Wine Tasting Series At Windsor Court
The sommelier of the Windsor Court Grill Room, John Mitchell, continues his series of informal wine tastings, surveying a different area of wine production each time out. This one is scheduled for Tuesday, January 13 at 7 p.m. It surveys the wines of the Rhone Valley in France, where Syrah and Grenache became famous. The price is $40, plus tax and tip. After you finish the tasting, you will find a strong urge from within you to stay and have dinner in the Grill Room, but that’s up to you. Reservations for the tasting (or for dinner) are required: 504-522-1994.
Windsor Court Grill Room
CBD: 300 Gravier. 504-522-1994. www.grillroomneworleans.com.
NOMenu invites restaurants or organizations with upcoming special events to tell us, so we might add the news to this free department. Send to news@nomenu.com.
Friday, January 2, 2015.
Custard At Peppermill.
The radio station isn’t what I would call a buzzing hive of activity, but the whole staff is there save for a few people who are taking vacation days. I can’t figure the way vacation works over there, and as a result over the years I’ve left vacation unused. One accumulates a certain number of hours every work week. But they must be used by the end of the year, or be lost! So how does a person get the vacation credit he earns on the last working day of the year? The management is actually flexible about this, but I’ll bet a lot of people wind up taking days off at the end of December, a time when few of us are getting a lot of work done, anyway. I predict that by the time I retire (around 2025, although I’m not looking forward to that) nobody except doctors and policemen will work during the last two weeks of the year.
I for one am on the job, still writing and recording commercials to replace those that refer to the holiday season, plus some new, first-of-the-year spots.
Then I head out to dinner alone and aimless. On such evenings there’s a strong chance I will wind up at the Peppermill. I order a Manhattan, pull out a New Yorker magazine, and try to catch up on my reading. I have found that, as a subscriber, I can read the entirety of every issue from my smart phone. The problem is that I have a Windows phone, which seems to be incompatible with everything. I enter the code from the label of my magazine, but to finish connecting the two technologies, I must click a button that is off the screen and can’t be reached by any method I have yet found.
Oysters Riccobono.
At least the dinner is familiar and easy. I start with a salad and finish with oysters Riccobono, probably the best dish here. Oysters, mushrooms, garlic, olive oil, and bread crumbs, all baked to bubbling, with a roll of angel-hair pasta bordelaise on the side. Yum.
Caramel custard.
Caramel custard for dessert. I developed a taste for this simple dinner-ender in my late teens, when I had dinner two or three nights a week at the Buck 49 Steak House on Carrollton Avenue at Maple. The Buck 49–now extinct–was the ancestor of the Peppermill. Many of its dishes live on in the latter-day restaurant, and caramel custard is one of them. Whoever prepares it at the Peppermill has the knack. It’s at least the equal of Galatoire’s, which is considered by many to have the ideal version.
Caramel custard once was in nearly every white-tablecloth restaurant in town. Now it’s a rarity, even in the old-line establishments. It’s not to be found at Antoine’s, Commander’s, the Bon Ton, or Tujague’s these days, let alone in the hip bistros.
Fortunately, it’s very easy to make at home. Which, if anyone but me liked it, I would do more often.
Peppermill. Metairie 2: Orleans Line To Houma Blvd: 3524 Severn Ave. 504-455-2266.
Saturday, January 3, 2015.
Breakfast @ Mattina Bella. A Discovery: Opal Basil.
I will publish this day’s entry on Monday. There’s much to say about the Opal Basil, and I don’t have time to do it justice today. Instead, if you will, this:
Sunday, January 4, 2015.
Doughnuts, King Cake. Choriqueso, Enchiladas De Molé.
I make my third appearance in the choir loft at St. Jane’s. (I neglected to note that I was there on Thursday, a holy day of obligation, formerly celebrated as the Feast of the Circumcision but now carrying a family theme.) The loft is nearly full, with some young singers engaged in the performances. I like it.
Before I even arrive I am thinking about the coffee and doughnuts that will be served after Mass to all the clued-in parishioners. By the time I get there (stopping to talk with a number of people who spot me and wonder whether I am who I am, or Steven Spielberg), the coffee is gone (except for decaf, which of course isn’t coffee). King cake is here, and I eat two thin, very sweet slices. The oversize, not-so-good doughnuts that seem to appear at every parish event like this are thoroughly unappetizing. Good! I may finally be shut of my lifelong mental association between Mass and doughnuts.
One of the people I speak with today outside the church is John d’Hemecourt. He is the owner of the Abita Quail Farm, a former restaurant now operating (for a couple of decades, at least) as a catering facility. Nice rustic scene there and good food. John and I have many New Orleans Incest connections, as per my theory that only 500 people actually live here. He and I were both heavily involved in campus politics at (LS)UNO in the early 1970s. We were both in the convenience store business for a fair length of time. And our circles of friends intersected improbably often. But our paths have not crossed in decades, and we catch up.
Not long after I get home, the Marys and The Boy go to lunch at La Carreta, and I tag along. Despite the fact that it’s so cold and windy that even the most palate-searing food cools to below room temperature faster than I can eat it, Mary Ann insists on eating outside. We are the only ones out there. The people inside must think we’re fools. And maybe we are.
Usual regimen: choriqueso (two orders for the table, plus two more orders of just queso), steak tacos for The Boy, chicken enchiladas with molé poblano (olé!) with bean soup on the side for me. We return home and I walk all this off in a full one-hour strut around the ranch. Winter is at its worst when it’s wet outside, which it is today and very.
La Carreta. Mandeville: 1200 W Causeway Approach. 985-624-2990.
David Guas’s King Cake
New Orleanians celebrate the end of the Christmas season and the beginning of the Carnival season on the same day: January 6, the feast of the Epiphany, also known as King Day for the three Magi to whom the baby Jesus was first revealed to the world. The day has its distinctive dish: king cake, inherited along with the rest of New Orleans’s French culture. King cake is as popular in New Orleans as any other local specialty. We start seeing king cakes in large numbers right after Christmas, and they’re everywhere until Mardi Gras. In recent years, bakeries have begun making king cakes much earlier–in Christmas, Thanksgiving, and even Halloween colors. I am opposed to this spread of what is more enjoyable in its season, but know that the trend is unstoppable.
Here’s something else I know: Unless you really enjoy baking and are good at making yeast breads, it’s not worth the trouble to make your own king cake. It’s the kind of thing that a commercial baker can turn out far more easily than the home baker. Not only that, but people are so accustomed to eating bakery-made king cake that they often reject as weird even a well-executed individual work.
I gave up on creating my own king cake recipe years ago. However, I have a baker friend in Washington D.C. who has a great recipe in his book GoodDamSweet. David Guas is a New Orleans guy who moved to D.C. with his wife Simone Rathle (who was for a long time the p.r. lady at the Windsor Court). So he understands the concept of king cake and what people expect of it. He has his own artisinal bakery in the D.C. area, and his book is terrific. I add more cinnamon when I bake his recipe, but otherwise it’s perfectly to my taste.
1 (1-1/4-oz.) package dry-active yeast
1/4 cup warm milk (105°F–115°F or warm to the touch)
1 cup plus 6 Tbs. bread flour plus extra for rolling
1 Tbs. honey
3/4 cup cake flour
2 large whole eggs plus one large egg yolk
2 Tbs. granulated sugar
1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp. vanilla extract
1/4 tsp. almond extract
1 tsp. salt
5 Tbs. unsalted butter, at room temperature
~
Egg wash:
1 large egg
1 Tbs. milk
~
Icing and decoration
2 cups confectioners’ sugar, sifted
2 Tbs. light corn syrup
3 Tbs. milk
1/4 tsp. vanilla extract
3 cups granulated sugar
Green food coloring
Gold or yellow food coloring
Purple or red and blue food coloring
1. Whisk the yeast with the warm milk in the bowl of a stand mixer until dissolved. Add 6 Tbs. bread flour and the honey. Using the paddle attachment, mix on low speed until smooth with a few small lumps, scraping the bottom and sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let it rise until doubled in volume, about 20 minutes.
2. When the dough is doubled, add 3/4 cup bread flour, and all the cake flour, eggs, egg yolk, sugar, cinnamon, vanilla and almond extracts, and salt. Mix on low speed until combined, then switch to a dough hook. Increase the speed to medium, and beat until smooth, about 2 minutes.
3. Increase the mixer speed to medium-high and add 4 Tbs. of butter, one Tbs. at a time, mixing well between additions. Continue to knead until the dough forms a slack ball that will hang loosely on the dough hook and be sticky to the touch. (It shouldn’t slap the bowl, but it should hold together). This should take 2-3 minutes. If the dough doesn’t hold together, add up to 1/4 cup of bread flour and keep kneading until it does.
4. Coat the inside of a large bowl with 1/2 Tbs. of butter. Transfer the dough to the bowl, turning it over in the bowl to coat with butter. Cover the bowl with a piece of plastic wrap and put it in a warm, draft-free spot until the dough has doubled in size–about 1 hour.
5. Line a rimmed baking sheet pan with parchment paper. Coat the parchment paper with the remaining butter. Generously flour your work surface with bread flour. Turn the dough out onto the work surface and sprinkle the top with flour. Using your hands, press and flatten it into a rectangle.
6. With a rolling pin, roll the dough into a 1/4-inch-thick strip about 24 inches long by about 6 inches wide. Starting with one of the long sides, roll the dough on top of itself, making a long, thin baguette-shaped length. Pinch the edge to the body of the dough to seal. Then turn the dough so it lies horizontally on your work surface, and gently roll it to even out any bulges and create a more or less consistent 1 1/2-inch-wide rope. Bring the two ends of the dough together and pinch them together.
7. Carefully transfer the dough oval or circle to the prepared sheet pan. Cover with a piece of plastic wrap. Set in a warm, dry spot to rise until doubled, about 1 hour.
8. Heat the oven to 375°F. Whisk the egg and milk together in a small bowl. Brush the egg wash over the top and sides of the dough, and bake the king cake until golden and cooked through, 25 to 30 minutes. Set on a rack to cool completely.
9. Make the icing while the cake cools. Whisk the confectioners’ sugar, corn syrup, milk, and vanilla together in a bowl until smooth and completely incorporated. Cover the bowl with a damp kitchen towel until you are ready to glaze the cake.
10. To make the colored sugars, divide 1 cup of the sugar into three sealable quart-size plastic bags. Add 4 drops of green food coloring to one bag, 4 drops of gold or yellow to another, and 4 drops of purple to the last bag. (If you don’t have purple, mix 2 drops each of red and blue food coloring in a spoon, and mix with a toothpick.)Seal the bags and shake them to combine the sugar and food coloring.
11. When the cake is cool, spoon the icing over the cooled cake. Immediately after icing, decorate with the colored sugars in patches of one-third or one-sixth to surface area. Slice and serve immediately.
January 9, 2014
Days Until
Mardi Gras–39
Valentine’s Day–35
Eating Across America
Connecticut, The Nutmeg State, became United State Number Five today in 1788. The nickname commemorates a fraud. Nutmeg, a tropical spice, cannot be grown there. But it was expensive enough that some early Yankee con men carved nuggets of what looked like nutmeg from wood and sold it as such to anyone they could fool. The tradition lives on: now Connecticut’s specialty is insurance.
Today’s Flavor
In honor of the statehood of Connecticut, this is National Nutmeg Day. Nutmegs are the fruits of a small tree native to the East Indies. It’s really two spices in one: the nutmeg itself, which looks like a pecan but smaller, and mace, which is a lacy covering around the nutmeg. Both are used in recipes.
Mace has a more powerful aroma, but nutmeg has the more intense flavor. Indeed, a little nutmeg goes a long way, especially when used in a savory dish. Like what? Sneak a pinch into cream sauces and bechamel. You won’t taste nutmeg, but you’ll notice an improvement in the finished dish.
Most of us have jars of nutmeg that should have been thrown away years ago. The old stuff has as much flavor as the grated wood that gave Connecticut its unlikely nickname. The best way to use nutmeg, of course, is to grate your own as you need it–if you can find the damn nutmeg grater.
The Old Kitchen Sage Sez
No dish ever needs a little more nutmeg.
Annals Of Popular Cuisine
Campbell’s Soup was made a trademark by the Patent Office today in 1906. The first of their soups was tomato. . . In other food branding news, today in 1984, Wendy’s premiered a strange new advertising campaign that added a new catchphrase to American speech: “Where’s the beef?” The line was delivered by Clara Peller to a fellow octogenarian to express her disappointment with the product of a competing burger joint.
Gourmet Gazetteer
Chicken Lake is barely inside the panhandle of Nebraska, in the howling winds of the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains as they get buried beneath the High Plains. It’s way out there, with the closest major city Cheyenne, Wyoming, 242 miles southwest. Nor is it welcoming in any other way: Chicken Lake is often bone dry, and when it contains water it’s not really drinkable. It’s trapped inside of hills with not much place for the water to go except up into the sky. A good place to remember next time you think you don’t like where you are now. It’s a fifty-four mile drive to the nearest restaurant, the Pheasant Run in Hay Springs.
Deft Dining Rule #239:
The world’s most underrated combination of flavors is seafood with beans. Any kind of either tastes great together.
Music To Eat Vitello Tonnato By
Domenico Modugno was born today in 1928. The Italian singer had a Number One hit in the United States–in Italian, yet!–with a song titled Nel Blu Dipinto Di Blu. It was better known as Volare. One of the most familiar songs in the world, it is heard in Italian restaurants everywhere. Spunto, a short-lived restaurant on St. Louis Street (in the building where Nola is now), played Volare at top volume every half hour. The waiters would go around the room warning that it was about to start, so as not to alarm the patrons.
Edible Dictionary
steamed buns, (Chinese), n.–A kind of Chinese dumpling made with a leavened dough, instead of the pasta-like dough used for most dumplings. This causes the skin to puff up and become soft, white, very moist, breadlike layer an inch or more thick. Pork and gelatin are in the center. As the name implies, these dumplings are steamed before serving. The heat makes the gelatin melt and forms a pocket of rich broth in the center with the pork. Steamed buns of several kinds are a mainstay of dim sum restaurants, where they are most commonly found in this country. Be sure to have hot tea standing by; steamed buns need to be washed down.
Food In The Funnies
Today is the birthday, in 1901, of Chic Young, who created the Blondie comic strip. It’s more about her husband Dagwood than Blondie. Dagwood is an iconic chowhound, although he doesn’t appear to be an ounce overweight. His finest creation is an overloaded sandwich on a whole loaf of French bread. It contains every known foodstuff, including whole fish. Such things have come to be known as a Dagwood Sandwich. A few years ago news came of the development by New Orleans-based chain of Dagwood Sandwich Shoppes. There are a few of them around the country, but none here.
Food Namesakes
It’s the birthday, in 1913, of actor Eric Berry, who appeared in the film Double Exposure, among others. . . Wally Mary Stiefel McBride Baker was born today in 1898. She was the oldest person in history from Delaware. She passed away in 2009 at 111 years old. . . Television personality Beth Troutman saw the Big Tally Light come on today in 1977.
Words To Eat By
“Richard Nixon committed unspeakable acts with cottage cheese.”–Jay Jacobs, the former New York restaurant critic for Gourmet. It’s Richard Nixon’s birthday (1913).
Words To Drink By
Ho! Ho! Ho! To the bottle I go
To heal my heart and drown my woe
Rain may fall, and wind may blow
And many miles be still to go
But under a tall tree will I lie
And let the clouds go sailing by
―J.R.R. Tolkien
Questions Of Taste We Never Have Eever Answered #64868.
Really, fungi more often than not make very little statement at all, and so most dishes involving them soon dissolve into meaninglessness. But consider this: maybe that’s the mushroom’s way of keeping us from eating them.
Click here for the cartoon.