Stopped by the Red Stick Farmer’s Market last Saturday and was able to talk Maggie’s Mushrooms into selling me a bag of assorted mushrooms. Also picked up some young garlic (which looks like large green onions that early on) and a couple of pints of locally produced heavy cream. Rainy day, but when it rains all the farmers set up inside the Galvez Parking Garage. I’ve been thinking about doing a cream of mushroom since I picked up that Le Creuset Dutch oven. Easy enough to throw down. I melted a half stick of real butter and sautéed the young garlic and mushrooms with some pink Himalayan salt and Italian seasoning and white pepper then dusted it all with a half cup of white flour and stirred that around until it started to stick and brown a little then added the two pints of heavy cream and brought it up to almost a boil to thicken the soup. Simple, but very effective.
I was able to pick up everything I needed for these at Whole Foods except the slider buns which I got from Calandro’s. Whole Foods has one pound packages of ground lamb all the time, bison as well if you want to go that direction. The salad bar is right there to get just the right amount of spinach, red onion, and tomato. And their house made tzatziki was perfect for this execution. I used the rest of the lamb in a ground beef, pork, and lamb meatloaf that I posted earlier.
Hard to even write the word meatloaf without hearing Paradise by the Dashboard Light in the back of your head somewhere. What’s it going to be boy? I think the main reason I ever go to the trouble of cooking meatloaf at the house instead of getting a perfectly good plate of meatloaf and gravy and mashed potatoes to go from Bet-R is the cold meatloaf sandwiches the rest of the week. Hard to beat a meatloaf sandwich. I’m a member of the mayo crowd, but I know a lot of folks prefer ketchup or mustard.
You may be wondering about the boiled egg in the middle of the meatloaf. For the longest time I thought everyone did it that way, but apparently no one but my mother put boiled eggs in the center. Now she didn’t make hers with three kinds of ground meat like I do, but at least mine looks enough like hers to remind me of all the good meals she put together for us back then. One of the reasons I’m deeply appreciative of the throwback meat counters at places like Whole Foods and Fresh Market is being able to buy just a third of a pound of ground chuck and a third of ground pork. Sometimes they even have ground lamb fresh in the case, but Whole Foods has it in one pound packages. I’ll do a post later on about the lamb sliders I made with the leftover ground lamb.
Meatloaf has always been about binders and fillers. I added a couple of slices of toasted rye, one beaten egg, and some sautéed red onion and green bellpepper along with the two hard boiled eggs and a third of a pound each of ground lamb, beef, and pork. Salt, sage, and Italian seasoning with some white and black pepper to finish it off. Same seasoning on the new potatoes I cooked with the meatloaf at 400 degrees for forty five minutes (checked it just in case after 30).
I beefed up the packaged onion gravy (literally) by using beef broth instead of water and added that to some more sautéed red onions. Came out nice. Again, great meal to cook at home, but I always find myself looking forward to the sandwich even more than the entrée. Glowing like the metal on the edge of the knife is totally stuck in my head now…
I have to admit, I have yet to sit down and actually eat at this place. I hit it up on Waitr for delivery and also to pick up on my way home from work. I’ve gotten fixated on a 10″ cheese with mushrooms, red onions, and capers.
It’s a thin crust pizza and the capers take it in a whole new direction. Just that little extra tanginess, kind of like adding a lot of lemon to the crawfish pot, that sharpness serves as contrast to all the other flavors and makes it all pop. The patio is really nice and they’ve got a good beer selection so I really need to try and get a group together to go hang out when the weather gets a bit warmer and more predictable. Impossible to plan anything outside in LA right now.
Fleur de Lis is still my favorite, but I find myself gravitating more and more to Red Zeppelin over all the others. Still need to check out Datz Italian in White Star, and I stopped by Rocca’s for a sandwich, but haven’t tried the pizza yet. I went through a Hungry Howie’s stage, and I used to order Rotolo’s pretty regular and Schlitz and Giggles isn’t bad. I was into Mellow Mushroom for a while, but I’m deep in this Red Zeppelin phase right now. Definitely recommend it, if only as a change of pace.
So I went to my cousin’s 90th birthday party Saturday, hosted by her son at his very nice place out in Greenwell Springs. A good time was had by all, and LSU beat Tennessee by one point in a double overtime basketball game, the final minute of which took ten minutes real time to play out on the big screen. It was good to catch up, and since I was already all the way out there, I had to stop by Jerry Lee’s Cajun Foods to stock up. Picked up some jerky and cracklins to take to the office for snacks and of course some headcheese and boudin. I first encountered the boudin omelet when I was working for Café LeGrange on Acadian and we had agreed to set up the mobile kitchen out at the Fairgrounds to sell to everyone going to the inaugural Hot Air Balloon Festival . Back then the firing up at dawn for the day’s racing was a big deal. Since we had no real breakfast items on the menu, we cooked omelets stuffed with Jerry Lee’s boudin on the flat top in the mobile kitchen. The mobile kitchen was like a food truck, but it wasn’t designed for window sales. Just an asset when catering large events. It had an oven/stovetop and three or four deep fat fryers and a sandwich table with a lot of refrigeration packed into an old Frito-Lay delivery van. The guys had welded a platform to the back for the propane tanks and to store the generator while we were on the road. At any rate, I’m sure the boudin omelet or boudin scrambled eggs or grits and boudin has been around for a long, long time, And I know we used to stop at Jerry Lee’s on our way into town from the catering depot out in Central to grab a link or two for breakfast before we went to set up crawfish boils or jambalaya and white bean dinners or fish fries–but that was the first time I had ever encountered it commercially as a menu item anywhere. People at the Balloon Fest were pleasantly surprised and we had good sales. I turned the headcheese into sliders for lunch today. Tasty.
When I saw they had changed the Friday fried pork chop special to fried fish for Lent, I just had to check it out. That’s their picture on top. Mine below. I guess I’m always looking for an excuse to hit Phil Brady’s for lunch because it reminds me of going over to the Bayou as soon as the lunch shift was over at The Gumbo Place (whether I was on schedule for a double that night or not} and just hanging at the bar with a Bud, or High Life, or PBR waiting for someone else to show so we could shoot pool. Back when I used to work at The Chimes, people would come in and talk about how they remembered going to The Chimes back in ’68 or ’69. I’d never bother to tell them that it was still a drugstore then, that they were conflating Chimes with Magoo’s or The Library or The Bayou or The Gumbo Place. Maybe even The Brass Rail and The Bengal and The White Horse. In a way, all those cool dark bars are portals to the past. Times we’re desperate to remember, and also times we’re glad are long gone. Hard to think of any place better to deep dive into nostalgia than a bar stool in a bar that reminds you of a bar that you used to know.
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Kept seeing this shot of fried pork chops on Facebook and just had to follow up on another lunch at Phil Brady’s. The actual chop wasn’t as pretty as these, but it was still tasty, and it is really nice to lunch in a dark bar with really good tunes playing.
There’s a lot to be said for bar/kitchens. Both The Chimes and Chelsea’s started off as bars with food. We can probably expect the same from Dave Remmetter’s new beer garden on the corner of Government and Steele. And The Brass Rail in Baton Rouge and Port of Call in New Orleans fielded two of the best hamburgers I’ve ever experienced. The food at Phil Brady’s isn’t to die for, but the experience is worth stopping in on occasion, if only to feel the vibe and have a good talk with the other lunch patrons. Guy today was talking about crawfish at Addis Seafood and I asked him if he’d ever been to Chuck’s in Addis. So we spent the lunch hour reminiscing about the icy fishbowls at Chuck’s and he shared that he’d worked at Chris’s bar on North Street where they also had a great fishbowl and I told him about when I first started at Mike Anderson’s how we still had frozen fishbowls and eventually I shared the high school tale of handing the principal a note to read on the PA system There will be a meeting of the Interact Club tonight at Chuck’s house across the river. The meeting will start at 7pm, please don’t be late! Back then no one would run you off if you sat down at a bar and were not eighteen, but had a reasonably good fake ID. Lot of good times had at Chuck’s in Addis.
Whether you’re cooking for just you, plus one, family, or you and a bunch of friends, today’s packaging at groceries and markets makes it very difficult to prepare just the right amount of food. And because we were raised to put too much on the table rather than too little, combined with waste not want not–we all have that leftover reckoning that hits like an episode of Chopped. Over the weekend I wanted biscuits and bacon and didn’t want to make a trip just for the five biscuit can of baby Grands so I bought the ten biscuit can at Whole Foods knowing I’d have biscuits to deal with later in the week. A good friend’s chickens started laying again so I was gifted with a dozen fresh eggs. And also this weekend I roasted a Free Range Heirloom Air Chilled Chicken, also from Whole Foods. These are their stories.
I know a lot of people have biscuits and gravy in the need to get at a diner category, but the quality of prepared foods is really pretty high. Pillsbury biscuits are good, quick, and easy, and prepping a decent gravy comes down to mixing a pack of McCormick’s Country Gravy mix with a pint of milk and not burning it when you heat it up. Throw in some fresh eggs seasoned with Tony’s and black pepper and scrambled and you have one breakfast lunch or dinner knocked out. My background makes it impossible for me to just have a prep gravy going on the stove top, so I sauteed some mushrooms to use throughout the week at the same time I was prepping the gravy.
Some of the mushrooms ended up in the Leftover Free Range Heirloom Air Chilled Chicken and fresh egg breakfast ramen—
and some ended up in a Garlic Mission Jack Cheese and Mushroom Omelet, which came out so good it was followed by a Garlic Mission Jack Cheese and Mushroom Frittata (not pictured because my phone was updating and I couldn’t wait to dig in).
Here’s a shot of another one sheet pan meal. Catfish and corn on the cob. Twenty minutes at 400 degrees.
Which, of course, has generated leftovers I don’t yet know what to do with. Maybe I’ll combine the catfish and corn with a can of Amy’s No Chicken Noodle Soup later in the week, but really, what goes better with Amy’s No Chicken Noodle Soup than—
a leftover roasted breast of Free Range Heirloom Air Chilled Chicken from Whole Foods? Happy weekend!
I did a post a while back on menu hacks and mentioned several I’d come up with at The Chimes, so I thought I’d follow up and order them again and take a few photos. This is really just another way to navigate the menu since portions and pairings might not always be to our liking, and some places have the ubiquitous salad and side that just might not be your thing that day. Most of these are just a way to enhance an appetizer into an entree, or put two things together that aren’t together on the menu. Let’s start with one of my favorites, fried alligator with rice and gravy. Now it isn’t going to come out like the photo–I took a few liberties with the presentation to get a better pic. It will come out on two plates and you need to make sure you tell the server or barkeep you want it to come out together if they fail to ask. Should be a no brainer, but never assume in a restaurant setting. The person taking care of you may be barely trained, hungover, pissed at management and thinking about quitting–same as your workplace. I think if you are from Louisiana, you just naturally want to add rice and gravy or grits and gravy to anything, up to and including an old shoe. And the fried gator is nicely complimented by the horseradish dijonnaise that comes with it, but dijonnaise is not rice and gravy. Another good hack is ordering a bowl of the duck and sausage gumbo, add blackened alligator. Believe me, something already rich and hearty can always be more.
Crawfish and 3 Cheese Macaroni, add fried crawfish tails.
The Chimes has a good shells and cheese that they offer with a few sautéed tails thrown in as an appetizer, and just shells and cheese as a side, but adding the fried tails definitely takes it up a notch. It might be a little light for lunch for some folks, but you can always ask them to add a roll which will bring it up to speed for most.
Small Crawfish Étouffée, add eight fried shrimp
Eight fried shrimp is really too many for me, six would be good, but the bartender told me adding eight was cheaper than six. Who knows why? I gave her the extra two shrimp. I’ve always wondered why restaurants that have étouffée and rice ready to go don’t offer it as a side on their fried platters. Seems like a no brainer to me-oh, wait, yeah, I guess that does make sense, no brains. You can always stretch this into a nice surf and turf if you want to and have the money. Ribeye, mid-rare, side of crawfish étouffée, or, Petit filet, very rare, and could you please add a small side of crawfish étouffée?
Bowl of seafood gumbo, add six fried oysters
And what is gumbo, but a different kind of rice and gravy? This is actually a Parrain’s menu hack since I was closer to them at lunchtime. This also works with fried poboy shrimp, or you can ask for catfish fillets, or any and all of it blackened or grilled. Whatever store you pick, they will be happy with the sale, especially at lunch when everyone is fighting for more business. Point being, don’t let the menu hem you in. Ask for what you want, and if you can’t get it, move on to the next place until you do.
I’ve been looking at these chickens at Whole Foods for a while now and finally broke down and bought one to take to the house and roast. It was good. Tasted like froglegs. Ha. Kidding. It was a good bird, not necessarily worth the extra cash unless the buzz words get you all hot and bothered, but I was curious to see how much different it would be from the normal factory bred antibiotic infused chickens we’re used to. Mainly curious to see what birds were like when polio was still rampant, because if this bird was all that was advertised, that’s what we’d be talking about, a Great Depression bird grown out in the yard. No way to know if this chicken really had anything in common with its historical counterparts. It came out good though. I stuffed the cavity with lemon and onion and fresh basil and rosemary and green onion then doused the outside with lemon juice and Lea & Perrins and olive oil before dusting it with garlic salt and garlic powder, onion powder, Zatarain’s and black pepper and popped it in the oven at 400 for 45 minutes since it was only a 3 lb bird.
Like I said, it came out good, but I don’t think I’ll be buying another one. Nothing really discernibly better despite all the super nice labeling. A chicken by any other name. Now I’ve got to chase down some frog legs somewhere. I think they have them on the buffet at Nagoya on Sherwood Forest. Have to check it out.
Casa Maria is a solid Mexican-American restaurant with a nice patio, a really good salsa to start with, and a familiar flavor profile. You’d almost think you’d unwrapped a Patio frozen dinner, except it’s fresh made and heated through. I know this might sound like faint praise but it’s not. Every meal doesn’t have to be on the edges of the gastronomic frontier. Sometimes safe and familiar is just what you need. Comfort food. The wall art is nice, the staff friendly, and the Combinaciones will definitely remind you of Patio dinners. I went for the Plato de San Juan, a tamale, an enchilada, and a taco with rice and beans.
Everything is exactly what you would expect. Well executed. Very tasty. Now, why was I at Casa Maria in the first place? I love Saturday morning show times at the AMC 15 down the street at the Mall of Louisana. Especially films in IMAX 3D. This week I went to see Alita: Battle Angel, a flick I’ve been looking forward to since I saw the preview at The Last Jedi. But even with a huge bucket of popcorn and a massive coke, a 10:30 am showtime means a late lunch, preferably somewhere nearby.
Alita was all that. I’ve been fascinated since I was a kid watching Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer on tv by how the technicians could transform human expressions onto stuffed animals. That universal understanding of facial expression that transcends language and culture comes full circle in Alita as they make a CG cyborg with anime eyes look fully human. This fantasy version of Rosa Salazar is compelling in every scene. I was also amused by how much James Cameron stole from other classics. The reincarnation of Rollerball is fantastic with the high speed cyborg characters. The fallen earth city below the last remaining sky city of Zalem looks almost exactly like Jedha City, and when Alita goes off in the bounty hunter bar I think she copies all the moves of River Tam going off in her Serenity bar fight. And the childlike enthusiasm that follows the rebirth of the warrior is infectious. Alita is reborn into a shit show that is the direct result of her previous life, but without preconceptions, the first thing she wants to do is learn how to play Motoball.
I’ve been enamored of IMAX 3D since it happened. I’ve never had good eyesight. Before I got my first pair of glasses in the fourth grade, I would have to walk to the front of the classroom to read the chalkboard, since I was one of the taller kids and sat in the back of the class. Got used to being stared at, thought of as different, and the whole exercise really improved my memory skills, since that reduced the number of trips I had to make to examine the problem or instructions. Even now, I don’t see or hear the natural world as well as I do anything depicted in an IMAX theater. I get the same feeling I got when I walked outside for the first time with the glasses on and could see individual leaves at the top of the trees. I probably made a face like Alita did when when she ate an orange for the first time once she was reborn. The ability of the director, the cinematographer, the actors, hell, everyone on the set and in the cutting room to capture and convey that feeling of pure joy and discovery is why we are alive, or at least it’s what we call feeling alive. The film Alita: Battle Angel delivers that feeling to us like so many other art works both contemporary and historical, I’m constantly going on and on about the two things I consider to be the greatest attributes of this age we are currently living in. The first is instant access to almost any music ever recorded for just pennies a day. The second is the unbelievable accomplishment of the film industry to bring something so fantastical as comic books to the very edge of reality. I hope I live long enough for the hologram projectors to be perfected so you can be even more immersive in the stories they tell. Until then its IMAX 3D at AMC 15 on Saturday mornings and a late lunch close by. Maybe I’ll hit Ava Street Cafe when I go see Captain Marvel in March. Or maybe Antojitos y Taqueria Franko’s on Perkins. Decisions, decisions.
