$20 Lunch Is Coolinary At Windsor Court Grill Room
In the golden years of the Windsor Court’s Grill Room, the cushy dining rooms were busy (but never noisy) with the full spectrum of New Orleans people. Lunch hasn’t been emphasized much in the past decade there lately. So it’s good to see the room doing something special for the duration of summer. It’s the Coolinary standard: two courses, $20. Two other rules obtain: your party can’t be more than eight people, and you have to turn your cellphone off. Sounds reasonable. Here’s the menu:
Local Baby Lettuces
Pickled peaches, shaved radishes, spiced pecans, goat cheese croquettes, cane syrup vinaigrette
~or~
Sweet Corn Soup
Sage-popcorn panna cotta, baby shrimp, summer truffle
~or~
Heirloom Tomatoes
Handmade ricotta, glazed pork belly, basil, e.v.o.o.
~~~~~
Sautéed Gulf Shrimp
Corn maquechoux, baby lima beans, red chili butter
~or~
Herb Roasted Chicken Breast
Turnip puree, roasted brussels sprouts, mustard jus
~or~
Grilled Hanger Steak
Pommes frites, sauteed spinach, wild mushrooms
Windsor Court Grill Room
CBD: 300 Gravier. 504-522-1994. www.grillroomneworleans.com.
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Saturday, August 2, 2014.
Palmettos On The Bayou.
I don’t use sports metaphors often, but one of them is appropriate here. I feel like a football player who breaks straight through the defense, pigskin in hand, and runs thirty yards. The Saints have usually begun their pre-season by now, and that usually means my Saturday show is kicked off the field. But I have a regular three-hour show at the regular time today. For the next two weeks, I’ll be on the full time, but later. After that, who knows?
Mary Ann is agreeable to the idea of dinner in Slidell. An assortment of listeners and radio salespeople have tried to get me to dine at Palmettos for the last few years. Indeed, I tried four times. The first time, there was a big party on the lovely deck around back of the restaurant. A wedding reception, I think. I managed to score only a small table in the center of the dining room. My closest neighbor was the band, which tuned up for a full hour, coinciding almost exactly with the time I was there. It was too noisy to carry on the meal past the entree.
My next three attempts fell on nights when the restaurant had a buy-out–a private party taking over the whole restaurant. In one of these, I asked for a table and was given one. It took some fifteen or twenty minutes to learn that nothing would happen at that table. Another buyout. The hostess thought I was just an early arrival for the party.
Tonight, we were smart for a change and called ahead. No buy-out, no big parties. We could expect a normal evening of dining.
The deck at Palmettos on the Bayou.
Mary Ann has not been to Palmettos, and is enthralled by the place. It’s nicer inside than the rusticity one expects from its railroad-track-and-bayou setting. The main dining room and bar are expansive, with tall ceilings and many windows. The rambling network of decks outside allows the sun to get lost in the assembly of tupelos and cypresses. Even the namesake palmettos stand around in abundance.
Eggplant Palmetto.
All this augurs a lovely evening. We’re even in the mood for seafood, which dominates the menu. I get the half-dozen fried oysters with truffle butter. Mary Ann has eggplant palmetto–two semi-circular cuts of the vegetable, panneed and crossed with what the restaurant claims is its “famous seafood sauce.” It’s creamy and there’s shrimp in it, but I hazard no further guesses.
Trout Pontchartrain.
Entrees. Hers is trout Pontchartrain, with its classical crabmeat topping, plus artichokes and mushrooms in a beurre blanc. A transparent green sauce completes a very nice-looking plate. Mine is catfish Bonfouca (the name of the nearby bayou, coated in a thicker, heavier way than I like, and covered with the legendary seafood sauce. It’s all on a mound of mashed potatoes–a practice left over from the 1990s, when chefs began stacking foods, without regard to textural contrasts (or the lack thereof) between the layers.
All the previous dishes have something in common. They are overcooked and to the same degree far too firm. Whatever fresh flavors the fish once had are obliterated in the pan. We both feel let down. For awhile there, we thought we had a new place to dine regularly. Mary Ann still loves the look of the place, but it may be hard to persuade her to join me here again.
Palmettos. Slidell: 1901 Bayou Lane. 985-643-0050.
Sunday, August 3, 2014.
Ordinary Time.
Remember Sunday dinner when you were growing up? At our house it was baked chicken, peas and corn. My sisters insist that their recollection is of roast beef, not chicken, but I remember that chicken so fondly that I refuse to be taken in by them. (We all agree on the peas and corn, because of an anecdote involving my father on that subject.)
My point is that Sunday was a special eating day. Unlike the other days of the week, the major meal came at around one in the afternoon, not six at night as it did the rest of the week.
That’s not how it is now at the Cool Water Ranch. If anything, Sunday features the most impoverished dining of the week. Lunch, if it happens at all, is minimal. We go out to dinner about half the time, and then only to the familiar default places, all of whom have wall-to-wall televised football.
That describes today perfectly. The younger members of the household go off on their own. Mary Ann and I wind up at Zea, where I have a salad and a bowl of their rich tomato-basil soup. I remember to ask to have the shredded cheese left off the salad, but I forget to give the same order for the soup, which absolutely does not need a tablespoon of grated parmesan in a pile.
Yes, it’s a lazy, summer day. I cut the grass, but so what?
Wait! There is one big change after all. The editor of CityBusiness, where I have written a weekly column since 1980, changed my deadline. Now I must file a column on Mondays instead of Wednesdays. This is good for me, for reasons too boring to write about.
Zzzzzzzzzzzz–ZZ!–Sknx! What? The chicken’s ready? What? No chicken? Oh. Too bad.
Monday, August 4, 2014.
Pizza Man With The Boy.
A much time as The Boy spends at our house, waiting for Mary Leigh to finish her day’s work at the pastry shop, he and I have never had dinner together, just the two of us. Mary Ann has been suggesting I do this, not because we aren’t chummy enough, but so I can communicate to him some standpoints about life that she thinks need to be put across.
The two of us turn up at Pizza Man, where many happy hours were spent when the children were little. Pizza Man (Paul Schrem, who is likely these days to be Slightly-Retired Father Of Pizza Man) is still playing his games in the big window, where the current generation of little kids is delighted to watch him draw faces with pizza sauce on the crusts and fling flour around.
We split one of the restaurant’s excellent, laughably enormous Italian salads. Then a large pizza–half cheese, half pepperoni. As has long been the case at Pizza Man, the toppings are superb, and the crust is soggy. I like it anyway.
I get the new white beer from Abita. The Boy–who does enjoy a brew or two–doesn’t. He’s trying to get himself in shape for a major physical he must undergo when he shows up for Army basic training this January. The one salient part of our conversation reveals that he will spend four months in the southwestern deserts.
This is the first I’ve heard of that. I wonder how that will affect the lovely romance, but I don’t see that as any of my business, beyond a general wish for their continued happiness. For now, the two of them are marking time.
So we two guys just shoot the breeze about the usual nothing.
Later, I find myself wondering whether it’s best for people in their young twenties to charge ahead with their careers, or enjoy that wonderful time of life to the maximum. Already set in my workaholic ways in those years, I didn’t handle that question well enough to have credible advice to give. I like the way things turned out, but I feel that I missed an important chapter or two.
Pizza Man Of Covington. Covington: 1248 Collins Blvd (US 190). 985-892-9874.
Cooking With Wine
Q.
I am far from a wine expert, so can you recommend which wines are good for cooking when called for in a recipe? And, while I’m here, should I concern myself that some of the people coming over are teetotalers?
A. No special training is required for you to drink or cook with wine. All you need to know is how to open the bottle, pour the wine into a glass, and raise it to your lips. Never concern yourself that you might buy the wrong wine. All food goes with all wine, with so few exceptions it’s not worth worrying about. With very few exceptions (see below), you can cook with any wine.
Cook with the wine you have left over from the last bottle you opened. Either that, or keep a bottle of inexpensive ($10) dry white wine (Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Grigio. . . most wines are dry wines for cooking purposes) in your refrigerator for cooking. Red wine is used less commonly in cooking, but save any open bottles you might find yourself with–also in the refrigerator. (Cold red wine isn’t the best to drink, but it doesn’t matter in cooking.)
Exception: Under no circumstances should you ever buy what’s labeled as “cooking wine.” It’s a remnant of Prohibition: undrinkable wine with salt added to make it even less appealing. It throws recipes off balance and should never be used. If you have any, throw it away. It’s utterly worthless. It will not be on the shelf with the other wines, but with the vinegar and stuff like that, so there’s not much chance of confusion.
The question about whether you should cook with wine for people who don’t drink has a simple answer. Just bring the pan with the wine in it to a good boil and hold it there for a couple of minutes. While you never get all the alcohol out of it, the amount remaining is about what you find in bread (where yeast and carbohydrates also combine to make alcohol). It’s unlikely that anyone will feel tipsy as a result of your deglazing a pan with a quarter-cup of Pinot Grigio. That leaves only those with serious health issues and those whose religion prohibits even a little wine for you to worry about.
Deviled (Stuffed) Crab
The crab cake is a dish imported idea from Maryland in the latter 1980s. It was rarely seen in New Orleans before then, and has driven similar dishes from the scene. But those indigenous crabmeat dishes are not half bad when made with our first-class crabmeat, plus an adventuresome flavor complement. I offer this one as a case in point. I like serving this as a side dish to pasta, entree salads, or even fried seafood.
This is one of relatively few dishes in this collection that begin with what is known around New Orleans as the “holy trinity”: onions, bell peppers, and celery.
2 sticks butter
1/4 cup chopped onions
1/4 cup chopped celery
1/4 cup chopped red bell pepper
1/4 tsp. curry powder
1 tsp. yellow mustard
1/4 cup dry white wine
1/4 tsp. Worcestershire sauce
1 Tbs. lemon juice
1 lb. white crabmeat
3 Tbs. green onions, sliced thin
2 tsp. salt-free Creole seasoning
1 tsp. salt
1 1/2 cups bread crumbs
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
1. Heat one stick of the butter in a skillet until it bubbles, and sauté the onion, celery, and bell pepper until soft.
2. Add the curry powder, yellow mustard, wine, Worcestershire and lemon juice to the pan and bring to a boil, stirring to blend. When the liquid is reduced by half, add the crabmeat, green onions, Creole seasoning and salt. Stir to blend, trying to to break up the crabmeat much. Remove from the heat.
3. As gently as you can, stir in the bread crumbs until the mixture is uniform.
4. Although you can make the resulting mixture into cakes or balls (which you then bake on a pan in the oven, or even deep-fry), I find it comes out better if you bake it inside crab shells or gratin dishes. Top each piece with a half-teaspoon flake of butter. Bake in a preheated 375-degree oven until the tops sizzle and brown.
Serve with lemon wedges and remoulade or tartar sauce.
Serves six to eight.
Peche Melba @ Antoine’s
Antoine’s dessert menu includes an inordinate number of what amount to sundaes–ice cream sprinkled with nuts and flooded with chocolate sauce, with a few other wrinkles. One of these is the classic French dessert (created by no less than Escoffier!) peach Melba. (“Peche Melba” on Antoine’s Francophone menu.) It’s a slice of pound cake topped with a ball of vanilla ice cream, then sliced peaches, then a raspberry puree. Dame Nellie Melba herself would like it, I think. I know I do.
Peche Melba appears on Antoine’s current Coolinary menu as one of the two dessert choices.
Antoine’s. French Quarter: 713 St Louis. 504-581-4422.
This dish is ranked #409 in NOMenu’s list of the 500 best dishes in New Orleans restaurants.
August 12, 2014
Days Until. . .
Coolinary Summer Specials End 19
Today’s Flavor
This is International Asian Dumplings Day. Dumplings–stuffed pasta, more or less–are found in almost every kind of Asian restaurant. It all started in China, but it’s found now from Burma to Sakhalin. Dumplings can be made in many shapes and sizes, with many kinds of stuffings. The most typical is a light pasta skin wrapping a mixture of meat, vegetables, and herbs. Steaming is by far the most popular method of cooking. Some–notably “pot stickers”–are cooked a second time in a hot wok.
The vast range of Asian dumplings is most striking in dim sum restaurants. Japanese shu-mai and gyoza and the Korean mandu are identical to Chinese dumplings. The mark of quality in all these is lightness. A dumpling with a thick, glutinous skin is a poor dumpling. Deep fried dumplings are the mark of a restaurant looking to streamline its operations, not make the best.
Edible Dictionary
lamb’s lettuce, n.–Also known as mache (French) and corn salad, lamb’s lettuce is liked by salad eaters for its small, tender leaves of almost perfectly uniform size, narrow at the base and rounded at the ends. Each leaf is about three inches long. A salad of lamb’s lettuce alone looks almost too perfect. The leaves radiate outward from a central root, never getting far off the ground. It was made popular in Louis XIV’s court, although it had been picked wild in the mountains into Switzerland for centuries. It grows in cool climates. in warm ones, it quickly goes to flower and seed.
Deft Dining Rule #191
When you can pick up a freshly-cooked pot sticker with chopsticks, dip it in the sauce, and transfer it to your mouth without its splatting pack to the table, you can claim a blue belt in chopsticks usage skills.
Gourmet Gazetteer
Cracker Summit, Montana is in Glacier National Park, and about twelve miles from the Canadian border. It towers to 9832 feet, nearly 4000 feat above the water in Cracker Lake, at the bottom of a glacier-carved canyon just a half-mile to the northwest. Cracker Lake is famous for its striking turquoise water. Siyeh Glacier is at the head of this canyon, but it’s shrinking fast. All this is less than a mile east of the Continental Divide, which means that water flowing out of Cracker Lake winds up passing through New Orleans. It’s very close to the farthest-removed source of our water in America. It’s also in rugged territory, to which you must pack your own crackers. It’s a twenty-three mile hike to the Leaning Tree Cafe, just outside the park in Babb.
Eating Across America
Chicago was founded today in 1833. Originally the point from which boats on Lake Michigan would portage to the streams leading to the Mississippi River, the site’s advantages as a transportation hub soon became evident. When the railroads boomed, so did Chicago. The rails made it the center of many industries, not the least of which was the shipping of meat, beef in particular. Chicago has been a great steak town since the arrival of the first cattle cars. It’s a terrific place to eat anything else these days–probably the most underrated (except by Chicagoans) eating cities in the country. The restaurant scene is not uniformly fine–it’s dominated by chains, including many local ones. But the best of Chicago rivals the best anywhere else.
Eating Around The World
This is the Glorious Twelfth in Yorkshire, England, marking the beginning of the grouse and ptarmigan hunting season. I wonder how many of those birds are still around in England, after being shot at for as long as they have been. In this country, the only way you’d ever eat such a thing (there is an American grouse, living in the northern woods) is to shoot it yourself. Fortunately, laws prevent any kind of sale of wild birds, so they won’t become darlings of expensive kitchens.
Gourmets Through History
Diamond Jim Brady was born today in 1856. He started small and ended up big–in every sense of the word. He made a fortune selling railroad supplies, and used it both in philanthropy and very high living. His appetite knew few bounds, and his dinners in New York City were legendary for their grandeur and size. He got his nickname from the million dollars’ worth of diamonds he collected over the years. We had our own Diamond Jim in New Orleans–Jim Moran, who was the owner of La Louisiane in the 1940s. But that was a different guy.
Music To Eat Kobe Beef By
Kyu Sakamoto died in a plane crash today in 1985. He was a popular singer in Japan for many years. He had the distinction of recording the only Japanese-language song ever to make it to Number One on the American pop charts. It was named Sukiyaki for the American audience, after the Japanese beef dish–which had nothing to do with the song’s real lyrics.
Food Namesakes
Cliff Fish, who was part of the 1970s rock band Paper Lace, was born today in 1948.
Words To Eat By
“Hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple dumpling.”–Herman Melville.
Words To Drink By
“Drunkenness is temporary suicide.”–Bertrand Russell, a very bizarre thinker, in The Conquest of Happiness.
Who would want to conquer happiness? On the behalf of what?
Everybody Loves To Grill.
No matter what your background, one day you get the bug for charcoal and wood smoldering in the pit under racks of ribs.
Click here for the cartoon.