Mayhaw Man

Stock is always better. Sometimes I use ham stock if I have it, sometimes chicken or whatever. But, to stock or not to stock? Stock.

whoops

1) Get a bowl. A large one with a flat bottom would be most suitable 2) Put some of the scraps in the bottom of the bowl for the first layer 3) Heap in some homemade ice cream suitable for the type of cake scraps being used 4) Layer on some more cake until well covered 5) Eat. Smile. Take pleasure in your oversupply of cake and ice cream You could also make two of these and please someone else. Then again, you could just construct two of them for you. Simply eat one, and cover the other with saran wrap (mashing down slightly to keep out the air and giving you a nice ice cream sandwich effect) and eat the other one later. Too much cake is never, ever a problem in my book.

We send Haydel's King Cakes as work gifts and everyone has always seemed pleased (if not, just a little, befuddled as I usually have to explain what they are to the clueless masses). Last year they were including a Mardi Gras CD, but I'm not sure that they are doing that now.

What about The Oyster Bar at Grand Central?

I was going to tell you Randazzo's because they make my favorite one, but if you take a look at the site, you will find that I would be wasting your time-they're sold out through the holiday. Wow. So, aside from Haydel's (which are, in fact, good) you might want to take a look at Gambino's . They know a thing or two about king cakes.

Chef Boyardee is about as famous as you can get.

I am nothing if not bumfuzzling. In my current kitchen, I have a side by side. It has a huge refrigerator and I suppose what amounts to a standard size freezer. The square inch thing is probably pretty large, but in terms of practical storage space, especially when taking air flow into account, it's just not large enough to be my only freezer. Happily, I have a big chest freezer that takes the overflow, so, generally, the only thing in my side by side is stuff that I might use pretty regularly. What I meant when I mentioned turkeys (or any other oddly shaped food) is that it makes for a messy freezer when I am trying to cram the frozen leftovers in on top of whatever else that I have in there. Also, this particular model has an ice maker in it, making it even smaller. I believe that it would probably be much more useful were it not for the icemaker and all the mechanical junk that goes along with the water and ice in the door feature-which I never use. I am an old school, reach in and get the ice, kind of guy.

Side by sides aren't worth anything. They're not wide enough nor are the compartments large enough to hold any kind of real life sized containers-or something like a turkey or some other large item. You have to give up valuable real estate to do stuff like freeze the bowl for the ice cream maker, etc. and just generally there isn't enough space. I don't have alot of preference on the top and bottom freezer argument, but one or the other is miles away better than side by side-at least the ones that I have come into contact with.

I loved it. Peeping in my undies drawer for my blindfold, so I'll be appropriately attired if someone's nuts enough to take me there. And in fact, I'd leap at the chance. ← Apparently, if you leap too high, you'll need medical attention. The ceiling is filled with sharp objects.

How about a slash and burn review? Wow. Somebody peed in Bruni's Cheerios

Al Copeland Enterprises makes all of the stuff for Popeyes, and most for Church's, until 2029. It was part of his settlement when he sold everything after blowing the deal when he bought Church's Chicken. The products-spices, wet mixes, dry mixes (think biscuit mix) are made at Diversified Seasonings in Covington, LA in a huge plant that was completed just before the hurricane. Al is, well, a piece of work. His story is here, in case you are interested. He's unapologetically flamboyant but a seriously good businessman. I've known him, somewhat, for a very long time. I used to make beer for him, in fact, when Copeland's was serving house branded beer.

Lard. Trust me on that one. Lard. Those beans were developed for Al Copeland by a really talented chef named Warren LeRuth. The guy ran a great place on the West Bank and then went into recipe and concept development. In fact, LeRuth's was the first "real" French restaurant that I ever dined in. It closed probably 25 years ago, but people still talk about the place.

I, for one, will be looking forward to the next few weeks. I enjoyed this a great deal. And the Ramones are always appropriate on a short-handed, busy night.

Ok, so I just used Recipe Gullet. That's how much I like you. I even checked to make sure that it worked, which it doesn't always (at least not for me). Here you go-Easy New Orleans Style Red Beans and Rice Tonight, as with most Monday nights since the levees failed, I will be going to a friend's house over on Magazine St and enjoying a couple of bowls of these (or some similar-my friend Pableaux is a proponent of the pressure cooker method-which I abhor on principle-but which in reality works really well) with an ever growing group of new friends and some very old ones, as well. I love red beans and rice. There is a comfort associated with this dish that, for me, is hard to get with many others. They are what they are, and, ultimately, there's not much to them. But for now, they have come to represent comfort, friends, good conversation and some solace that has been difficult to find in the last year and a half. Plus, they taste good. I hope you make them and enjoy them. Please feel free (I insist!) to adjust the seasonings. I make these at least twice a month, but I never, ever measure anything (though I do accurately know about the veg. content-so you can follow that pretty well, I think). I can tell you that they always take more salt than you think that they will. Also, if you like them super creamy, just remove about 1/4 of the beans and mash them or whizz them up and put them back in. Wallaaah! Creamy beans. Get some crusty bread, maybe a salad if you want one, and some big ass red wine and dig in. I hope that you enjoy them. Best, B

Dog n Suds Lum's Shakey's Pizza I mention these because, I'm pretty sure, that they were the first fastfood that ever showed up in the North LA burg where I grew up. I really liked Dog n Suds when I was a kid. Lum's? Not so much. Shakey's was cool not for the pizza or the oddly colored beer that my dad and his buddies drank there, but because it had a player piano availabe to throw quarters into. It was like magic or something, that piano.

Easy Red Beans and Rice Red Beans and Rice, at least made in this way, is an old New Orleans tradition. They are typically served on Monday's here, as that is when women used to do the week's washing and beans were something that could be cooked, relatively unattended, while the scrubbing, the hanging, the ironing, and the folding was taking place. Here in New Orleans these are almost always made with Camellian Brand Red Kidney Beans, but any good quality dried red bean will work (you can also sub white beans in this, up the cumin, add some chile powder, and sub the sausage for an equal amount of grilled chicken, and you will have White Chile, as it is called here). 2 lb Dried Red Kidney Beans 3 T Olive oil 3 medium yellow onions 2 green bell peppers 3 stalks celery 3 jalapeno peppers (seeded) 3 T salt to taste (more than you think) 2 T Black pepper 2 tsp Cayenne pepper 1 tsp Cumin 2 tsp Rosemary 2 tsp oregano 3 Bay Leaf 2 lb smoked sausage Put first 13 ingredients into a large, heavy bottomed pot, cover with 2 times their volume in water (enough to keep them from surfacing as the beans soak up the water) and let soak overnight Bring pot with first 13 ingredients to a boil. Turn pot down to a low, low simmer, stirring occasionally to keep from scorching. Keep an eye on liquid level, as these are SUPPOSED to be a little soupy, not thick like goo. Simmer for approximately 6 hours until tender (your house will smell great) Add browned sausage about an hour before end of cooking time. Adjust seasonings to taste Serve over medium or long grain rice. Eat until sated. Keywords: Main Dish, Easy, American, Pork ( RG1937 )

I don't know if your Costco carries them, but some of the ones down here do and all of the Sam's Clubs have them, but I am a huge fan (well, not as huge as you are, but I'm huge, relatively speaking, I suppose) of Mary B's Frozen Ready to Bake Biscuits. So far, they are the ones that I think come closest to really well made biscuits concocted from scratch. They're crazy handy to have in the freezer. In fact, I just got home from a really swell parade and I'm feeling a bit peckish. I think that I will go throw six of those little white hockey pucks into the oven, right now. Buttered biscuits and Steen's Syrup make a fine late night snack.

Instructions with illustrations (sort of, anyway) here. I will put together something for you and post it on this thread (just as soon as I send instructions to Todd about cooking boned chickens-ack, I forgot about that). Crawfish boiling and other LA food activities-click here It's funny, and not a little bittersweet, about how much has changed since I did this blog. A number of those people don't live here anymore, and the very back yard that those photos were taken in probably had 6 to 10 feet of water in it on Monday, Aug 29, 2005. Hell, I don't live in that house anymore (though my children do). It's got a nice kitchen now. Life changes pretty damned fast. Enjoy it while you can. Make that roadtrip. You'll be glad that you did.

Well, it's not exactly fine dining, but you can't eat this anywhere else. Don't eat if you are getting on a plane within the next 12 hours. Really. It wasn't a good thing, in that regard. Uggh. From the SFA Oral History Site...

Is there any other kind, Dean? Perhaps I have missed something that I should know about.

There are a number of people that ship them here these days. I will try to put together a new list of the folks that I reccomend. On the other hand, it's an 8 hour drive. You could come over on a Friday, spend the night and eat some good food, have a few pops, and then get up in the morning and go buy a big load of crawfish. You could then drive home and have a big ass crawfish boil with all of your friends on Sunday. Simple, and frankly, this would probably still be less expensive than shipping live crawfish. They are asking some pretty crazy money for that service, no matter the price. If you are nice, hell, I might have a boil for you while you are here. Todd's right, I'm no amateur.

Of course, I have nothing to back this up with but personal, on the ground observation, but when I was working in Tecate, BC, MX one of my workers (a very talented young brewer) told me that a portion of the grain bill used to brew Tecate was sorghum. I didn't believe him and told him that he must be mistaken. The next day, he shows up with a cup full of grain that he had scooped up off of the railroad tracks behind the giant Tecate Brewery. Sure enough, it was sorghum (dried, apparently, but unmalted as far as I could tell). I went by there on my way home that day to see for myself. As per usual, there were lots and lots of grain cars on the tracks and with just a little bit of walking, I too found piles of spilled sorghum between the rails. I worked down there making beer just down the stree for almost two years, but I never got to the bottom of the story. Those guys at Tecate were secret agents extraordinaire. They were constantly chatting up my employees in town, trying to figure out what the gringos were up to down the street (even though we were owned almost completely by a Mexican national from DF) and generally making life miserable by running my green card (aka FM3 permit ) to make sure that all was in order. The one time that it wasn't, well, let me tell you, if you haven't ever been to jail in Tijuana you haven't missed anything worth doing. Yikes.

Big deal. My car does that. For what it's worth, I have an "8 pass broiler element for even broiling" on the Jenn Air that's in my house. That thing does, in fact, broil evenly. It also will, unless it is carefully watched, turn any perfectly good foodstuff into carbon in just a matter of seconds. It takes some getting used to.

I am a big broiler kind of guy. I like mine and use it frequently. It does take some practice to get used to (each oven is different, as well, so it's not like you can just move from one place to another and do the same thing you did at your own house) but once you are comfortable with using the broiler, it can become an important part of the kitchen operation. That being said, I think that the reasons that most people don't use them has more to do with physical stuff than cooking fears. They are a pain to clean up. Broilers, especially when broiling meats, tend to make a mess. Grease spatters all over the place and is difficult to clean up. On top of that, the high heat, the open flame, and the spattering meat often combine to make tons of smoke. This might be no big deal in a commercial kitchen, but unless one happens to have a venting system that works really well (venting to the outside, probably) there is a pretty good chance that you are going to stink up the house or that a well meaning neighbor will alert the fire dept. To me, there's not much better than a really good piece of steak, quickly seared on a white hot black iron skillet and thrown under a broiler for a quick finish. I love to cook steak that way. The broiler is also a swell way to make lots of toast fast. Totally worth the investment, that mass toast making.