Local Flavor is a collaboration between Scott Joseph’s Orlando Restaurant Guide and The Community Paper.

Bites & Bubbles, the contemporary American restaurant at Mills Park in the Mills 50 District, is known for its extensive assortment of tapas and charcuterie boards as well as full entrees. And craft cocktails if you’re not in the mood for bubbles.

With summer upon us, chef and co-owner Eddie Nickell is sharing his recipe for Summer Watermelon Salad, which is a perfectly cool option for a hot day. B&B tosses the salad dressing with mixed greens, blueberries and cherry tomatoes, although you could substitute your favorite salad fixings. But do toss in some cubes of juicy watermelon.

The recipe for the dressing makes one quart, but Nickell says you can easily halve it. See the full recipe at yourcommunitypaper.com.

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Photo: Tap Room Dubsdread

In this month’s issue of The Community Paper, my Local Flavor column features the recipe for Hot Crab Dip from the Tap Room at Dubsdread.

Here in Florida, there really isn’t a crab season — we can pretty much get fresh crab all year. However, right now is when the freshest catches occur, so you’re likely to find some good product at your favorite fishmonger. Or crabmonger, if you will.

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Hamburger Mary’s Mac & Cheese Balls. Photo: John Paonessa

Note: Local Flavor is a collaboration between Scott Joseph’s Orlando Restaurant Guide and The Community Paper.

Hamburger Mary’s Bar & Grille, whose motto is “Eat, Drink, and Be … Mary,” celebrated its 15th year in downtown Orlando in March. From the beginning, its Mac & Cheese Balls have been a popular appetizer. John Paonessa, co-owner of the franchise on Church Street, shared the recipe with us.

The yield on the recipe is 60 balls, scaled down from the usual 300 — I told you they were popular — but Paonessa says they can be kept in the freezer until you’re ready to fry them up.

Click the link below to go to the recipe at yourcommunitypaper.com.

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For this month’s edition of Local Flavor, the recipe column I do in collaboration with The Community Paper, I’m featuring the scotch eggs from Claddagh Cottage in the Curry Ford West District. St. Patrick’s Day is in March, after all, and Claddagh Cottage is one of the area’s most popular Irish pubs.

But why feature something Scottish from an Irish pub? you ask. Well, a scotch egg (notice the lowercase s) is not Scottish (uppercase S). Scotching (an uppercase S only because it’s at the beginning of the sentence, otherwise it would be scotching) is the process of wrapping minced meat around something, in this case an egg. If you were to wrap minced meat or sausage around, say, a strawberry it would be called a scotch strawberry. And it would be a lousy appetizer. And indeed, scotch eggs are very popular appetizers in Irish pubs, at least in American Irish pubs.

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Local Flavor is a montly collaboration between Scott Joseph’s Orlando Restaurant Guide and The Community Paper.

I keep a list of recipes I refer to as my graduate student dishes because they’re quick, easy, often use shortcuts and are generally inexpensive to make. This particular recipe I collected shortly after grad school when I was in my first professional job as a communications media specialist. I worked for a small hospital in Illinois doing videography and photography of the sort best not discussed in a food column.

When I mentioned to one of my co-workers — think Flo, the waitress from the TV show “Alice,” but as a medical transcriptionist — that I wanted to cook more meals at home but didn’t know where to begin, she recommended that I start with this recipe, which she recited to me by memory.

It was just right for a novice, sort of like cooking with training wheels.

It’s also a good dish for anyone who needs to whip up something fast, simple and, for the most part, budget-friendly. And it’s an almost-one-dish recipe. In fact, if you want, you can mix the cream of chicken soup and water in the baking dish before you add the rice and eliminate the mixing bowl — you have my permission.

To save time, you can buy the chicken precut, or you can get a whole fryer and chop it up yourself, which you’ll find is cheaper. You can use the chicken wings — or not — but leave the back out of the dish and save it to make chicken stock. That’s a doctoral candidate-level recipe. See the recipe at The Community Paper.

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Local Flavor is a collaboration with The Community Paper.

Dharma Southern Kitchen is a vegan restaurant in the Milk District’s Market on South that opened in 2015. Chef/Owner Shaun Noonan shares his recipe for Fried Green Tomatoes, which uses a cornstarch slurry in place of the usual egg wash.

Noonan says there are two keys to this dish: finding truly green tomatoes and slicing them no thinner than 1/2 inch. Otherwise, he says, you’ll end up with mush.

The finished tomatoes may be used in a sandwich, as shown in the photo, or eaten with a knife and fork as an appetizer.

Click here to see the full recipe at YourCommunityPaper.com.

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Local Flavor is a collaboration between Scott Joseph’s Orlando Restaurant Guide and The Community Paper.

White Wolf Cafe has been a mainstay of Ivanhoe Village District for 31 years — before it was known as Ivanhoe Village Main Street District. Back then, you’d more likely hear it referred to as Antique Row because of the many antique shops along that stretch of Orange Avenue.

In fact, White Wolf started as part antique shop and part cafe, and in those early days, a large white German shepherd named Casper (the putative wolf in the name) could be found lolling around the store, effectively eluding the glance of health inspectors.

Casper left us long ago, and owners Michael and Anne Marie Hennessey turned their focus to the restaurant side of the business. Here, Anne Marie Hennessey shares the recipe for White Wolf’s award-winning Baton Rouge Burger, so named for the Cajun notes from the blackened seasonings. The burger started out as a burger-of-the-month special but proved so popular that it is now part of the regular menu.

Find the full recipe at YourCommunityPaper.com.

There’s a lot of history in the building on Shine Avenue that has been the home of Maxine’s on Shine for the past decade. The structure started out as a grocery market, but as a restaurant site it has held East Side Cafe, Derby Court, Shine Avenue Deli, Deli Down Under (I actually missed that one), Kia Rose, Union, Union City Tavern, Bravissimo and Shine Neighborhood Kitchen. Current owners Kirt and Maxine Earhart seem to have put an end to the revolving door of restaurant concepts and they’ve recently added a historical note of their own: Maxine’s was on the list of recommended restaurants in the inaugural Florida edition of the Michelin Guide.

There’s history in Maxine’s kitchen, too, where George Vogelbacher has been cooking since 2014. Previously, Vogelbacher owned a restaurant called Le Cordon Bleu that was in the building where Ravenous Pig currently stands. When a fire shut down Le Cordon Bleu and the neighboring Harper’s Tavern, Vogelbacher moved to a restaurant space next to the Enzian Theater in Winter Park and opened Nicole St. Pierre.

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Chef Reimund Pitts of Le Coq au Vin with his Coquilles St. Jacques. (Photo by S.T. Cardinal of The Community Paper)

Le Coq Au Vin, at 46 Orlando’s oldest French restaurant, was already in operation for six years when Louis Perrotte and his wife, Magdalena, bought it. It is now owned and operated by Chef Reimund Pitz and his wife, Sandy, in partnership with the Perrottes. Housed in its unique A-frame — the original structure was a model for a company selling beach homes — Le Coq Au Vin is still a go-to special occasion restaurant for many Central Floridians.

In this edition of Local Flavor, a collaboration with The Community Paper, Pitz shares his recipe for coquille St. Jacques, a classic French dish of scallops in a creamy sauce. See the full recipe here.

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Se7en Bites

If you start to notice a lot of culinary-savvy tourists finding their way to the Milk District, it’s probably because they’re looking for Trina Gregory-Propst’s bakery and eatery, now known succinctly as Se7en Bites.

It opened nine years ago, first in a small former sandwich shop (which is a sandwich shop again: Bad As’s) before moving to its more spacious current location. In that time, it has earned numerous accolades and national recognition. Se7en Bites was featured on Guy Fieri’s “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” — though it’s really none of those — and recently was recognized as a Bib Gourmand recommended restaurant in the first Florida Michelin Guide.

All the praise is well deserved, and Gregory-Propst’s delicious pastries are the reason why. In the current issue of The Community Paper, she shares her recipe for Perfect Florida Strawberry Shortcake in my Local Flavor column.

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