Supporting My Local Paddling Chef!

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you:

Steve Heinzerling, the Paddling Chef!

Here are some shots of Steve in action:

Steve with a lobster! Steve with a steak! From 5 Years Around Long Island Year 4 Steve with steak and squash! From Proxigean Paddle! Steve cooking up some delicious Eggs in the Holes before an icy paddle in January From 5 Years Around Long Island, Year 3 Steve choosing corn (supervised by Commodore Emeritus John W.) He's coooookin' in the rain, just cooooookin' in the rain! From 5 Years Around Long Island - Days 2 & 3 You just never know what he's going to pull out of a hatch to share. This was the best pineapple I've ever tasted outside of the Hawaiian Islands. From 5 Years Around Long Island - 2nd Year Day 1! Steve with another lobster Steve with fire From 5 Years Around Long Island Year 4

Steve paddling!

Honest, it's not just the food that makes him one of my favorite paddling companions - that smile you see in every picture except the last one (and you can bet it's there in the last one, he's just a little too far away to see it)? That's just his normal expression. He is one of the most naturally cheerful people I know. His two favorite phrases? "Uff da!" (a Norwegian expression of dismay which is the term he uses at times when crankier folks like myself would be using terms of a far less easy-on-the-ears nature) in 2nd place, and "It's like a dream!" in first, by a mile.

A great guy, and a great chef, and so I was absolutely tickled to see him get a nice little plug in the popular local Ditmas Park Blog. If Steve recommends something it's just GOING to be insanely good, and it happens to be the time of the year when I'm making my favorite green tomato rice recipe to use up the tomatoes that came too late, and I thought a little of this would add a nice flavor.

Here's the ham -


All the ingredients:


The recipe I like is actually something TQ found on line the year a couple of years ago when we had that terrible tomato blight in the Northeast. Click here if you'd like to see it. Ironically, that was probably my best year ever for tomatoes - at the same time as TQ's vines were withering away in Pennsylvania, sending him scrambling for ways to cook green tomatoes, I was picking delicious monsters like this. He served this rice with dinner one night & it's become my favorite way of using up the last tomatoes.

I usually skip the bacon & do the frying in olive oil; the Mangalica ham IS very expenive but it doesn't take much to add a very nice flavor.