Muriel’s
Muriel’s on Jackson Square rises to every special occasion with alluring seasonal menus. Their Reveillon menu every year is a particularly good example of this. Chef Erik Veney–who is back at Muriel’s after a long stint at the now-extinct Stella!–reaches into the market for what’s good and matches the weather. The four courses (two choices offered in each) at $48 constitute an excellent value even by Reveillon standards. The raw materials used to accomplish all this is of top quality. The fact that St. Louis Cathedral is less thana half block away completes an ideal venue for the Reveillon spirit.
Indoor courtyard at Muriel’s.
Four courses, $48.
Fried Oyster Chowder
Oysters, cream, leeks, potato and bacon
~or~
Butternut Squash Bisque
Cabernet poached pear, walnut and maple cream
~~~~~
Satsuma and Spinach Salad
Chipotle vinaigrette, feta cheese, toasted pumpkin seeds, and crispy prosciutto
~or~
Daube Glacé
French bread crostini, pickled onion, and creole mustard aioli
~~~~~
Pan Sautéed Speckled Trout
Herbed popcorn rice, jumbo lump crab meat, pistachios, and brown butter sauce
~or~
Wood Grilled Veal Chop
Potato and asiago croquettes, grilled asparagus, topped with a wild mushroom and tasso cream sauce
~~~~~
Vanilla Bean Crème Brûlée
~or~
Sticky Toffee Pudding Cake
Muriel’s.
French Quarter: 801 Chartres. 504-568-1885.
FULL REVIEW
All the Reveillon menus can be perused here. We’ll feature one every day throughout the Reveillon season, which runs in most of the Reveillon restaurants until December 31.The snowflake ratings are for the Reveillon menu, not the restaurant in general. Dishes marked with asterisks are my recommendations.
Friday, December 16, 2016.
Zea’s Soups.
Mary Ann and I have lunch at Zea for the first time in awhile. For the last couple of year, the most attractive portion of Zea’s menu for me was its soups du jour. I like some much better than others. Today they have one of the good ones: a southwestern-style chicken soup with thin tortilla chips. I don’t remember running into it before. I will remember that for future Fridays. Also good are the creamy tomato-basil soup on Sundays and the roasted corn bisque. I’m less enthusiastic about the red bean soup, which has more of a pureed texture than that of a soup. Or beans a la Monday.
Another new attraction of Zea is its fried catfish. Like many other restaurants around town, Zea has shifted from the Vietnamese catfish to locally wild-caught Des Allemands catfish. They serve it in small fillets–just the way I like them. They are very good today.
The NPAS Christmas-carol contingent is performing somewhere tonight, but I don’t find out where until it’s too late. They’re also dressing in Dickensian attire, and I don’t have such a costume handy. I’m very disappointed in not doing any organized singing for weeks.
Meanwhile, our sad Christmas tree has still not been decorated. Even though its bottom rests in sugar water, it releases a torrent of needles if you so much as touch it.
A nostalgic force within me makes me want to watch Johnny Carson after MA has gone to bed. I discover that Johnny’s Tonight Show programs are available on DVDs for a hundred dollars a disk. Some free episodes are out there, and I watch an hour’s worth of them. I am reassured that Johnny is as good as I remember. Early in my twenties, watching him one night for the first time since the sixties let me escape losing my mind. (Long story.)
I hope tomorrow isn’t as dreary as today.
Saturday, December 17,2016.
Dining With The Radio Guys @ Tomas Bistro.
A big day for a Saturday. I run my errands quickly enough to allow for a modest breakfast at Fat Spoon: scrambled eggs, bacon, biscuit, and grits.
Announcement to all basic breakfast places: if you don’t start making grits with more going on in terms of flavor, texture, and general interest, grits will become nearly extinct (the way Creole cream cheese is nearly extinct already) within our lifetimes. A good model of what grits should be like is at Zea, with its roasted whole corn stirred into the grits with some other flavors.
I am on the radio for three hours commencing at noon. That show on WWL is incomparably easier for me than the weekday edition of The Food Show on WWWL. The main topic, as it always is this time of year, is about roasting prime ribs. Very timely. Prime rib is to Christmas what turkey is to Thanksgiving.
The show ends at three. I take an hour-long walk around the ranch. Mary Leigh’s dog Bauer has been brought to the ranch against his will. Our long-standing ranch dogs Barry and Suzie are not hospitable, and are much larger than Bauer. A few crises erupt, but no blood is lost. Poor puppy!
The radio stations have their annual Christmas party at Tomas Bistro. Mary Ann never attends these, but I feel as if I should be there. I know only about a third of the attendees. That is normal for a radio group, since except for the sales people everybody works on a totally different schedule. The many on-air talents for the FM stations are especially incognito.
It’s a good party, with the food prepared by Tommy Andrade’s excellent kitchens. One of his chefs roasted a whole steamship roast beef round. I haven’t seen one of those in a long time, but this is a chef who has been at the job for decades. He doesn’t need to consult a recipe book to find out how to cook that massive chunk of cow. I’d like to see one of those young chefs who buy micro-greens, raw fish and wild mushrooms wrestle with a steamship.
The food is good and the company happy. Among the folks I know are Tommy Tucker, Scoot, John Volpe, Bob Frost, Doug Christian, and our Big Boss Chris Claus. Tommy Andrade–one of the most accomplished restaurateurs in New Orleans dining history, circulates around. Why did we not use Tomas Bistro as a place for the wedding receptions I’ve bought in the past few years?
No music, but there is a dance floor. A long time ago at one of these parties, we had karaoke. I think we ought to do that again someday.
Sunday, December 18,2016.
The Tree Is A Disaster.
The weather is terrible all day, with cold-front storms sweeping across the state and making visibility tough. It could be worse: Natchez is getting sleet. (Or, as they call it up north, “wintry mix.”) All this is enough to keep me home. Except, of course, to go to St. Jane’s for my singing gig. It was pouring when I left, but a passageway through the rain gave me just enough time to get to the church without getting drenched.
My afternoon fills itself with a few hours of tedious work on the inner workings of the web site. I have Christmas music on from an internet station whose selection of holiday music is both eclectic and almost entirely from the past. Forties to the seventies. It’s so different from the usual holiday sounds that I will remember this day always.
Mary Ann and I finally trim the tree. I decide this is a good time to disentangle all the strings of lights I have accumulated since my first Christmas tree in 1971. Among these are some four dozen bubble lights, most of them no longer lighting, bubbling, or either. How low has this descended! There was a time when I could cover the tree with nothing but bubble lights.
I lay out one string of ten sockets and attempt to fill it with working bulbs only. This proves to be impossible. Each attempt to employ the final light either 1) makes that bulb pop and die, or b) cause an already-attached bulb to shuffle off this mortal coil or iii) makes a circuit breaker click off. Especially that last eventuality makes me decide that it’s time to retire all this old stuff, if just to keep the house from burning down.
As I hang the lights on the tree, then remove them to try a different string and repeat the process, the tree’s needles cascade onto the floor by handfuls. I stop. “We have reached the end of this chapter in my life,” I say to MA, the dogs and the cats.
I pour myself a big glass of egg nog. I sit down and watch MA hang our enormous collection of ornaments. In our collection is one ornament that was on my parents’ tree when we lived on Ursulines Street in 1956. That ornament–which looks like a disk-like spaceship built in New Orleans–has the honor of being the first ornament on the tree, and the last one off every year.
But this year I can’t find it.
After all these years of towing pieces of my life unrelentingly, I and my collection of paraphernalia are breaking down. Who will step in to keep it all going?
Coffee Cake
A well-made coffee cake–aromatic of spice, crunchy-crumbly on top, each bite with a different mouthful of textures and tastes–is a wonderful thing. Makes the whole house smell good as it bakes, and keeps on giving pleasure for days of breakfasts if it lasts that long. You can add all sorts of things to the standard nuts and brown sugar–apples and blueberries are especially common. This recipe is for a basic coffee cake, a starting point for your additions. But pretty good on its own.
What makes a coffee cake special is the streusel–the lumpy, nutty scattering that encrusts the top. You can bake the cake in either a tube pan (the traditional way, with a funnel-shaped hole in the center) or a deep (at least 2 1/2 inches), round cake pan.
3 cups self-rising flour
1 1/2 cups sugar
3/4 cup (packed) dark brown sugar
2 Tbs. cinnamon
2 sticks butter
1 cup chopped pecans
1/4 tsp. salt
4 large eggs
1 cup buttermilk
1/2 cup sour cream
1 Tbs. vanilla extract
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
1. Mix the flour, sugar, and brown sugar in a bowl.
2. Measure out two cups of the mixture. Put that into a food processor. Add 3 Tbs. of the butter, the cinnamon, and the pecans to the processor bowl. Pulse the processor until everything is barely. There should be lumps about the size of lentils or smell peas. This is the finished “streusel.” Set this aside.
3. Grease the inside of either a 10-inch tube pan or a 12-inch cake pan.
3. Put what’s left of the flour-sugar mixture from the first step into a mixer bowl. Add the salt and give it a quick stir with the mixer to distribute everything evenly. Add the butter and let it mix into the flour on low speed.
4. In another bowl (you can use the one the flour and sugars were in–you don’t even have to clean it), whisk the eggs, then add the buttermilk, sour cream, and vanilla.
5. Pour half the egg mixture into the mixer bowl and beat on medium speed for about a minute. Scrape down the sides of the bowl, all the way to the bottom, with a rubber spatula. Start the mixer again on medium-low speed, and add the rest of the egg mixture. After about a minute, scrape down the bowl again. Now run the mixer a bit higher, until you can see the batter starting to rise and expand.
6. Pour about a third of the batter into the pan. Smooth it out with the rubber spatula, and sprinkle about a third of the streusel uniformly around the pan. Add another third of the batter and repeat the strewing of the streusel. Add the rest of the batter, and top it with the rest of the streusel.
7. Bake the cake at 350 degrees for 50-60 minutes. Check with a cake tester; when it comes out clean of interior ingredients, it’s done.
8. Let the cake cool for about a half-hour. Remove from the pan to a rack, and cool for another hour or two. (You can serve it warm, but sometime it falls apart when you slice it.
Serves about 12.
Cuban Sandwich @ Fat Spoon
Although the Fat Spoon’s two locations on the North Shore are more about breakfast than lunch, they do make some big, well-assembled poor boys and the like. The best of these specialties is an excellent Cuban sandwich. It’s a foot long, well layered with ham, roast pork, Swiss cheese and pickle slices. The bread is not the kind found in the Cuban communities in Florida, from which this sandwich originally comes. Instead, standard New Orleans French bread is pressed (literally) into service. That’s the unique quality of a Cubano: it’s toasted on a gizmo that works like waffle iron. The bread comes out with a light tan, heat of the sandwich press softening (but not melting) the cheese and warming up the meats. It’s the best Cuban sandwich I’ve found on the North Shore and about twice the size I can finish. Tuesdays are North Shore days in the New Orleans Menu Daily.
Fat Spoon. Covington: : 2807 N US Highway 190. 985-893-5111..
Mandeville: 68480 Highway 59. 985-809-2929. This is among the 500 best dishes in New Orleans area restaurants. Click here for a list of the other 499.
December 20, 2016
Days Until. . .
Christmas 5.
New Year’s Eve: 12.
Today’s Flavor
Today is reported to be National Sangria Day. Sangria can be good, but usually isn’t. It’s a mixture of wine with fruit and fruit juices, and probably began as a way to make lesser wines more palatable. Especially when they’re served cold, as sangria usual is. We see it in Spanish restaurants without exception; it is a very popular beverage in Spain. Seems more like a summer beverage to me, and less appropriate for this day than something like wassail or mulled wine.
Edible Dictionary
wassail, n.–A drink made of warmed and spiced beer, cider, or wine, sometimes containing honey, sugar, or fruit juices. It’s mentioned in several Christmas carols. The word reveals the ancient origins of the beverage: “wassail” derives from a Norse toast meaning “to your health.” We get it through Old English. The original form of wassail probably involved beer. Its modern descendants are those spiced beers mall breweries put out this time of year. The version of wassail most commonly made these days is made with sweetened wine and spices. Something much like it was known in Roman times during the festival of Saturnalia–the celebration the Church co-opted and turned into Christmas.
Gourmet Gazetteer
Goose Egg, Wyoming is about fifteen miles southest of Casper, on State Highway 220 at the junction of Goose Egg Road. It lies in the rocky valley of the North Platte River, less than a mile to the north. The place to eat there is the Goose Egg Inn, which claims to serve home-style food, but looks rather classy. Whether six geese a-laying those eggs can be found there around the Christmas season, we’re not sure.
Deft Dining Rule #208:
From now until Christmas Day, a man must offer to buy a drink for every friend he sees in an eating or drinking establishment.
Roots Of Our Culinary Culture
Today in 1803, in a ceremony here in New Orleans, the United States took possession of the Louisiana Purchase territory. It doubled the size of the country and brought New Orleans (but not the North Shore, which remained part of Florida) into the Union. It made Pass Manchac an international boundary. The customs officials ate lunch at Middendorf’s, right?
Food Equations
According to Harper’s magazine, a Hummer H2 could be driven around the world 244 times on the excess calories consumed in a year by the average American. I’d go for the food instead of the drive.
The Old Kitchen Sage Sez:
To make lighter muffins, use buttermilk instead of regular milk. The extra acidity will create more gas bubbles in contact with the baking soda. Another trick to accomplish the same end: separate the eggs, beat the whites, and fold it into the batter. Neither of these work for heavy, chunky muffins, though, as I learned when my former girlfriend threw one at me.
Restaurants Around The World
Today in 1928, Harry Ramsden opened his first fish-and-chips shop outside of Leeds, England. It has expanded to become a large chain of restaurants specializing not only in fish and chips (using many different species of fish), but also many other popular British dishes like meat pies, gammon steaks with mashed potatoes, and the like. Its rough American equivalent would be Applebee’s.
Food Namesakes
Many bakers today. The jazz singer Anita Baker was born today in 1957. . . and actress Blanche Baker hit the Big Stage today in 1956, which was also a big day for her more famous mother, Carroll Baker . . .Rock singer David Cook, who won the seventh season of American Idol, hit his first note today ion 1982. . . Charley Grapewin, who played Uncle Henry in The Wizard of Oz, was born today in 1869. . . American sculptor Beverly Pepper began to carve out a life today in 1924. . . Pieter de Hooch, a painter of Dutch scenes in the 1600s, seemed very lifelike to his mother today in 1629. We lift our glass to Hooch.
Words To Eat By
“My manner of living is plain and I do not mean to be put out of it. A glass of wine and a bit of mutton are always ready.”–George Washington.
Words To Drink By
“I’m not so think as you drunk I am.”–Sir John Collings Squire, British writer of the first half of the 1900s.
Another Reason Not To Fry Turkeys.
The big bird takes its good old time.
Click here for the cartoon.