Revision!
Commander’s Palace’s Wine Guy came through with a list of the wines we had Saturday when we sampled the Reveillon menu here. All the info is here:
Monday, December 21, 2015.
Unexpected Pre-Christmas Fast.
The heartening news is that it is the Winter Solstice, after which the days begin getting longer. I also like that it is a universal holiday for all mankind. We’ve never done enough with that celebration.
My celebration is hanging the lights on the Christmas tree. My lighting strings are still the old kind, shaped like flames but much bigger. I also have bubble lights, which become harder to replace with each passing year. I once had enough working bubble lights to cover the whole tree. Now I can only do bubble-illuminate about half the tree.
When it rains a lot, sometimes the road that leads to the Cool Water Ranch becomes flooded with a depth of water not worth attempting to cross. It almost always goes down after a few hours, but that wasn’t soon enough to escape to have either lunch or dinner. I fling some leftovers into a meal. Mary Ann is on the other side of the lake with friends and clients. I don’t see her until nine in the evening. She doesn’t ask what I ate, and I don’t volunteer the info.
Tuesday, December 22, 2015.
Fogged In. Leftovers Again.
I was on my way to the radio station, almost all the way to the Causeway, when a reader board tells me that fog on the bridge had the lanes down to one and speed to 35 miles per hour. (Which in fact means 20-25 mph.) No way I will get to town at that pace. I return home and broadcast from there.
Mary Ann finds some better leftovers for supper than yesterday’s. She loves leftovers, and actually would prefer eating them to freshly-cooked food, depending on what it is. We have some leftover steak Stanley from Commander’s. I eat it, perhaps setting some sort of record in being the first man to eat three plates of steak ‘n’ bananas in less than a week.
Mary Ann begins to hang the ornaments on the tree. I am very concerned that my oldest ornament–one that dates back to my parents’ home in the late 1950s–is missing. It is fantastically ugly after all these years, and so has a special place on the tree: down on the bottom branches, way in the back. It’s a ritual that I hang this silvery, plastic, blotchy thing before any other ornament. It is also the last to be removed. But where is it now?
Wednesday, December 23, 2015.
Free Concert, Opera House, Late Supper.
Daniel Lelchuk, the Gourmet Cellist, keeps turning up. Today he is performing at Christ Church Cathedral with a soprano, a violinist, an oboist and a bassoonist, all members of Lyrica Baroque, a classical ensemble. It’s a free concert with a Christmas spirit. Mary Ann and I planned to attend even before we saw Daniel’s smiling face on the brochure. The big church was full and the performances were outstanding.
Mary Ann thought the finale was familiar. “That’s your song, isn’t it?” She means “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas,” the song that drew blood and tears in my failing attempts to hard-wire it into my brain for an NPAS solo two weeks ago. Soprano Sarah Jane McMahon sang it as beautifully as all the other songs she warbled tonight, and certainly didn’t need a cue card to remember the words, as I did.
There was a reception after the performance at the New Orleans Opera’s reception hall on Prytania Street. Daniel was there, as was Robert Lyall, the music director of the Opera. He has been on the radio with me many times. He tells me the Opera is doing Sweeney Todd next season. NPAS did that scary Sondheim piece a few months ago.
And here was Sarah Jane McMahon, as beautiful as her singing. While Mary Ann kept her husband distracted with a conversation about the Grand Canyon (long story), I asked her whether she had any kind of problem getting the verse’s lyrics down in “Have Yourself A Merry. . . ” I know she’s a pro and I’m an untrained hack, but she was gracious, and pleasantly surprised me by saying that indeed she did find it a little sticky the first time she took a swing at it. (No sign of this in her performance, nor on her Christmas CD, however.) “You have Christmas future, then Christmas past, then Christmas present,” she said. Don’t I know it!
The original plan for today was to have the Reveillon dinner at Arnaud’s. But I waited too long to make a reservation, and there were no tables. How about Andrea’s? He has wanted to see photos of Jackson, our grandson. But when we arrived, we were told that the kitchen was closed.
So we went to Impastato’s, which was almost full. I did a couple of songs with Roy Picou. (But not “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas,” which he had just done.)
We have Joe Impastato’s famous crab claws, then some fettuccine for her and baked Italian oysters for me. She quits at that point, but I move ahead with speckled trout Marianna–named for Joe’s mother, but–and I just though of this just now–Mary Ann’s name in Italian. I tell her I ordered the dish to honor her. She doesn’t buy it.
Red Velvet Cheesecake
I got this recipe right before Thanksgiving from Chef Jeremy Langlois, who ran the kitchen for a long time at Houmas House Plantation and its restaurant Latil’s Landing. It sounded so alarming to me that I am making one for Christmas. Red velvet anything is a dark, intense red color, a fine complement for the poinsettias in the room. The flavor of red velvet, however, is actually chocolate. I’m adding my usual component of orange peel and juice to the mix (Jeremy doesn’t have that in here). Otherwise, this is the way it’s served at Kevin Kelly’s magnificent sugar plantation complex on River Road in Burnside, halfway up the river to Baton Rouge. `
Remember to leave lots of time for cooling the cheesecake. This must be done slowly and gently, or you’ll have cracks in the top.
Crust:
2 packages graham crackers (out of the standard three in the standard box of graham crackers)
1/4 cup sugar
6 oz. butter, melted
Filling
4 8-oz. packages cream cheese, at room temperature
1 1/2 cup sugar
1 cup sour cream
4 eggs
1/2 pint whipping cream
2 Tbs. vanilla
1 tsp. lemon juice
1/4 cup orange or satsuma juice
Zest (grated peel) of one orange
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
2 oz. red food coloring
1. Put the cream cheese and the sugar into the bowl of a mixer and blend on medium-slow speed until completely blended and fluffy–about 10 minutes.
2. While that’s going on, make the crust. Grind the graham crackers into small crumbs in a food processor. Add the sugar and the butter and process until the butter has soaked all the crumbs.
3. Line the bottom (only–don’t go up the sides) of a 10-inch springform pan with parchment paper. Dump the crust mixture in and press a wedge of crumbs into the bottom corner all the way around. Then make a bottom crust, and finally press the remaining crumbs up the sides of the pan. It is not necessary for the crust to come all the way to the top of the pan. Set aside.
4. Add the sour cream to the mixer bowl. With a rubber spatula, scrape down the sides of the bowl after this and each other ingredient addition throughout the recipe.
5. Add the eggs, one at a time, allowing them to blend in completely before adding the next one. (Break each egg into a cup first to make sure it’s okay before you add it.)
6. Add the cream, vanilla, juices, zest, cocoa, and red food coloring. Mix for another five minutes or so, until no streaks are visible.
7. Pour the filling into the crust. Place the springform pan into a shallow pan (i.e., a pizza pan), and place it in the center of the oven at 350 degrees (no convection). Pour warm water into the bottom pan. Bake for 10 minutes, then lower the heat to 300 degrees. Bake for another hour and fifteen minutes, until you see the cheesecake has just a hint of browning on top.
8. Turn the oven off, but leave the cheesecake inside. After 30 minutes, open the door a crack and let the cheesecake cool in the oven another half-hour. Remove the cheesecake and let it finish cooling on a counter. After another hour, remove the sides of the springform pan and put the cheesecake into the refrigerator. Chill at least six hours before serving.
Makes one ten-inch cheesecake; serves twelve to sixteen.
Oysters Amandine @ Mr. Ed’s Oyster Bar & Fish House
After eighty-five years of serving simple but meticulously cooked seafood, the elderly owners of Bozo’s restaurant found the perfect person to carry the torch into the future. Ed McIntyre is not only an excellent operator of neighborhood cafes, but also a big fan of Bozo’s for his entire life. When he bought Bozo’s in 2013, he kept a lot of the old menu, but tripled it in size with a wealth of new dishes. The oysters amandine may be the best of them. They’re fried, topped with an old-style meuniere sauce, and then finished with toasted almonds. They come out of the half shell after a pass through the broiler. They’re not only delicious but very appealing to the eye.
Mr. Ed’s is also close enough to Lakeside Mall for it to be a good place to stop for lunch before going back to shopping. (If they’re open, which I think they are.)
Oysters Amandine.
Mr. Ed’s Oyster Bar & Fish House. Metairie: 3117 21st Street. 504-833-6310.
This is among the 500 best dishes in New Orleans area restaurants. Click here for a list of the other 499.
December 24, 2015
Days Until. . .
Christmas–1
New Year’s Eve–8
Looking Up
Today in 1968, the astronauts of Apollo 8 arrived at the moon, made ten orbits of it, and headed home. Frank Borman, one of the spacemen, transmitted a wish for peace on earth on that Christmas Eve. I heard his words on the radio, went out to look at the moon, and found the sight very peaceful, indeed.
Today’s Flavor
This is National Candy Cane Day. Have you found them this year? We had an unusually hard time locating the classic inverted-J shaped candy canes, the kind about as big around as a fat pencil, flavored with peppermint, and with one large red stripe and three thin ones. All of those qualities are symbolic (the “J” for Jesus, the stripes for the Trinity, etc.). However, we just like to have them around and on the Christmas tree for ready enjoyment. The expansion of variety in candy canes has brought some very unusual colors and flavors to the medium, and some of them are good. But there’s nothing like the traditional.
Deft Dining Rule #25:
The food and service in restaurants on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day will be at best half as good as it would be on a normal day, and possibly very irritating and depressing if you can’t go with the flow and enjoy it for what it is.
Gourmet Gazetteer
Lamington is a rural crossroads in north central New Jersey, forty-three miles west of Times Square in New York City. Its name comes from a Native American word for “place within the hills.” This describes it well. The farm fields cover wide patches of flat land. The highway and the river–a tributary of the Raritan River–bear the same name as the town. Over a hundred spellings of the name have been recorded over the centuries. The first European permanence came with the establishment of a Presbyterian church in 1740. The nearest restaurant is Houndstooth, a mile and a half away in Oldwick. I wonder if the residents of Lamington know of the coconut-covered little cakes of the same name, made by young people at Christmas parties in Australia.
Edible Dictionary
turtledove, n.–Known more from references to it in the Bible, folklore, and the Twelve Days of Christmas, a turtledove is a smaller member of the pigeon family. It gets its name from the black-on-light brown pattern on its wings, which does resemble that of a turtle’s shell. It’s an Old World bird, but it has a very close relative in the common mourning dove here in America. Its fame comes from its late migratory pattern (when the turtledoves show up, spring really has arrived) and from its habit of forming lifelong couples. Like other doves, it has long been hunted for food. It would take two of them to make an entree, but otherwise they resemble squabs, to which they are most closely related among commonly-eaten birds. Their meat is dark, and when cooked gently stays red, resembling beef.
Music To Eat Creole Gumbo By
Today is the birthday of two major players in the early days of New Orleans R&B. Dave Bartholomew was born today in 1920. His band and arrangements backed up most of Fats Domino’s recordings. . . And in 1924 on this date, Lee Dorsey entered the scene. His big hit was “Working In A Coal Mine,” but he was a fixture at the Jazz Festival and in local clubs for a long time.
The Saints
Today is the feast day of Adam and Eve, according the the Bible the first and second humans respectively. They were also the first to learn that it pays to be discriminating about what one eats. . . It is also the birthday, in 1491, of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits. If it weren’t for the Jesuits, it’s unlikely you would be reading these words of mine.
Annals Of Overeating
Today in 1991, Walter Hudson died. He weighed over a thousand pounds. Note to self: forget Walter Hudson for now, but remember him December 26.
Food Namesakes
British poet George Crabbe lived his first stanza today in 1754. . . Captain James Cook landed on Christmas Island, the world’s largest atoll, right in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It was uninhabited, but he found large stone statues of the head of Santa Claus on the beach. (Am I confusing this with Easter Island?). . . Professional wrestler Chris Hero was given a half-nelson by an obstetrician today in 1979. Eat a poor boy sandwich in his honor.
Words To Eat By
“Cookery is an old art, as it goes back to Adam.”–Louis, Marquis de Cussy, chef to Napoleon and cookbook author.
“Ever since Eve started it all by offering Adam the apple, woman’s punishment has been to supply a man with food then suffer the consequences when it disagrees with him.”–Helen Rowland, American writer and humorist.
“Give books for Christmas. They’re never fattening.”–Lenore Hershey.
Words To Drink By
“Holly and ivy hanging up
And something wet in every cup.
–Irish Christmas toast.
Free-Sample Acceptors Can’t Be Choosers.
One wonders whether it’s possible to get enough food to live on by going from one supermarket to another and grazing from the offerings.
Click here for the cartoon.