Last weekend, my dad was in town for a visit. About an hour after his plane touched down, and on the recommendation of several friends, we went fishing for redfish, trout and whatever else would bite with guide and longtime Charlestonian Peter Brown. Though the redfishing was really good, the speckled trout ended up the highlight.

Speckled, or sea trout, are among of the lowcountry’s most succulent, tasty fish. This time of year they’re found inshore, mostly in shallow waters feeding on crustaceans, shrimp and small fish. After a solid afternoon of catching redfish (but none in the right size window for keeping), Peter put us on the speckled trout.

My first cast with a wiggling live shrimp quickly lured a three-foot bonnethead shark from the grass. The shark aggressively circled the shrimp, then took it. With a little luck I eventually brought him in and let him go — fun fight and a good picture, but not what we were after.

After a few more casts (and several smaller fish), I finally brought in a sea trout big enough to keep. We put the spotted iridescent beauty in the livewell to keep him fresh, then headed back to the dock where we cleaned, scaled and otherwise left the trout whole. We packed it ice, and headed home for dinner.

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Now that fall’s here, I’m settling into my new home on a small barrier island near Charleston, SC. And after a long summer hiatus, my cookbook writing and testing has begun in earnest — an exploration of the relationship between Southern (U.S.), and Southeast Asian food and cooking. More on that later.

Meanwhile, I started the workweek off today with a hearty breakfast combining good old oatmeal with ingredients prominent in Southeast Asian cooking — coconut (milk), bananas and cashews.

First, I combined a handful of steel cut oats, twice as much water, and a pinch of salt in a large microwave-safe glass bowl, covered the bowl in plastic wrap and cooked the oats at 80% power for six minutes. Then I moved the partially-cooked oats to a saucepan, barely covered them with coconut milk, and stirred in a tablespoon each of butter and brown sugar.

I simmered the oats, stirring often, until they were soft — another five minutes. Then I topped them with a sliced banana, a handful of cashews I had crushed in a mortar and pestle, and a drizzle of honey.

Things that grow together definitely did go together here: the coconut milk, bananas and cashews were a great match, especially anchored by the underlying warm nuttiness of the oats.

This space has been quiet for the past couple of months, and we’ve neglected to explain why. The short answer is that we’ve had a really busy summer.

My book about the pluot was published last week by Bloomsbury and is now available at bookstores everywhere. In The Perfect Fruit: Good Breeding, Bad Seeds and the Hunt for the Elusive Pluot, I tell the backstory of the pluot and its creator, Floyd Zaiger.

In its review of the book, Publisher’s Weekly wrote that “Brantley’s engaging mixture of agronomy, reportage and food porn… goes down easy.” For more information about the book, you can visit chipbrantley.com, follow me on Twitter, or check out Bloomsbury’s page on The Perfect Fruit. To keep track of upcoming readings and author events, please join The Perfect Fruit (the book) group.

One more personal note, Elizabeth, Angus and I moved to Alabama in June, and we’re slowly getting settled to life at the edge of the subtropics. Elizabeth and I grew up in Birmingham, and while we miss our life in MA, we’ve loved being closer to our families and reconnecting with old friends. Birmingham is also one of the best food towns out there. Come visit us and we’ll prove it.

In Cookthink news, we’re excited to announce that we’ve recently partnered with Weather.com on a syndication deal. We’ll share more details on that closer to the end of the summer, but be sure to check out the re-design at Weather.com–they’re adding a lot of interesting features.

One thing we’d love to see: Al Roker talking more about the impact of weather on our food cravings. As anyone who’s read Cookthink for a little while knows, that topic is one of Brys’s obsessions. In fact, he’s been busy this summer researching and writing a cookbook about the influence of weather and climate on cooking. (Right now, he’s studying the food of a certain humid coastal plain.) Look for updates from him later this summer.

More news soon. Stay cool in August.

Today is the 10th anniversary of Attila Ambrus’s escape from prison. A folk hero around the world, Ambrus is a former professional hockey goalie (maybe the worst ever to play the game) who was finally arrested in 1999 after robbing more than two dozen Hungarian banks (often with great panache).

Known as the Whiskey Robber because he was frequently spotted drinking the stuff before a robbery, Ambrus escaped from prison on July 10, 1999, and the subsequent manhunt was one of the largest in modern European history. He’s currently serving a 17-year sentence in Hungary, but he might be released in 2011 for good behavior.

For the whole story on Ambrus, read Julian Rubinstein’s fantastic book Ballad of the Whiskey Robber: A True Story of Bank Heists, Ice Hockey, Transylvanian Pelt Smuggling, Moonlighting Detectives, and Broken Hearts. (Or download the collectors’ item audio book, performed cabaret-style by a cast that includes Eric Bogosian, Gary Shteyngart and—oddest of all—Samantha Power.)

In the meantime, pour a Whiskey Robber cocktail, named in honor of Ambrus, by mulling an orange slice in the bottom of an Old Fashioned glass filled with ice. Then, in a cocktail shaker filled with ice, combine 1 1/2 ounces of Johnnie Walker Red, 1 ounce of sour mix and 3 dashes of bitters. Shake well and strain into the glass, then top with a spritz of ginger ale.

I just got back from a good long trip to the panhandle of Florida along the Gulf of Mexico coast, where we’ve been vacationing since I was little. I’ve always appreciated the amazing seafood down there, but there’s one thing in particular I look forward to each trip — the shrimp.

Shrimp, of course, look and taste reflective of the water they live in. When raw, these glisten clear and just a little opaque, with a hint of coral and aqua. When barely cooked through they’re bright white and pink, firm, sweet — the best of both shrimp and lobster in a single crustacean.

This year, a few miles from the beach on a bridge crossing a large coastal bay, I came across a shrimp boat selling shrimp caught the night before. Jackpot. I went back again and again.

Because they’re so delicate, for all the ways I cooked them when I was there (I must have eaten six pounds), my favorite was simply boiled for one minute with crab boil, chilled, peeled, then eaten straight up with a glass of crisp white wine. I miss them already.

Recipe: Southern Boiled Shrimp
Recipe: Spicy Shrimp Salad Sandwich
Recipe: Spicy Shrimp And Corn Fritters

Raw vegetable salads lend simplicity, convenience, elegance and a good dose of vegetables to a meal all at the same time. The basic formula is easy: choose three or four different vegetables you’d eat raw (corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, fennel, carrots, radishes, cabbage, radicchio, endive, sweet or green onions), add in some cheese (feta, mozzarella, Swiss, cubed parmesan) and / or toasted nut or seed (pecans, almonds, pine nuts), and toss it all with any simple vinaigrette and some chopped fresh herbs (parsley, marjoram, chives, thyme).

Raw vegetable salads are especially good in summer when the garden and farmers markets are bountiful. They’re refreshing and light, contrast nicely with grilled meats and simply cooked grains (rice, couscous, quinoa), and can even serve as the main taste and flavor component of a meal. They can be made ahead and chilled so their flavors have time to meld, then brought out an hour or so before you serve dinner to come to room temperature. Cut the vegetables into large pieces for a more traditional “salad,” and into smaller pieces for more of a relish feel.

Recipe: Tomato, Corn, Cucmber And Feta Salad
Recipe: Greek Salad
Recipe: Moroccan Carrot Salad
Recipe: Grated Beet, Frisée, Walnut And Goat Cheese Salad
Recipe: Fennel And Orange Salad With Pecorino
Recipe: Tomato, Mozzarella And Basil Relish

I’m almost always hungry first thing in the morning. But today, after a good long jog yesterday, I was ravenous. What to eat?

Before I even got out of bed, a dish I had heard about recently, quinoa pancakes, popped into my mind. I had no idea how to make them, but it was pouring down rain outside, I had a strong cup of coffee in hand and I was up for a little experimentation.

First, I rinsed and drained a handful of quinoa in a colander (some varieties of quinoa have a toxic powdery substance coating the grains). I put the damp quinoa in my mini food processor and tried to grind it to a paste. It was slow going, but after scraping down the sides of the processor a few times and adding a few teaspoons of water, the quinoa finally formed a paste. It had an assertive, nutty aroma — a lot like sesame tahini.

I poured the paste into a bowl, and whisked in some whole milk and an egg. I wanted a savory, not sweet cake, so I seasoned the batter with salt and pepper, and stirred in a handful of grated parmesan and a little chopped fresh rosemary.

Then I just cooked the batter as I would when making pancakes (but with olive oil instead of butter) until the cakes were brown on both sides and cooked through, about 2 minutes total. I topped the cakes with a couple of olive-oil-fried eggs and a little more grated parmesan.

The cakes were really flavorful — bold, nutty — and filling. I’m looking forward to tinkering with the recipe some more. I think they’d be good really big and thin, used like a flatbread.

Reference: What is quinoa?
Reference: How do you pronounce quinoa?
Reference: Is quinoa a grain or a seed?

You want to add some flavor to a cut of meat. Why use a spice paste over a marinade?

First of all, you need time to marinate, time you may not have unless you’ve planned things in advance. Because a spice paste clings to the meat and forms a crust when you cook it, you don’t have to give it the waiting time you do a marinade. (You could rub a spice paste on a couple of hours ahead of time, but you don’t have to.)

Once cooked, the pungent, textured crust contrasts the plain, juicy meat. Unlike a marinade, which evenly coats a cut of meat and results in a consistently flavored finished dish, the spice paste comes with surprises: a cluster of ginger here, a nugget of toasted garlic there.

The formula for a spice paste is simple: a few ground spices + puréed aromatics like ginger, garlic, chiles + salt and pepper + just enough oil to hold it together — so try a spice paste instead of a marinade the next time you grill.

Yesterday afternoon I was looking forward to grilling two beautiful Niman Ranch pork tenderloins for a dinner party. But when it was time to fire up the grill, the sky cracked open and it started to pour. Even though my grill’s just outside the door, the rain was coming down hard and I didn’t feel like getting wet. So I opted instead for my second-favorite way to cook meat — pan roasting.

I preheated the oven to 375F and sprinkled the pork generously with smoked paprika, toasted and ground cumin and coriander, salt and pepper. I seared the tenderloins in canola oil in a hot skillet until they were dark brown on all sides, then put them in the oven to finish cooking. When their internal temperature was 150F in the thickest part I removed them to a cutting board to rest, loosely tented with foil, for 10 minutes.

The pork didn’t quite have the charred flavor that grilling gives, but thorough searing in the skillet, smoky paprika and toasted spices helped compensate. It went well alongside fragrant coconut rice, mango-avocado salsa, cucumber raita and the sound of steady rain through a cracked window.

Recipe: Pan-Roasted Pork Tenderloin
Recipe: Coconut Basmati Rice
Recipe: Mango-Avocado Salsa
Recipe: Cucumber Raita

Reading Francis Mallmann’s new book Seven Fires: Grilling the Argentine Way (written with Peter Kaminsky), I’m reminded that for all the things that cooking is about, at heart it’s about fire — cooking’s “mother tongue” as Mallmann calls it. This beautifully written cookbook and fire-guide shows Mallmann and Kaminsky’s fluency in that language.

In the beginning of the book, Mallmann describes seven types of wood-cooking apparatus: the parilla (a grill grate set over hot coals), chapa (flat cast iron griddle set over fire), infernillo (two-story fire with a cooking surface in between), horno de barro (wood-fired oven), rescoldo (covering food with embers), asado (vertical spit for cooking whole animals) and caldero (iron kettle).

For the rest of the book he harnesses those fires to make dozens of beautiful dishes from salads to desserts, with plenty of meat, seafood and vegetable dishes in between. Savory Corn Pudding, Empanadas, Mussels With Garlic and White Wine, Beef and Potato Pie, Peached Pork . . . the alluring list goes on and on, each accompanied by a little history, clear instructions and beautiful photography.

In a world replete with books about barbecue Mallman manages a completely original take on the subject, a primal exploration of grilling’s “new frontier.” It will have you dying to cook with wood and fire.