Food Porn Chronicles: It Was a Dark n Stormy Night

So the saying goes that all anyone ever uses blogs for these days is to post pictures of their cat or whatever they happen to be eating. I guess I've been guilty of both. It's not as extreme as the San Francisco Chronicle's Jon Carroll and his cat columns, but I like to think the comparison is somewhat appropriate. Carroll is more brilliant than me, though, so he gets to be more self-indulgent than me.

But onto the blah blah blah.

Tonight's dinner was inspired by a trip to Dallas BBQ last Saturday, when it was about 140 degrees outside. It's a touristy joint with passable barbecue, but we were more interested in the frozen margaritas. My friend inhaled his large plate of steaming brisket, but I couldn't bring myself to have anything hot. Instead I had a shrimp cocktail on a bed of avocado and lettuce. Crisp, cool and horse radishy. It hit the spot.

Tonight, back in my greenhouse of an apartment, I decided it was time for Dallas BBQ shrimp cocktail, redux.

7-9 large shrimp, peeled
1 ripe avocado
1/4 red onion, minced
1/2 tomato
1-2 leaves lettuce, chopped
juice of 1 lime
salt
red chili flakes
shrimp cocktail sauce

Boil the shrimp until cooked through. Don't overcook. Combine avocado, onions, tomatoes and lime juice. Mash together until smooth with a few lumps (you've just made guacamole.) Add salt and chili to taste. Place shrimp along edge of bowl. Serve guac on top of lettuce. Makes 2 servings.

Notes: I didn't have shrimp cocktail sauce on hand, so I mixed wasabi with ketchup. The wine glass turned out to be hard to eat out of so I recommend a regular ole bowl. If you don't like eating sea poo you should devein the shrimp before you boil them.

A couple of friends recently brought me a bottle of dark rum in exchange for dog-sitting their beautiful, sweet Australian cattle dog while they were on vacation. Perfect for dark n stormys.

The rum, not the dog.

The key to good dark n stormys, according to a quick trawl of the interwebs, is the ginger beer. My favorite is Stoney Tangawizi (made by Coca-Cola??), a standard soda offering available in nearly every inhabited outpost in Kenya. It's not too sweet, has quite a bite and makes me sneeze. A friend visiting from the U.S. even brought a few bottles back to California with him, or claimed he was going to.

Alas, Stoney, like Tim Tams (owned by Pepperidge Farm??) and a limited few other brilliant foreign creations, is not available in the U.S. Would I have to go to Whole Foods to buy overpriced ginger beer?

It turns out that ginger beer is extremely popular in the Caribbean, and that dark n stormy is a Caribbean drink from Bermuda or Jamaica depending on who you ask. Which means that my neighborhood grocery store, which serves a Caribbean and West Indian community, stocks shelves and shelves of ginger beer varieties. There were so many to choose from. I couldn't decide. I finally went with the Diet Goslings. You know, if you're planning to drink as many dark n stormys as I am, you should avoid any sugar you don't have to ingest.

Dark N Stormy

1 part dark rum
4 parts ginger beer
ice

The can of soda expanded in my fridge, resulting in the Tower of Pisa effect you see.

And another thing. Apparently you can suck tea or coffee through a Tim Tam with the corners bitten off, and win contests for your effort.