Featured Story by The Outer Banks Voice-
Sharon Peele Kennedy: Art of cooking Outer Banks Catch
By Submitted Story on September 30, 2014
By Susan West
Sharon Peele Kennedy will tell you that she grew up with a spatula, not a baby rattle, in her hand.
Kennedy was born into a family with a rich culinary heritage that combined her father’s traditional Hatteras Island–style cooking with her mother’s readiness to add the unexpected.
“My father could stew a nickel and make it taste good,” the Buxton resident says. Her father used only basic ingredients — potatoes, onions, salt pork, flour, salt, pepper — in dishes like stewed shrimp with piebread dumplings.
Her mother cooked with a variety of spices and herbs, like the ones found in New York City where she lived as a child until the Great Depression set in and her father brought the family to Hatteras Island.
Kennedy’s favorite childhood meal was her mother’s baked fish, usually a large red drum or bluefish, layered with potatoes and onions. Other favorites were clam chowder, fried spot, roasted oysters, and shad roe with scrambled eggs.
She wasn’t introduced to the flavors of offshore species until she began her restaurant career.
“Fish like grouper and triggerfish taste very good, but the offshore species don’t have the distinctive depth of flavor like the inshore species that I still prefer to this day,” Kennedy says.
Her restaurant career started with a job bussing tables at a Hatteras village restaurant when she was 12 years old. Later she waitressed, but it wasn’t until she tried her hand in the kitchen that she knew she had found her food-service niche.
“The kitchen was where I wanted to be,” she says. “It was the place where I felt I could create art.”
Kennedy credits her culinary education to the women she worked with in Hatteras Island kitchens in the 1960s and 1970s, before pre-prepared foods became popular.
“I was blessed to have learned from the best,” she says. “Those women were all self-taught and knew how to make the most out of every ingredient.”
Kennedy continues to cook in a local restaurant and also hosts a local radio program on Beach 104.1 called “What’s for Supper with Sharon Peele Kennedy,” which features easy-to-prepare seafood recipes. Now in its sixth year, the program developed after a chance conversation about the flavor of soft-shell sand fleas with a radio station employee.
“The program is about as cornbread and country-fed as you can get because that’s how I am,” Kennedy says with a laugh.
Kennedy cautions consumers to avoid over-cooking and over-seasoning seafood.
“Seafood should be done simply,” she advises. “Don’t mask the flavor of premium seafood with sauces. Kick up your sides instead.”
No one type of fish is her favorite, but Pamlico Sound bay scallops clearly hold special status with Kennedy.
“The taste is very sweet and salty, especially when eaten raw,” she says.
Kennedy serves on the boards of Outer Banks Catch and N.C. Catch, two consumer education initiatives that promote local seafood, and she often presents seafood-cooking demonstrations in locations from the Outer Banks to Raleigh.
She will present a seafood-cooking demonstration in the Outer Banks Catch tent at the Outer Banks Seafood Festival on Oct. 18.
No comments:
Post a Comment