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

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

The first question we ask in our weekly Cookthink Questionnaire is “Sweet or salty?”

And while there are certain unequivocal adherents to one or the other camp, the answer we most hear is “both,” usually followed by “at the same time.”

I do think that most people are born with a predominantly sweet or salty tooth, but it’s the combination of the two qualities that often seduces us in the end. Oatmeal cookies sprinkled with sea salt, pineapple fried rice, a watermelon and feta salad, chicken pot pie with apples — these dishes sing to us because they hit sweet and the salty (or savory) notes at once.

How about you? Are you sweet or salty? Or both at the same time?

Not all muffins have to be eaten straight from the oven, but both black molasses and pear ginger muffins taste best warm.

Is there any dessert more crowd-pleasing than a cheesecake, so versatile and amenable to endless variations? A classic Lindy’s famous cheesecake with a strawberry or pineapple glaze tastes great anytime. A lemongrass cheesecake is welcome after a spicy Thai meal. And the slightly grainy, fine texture of an Italian ricotta cheesecake makes a nice change of pace from the cream cheese-based variety. Find more cheesecake recipes here.

We’ve never quite figured out how to solve the problem of having Champagne tastes on a beer budget. But if you’re craving caviar, sometimes a less expensive fish roe fix can do the trick. If you’ve never tried it grated over spaghetti or shaved over an omelet, now just might be the time to break out the bottarga, a specialty made of fish roe that the Italians call poor man’s caviar. (Or you could opt for some budget-friendly tarama, pictured above, our favorite Greek roe-based dip.)

The Cookthink tool allows you to search for recipes based on your cravings — whether you’re hankering for a specific ingredient, dish type, cuisine or mood. And while we all believe in healthy eating, there are times when we can’t resist our craving for something that’s deep-fried, sugar-loaded, empty-caloried — just plain junky.

Corndogs are not good for you. You know that. But if you’re in the mood for something junky, instead of heading for the junk food aisle or the nearest greasy spoon, why not take junky into your own hands and fry up these fairway-style corndogs at home? We used vegetarian dogs to assuage our conscience a tiny bit, but any dog will do.

At his first state dinner the other night, President Obama served the nation’s governors a four-course meal that included crab agnolotti with sunchokes, a winter citrus salad with pistachios and lemon-honey vinaigrette, creamed spinach (made without cream) and — one of Obama’s favorite foods — scallops.

Got me thinking again about Bittman’s 98-second scallops.

Reference: What is a diver scallop? (Cookthink)
Reference: What are dry-packed scallops? (Cookthink)
Reference: What’s the difference between a bay scallop and a sea scallop? (Cookthink)