Mayhaw Man

I'm assuming that this means that it is now warm enough that you feel safe bringing the food in from the yard.

Rachel, I don't know if the people who said that read eGullet, but I'd like to address them directly. People who know nothing about the city seem to want to tell others how to treat us and speak about us. How dare you claim that only images of trauma are appropriate when speaking of New Orleans. We still live here, and even though times are tough life does go on. New Orleans may be half dead, but it's still got more life than most American cities. Yes, we need tourists money. There is no doubt about that. I think, however, that there is another reason why we're so gratefully when anyone visits. Knowing that people can still be enchanted by the food and the architecture and the culture of New Orleans reminds us why we love the place. Somedays, it's hard for us to see it. I've had the pleasure of escorting several first time visitors through New Orleans recently. When they see the beauty of the place, even in the face of all our troubles, it reconfirms for me that I made the right decision in returning. If we followed the advice of those fools and only focused on the negative, I'm afraid it would break our spirit and we'd never rebuild New Orleans. ← What he said. Incidentally, this is being spoken by a man who, along with his lovely wife, made a decision to move BACK to New Orleans after the storm when they absolutely did not have any reason to other than that's where they really wanted to live. Thanks for that, Todd.

The butterbeans are easy- First, you get your Mom to give you butterbeans out of one of her 3 freezers because you have to replace the ones that you had only put up a month before the hurricane knocked out the lights for 8 weeks. That's the hard part. The rest is easy. I had the broth because of the fact that I had boiled 3 mallards for the stock and for gumbo meat (I have, literally, a freezer full of ducks-the end of the season-the part that I missed-was pretty spectacular and we have lots and lots of donations) I picked the ducks (carefully peeling the fat off for the cracklins-which are easy to make-just put the oven on 450, turn on every fan in the kitchen, put the fat pieces on a fine wire rack, watch your kitchen fill with smoke, and wait), cooled the stock over night, defatted the stock, froze some of the stock, and saved the rest for the beans. 3 cups of beans into a pot with a sliced onion, a couple of toes of garlic (whole), salt, pepper, and a bay leaf. Cook until just beginning to turn tender and add the livers and whatever other little niblets that you have around (you can even add some chicken livers if you don't have a family member smart enough to save the good parts when the ducks get cleaned). Cook until tender, but not until mooshy (I know, I know, I'm from the South, and YES, I do like over boiled peas and beans, but not in this case), al dente, if you will. Spoon them with a slotted spoon onto plates, adding a little of the onion and the naughty bits, and watch your friends smile and say something like (and I quote), "You know, I thought that where you're from ya'll just boiled peas and butterbeans in water with some onion and salt!" It's a very satisfying dish.

It's not pesky at all-it makes awesome oil for salad dressing and is perfect for seared tuna-you can really taste the orangy deliciousness on tuna or any other quickly seared fish. Here's the whole menu from Sunday night just for the record: Tamales with duck cracklins and a green chile sauce Mixed Baby greens with roasted yellow beets, red onions, and red radishes Leidenheimer's Italian Loaf bread-almost straight out of the oven (that's a great connection, that bread thing. I love it) Roasted mallards stuffed with granny smith apples and andouille and a very nice reduction of red wine and pan juices Baby carrots (local, really good) braised in duck fat (think carrot confit-it's good, trust me) Braised Teal with sweet onion compote Purple hull peas Butter beans cooked in duck broth with innards and such Pontchatoula Strawberry Sorbet Rice Pudding with Strawberries About 6 bottles of apparently very nice wine and two bottles of very, very nice Veuve Cliquot with dessert. I drank alot of soda. Oh well. That's about it, I think. But that's enough. This is fun to do and we try to do it occasionally. Everyone kind of pitches in, but two of us did most of it. Alison Vines-Rushing made the rice pudding and I can tell you that it was off the hook good. I could have eaten a quart, but sadly, there were no leftovers.

Sunday night I cooked ducks (wild ones) several different ways. One course was seared and braised duck breast with pearl onions and baby carrots (real baby carrots-not those little hunks that they have in bags in the produce section which are, basically, machined carrots). It was pretty simple and damned delicious (my dining guests, as often happens on these nights, included a couple of James Beard winners and at least 3 food writers/critics)-they loved it, so, technically anyway, I suppose that it would have passed muster with most discerning critics. 8 breasts were seared to a nice brown color in a very hot pan coated with just a bit of blood orange oil. A good red wine (can't remember what there was alot of wine at this particular dinner) was added to the pan at the end of the sear along with pearl onions, 2 sliced yellow onions, a thinly sliced yellow bell pepper, additional cracked pepper, a bit more salt (I salt on the front end as much as possible-it's dangerous, of course, but I like this method better), and a large sprig of rosemary. I braised at low heat for about 90 minutes, adding the carrots at the end of the braise (along with the livers of the ducks-I always save them when I clean ducks). The pan juices needed no additional work or thickening and were perfect for the very tender meat. It's simple and it's good.

Whoever says that you shouldn't be here, or wonders why you are here, should be taken out and flogged. WE NEED PEOPLE TO COME HERE NOW! Not only to spend money , but to see what the hell is going on here and go home and tell their neighbors. I, for one, am thrilled that you are here and are taking so much time documenting the food world here. A lucky interview with the mayor, a few minutes with P. Prudhomme (not easy to get, trust me. He is a VERY shy man and very tight with his time), and some of the other things that you have been doing show that you are interested in more than jambalaya. Beyond that, it's important for people to see that some of this place works, but also to see that much of it does not-at all. Sure things are opening up, slowly, but many parts of New Orleans that used to be completely vibrant are now, for all intents and purposes, abandoned save for a few stalwart residents who just don't know when to throw in the towel. This, all of this, needs to be reported and not just by those of us who are frustrated, angry, tired, and disillusioned (the letter posted above is accurate-the "Katrina Fatigue" thing cannot be overstated). The divorce rate is out of sight, substance abuse rates are skyrocketing (primarily fueled by alcohol as it's hard to buy anything else as the drug business got washed away with everything else), and the suicide rate is much higher than it has ever been,. This place is a social anthropologists dream world. Lab rats living on their own is not a bad way to describe most of us. It's tiring. Everyday you see something, maybe even something minor, that reminds you of just how massively catastrophic this all has been Thanks for coming. I'm sorry that I didn't get to spend more time with you than I did, but in this P-K world, if you have a good job, it's best to hang on to it. White collar work is hard to come by these days.

It's going to be a pretty quick cycle of events, if things go well. It was announced in The Washington Post today.

You are right. My point, though, is that yeast that is already in primary fermentation is growing at an incredible rate-i.e. yeast shipped and restarted in live wort under clean conditions. Even if you get a decent quality dry yeast, you still have to make a starter if you want to come close to these conditions and 1) it's a pain 2) you are taking a HUGE chance of infecting the stuff with all of that handling. I might, though, make an argument about the percentage of live yeasts in one of those little foil wonderbags that Logsdon ships out. I'll email him and find out. Actually, even better, I'll see if I can get him to tell us himself. He's a nice guy. He might bite. Who knows?

If I only contribute one thing to a better homebrew, this is it: USE LIVE YEAST CULTURES! There are several people out there who sell these, but only one company who does it consistently to the standards that I would approve of 100%. Wyeast does a great service for anyone looking to better their homebrewing efforts. Their methods are top notch, their prices are reasonable, and your beer will be a ton better for it. It's worth the trouble and you will be really glad that you did. Think about it-if you are going to spend all of the time sanitizing and cleaning that you should, why would you use a dry yeast that is probably 1/2 dead cells and might, probably, contains some kind of low level off components that will cause off flavoring and possibly straight up contamination. You will also get less lag time. This is the most dangerous time in the whole brewing process as all kinds of bad things can happen between wort cool and the the kick off of fermentation. Really bad things. Trust me. I've done it and been there. It's a bummer, and it's just as disappointing when you are making 5 gallons or 5000. Edited to say that the Wyeast sight has a bunch of information concerning brewing yeasts that is useful to everyone, whether you are following my advice or not.

You know, it's funny. I grew up in house full, a family full, a universe full of people who could cook. Gorgeous kitchens, from the simple but infinitely practical farmhouse kitchen of my grandmother to a technological wonderland of a kitchen that is my mother's (for example, she had the first Cuisinart that I, or anyone else in North Louisiana had ever seen-still has the damned thing). One thing that I had never seen, however, was a decent knife. I didn't know this, of course, as they would take down whatever inferior cutlery they had and have the sharpening guy shine em up pretty regularly. As a wedding gift I recieved a 3 piece set of carbon steel Sabatiers. It was like seeing daylight for the first time. They were just a world apart from anything that I have ever touched. I still have two of them (the paring knife ended up in my tackle box and eventually in the Gulf of Mexico). That 12" slicer is still, today, my favorite all purpose knife. I use it all of the time. You could do major surgery with the thing. A few whacks on the steel and you are slicing and dicing with the precision of that Ginsu Guy on TV. I say, buy them the knife. They might not want it now, but once they use it a while (especially if they get the other junk to use as a comparison) they will long appreciate it. I got a crazy amount of stuff when I got married, and as some of you might know, you kind of forget over the years who gave you what. I can tell you though, that Colleen Reeves, my mother's college roomate at Baylor, gave me those knives and evertime I see her, which isn't that often except for funerals and weddings, I tell her thanks. I'm sure that she doesn't remember it, but she always tells me how glad that she is that I enjoyed them-for the last 23 years. Buy the good one. Who knows? They might remember it 20 years from now.

You might give some thought to the names of your favorite spots-Drago's and Uglesitch's-The Slavs have long run the oyster business in South La-it makes sense that they often have the best as they are generally the ones selling them to everyone else. Bozo's has some pretty swell ones too (once again, Slavic), out in the same neighborhood as Drago's (well, roughly the same neighborhood, anyway)

Willie Mae's is working on financing. Dooky Chase is working on a much more complex set of issues, and not all of them money. The place got trashed (I helped gut it, I know, it was a mess). Dooky Chase is very complex, in terms of construction, it was underwater for weeks, and there are some severe issues to face given the size of the place and the way that it is cobbled together. The Scotch House, on the other hand, is a much smaller place and really, once we ripped everything out, it's a matter of rebuilding. I'll take R and J over there on Tuesday pm and they can see for themselves. They're destroyed restaurants in a pretty desolate and abandoned neighborhood. It's not pretty. If you would like to contribute towards these efforts, all you have to do is contact the SFA-Mary Beth will be glad to tell you how you can help.

Congrats, For the video version I would highly reccomend incorporating the piece of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" where the Black Knight is denuded of all of his limbs. This is just the kind of thing that can happen in the kitchen when things go badly with the cutlery.

I have one over the stove and one over the sink. They are used interchangably and I don't have any kind of system. Having two just means that I am less likely to leave the cutlery lying around to get smooshed somehow. Martha likes to use them for all kinds of stuff- and that's a good thing

The way I eat and to have a meal reputed to be better than Besh, I would need to get a cab...and graciously spend the 100. ← You know, it's funny. I wouldn't say that it was better than August, it's entirely in a different kind of league-not skill wise as they are all up on their chops in the extreme, but in thought and attitude. Both places are awesome. They are making food, as is John, that they consider to be really interesting and happily, and they hope that others do to. Even if others were not interested, they would likely be making it anyway, somewhere. The place is, truly, an experience and one that you aren't likely to forget soon. It's a Louisiana restaurant, run by natives, but they are doing things on another plane and I hope that they keep doing it for a very long time. I love the place-if that's not clear already .

You would be better off renting a car. A cab, round trip, would easily be over a hundred bucks. It's about an 80 mile round trip from downtown.

Barnes and Noble has it here. At least the ones that are open have it.

I am cooking something out of the book tomorrow. I haven't decided what yet, but I will let you know tonight. I suspect that it will involve seafood, but I just don't know yet. I'll look at it when I get home. I am looking forward to a long weekend of cleaning up after the bug tenting this week and then cooking for friends who are in from out of town to cover the disaster for various media outlets. Food on Saturday night, Sunday night, and bugs on Monday. And just so you foriegners know what I am talking about, bug tent wise, here you go (the house is a twin of the big one next door. These are huge houses, this is quite a project, and though it was a pain in the ass, I promise that NOTHING lives through this. They give you a 5 year termite guarantee when you are done with it, but man is it a life disrupter-

As far as I know, Guinness no longer makes a porter. ← Actually, Guinness is, traditionally, if not in actuality, a porter in style. I am sure that tons of people are going to jump in and argue that it's a stout (but I believe that stout is a more accurate definition, in the world of beer tasting, but it is, broadly, still a porter-malt flavor being in the forefront, as opposed to hopping-dark roasted malt being the primary characteristic in Guinness), but a porter is a dark, low alcohol, beer that was consumed by "porters" and other working folk as a healthful beverage during the workday back when people drank during the workday-not that they still don't, but you don't often see the fork lift drivers heading down to the pub for a quick pub lunch and a pint anymore. Damned shame that. Oh yeah, use the Guinness. It's good for you.

I understand that they have already ordered their first rail car loads of garlic and olive oil. It looks pretty good.

Thanks for these comments. New Orleans, right now, today, is still, easily, one of the three most eating cities in the country. Period. What we are missing and will be for a while, are many of the neighborhood joints that were so prevelent here. Slowly, even some of them are coming back. When the insurance companies pay, and things get fixed, people will move back and those corner door groceries will open back up. Sure as rain and hurricanes. The cleaner part could not be more true. It wasn't spotless before the storm, and now it's just a mess. Safer? I'd be willing to bet, without checking, that for the last 6 months we are the safest American city of our size. Dude, we have the NOPD, The Orleans Parish Sherriff's Dept, The INS, The National Guard, elements of the 82nd Airborne, The regular Army, the Coast Guard, and Lord knows who else patrolling out streets, rivers, and airspace. This is a cop shop like no other in the country-and we have waaay better doughnuts and coffee than they would get in Charleston. Well mannered? Better mannered? Have you ever spent any time here? I'm sure that the people in Charleston are very nice and all, but that is pretty much a generalization that I, and dare I say many, completely disagree with. Our manners, our ways, our customs, may be different that EVERYONE ELSE'S in the world, but they are nothing if not friendly and welcoming. We have more houses out of commission than Charleston even has houses. Right now there are, just in New Orleans and the immediate surrounding parishes, roughly 185,000 uninhabitable houses. And the Gulf Coast between Lake Charles and Mobile is not in much better shape, in some parts worse. This has nothing, nothing at all to do with inept politicians or anything else. This is completely related to really bad weather, poorly build levees, and slow paying insurance companies. I ask you, did the power company declare bankruptcy after Hugo? Did you have TWO Hugos in three weeks? Were any of the houses in Charleston underwater for 5 weeks? Does Charleston STILL have dead people in houses around town? I think not. I'm sure that the politics are all squeaky clean over there, and that life is rosy, but the magnitude of the situation here is just a bit different and the comparison is not valid. You should come here and have a look. Everyone who is going to even comment on the situation should. The tune you are singing will change suddenly and dramatically with just one hour in the car with me. Give me a call. As a friendly and welcoming native I will be happy to drive you around and then take you to someone's house, whom you have never met, and who will welcome you with style and grace, and feed you as well as you are going to be fed anywhere in this country. We've been doing it for months. I look forward to seeing you. ← Sorry to get you upset Brooks but I know of what I speak..... Born at Hotel Dieu Hospital, grew up in LaPlace, High School in Destrehan, field trips to the Audobon Zoo, Boy Scout trips to the old Indian mounds in Chalmette, hunted Alligator in the spillway, learned to ski in Ponchartrain, fished in Lake Des Allemandes, hunted ducks in Maurepas, SLU Grad, Delgado Culinary Grad, cooked at Christian's, Eiffel Tower, the old Andrew Jackson in the quarter and Brother's Po-Boys in Hammond. I even appeared on Tom Fitzmorris' radio show. My father was intimately involved in politics, law and the legal system in New Orleans and the surrounding area. We rode out Betsy, Camille and later Hugo and saw the good and the bad. For many years I marvelled at the city corruption (especially contemptable was the corruption within the levee boards of Orleans & Jefferson Parish). The corruption is nothing new, it goes back way past Sidney Barthalemew, Moon Landrieu, Chet Morrison even past Huey. I still have plenty of family and friends in N.O., Metairie, Hammond and LaPlace and have been back twice since Katrina. I still get tears in my eyes when I think about institutions like Angelo Brocatto's, Liuzza's and that Roman Candy guy. Will they come back? I did get off the topic a bit (I apologize) because the article was not about what city is more organized, able or tourist worthy. R.W. was making the point that New Orleans has temporarily lost its appeal and with it the high dolalr tourist interested in significant food. CHarleston is a growing food city with a certain charm and appeal and would be even if N.O were still in the picture. New Orleans will soon regain its composure, its livelihood and its tourists but this herculean task will not be done by the City, State or Federal Governments...it will be done by proud, hardworking never-say-die Louisiana Men (& Women) like yourself. I'll make a deal with you. If you want to fuss at me some more let's just PM one another instead of going public. ← I will take it to pm, and I wasn't even particularly upset (I've heard it all in the last 6 months and believe me, that was a mild response, tempered even). But I do believe that a quick check of your high dollar chef buddies will reveal that the business that they can do, given the giant lack of employees, is good, very good. It's weird, it's different, and it's not like it was last year at this time, but it's business. And part of this place will be fine, particularly the part that comes from what most people consider as reasons to come here in the first place-the part that won't be is being slowed by many things, not the least of which are the many faults that you reference. I'm not saying that you aren't right, just that in that one respect, fine dining, this is still a hell of a place to get something exceptional to eat. What's lacking is someone to wash your dishes when you are done with your meal and somewhere for your dishwasher to sleep or take HIS family to eat. That, my friend, is what's lacking now and what may be lacking for a very long time. Maybe forever. It's damned sad. And the Roman Candy guy? He's good. Liuzza's? Good. Brocato's? Lots of us are trying to help. Hopefully they will decide that it's worth it. Hell, I can name two women in their 80's who decided that, so I can't imaging that the Brocatos won't. No malice intended. Just a thick skin with an amazingly deep sense on anger, humor, and humility-all of which can be displayed on a moments notice, often at the same time. It's like that here. I've seen people cry while banking or making groceries, I've seen them laugh at things that are so innapropriate to laugh at, so wrong, that anyone from anywhere else would think that there was something horribly warped and bad about the person doing the laughing, and I have seen, really, things that will, forever, make me believe that people are good and that if you just spend some time looking at things in the right light, everything is going to be great. It just takes a very special light. Fortunately, it shines here more often than not. Otherwise, there would be a steady stream of bodies going over the side of the Huey P. It's pretty ugly here, at first glance. You have to do some thinking to see anything that even looks close to a bright side. Deep thinking. There are lots of reasons to leave and few to stay. For me, however, the reasons to stay outweigh the reasons to leave by quite a bit. And for the record, I have had a very long conversation with RW Apple since Katrina and I know what his thoughts were in late October and it has been interesting to see how they have developed. He and Betsy love this place. They'll be back soon, I'll wager.

Brett Anderson has a report on the situation at Mosca's. I, for one, will be in that number when they reopen the front doors to their little roadhouse in Avondale (or more accurately, Boutte). I love that place. Chicken Grande, Oysters Mosca, Italian Crab Salad. All of them are delicious and while I can make acceptable versions at home, I love the place. Where else could I have eaten dinner firmly lodged in between the Hansen's (Hansen's Snobliz-the best snoball on earth) and Carlos Marcello (mob kingpin better known locally as "The Little Tomato Farmer)? Good luck to them. Mosca's in today's Times Picayune

So, anyway, I spent part of my day working diligently to make sure that Johnny's had a supply of one of the main ingredients for their fine sandwiches-Poboy loaves from Leidenheimer's in New Orleans. Due to complications related to labor and shipping, Leidenheimer's is no longer able to ship bread out of New Orleans-this meant that Johnny's, rather than serving some kind of inferior product, would have to take them off of the menu unless a solution could be found and found quickly. Ann and Johnny's solution was to contact some of their New Orleans friends in the Southern Foodways Alliance and ask them if they could organize a bread lift. They could, and they did, and they will. It's what we do. For as long as it takes. The bread is picked up on Mondays and Thursdays and shipped overnight to DC (the cost for this, really, is more than it would cost one of us to fly up with bread as carry on and checked luggage-it's crazy expensive-but that's how they work. Just the best-nothing else) where it will be served for the next several days. This is the same bread that is used in New Orleans and just as fresh and perfect. In fact, it's so fresh that I got some photos of it coming out of the cooling tunnels and being packed by Mike, the head bread dude. The place is in an old building just off St Charles Ave and looks like a mess on the outside, but is a wonder of modern efficiency on the inside. I was there for about an hour and had the opportunity to talk to a number of folks working there and all of them were really nice and really knowledgable about what they do for a living and the importance of it to our food culture. A river of bread-poboys, muffeletta loaves, and french bread-all three lines pass by that sharp eyed lady and she heaves the misformed ones into that giant pile, which will end up as breadcrumbs-regular or Italian. Mike the Head Bread Guy packs the loaves for shipment to Johnny's. They all thought that this was pretty interesting, in that the had never had anyone come in and buy cases of bread for shipment to a far away destination like DC. Most of the time, they just put it together and it gets shipped from the loading dock, but that's not happening in Post K New Orleans. This lady was a fountain of information about how the whole operation works. Leidenheimer's is operating 24 hours a day, with a very short staff, just to satisfy the needs of the bread lovers on the Gulf Coast. Hopefully, soon, they can again begin shipping across the country. So, what you should do is go eat a delicious poboy and do your part for the restoration effort.

Thanks for these comments. New Orleans, right now, today, is still, easily, one of the three most eating cities in the country. Period. What we are missing and will be for a while, are many of the neighborhood joints that were so prevelent here. Slowly, even some of them are coming back. When the insurance companies pay, and things get fixed, people will move back and those corner door groceries will open back up. Sure as rain and hurricanes. The cleaner part could not be more true. It wasn't spotless before the storm, and now it's just a mess. Safer? I'd be willing to bet, without checking, that for the last 6 months we are the safest American city of our size. Dude, we have the NOPD, The Orleans Parish Sherriff's Dept, The INS, The National Guard, elements of the 82nd Airborne, The regular Army, the Coast Guard, and Lord knows who else patrolling out streets, rivers, and airspace. This is a cop shop like no other in the country-and we have waaay better doughnuts and coffee than they would get in Charleston. Well mannered? Better mannered? Have you ever spent any time here? I'm sure that the people in Charleston are very nice and all, but that is pretty much a generalization that I, and dare I say many, completely disagree with. Our manners, our ways, our customs, may be different that EVERYONE ELSE'S in the world, but they are nothing if not friendly and welcoming. We have more houses out of commission than Charleston even has houses. Right now there are, just in New Orleans and the immediate surrounding parishes, roughly 185,000 uninhabitable houses. And the Gulf Coast between Lake Charles and Mobile is not in much better shape, in some parts worse. This has nothing, nothing at all to do with inept politicians or anything else. This is completely related to really bad weather, poorly build levees, and slow paying insurance companies. I ask you, did the power company declare bankruptcy after Hugo? Did you have TWO Hugos in three weeks? Were any of the houses in Charleston underwater for 5 weeks? Does Charleston STILL have dead people in houses around town? I think not. I'm sure that the politics are all squeaky clean over there, and that life is rosy, but the magnitude of the situation here is just a bit different and the comparison is not valid. You should come here and have a look. Everyone who is going to even comment on the situation should. The tune you are singing will change suddenly and dramatically with just one hour in the car with me. Give me a call. As a friendly and welcoming native I will be happy to drive you around and then take you to someone's house, whom you have never met, and who will welcome you with style and grace, and feed you as well as you are going to be fed anywhere in this country. We've been doing it for months. I look forward to seeing you.

A big part of the pond crawfish shortage, probably the biggest part, is that we are in a drought situation and that means that, in order to fill the ponds, farmers had to depend of pumped water this fall once the rice was harvested. Given that the price of diesel was $2.50 or better at that time, the payback just wasn't going to be there on small plots of crawfish-something most of those guys do on the side for a good hobby that pays a littel extra dough (often cash money on the barrelhead). They are very dear and hard to find. That's just going to be the situation this year, I think. B