Pre-Wedding Jitters

As you regulars know, my brother Terry and the lovely Annette are getting hitched tomorrow, so you can imagine that things are approaching that frantic stage where everything must come together just so.

You might also recall that I am BBQ'ing a small herd of unfortunate chickens to feed the celebratory crowd. In addition, I have cooked up a 4 gallon pot of Minorcan style clam chowder. It's red by the way ... the color of real chowder ... we're not making milk soup here.

(That should fire up the white chowder clan ... heehee)

I asked the folks at the seafood counter in Publix if they could find me some bones and parts for a little fish stock.

"Oh, we don't filet anything so we never have any bones lying around" the fish guy said as he leaned over a glass counter full of filet's on ice.

"It all comes fileted."

Who knew?

I didn't have time to run to a real seafood market, so I bought a few shrimp and some catfish nuggets for my stockpot.

That's the stock cooking in the photo above. There's datil peppers, catfish, shrimp hulls, a bit of onion, black pepper, a clove of garlic, and a bay leaf in the pot.

Later, I strained out the solids and added the broth to the huge pot of clam chowder.

The dogs enjoyed the mushy fish and shrimp hulls.


This morning, Mrs. FC was giving shrimp a quick boil to add them to "shrimp rounds" for the wedding feast. I don't make this dish, and to be honest, I like shrimp as "just shrimp", but this is a popular appetizer wherever we take it.

It involves some herby cream cheese surrounded by boiled shrimp, with a dish of datil pepper relish in the center.


Since I was trapped in the kitchen yesterday, cooking chowder and prepping for the big BBQ day, I decided to try out a recipe that had been dogging me since I stumbled upon it last week. In the 2007 Southern Living Annual Cookbook, there is a recipe for "Crockpot Apple Crisp".

It sounded good, but I just couldn't see how anything in a crockpot could get crisp ...

... And I was not disappointed.

What I mean by that is that the top did not get crisp. The stuff was delicious anyway. The tartness of the Granny Smiths and the sweetness of the brown sugar goo was fairly awesome.

There was no vanilla ice cream in the house though and this caused me some consternation.

Now THAT is a grill.

My good friends at B.K. Cypress Log Homes volunteered their company BBQ grill for my cooking mission today. This was a lifesaver as my smaller version has light shining through the bottom due to years of service, heat, and rust.

After this post, I'm going out to fire up my charcoal and begin hours of outdoor cooking under a clear blue Pure Florida sky.

If time allows later, I'll toss up a picture of the chicken cooking.

I'll have to taste test it often as it finishes off this afternoon.

Poor me.