Cooking For The Public

Getting In Touch With My Inner Child Chef


I have a confession to make (gasp…)

Please don’t hate me when I’m finished cleansing my soul, BUT...

I have to admit that just ten short years ago my cooking skills consisted mainly of opening cans and boxes of pre-prepared food “stuff,” along with handling a charcoal grill with slightly more than an average level of dexterity.

Yes ladies and gentlemen, I hate to admit it, but I now realize that I allowed myself to wallow in the gutters of divorced bachelorhood, swimming in a sea of trans-fat laden fast food and microwave pop corn.

Vienna sausages, peanut butter, and delivery pizza were my standard fare.

Fast forward to the new millennium, and I’m pleased to announce that today things are quite different.

I’ve become, in my own estimation, a pretty good cook.

Just like being a musician or pursuing any other art form, I know that I have arrived at some level of accomplishment in cooking because I’ve developed the ability to improvise—I can ad lib when the situation arises.

I don’t need a recipe in front of me to make cooking decisions any more.

For instance, last weekend, while visiting some of Pat’s family down in Florida, I was presented with a few pounds of Catfish and Flounder fillets and challenged to do something “different.”

After I made the obligatory “quick” trip to the grocer, I delivered a combination of beer battered fillets and a baked dish called “Jilly style” fish (I got the recipe off of the Tilapia website last year,) and I even managed to use red wine rather than white wine in the sauce and it must have been acceptable because every single crumb of my dinner was scarffed up by my appreciative audience.

Now I know how a good mother must feel at the end of the day when the dishes are all put away.

Maybe I should leave well enough alone, and I hope I’m not overly audacious, but next month I’m taking on a largely unbiased public audience in providing the catering of the food for a party for about two dozen people in the home of our Island friends Bruce and Ski.

Bruce is a real estate broker and his wife Ski is an excellent interior decorator. Their home looks like a photo spread in an architectural magazine, and her kitchen is likewise a beautiful place to be in.

Being the politically incorrect bastard that I strive to be, we’re doing a “Sies de Mayo” party, featuring my rendition of Mexican food. It’s also actually “Derby Day” with the Kentucky Derby horse race happening that Saturday afternoon, but the preceding Friday is “Cinco de Mayo”—Mexican Independence day—and as an overt insult to our southern invaders I’m declaring our party Seis de Mayo (sixth of May--actually being a day late and a dollar short helps greatly…)

I’m doing all of the major preparation work here at home and then finishing the presentation at the scene of the crime Bruce and Ski’s house.

The menu includes the following:

Beef, Pork, and Chicken Tamales

Armadillo Eggs (spicy deviled eggs and cream cheese stuffed peppers)

Fancy Baja style battered fish and chicken soft tacos

Two kinds of Guacamole

Three kinds of salsa (peach, tomato, and tomatilla)

Assorted accoutrements like shredded cabbage, mandarin orange slices, jalapeño peppers and sour cream.

I'm even looking at buying a real chef's smock to wear while I run around in my pajamas chef's pants in public.

OK, you can stop salivating, and you have to let me go now because I have to finish a batch of chicken tamales that I’m making as a test run this morning.