Some Very Unusual King Cakes At Butcher.
Unusual Maggie Scales, pastry chef for the Donald Link Restaurant Group, is once again baking highly offbeat king cakes for sale at Cochon Butcher. That’s the very casual cafe behind the main Cochon dining room. The oddity as that these king cakes are not limited to cinnamon and sugar in their fillings, but also the likes of Meyer lemon, almond, chocolate pecan, and strawberry. The most creative is The Elvis: peanut butter, banana and house-cured bacon topped with marshmallow. More on this. . .
Saturday, January 3, 2015.
Breakfast @ Mattina Bella. A Discovery: Opal Basil.
I ask Mary Leigh if she and The Boy would like breakfast with the old man, and they do. It’s been many weeks since the last time. Mattina Bella’s usual fine work. Mary Leigh gets a two-egg (small) “Country Boy” omelette. That sounds like a contradiction, but the name refers to its inclusion of all the meats in the house. It’s Mary Ann’s favorite. One of my favorites is before me: fried eggplant at the bottom, covered by Italian sausage, slices of tomato, topped with poached eggs and hollandaise. Nobody does this kind of breakfast cookery better.
Mary Ann joins me on the radio show as co-host for the second time. We have one problem to overcome: we both are primary voices, and we have to learn how to let the other person take over in turn. But I think she adds a new dimension, and she is having fun doing it.
Afterwards, she says that she wants to have dinner in a restaurant that is 1) different and b) nice-looking. We go through the list, then one of us thinks of Opal Basil. I have heard nothing but good reports about it during the six or so months it’s been open. It’s in an easy location to miss: across a side street from the Mandeville Trailhead. Downstairs, under the name “Viva Foods,” chef-owner Michael Vasquez serves salads, sandwiches, desserts, coffee, ice cream and the like.
The real action–and what we came for–is upstairs. Although it’s only open for dinner three nights a week, that is enough to nearly fill the place.
We run into Don and Andrea Smith, who we have not seen in a few years. They have come with us on a couple of our cruises, and we go to know them well enough that we had dinner with them now and then. They live more in Baton Rouge than here, is why we don’t see them often.
We join them at their Opal Basil table, where they are already indulging in foie gras and a few other small plates. These seem to comprise most of the menu, and are more ambitious than I expected. There’s even a chef’s tasting menu. The $37 repast has four courses, described as follows: “Seafood. Chicken. Beef. Sweet.” When I ask the waiter to vouchsafe some details, he says, “I don’t know what will come to the table until it comes to the table,” he says.
Cornbread with sauce.
The chicken dish from the tasting menu.
This is hard to resist for me, especially given the price. While we’re waiting, we have some cornbread covered with a creamy, lightly citrusy sauce. Then a kind of gratin of feta cheese with crabmeat and two sauces, set in an avocado. The chicken course combines white meat with chicken sausage, a brown sauce, and som citrus again. All of this is wonderful.
The steak is an offbeat cut–I think I heard flatiron, but it’s hard to keep track when even the waiter isn’t sure what the kitchen is doing. There’s a slice of griddled cheese atop the two slices of beef, with a poached egg on top of the whole assembly, with what tastes like bearnaise–and very good at that.
The beef on the tasting menu.
Shrimp brought together with some other things.
Mary Ann gets an equally hard-to-describe pile of shrimp and vegetables. She likes it as well as I have liked my parade of courses.
Blueberry bread pudding.
Dessert is a rich bread pudding topped with blueberries and a sauce anglais. Again, I’m not sure if I have all that right, but I do know that it was very good.
The tasting menu comes with a choice of two beverages: two glasses of wine, two cocktails, or one and one. I am on the latter program, with the cocktail being an interesting merger: a satsuma Sazerac.
On my second trip here–which will probably take place soon–I will take better notes than I did tonight. It’s maddening to not have even sketchy definitions of the food. But it’s worth the tradeoff for this great eating.
We sure are getting a lot of good new North Shore eateries lately.
Opal Basil. Mandeville: 690 Lafitte St. 985-778-2529.
Salmon With Sweet And Spicy Glaze
My wife Mary Ann greatly enjoys a dish called barbecued salmon. It’s sort of a cross between smoking and grilling, with higher heat than you’d use for lox-style smoked salmon. It can be served hot or cold, usually with a sweet glaze with some zing. Someone gave me a side of salmon from an Alaskan trip a few years ago, and here’s what I came up with in this direction (after a few tries).
When you buy the salmon, look for the pieces that are rather thick and short, and avoid those that clearly come from the tail section. You want uniform thickness–and pretty thick pieces, at that. If Pacific salmon or wild-caught Atlantic salmon are available, that’s what you want.
Glaze:
Juice of one orange, strained
3 Tbs. honey (coat the measuring spoon with oil first)
1 Tbs. cane syrup (same spoon as above)
1 Tbs. salt-free Creole seasoning
1 tsp. chili powder
1 tsp. cumin
1 tsp. ground coriander
1 tsp. Tabasco Caribbean-style steak sauce or Pickapeppa
1/4 cup white wine, preferably off-dry or even sweet
1 Tbs. soy sauce
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1 Tbs. lemon juice
4 salmon fillets, cut from the center, about 8 oz. each
Salt
Black pepper
Zest (grated skin) of the orange above
Preheat the broiler and broiler rack to 500-550 degrees. Set the shelf so that fish on the rack will be about four inches from the heat.
1. Mix the glaze ingredients in a small saucepan and bring to a light boil while stirring. Cook until reduced and thickened–three or four minutes.
2. Meanwhile, mix the wine, soy sauce, olive oil, and lemon juice in a wide bowl. Place the salmon fillets into this marinade, skin side up, and marinate them for just about a minute. Turn them over and let them sit there thirty seconds or so.
3. Place the fish skin side down on the preheated broiler rack and run under the broiler about four inches from the heat. Broil until you just begin to see browning at the edges. Brush a thick layer of the glaze on each fillet, and sprinkle on the orange zest and put the fish back under the heat for another two minutes.
4. Remove the fish with a slotted turner and serve immediately.
Serves four.
Garlic Soft Shell Crab @ Banana Blossom
This hip little Thai restaurant on the West Bank has a menu full of originals. This one applies a fried, cut-up soft-shell crab to the Thai stir-fry referred to on Thai menus as “Thai garlic.” It’s a savory sauce with not as much garlic as the name implies, but with enough other savory vegetables to make for a big flavor with light textures and the freshness of the fresh herbs. Also good here is the same crab with red curry, bamboo shoots, and coconut milk, a bit richer.
Banana Blossom. Gretna: 2112 Belle Chasse Hwy. 504-392-7530.
This is among the 500 best dishes in New Orleans area restaurants. Click here for a list of the other 499.
January 12, 2014
Days Until. . .
Mardi Gras–36
Valentine’s Day–32
Food At War
You remember how hot dog makers used to stress that their products were all meat? That stemmed from something that happened on this date in 1943, when the Office of Price Administration introduced the Victory Sausage. It was like a hot dog, except that the meat wasn’t specified, and soybeans were used as filler. It took decades for the wiener to live that down.
Today’s Flavor
This is National Stewed Chicken Day. That’s a whole chicken cooked slowly in a lot of water, which slowly becomes a stock, then a gravy. (Onions, parsley, celery, and other seasoning vegetables are in there, too.) When it comes to the table, the meat is all but falling off the bones. The bird might be pulled apart into primal pieces (leg, breast, thigh, wing), but no more than that. A half-chicken is the right portion per person, accompanied by rice and some kind of vegetable (peas are the classic, but potatoes or carrots are also good). This is a marvelous, homely dish found on fewer menus every year, and that is a shame. Solution: make it at home.
Gourmet Gazetteer
Eaton is a town of 1800 Hoosiers in east central Indiana, seventy-one miles from Indianapolis. It’s a commercial center for the many farms in that part of the state. It’s on the Mississinewa River. Its water winds up in New Orleans through the Wabash, Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. In 1876, while attempting to dig a coal mine, the people of Eaton struck a major natural gas reservoir, which contributed to rapid growth of the town in the early 1900s. Eatin’ in Eaton is best at the Country Cupboard, on the western end of town.
Edible Dictionary
chicken Marengo, n.–A classic dish in the French canon, created by Napoleon’s private chef, and named in honor of one of Napoleon’s most glowing victories, the Battle of Marengo in 1800. It was said to be the emperor’s favorite supper. The dish has a distinctly Italian quality about it–as did Napoleon himself. It’s broiled or baked chicken browned in olive oil, then finished with white wine, olives, tomatoes, onions, and crawfish. The latter ingredient is rarely used anywhere except in Louisiana, where crawfish are so common in kitchens that it seems like a natural. But the crustaceans are definitely part of the classic recipe.
Deft Dining Rule #549:
Beware of dishes whose goodness is lost on people too young to have heard of them before. Nostalgia is an ingredient that cannot be detected by the palate.
The Old Kitchen Sage Sez:
There’s not a chicken dish in the world that isn’t improved by wiping the chicken first with a lemon wedge.
Wine Names In History
Today in 49 BCE, Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon River, a gauntlet laid down by the Roman Senate. When the soon-to-be first emperor of the Roman Empire moved his armies into battle against the Roman establishment, it changed the course of history. “Alea jacta est,” Seutonius is supposed to have said to Caesar. (“The die is cast,” meaning that that Caesar had reached the point of no return. What that has to do with the superb Napa Valley wine called Rubicon is less clear, except that it was coined by Francis Coppola, the film director of The Godfather movies certainly show his feel for the dramatic. He reunited two prime vineyards that were part of the original Inglenook winery to grow the grapes for this Bordeaux-style red blend.
Big Mouths
Radio windbag Rush Limbaugh was born today in 1951. Rush’s favorite restaurant in New Orleans was the old Brennan’s, where he dined on many occasions, according to Ted Brennan. To follow Rush blindly, order Brennan’s turtle soup, oysters Rockefeller, steak Diane and bananas Foster. That’s actually a pretty good dinner. . . Strangely enough, today is also Howard Stern’s birthday, in 1954. I find him as unlistenable as I do Rush. . . And in 1959 Bob West was born. He’s the voice of Barney, the big purple dinosaur, who makes much more sense than either of these other guys. But I know nothing of his dietary preferences. (He looks carnivorous.)
Food Namesakes
Actress Farrah Forke was born today in 1967. . . Hattie Caraway became the first woman elected to the United States Senate on this date in 1912. She was already a Senator, filling her late husband’s term. Huey P. Long was a fan of hers. . . American rock guitarist and singer Kris Roe, of the Ataris gave his first riff today in 1977.
Words To Eat By
“I went on a diet, swore off drinking and heavy eating, and in fourteen days I lost two weeks.”–Joe E. Lewis, comedian and actor, born today in 1902.
Words To Drink By
“My grandmother is over eighty and still doesn’t need glasses. Drinks right out of the bottle.”–Henny Youngman, king of the one-liners, born today in 1906.
Keeping Up With Kitchen Protocol.
The creation of the brigade organization of cooks is considered an historic breakthrough in making the modern restaurant possible. The well-defined patterns of behavior are important to keeping the workflow efficient. They also include a language understood by all cooks of all backgrounds. Here is a fine example of this.
Click here for the cartoon.