Mayhaw Man

Thanks everyone for all of the kind comments. It was a really great weekend and, at least for a time, good for the city. There are so many things that we apparently don't do well, but we are really good at having giant parties. And I'm particularly glad that so many of you, through me, have a little better understanding of what this is all about. It's not about Bourbon St and naked coeds in the Quarter (though, clearly, that's part of it if you want to do that. I fully support the rights of naked coeds everywhere. It's a Constitutuional Freedom that I am willing to fight for). It's really about families doing things together that many of them have been doing together for 50 or more years, often in the same, exact spot that they have been doing it for years. Big barbeques, whole families bringing amazing assortment of foods for a family covered dish extravaganza, beautiful floats (this year with a common theme, mostly, as we were handed the biggest "fish in a barrel" costume theme ever last Aug 29), marching bands (though there were precious few of those this year), and really imaginative people dressed in some costumes that are second to none both in imagination and construction. It was, truly, a beautiful weekend and I, and about a half million other people, enjoyed it immensely. I hope that I see you here next year on the weekend before Feb 20th, 2007. Get your tickets in your hand if you want to go to New Orleans

5 minutes off of I 10 dammit. 5 minutes. You just don't remember because you were too busy yelling and pulling out what was left of my hair at that point. I'm bald now. Now you know the reason behind it.

OK, so you bugged us for a month. Where did you go, what did you do, is there any food left? The game here is that when we help, you have to report back-otherwise, next time, the best thing that you will here about is McDonald's and Applebees.

Turn north on the Breaux Bridge Exit-follow the signs to Poche's (you have to get on Poche Bridge Rd-it's tougher than it sounds at night-just axe Rachel Perleaux). Eat some boudin, fill up your ice chest, and head back out, happy and full. It's about 5 minutes off of I-10 if you don't get lost-then it's a bit farther. Have a good trip.

You know, not too many people do that anymore, but I really like catching crawfish. It's a great way to kill an afternoon with friends and it's lots of fun. It's even more fun when they are running a couple of bucks a pound and all it cost you to do it was a case of beer, some soft drinks, and a bunch of chicken necks (and I am old enough to remember when Popeye's GAVE AWAY big tubs of livers. Just gave em away. That was back when they had to cut their own chickens, though, and now they get shipped in parted out already).

I don't know, man. I've eaten alot of the little buggers in my life, but I'm not sure that I've ever eaten a city squirrel. Most of the ones that I have enjoyed were certified rednecks. Now, come to think of it, I have eaten a number of golf course squirrels and a few backyard squirrels, but they pretty much were all the same to me. So, I guess my answer is, well, I'll have to eat a city squirrel and find out-though she might be referring to wharf rats. City folks get all confused with this nature business.

I spent most of Mardi Gras Day, starting at about 8:30 in the morning (later than usual, but, not surprisingly, there was a power outage overnight and the alarm failed), walking from Uptown to Downtown to the Marigny. I met up with many resplendently dressed friends and strangers gathering for the beginning, or the middle, or some part of the St. Ann’s Parade-a neighborhood walking parade that makes it’s way through the Quarter to Canal St and then on to the Riverfront to dump ashes in the Mississippi. I didn’t make the whole thing, but I did go to Canal and it was a great trip. Several brass bands, all playing in semi unison, played hits like I’m Walking, It Ain’t My Fault, Mardi Gras Mambo, Night Train, and, in one particularly moving moment, a beautifully rendered version of A Closer Walk with Thee. It was pretty spectacular and for just a few, very precious moments, just like it should be here in the city that, aptly, is often called “The City that Care Forgot” Some scenes from Tuesday: 8:30 a.m. Thalia and St Charles A huge crowd of men women and children in the street doing the Electric Slide with a group of highly amused onlookers cheering them on. There were a couple of cops in the dancing group and they looked just as happy as everyone else. Nice to see those guys enjoying themselves. We are kind of short on cops right now and they had to have been pretty close to exhausted by that point. 8:50 St Charles and Camp St I walked up the Avenue, cluelessly walking through the police line (I had a big costume on so I think that they thought I was supposed to be there-think Wedding Crashers-The Carnival Episode!) and into the back of Pete Fountain’s Half Fast Walking Club. There were 10 or so loosely organized groups, with the rear being brought up nicely by the Ducks of Dixieland in their duck themed outfits. Trad jazz in the front, brass in the middle, and Soca in the rear. A very nice way to get downtown. I kind of ended up walking with them for a bit and it was a very good time. 9:15 Gallier Hall The crowd in the reviewing stands, mostly uncostumed and politically connected somehow, was seemingly uninterested in the colorful passersby. They seemed much more tuned into whoever they were chatting with on their cellphones. Perhaps they were all talking to each other. It was an odd scene for people who have, really, some of the best and most historical reviewing seats in all of Carnival. 9:25 Poydras and Magazine (I had to go, Ok? It was the nearest can that I could find) A woman walked up to me looking for an ATM that worked and had money in it. She said that they parking thieves were holding her license until she came back with the dough. Not much works here, but we can still collect parking fines I guess. Sheesh. Welcome to New Orleans, friendly, well meaning tourists. Howdy do! Pay up! 9:30 Poydras and Magazine A group of highly amused looking cops had a young civic leader down on the ground next to a very nice, new Cadillac Escalade. I asked a policeman what the deal was, and he laughed and said that they had caught “the dumbest guy in New Orleans-and that’s saying something!” Apparently the guy was in, they thought anyway, one of the famous stolen Cadillacs from Sewell Cadillac. He was driving it around with a Texas plate on the front and a LA plate on the back-only two blocks from the scene of the theft. Bold, indeed. 9:45 Canal and Royal St The first tune that I heard walking into the Quarter was a spectacularly energetic version of Liza Jane being played by a group of men who, apparently, were all in different bands and just met up for a bit before going on to their regular gigs. It was, truly, wonderful. Ohhh, Little Liza, Little Liza Jane! Yes, indeed. 10:00 R Bar-Corner of Royal and Something or other Giant crowd. All in costume. I had some friends there dressed as sort of existentialist Super Heroes-the funniest of which was my friend Chad-outfitted as “The Cuddler”. It was a very good costume, as cuddling seemed to be going very well for him in that very sexually liberal, and somewhat confused crowd. Many costumes with Katrina themes-mold, FEMA, Halliburton, politicians, blue tarps, etc. Lots of stunning imaginations left here, it would seem. 10:00 Down Royal towards Canal Parade progressed slowly behind the Storyville Stompers and a bunch of extra brass. They were, in just a few words, as good as it’s ever going to get. Brass being played outside, in a march, with a crazy happy crowd. It really never gets any better than that. All hits, all the time. Singing, dancing in the streets, heavy drinking, botanicals in the air. Wonderful. Just fantastic. The best. 12:30 Jackson Square The band and parade (at least a thousand happy souls) stop in front of the Cathedral and play a few tunes to the delight of the onlookers, who have no clue what all of these people are doing walking around together. 1:00 Old Supreme Court Building/Wildlife and Fisheries Building/ Unbelievably, there are about a dozen clean port-o-potties set across the street from K-Paul’s. Yes! No lines! 1:30 Royal and St Louis My fabulous and slightly scary Venetian carnival mask breaks (my mom brought it to me this summer. Thanks mom) and a quick thinking woman from Brooklyn dressed as a cross between Carmen Miranda and Marie Antoinette on acid stepped from the crowd with repair materials. A quick repair and I was once again slightly threatening instead of tired and disheveled. Masks are good things to have. 2:00 Royal and Canal Parade dead ends into Rex Parade like some scene from Monty Python. People smashing into each other going in opposite directions and laughing about it like maniacs. Band sits on the side of the road and takes a break with some much needed beers and some shade-as it was unusually sunny and hot for the end of February, even in New Orleans. 2:30 Down St Charles towards home I stop and talk to a number of the BBQ men that I had met on Sunday. Never one to turn down some good food, I sampled ribs, chicken, more oysters, rabbit, pork butt, lips, feet, gumbo, chicken fricassee (high point of day-it was ethereal in it’s goodness), jambalaya (both with and without tomato-I’m a tomato guy, me-but they’re both good. 4:00 Home-St Mary St.-Lower Garden District Shoes off on the front steps, watching the world go by. 10 miles of so of walking, talking, laughing, and eating will do that to you. Then off to the keyboard to crank out what you just read and two other pieces hopefully for publication. It was a great day and one that I will always remember. It’s been a hard time here, hard for all of us, as a group and personally, and this was truly a cathartic experience in many ways-some of which won’t ever even be realized. They just were and will be. Thanks for following along. I look forward to seeing you down here. It’s a great place, even now, just know that while you can come and have a great time and that we are glad as hell to have you, that it’s not fixed and with will be a long while before it is. But it will be. You can bet on it. Brooks 3/2/06

Most of the catastrophic spillage directly related to plants (as opposed to having something like 1/2 million cars underwater) occurred in St Bernard Parish. St Bernard will be dealing with the results of some of these accidents for years to come, but it won't have much effect on crawfish, or even seafood in general. Crawfish come from 2 primary sources-rice ponds that are active early in the season before planting (early spring) and the Atchafalaya Basin, which is active longer and later in the season. The problem is that there was a drought after (and before) the storm and we had a very, very hot fall (we were in the nineties here well into October). This means that rice farmers who have to pump water to fill their fields were less likely to do it due to the crazy cost of diesel fuel last fall (as an example, to fill a 15 acre rice field for duck hunting this fall cost my dad, or at least the farmer, about 6K. It's not something that everyone is willing or able to do after a year when crops took two huge hits from storms). Rice farmers below I-10 also had to deal with, as did the sugar cane boys, salt water intrusion from the marsh. Fields that have been filled with salt water are not exactly conducive to raising crawfish. Prices should drop towards the end of the season, as they almost always do-it's just a question of how much and how soon. This happened a couple of years ago and then last year, there were so many and they were so cheap that people were boiling several times a week. It's a great way to have an easy, low cost, party and you can do it in the drop of a hat if you know what you are doing and you have the gear for it. I've only had them twice this year and they were very expensive. Shrimp are actually cheaper at this point and we have been eating them by the ice chest load. So there's not that much to complain about, I guess.

Nah, he's from St Martinville. He wrote a really good book last year that was inconveniently published just prior to the place getting all blowed up-Eating New Orleans-which was the basis for The Perleaux's travels the last time that they were down here. Nice guy and the man whom I would nominate as the maker of the most consistently good red beans on earth. He is a bean cooking fool, that boy.

It's very sad, and very common, to hear these kinds of stories these days. Not only that, it happened to really nice people-just like it's happening to really nice people everywhere. It was a really enjoyable place to eat, always. And I was so looking forward to nude nights. Nothing like hanging out with all of your friends. I'll bet he'll be back. Somewhere. Somewhere good. Somewhere better. Soon.

Kim Severson, one of the very, very good guys who has been doing great work here in New Orleans and the surrounding area, had a piece in today's NYT food section about the crawfish market (or lack of a supply for that market). It's nicely done and has some swell photos taken by some guy name Pableaux.

In an up and doing party setting (think big deal wedding brunch, where you often see this dish) you will (or I do) mostly see the grillades made from veal-but I do them with round steak, sometimes pork, whatever I have around (which is rarely a ready supply of veal). Either way they are good. The Upperline version is usually what I am used to seeing and I've had Chef Ken's version of this dish, several times, and they are pretty danged skippy.

Of course I learned it from them, and in fact, I'm the one that sent them to your house. I was already full up with teenagers and an odd New Yorker who spent way too much time in the bathroom making his hair look like he hadn't spent any time in the bathroom. Thankfully, he will be gone when I get home today. I hope that they get some of that up on the website. It sounded pretty interesting. B

That's not fair. I should have excluded you from this fabulous contest. I'm afraid that you didn't read the fine print about "employees of the station and their families..." But you are right, according to them, they sold 125,000 king cakes in the last two months. And, you know, they're pretty good. They're not superior, those King Cakes, but they're not that bad.

And today's trivia question is: Who sells more King Cakes than anyone (4 times as many as Haydel's, mentioned in the piece above)? It's not who you think. Hint: You'll need to name both the store and the location.

So, well, like umm, if this seems to take me a while to get to it, it's, well, just going to take a while. First, my man Chris Rose had a great column in the paper, summing up, again, for the zillionth time, just how many of us felt this past week about what we were doing standing on the side of the road, night after night (I went to, really, every single parade that went down St Charles Ave this year. Every one. Every damned one). And you know what, my 12 year old trooper, swell, fun loving, bizarrely adult for a 12 year old kid, went along with me for almost all of them and the ones that we weren't together for, he was down the Avenue with his buddies watching it. We have, like, I don't know, oh, 200 lbs of beads, frisbees, cups, blinkie beads (including the highly desirable Krewe De Tat skull blinkie medallion-oh yeah! Soon to be a collectors item), boas, superballs and myriad other geegaws bestowed on us by the masked float riders. Lucky thing too, the attic in Abita was cleaned out of 15 years of Mardi Gras by the storm, so it's time to start stocking up. Someday, when archaelogists from another time come down here and find us, ala Pompeii, all buried in the mud, they will probably postulate important theories on those beads that were, obviously, held in such high esteem by our culture that everyone kept them hidden in their attics. So Go read his column and enjoy the battle of the Titans-The Bacchus People vs. The Endymion Clan Rollin Garcia, owner of Bullet's Bar in the hard hit 7th Ward, summed it up best for me today when being interviewed by Channel 4's Dave McNamara-When asked about his earlier thoughts that maybe having Mardi Gras wasn't the best thing for the city, McNamara pointed out to Mr. Garcia that he looked like he had changed his mind as he had a pair of women's panties on his head and the 7th Ward Hard Head Hunters masking outside of his bar. Garcia responded, "Well, yeah, you know how it is. I'm all up in it now. This is the greatest day ever!" I'm with Rollin. It was. Cathartic is the only word that I can come up with that even comes close to making sense out of what we just got through doing (or to be more accurate, I got through-many will be doing whatever it is that they do in the French Quarter at night until 12, when the cops will line up on Canal and start their solemn march down Bourbon with the bullhorns blaring, "Mardi Gras is now over. Go Home. Or go somewhere, but you can't stay here!" It's a very quaint little tradition and one that I have only seen one time and I can tell you that my memory of that is pretty dim, but I do remember it-or they tell me that I do, anyway) It's been a crappy 6 months. Many of you who are seeing the images on TV of Mardi Gras today are probably wondering, rightly I suppose, what the hell we are doing out on the street BBQing, dancing, marching, throwing valuable trinkets and garbage into our streets when the place is a wreck, 2/3 of it is uninhabitable, and we don't even get our mail on a regular basis and haven't seen magazines in months. Well, OK. That's a fair observation. What we are doing is this: We're doing what we do. We're doing what we have been doing for many, many years and what we will be doing until the last levee is gone and there is nothing left but muddy carnival throws buried in the muck. We'll be here. Doing this. Exactly this. We're glad that you come, and we hope that you come back soon, but even if you don't, we'll still be here. We ain't going nowhere, us. Later, I'll be back with a tale of food-good food, opulent food, and some really crazy food (nutria tacos, anyone?. I'm working on it now.

Sounds perfectly disgusting to me... ← That, my dear, is because you have never enjoyed Popeye's Spicy (as opposed to mild) on the neutral ground on St Charles Avenue on a gorgeous, sunny, fun filled Mardi Gras day in New Orleans. If you had ever experienced just one luscious, juicy, spicy, tongue numbing leg you would be singing the praises of Colonel Copeland's secret recipe of herbs, spices, and preservatives. Yes, yes you would. Today, I, who was costuming as the Dixieland Epicurean (photos to follow as soon as my email box starts filling up-I don't photograph myself well), enjoyed several pieces on the corner of Thalia and St Charles as I was interviewing some men setting up a serious BBQ operation. The chicken? Delicious! The 100 or so men, women, and children doing The Electric Slide, 5 or six abreast in the middle of the street, were even better than the chicken. They left a taste in my mouth like no food I have ever eaten. Truly, it was a sight to behold. We're different. We don't have houses, jobs, levees, money, mail, regular garbage pickup, straight politicians, or maybe even a chance-but we know how to have fun better than anyone in North America and likely the world-and right now, today, that was good enough for all of us. Plenty good enough.

Ben Yagoda (supremely nice guy and a very good writer) wrote a nice piece on his weekend in New Orleans. I was lucky enough to share breakfast with him at Savvy on Sunday morning and got a really refreshing breath of fresh air from the guy. Not everyone who comes down here ends up with such a positive attitude at the end of the stay. Ben Yagoda on the Willie Mae Seaton Project

Oh, sure, she's the Queen of the North-but now I know what the real deal is. Hell, I could probably live up there. It's not so bad, at least not the way that they do it.

Before 8/29 I would have agreed. No mo. Parasol's is serving a consistently heart stopping product. And, well, you just can't go wrong with gravy cheese fries. Besides, I can walk there. Always a plus during Carnival.

As someone who PROUDLY toted a lunch bag to school for most of his career (4th grade on) I can safely say that, except for the time that my mom put ipicac in some cupcakes to find out who was stealing my lunch--it worked, and didn't hurt him much-he went on to become a journeyman, longtime QB in the NFL--that no one ever got sick from her lunches. It's a shame, I'm against it, but as Chris reasonably argues above, it's the world that we live in and I can see, easily, the other side of the argument. My kids, both of them, take a lunch most days and as far as I know, they have not been accused, as of yet, of being Typhoid Miles or Typhoid Graham-but hope springs eternal, I suppose.

Score!

I leave my tea kettle on the stove at all times. It provides me solace and caffienated beverages. During the summer, I make one gallon of tea, per day, and that often runs out. At night, before bed most nights, I consume at least on swell bodum tea pot full of World Peace Tea (aromatic, non caffeinated, custom blended in DC somewhere-I love the stuff). I love my kettle. It stays on the stove.

Of course, your wife weighed in upthread with a few thoughtful comments. So you're saying? I mean, I'm just saying...

It does happen, you know? On occasion, it has been known to happen twice in a row. Sadly, it's just not very often. Recognition from those that you admire is always good, though. Thanks Janet.