Sunday, September 4, 2016.
Like Nothing Ever Happened.
I’m working on the flat tire on the lawn tractor, and getting nowhere, because I have no jack. But then, deus ex machina, Mary Leigh shows up at the Cool Water Ranch with her fiance Dave. Dave is just back from an extended bachelor party, the highlight of which was a parachute jump in the local airport outside Abita Springs. Dave is in the Army reserve, and does things like that.
He’s also in good enough shape to help me with the lawn tractor. He lifts the front of the tractor high enough that I can slip some lumber under it, allowing me to turn the bad wheel. We try to pump the tire up, but it’s leaking badly somewhere. Getting the old tire off is very difficult. (I still haven’t done it.) Nor can I seem to locate a new tire. What I really need is a new tractor—this one is over 15 years old. But I was hoping to postpone that big purchase until next spring. On the other hand, the rain is falling so often and hard that I might not be able to cut the grass anytime soon.
While Dave and I work on the tractor, I have my first talk with him since the postponement of his wedding to my daughter. I come away from the discussion with the feeling that he and she are perfectly okay with the situation as it stands. Trying to dope it out further leaves any outsider only puzzled.
Monterrey Fajitas at La Caretta.
MA joins the three of us to have dinner at–where else?–La Caretta. Here come the familiar queso with chorizo, the beef tacos, the salads, the cups of black bean soup, and about four baskets of thin tortilla chips with maybe a quart of the excellent salsa. Why are we outside on a day that is both hot and occasionally rainy? I just go along with the flow.
Monday, Labor Day, September 4, 2016.
Good-Bye To The Nearlyweds. Five Hours At The Chimes.
Mary Leigh and Dave and one of Dave’s groomsmen (a guy who once was in the Boy Scout troop with Jude; once again we prove that only 500 people live around New Orleans) hit the road at five in the morning for Dave and ML’s apartment in Virginia. So much for that!
Among the worst days of the year for dining out is Labor Day. Not even the indefatigable Chef Andrea opens. For the most part, only the chains are available.
But Mary Ann wants to get together with all six of her siblings, who are still in town for the event that wasn’t. They go to The Chimes. Of course. MA’s favorite place. I go along, with oysters on my mind. Bad news! Chimes is smackout of oysters in all forms. I get a platter of fried catfish instead. They wrere reasonably good. No I have something else to eat next time I am dragged to the sports-intensive eatery.
The view from the deck at The Chimes. During the recent floods, the water was at the top of the wood ramps in the background.
We are there for six hours. The first of them is the wait for a table. We are about to be seated when MA says that she would allow another fifteen minutes so she can eat outside on the deck. It is raining.
We discuss the wedding massacree and everything on earth related to it, over and over. But things really get lively when Mary Ann’s little brother Tim shows up. We all know from the experience of many Thanksgivings that one must accord Tim at least an extra hour to arrive at anything.
But he is worth waiting for. His car is under siege by a battalion of what are known as Crazy Ants. This is another exotic species which has found new places to live in the New Orleans area. Crazy Ants are so aggressive that they are actually giving fire ants–another import that seemed to be decimating all the other ants–a run for their money. The Crazy Ants can also run termites out of a niche. They almost sound good. But they are not.
At first, I think Tim was making all this up. Photographs of the ants makes them look likle cartoons. No matter how many places he has run them away from his car, shed, and house, they seem to be not long before appearing again, usually carrying a vanquished insect that seems too big for the ants to carry. But they do carry it. Tim’s description of the ant ordeal is so funny that the whole table is convulsed in laughter.
And so the big weekend ends. Not with a honeymoon, but with a puzzle, and a story about ants. We will consider all this for the rest of our lives. I’ve heard and seen enough to feel actually good about it all.
The Chimes. Covington: 19130 W Front St. 985-892-5396.
Veal Marcelle
This rich, old-style dish was created by the chefs at Commander’s Palace in honor of Marcelle Bienvenu. She worked at Commander’s for a few years, opened her own restaurant outside Lafayette, wrote many of Emeril’s cookbooks, and is the author of the best food column in the New Orleans newspaper. She, Dick Brennan and I had dinner together at Commander’s monthly for almost ten years. This is a really rich dish–a Creole variation on veal Oscar. The recipe is adapted from one in the Commander’s Palace Cookbook, by Ella and Dick Brennan.
8 slices veal , about 3 oz, each
Creole seasoning
All-purpose flour
3 Tbs. butter
1/2 cups green onions, thinly sliced
2 medium shallots, chopped
1 cup jumbo lump crabmeat
2 tsp. Worcestershire sauce
1 cup hollandaise
1. Pound the veal between two sheets of plastic wrap. Season with meat seasoning and coat very lightly with flour.
2. Heat the butter in a skillet until it bubbles. Add the veal and cook until golden brown on both sides, turning once. This happens quickly; don’t overcook.
3. Remove the veal and keep it warm. Add the green onions, shallots, crabmeat, and Worcesterhisre to the pan. Stir while cooking for about a minutes.
4. Place two slices of veal on each plate and divide the pan contents among them. Top with hollandaise and serve immediately.
Serves four.
Herb Crusted Crabmeat Gratinee @ Broussard’s
How could the standard crabmeat au gratin be improved? My thinking on that assignment would be to remove the heavy cheese component, which does nothing to bring out the subtle flavors of our local crabmeat. Replacing the cheese would be a light, almost sloshy sauce of crab stock, stiffened up with a sprinkling of bread crumbs and Parmesan. We note here that the expression “au gratin” doesn’t mean awash in cheese, but that the dish it topped with a crust of some kind. Well, here is that dish in reality, a new appetizer created by Broussard’s chef Neal Swidler, who has a knack for brining new approaches to familiar dishes. Finishing this fine little plate is some grilled slices cut across a head of cauliflower. This is just the right subtlety to nudge the crabmeat along.
Herb Crusted Crabmeat Gratinee @ Broussard’s
Broussard’s. French Quarter: 819 Conti. 504-581-3866.
This is among the 500 best dishes in New Orleans area restaurants. Click here for a list of the other 499.
September 9, 2016
Days Until. . .
Summer ends 13
Celebrity Chefs Today
It’s the birthday (1960) of Mario Batali, one of the most celebrated of American Italian chefs. He was born and grew up around Seattle. Soon after graduating from college, he moved into a cooking career, and has been at it ever since. Restaurants he opened in New York City with legendary Friuliano restaurateur Joe Bastianich were so lusty and unique that he became a major celebrity chef. He’s still constantly on television and on tour, and headlines numerous restaurants around the country. Batali, with his infectious enthusiasm for earthy cookery, proves that one need be neither slender nor beautiful to get on television–although the Food Network, in its effort to make everything on its air cute, has moved away from real chefs like Mario.
This is the birthday, in 1971, of Chef Jared Tees. He came to prominence as the original chef at Dickie Brennan’s Bourbon House. After the hurricane he moved to the John Besh restaurant organization, and opened Luke. He’s now stationed at The Besh Steakhouse. Tall, good-looking, well-spoken, talented chef.
Food Entrepreneurs
Harlan Sanders was born today in 1890, in Henryville, Indiana. His is one of the world’s most familiar faces: his portrait hangs in all 11,000 Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants around the world. He began cooking when he was six years old, after his father died and his mother went to work. He used that skill to open a cafe in a gas station in Corbin, Kentucky in 1930. His food good enough that it was highlighted in Duncan Hines’s guide to dining across America, and for the governor to name him a Kentucky Colonel.
Colonel Sanders (as he was best known) perfected his fried chicken recipe by introducing the use of a pressure fryer. When a new highway bypassed his town, he sold the restaurant and gas station, but was left stone broke. At sixty-five he hit the road, selling restaurateurs around the country on his fried chicken recipe. It was an enormous success, and Kentucky Fried Chicken became an icon. In the early years, the KFC restaurants cooked all the chicken to order. When it went to a fast-food, prepared-in-advance production system, KFC lost a lot of its goodness. I hear that the Colonel was never a fan of the crispy version. When the original recipe with the famous eleven herbs and spices is made properly, it’s still pretty good. But it’s a long, oily slide from the Colonel’s original product. He died in 1980, but his countenance still gazes on all of us as we drive by.
Gourmet Gazetteer
Soup Hole is a lake in the wooded Cascade Range, thirty-three miles west of Seattle. The three-and-a-half-acre body of water straddles the line between King and Snohomish Counties, at about 820 feet above sea level. It’s a good place to go hiking, camping, or paddling canoes. There’s a surprisingly large number of restaurants–with tremendous variety, too–in Duvall, four miles away from the hole. Teddy Bear’s Barbecue sounds good. Also here are Thai, Vietnamese, Japanese, American and Lebanese restaurants.
Food Calendar
This is National Pressure Cooking Day, in honor of Colonel Sanders, who is probably responsible for more pressure cooking than any one other person. Pressure cooking involves closing a cooking utensil with an airtight lid, such that boiling water inside causes the air pressure to rise. Under pressure, water boils at a much higher temperature. The pressure also forces the cooking liquid deeper and faster into the food. None of this haste creates any extra damage to the food. It’s not a new idea–French inventor Denis Papin is credited with devising it in 1679s. Despite the complete safety of modern pressure cookers and their effectiveness, pressure cooking has never really caught on in the mainstream. Those who like the technique are very enthusiastic, but there lingers a widespread, unfounded doubt about it.
Edible Dictionary
fricandeau, [free-can-DOE], French, n.–An obsolete term in most of the world of cooking, fricandeau still pops up every now and then in Cajun cooking–the last repository of many old French culinary styles. It consists of slices of meat–usually a rather tough meat that needs to be pounded or even larded to make it tender–cooked in a thick sauce made primarily with vegetables. The sauce’s contents contain enough solids to lift the meat up off the plate, or weigh it down, depending on which side it’s on. Some versions of grillades and grits are very close to the fricandeau idea. The name is French, and comes from the same root as fricassee–which is also fried or cooked in a skillet.
Eating Across America
This is the anniversary of the statehood of California, admitted to the Union on this date in 1850. You and I would not eat and drink as well as we do were it not for the farmers of the Golden State. They raise an almost unbelievable percentage of the fresh produce we consume, including almost all of the artichokes, garlic, lettuce, oranges, and eating grapes. Wine grapes grow all over the state. California winemakers vinify almost every variety known in the rest of the world. And one of its most popular grapes–Zinfandel–is its unique property.
Beyond fruits and vegetables, California has a food culture that supports a terrific array of artisanal producers of lamb, beef, cheese, and herbs. About the only food arena in which the state is an also-ran is seafood–but even there it has some specialties, notably Dungeness crab, abalone, petrale sole, and oysters. California’s dark side is that it is the world’s leading producer of hot air in cookery. Restaurants tend to emphasize good stories than good flavors in their food. Still, it’s quite a place for eaters.
Music To Eat On The Dock By
This is the birthday, in 1941, of Otis Redding, the greatest soul singer of all time. He was a terrific composer, too–Respect and Dock of the Bay were his best-known works. His finest recording, however, was the 1930s standard Try A Little Tenderness, which I can’t listen to without feeling my soul moved. Otis died tragically young in a plane wreck, at 26. What would his career have become had he lived?
Music To Drink Champagne By
Michael Bublé was born today in British Columbia in 1975. He has become the leading performer of Big Band jazz and standards among his generation. He’s a glamorous, polished performer who has even caught the attention of teenagers to the music of the 1930s and 1940s. That’s quite a feat, despite the surpassing musical excellence of that material. He packs houses wherever he goes.
Music To Eat Roast Beef By
Dee Dee Sharp was born today in 1945. She had two 1960s hits with food names: Mashed Potato Time and Gravy (For My Mashed Potatoes).
Weather And Food
Hurricane Betsy, the first American hurricane to do over a billion dollars’ worth of damage in the United States, hit the Gulf Coast near New Orleans today in 1965. It was a Category Four, and traveled across the southwestern side of the city. It flooded many of the same parts of the city that would be inundated in Hurricane Katrina. Many restaurants closed permanently after Betsy, but many more new ones opened to take their places.
Food And Drink Namesakes
Major-league relief pitcher Todd Coffey took the Big Mound today in 1980. . . Jose Negroni, singer with the 1950s group Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, as well as a Rock and Roll Hall of Famer, was born today in 1940. A Negroni cocktail (not named for the singer) is gin, sweet vermouth, Campari, and club soda, on the rocks.
Words To Eat By
“Nothing rekindles my spirits, gives comfort to my heart and mind, more than a visit to Mississippi. . . and to be regaled as I often have been, with a platter of fried chicken, field peas, collard greens, fresh corn on the cob, sliced tomatoes with French dressing. . . and to top it all off with a wedge of freshly baked pecan pie.”–Craig Claiborne.
Words To Drink By
“Drunkards are doomed to hell, so men declare,
Believe it not, ’tis but a foolish scare;
Heaven will be empty as this hand of mine,
If none who love good drink find entrance there.”
–Omar Khayyam.
Grills Of The Future.
But the future looks bad. What’s this about grilling in the cloud?
Click here for the cartoon.