar. Stir it all up and let the wings lounge around in the pool while you’re heating up the grill. You could leave them overnight if you want. I didn’t, because I was hungry.

You can crowd them. Really.

I didn’t fool with charcoal. I have a Broilmaster gas grill converted to run on natural gas hooked up permanently on my deck. I use it like an oven. The wings went on the left side, packed tightly so they wouldn’t dry out. The flame went on the right side, turned to medium low so the temperature hovered just below 300 degrees. Then I went off and got busy. Every 20 minutes or so I’d mop the wings with the marinade. I never turned them. At low temperatures, the skin will stick to the grill until they are finished. Futz with them and you’ll make a mess. Just mop them and make yourself busy elsewhere.

Maybe by making Corn Maque Choux. Look it up and you’ll learn that it’s a traditional Louisiana dish, with as many versions as there are Cajuns who eat mudbugs. Sometimes I invest time in it, and it’s almost like a paella. Sometimes I just knock it out, and it’s a perfect side dish for the wings.
Here’s how I do that.
Pour about three cups of frozen corn in a cast iron skillet. I get mine from Costco. Why wouldn’t I? It’s organic, it’s delicious, and if you have room in the freezer to store it, it’s cheap and handy.

Let the cooking begin.

Turn the heat on medium and spray the corn with a little olive oil. I use one of those little Misto bottles to squirt a little on the top. It’ll drain down to the pan. Sprinkle a little kosher salt over the top and get to work on the vegetables.
Chop a stick of celery into thin slices. Do the same with a medium onion. Seed and core four jalapeno peppers and slice them. Drop all this on the corn. Stir it around. Squirt a little more oil if you think it needs it. The corn will thaw and cook as the vegetables wilt. You don’t want this overdone. A little charring is cool, adds flavor because it caramelizes the sugars released as the veggies cook.
That’s it. Tough, huh?
While the corn’s cooking, I throw some sweet potato fries in the oven. Again, check out Costco. Big bag, low price. They aren’t as flavorful as the more expensive ones from Publix, but that’s easily remedied by hitting them with a little French Fry Seasoning from Steak n’ Shake.
You can’t get this kind of insight from Rachel Ray.
Back to the wings. They’re done when the skin is crispy. At low temperature, you don’t have to worry about the meatbeing done. The skinny, bony, tough little morsels don’t like to be rushed. Slow heat melts the meat on the bones, and the skin crisps up to hold everything together.
When the grill grate releases the wings, you can toss them around, hit them with a little more Frank’s, turn up the heat a little if you want them crispier.
The crispier they are, the more of that nasty old fat will burn away. Beats spending time on the treadmill, huh?

Cheaper than a trip to New Orleans, and healthier than eating at Outback.

One cautionary note: Don’t mop them with the marinade. It had raw chicken soaking in it. You don’t want to put that on food that’s about to hit the table. Salmonella is not your friend.

I love the smell of the sea

Yes, I do. And I don’t mean just the stringent clipped scent of salty mist brushed off the crest of the waves by a brisk breeze. I love the smell of low tide, when the mud and the shells and the plankton forsaken by the indifference of a moonstruck medium get together and bang out a primitive olfactory beat: Two parts funk, one part rot, sulfur in the top note and a backbeat dating back to the first organism that decided to “be a man,” thus changing forever, well, everything.
I would have been in Florida this week, but I’m not. We’ll leave it at that.

The beach in Naples. Oh yeah.

But I found a substitute in the freezer, a vacuum-packed bag of jumbo white shrimp I brought back from a September trip to Oak Island, N.C. If I’d been in a hurry, I would have washed all the goodness away by thawing them under running water, the way most restaurants do. But I wasn’t, so I moved them to the refrigerator for a day and let them thaw on their own. When I opened the package, the scent was, well, other-worldly. I poured them into a big bowl and carried them out onto the deck, where the fresh air would do them good. I peeled them. I deveined them. And every couple of shrimp, I probably confused the neighbors by holding my head down to the bowl and breathing in deeply.

Smelling good, like fresh shrimp should.

Shelled, deveined, ready to wrap.
While the shrimp were being undressed, I soaked a handful of precooked bacon strips –– the only kind we generally buy anymore –– in a bowl of hot water to limber them up. I cut these in half and skewered each shrimp with a piece of the bacon.

A half slice of bacon, to seal the deal.
I’m not one of those purists who believes gas grills are for sissies and only real men use charcoal. But there are times when charcoal is called for. I mean the good kind, not the compressed pellets of petroleum residue and sawdust dyed black and smelling like Gary, Indiana. I’m talking hardwood chunks, with a few pieces of real wood tossed in for good measure. I’m blessed with hickory and wild cherry trees, so I can scrounge up enough to add a touch of smoke. If you’re not, you can always buy a bag of boutique wood chunks.

Don’t run off. There’s tending to do.
I’m not laughing at you. I’ve done it.
With the fire ready, I brush the wrapped shrimp with a mixture of Bulls Eye barbecue sauce thinned with cider vinegar. Why Bulls Eye? I bought it the first time because Cooks Illustrated rated it the best, and I haven’t been tempted to go back to KC Masterpiece since. Scientific, huh?

Turn often, basting with sauce each time.

Don’t grill the shrimp over the coals. Keep the coals on one side, the shrimp on the other. Turn them often. Baste them until they ask you to leave them alone.

They look like this when they’re done.
There’s nothing worse than ol’ dried-out, overcooked seafood. Or more profitable, if you go by the success of places like Red Lobster. But that’s beside the point.

Aren’t you glad you looked after them?

Try melting a potato

Potatoes Anna is an easy-to-prepare dish that demonstrates perfectly the magic heat works on something as plain and simple as a russet potato.
There are few tricks involved in the preparation of the dish. I didn’t discover that from watching Julia Child fix it on television. I discovered it in the Real World, when knocking out a side dish in a hurry was more important than clinging tightly to the propriety of a rigid technique.

Rich buttery crust and an inside just like custard.

This dish is nothing but butter and potatoes and a little salt. After baking, it becomes a glorious tart, golden and crispy on the outside and meltingly rich as custard within. The secret to getting that result is to slice the potatoes as thin as possible, to stack them in thin layers in a heavy casserole, and to brush each layer with melted butter.
I will warn you now: You will use more butter than seems wise or reasonable. You will console yourself by saying you don’t do it very often. But you will never resort to silly weight-watching tricks like substituting olive oil or, worse, Pam, in an effort to salve your inner Jenny Craig.
Some dishes are rich. They have no reason to exist if they aren’t. Rather than corrupting them with the kind of chemical nonsense that makes Diet Coke and 20-calorie brownies possible, I choose to enjoy them in moderation. That means I make them rarely, and I practice self-control.
Which means turning down the fourth serving. You think I’m kidding, but that’s how addictive this dish is.
Safely stored in its box on a shelf in my prep kitchen is a mandoline, which will produce razor-thin slices of potato as quickly as you can slide one down the stainless steel ramp and over its wicked little angled blade. I once thought a mandoline was necessary for Potatoes Anna. I now know better. All I needed was a simple potato peeler. First I use it to remove the peel from three large baking potatoes. Then I use it to whittle each of those potatoes down. I do this over a cast-iron skillet into which I’ve sprayed a bit of olive oil.
I no longer laboriously arrange the slices in a rotating pinwheel, which probably makes me unqualified to be one of the wranglers who does that type of work for Martha Stewart. I just flip them in the skillet. When they fold over on themselves or begin to clump up I gently pull them apart and straighten them out. When the bottom of the skillet disappears, I brush the slices with melted butter. I don’t bother to clarify it. The milk solids that might cause the dish to burn generally don’t get lifted by the brush.
Then I sprinkle a little kosher salt over them and bury them in another layer. Which I brush with butter. And then bury with another layer. And so on.
Three large potatoes and one stick of unsalted butter will fill a 10-inch cast-iron skillet nicely. If you own a porcelain-clad skillet from LeCreuset, for instance, you can use it. But don’t use a regular steel or aluminum skillet. They don’t hold enough heat to melt the potatoes.
Brush the top layer with the last of the butter. Place the pan, uncovered, in an oven preheated to 400 degrees. Leave it in there, without stirring or lifting, until the top is gently browned. How long will that be? Probably about 45 minutes, but keep an eye on things after a half-hour or so. Every oven is different, and every spud has a different water content.
As the dish bakes, the top will gradually dry out and seal, trapping the moisture beneath. The bottom, meanwhile, will cook to a glorious golden brown, basted by the butter working its way down there. The middle will melt. Literally. The steam will turn the middle of the dish into something like a custard, smoother than any mashed potato could ever be.
When the top is browned, remove the skillet from the oven and turn it over on a warmed platter, a pizza stone, or anything similar. Cut your creation into wedges. Serve it with a piece of broiled fish, a nice steak, or a grilled portobello mushroom. A salad of romaine and rice wine vinegar, with a few slivers of sweet onion, would be a nice addition.
If your guests request sour cream or applesauce or ketchup, apologize for having run out.