Seasonal dinner

You can't read the news these days without hearing about local food, carbon footprint, and all that shit. While I'm happy to support local businesses and farms, I'm not convinced that eating "local" is necessarily the best way to live. For example, if you live in New England, does that mean you never eat citrus? What about olive oil, or wine? I suppose Westport Rivers makes great local wines, but wouldn't you want a bit more choice than that? Also, will a local tomato ever beat a canned san marzano tomato at its peak ripeness? If you live in Iowa, are you only allowed to eat corn? Seriously, where do you draw the line?
I don't think I can ever do the real locavore thing. I need ethnic food--Chinese, Indian, Italian, Mexican, Thai, French, everything. That's the best part about food!!! All the crazy ingredients from different cultures, mixing things together, learning about all the foods of the world. How sad to limit yourself to only what comes out of the ground immediately surrounding you! There's got to be some middle ground, right? Where you can support your local farmers, but not limit yourself to potatoes and kale in winter?

In any case, here's a dinner we made including some local ingredients:
Local corn, red peppers, shallots, shiitake, and maitake mushrooms sauteed with butter and olive oil, finished with scallions and basil. Sauteed pork chop with pan jus, and gooseberry sauce (finished with poire william liquor).


We also had a totally non-local cheese plate:
Speck, toscano, morbier, laguiole, roaring 40's blue, and olives


Finished with chunk monkey ice cream.

Ultimate green beans?

I absolutely love green beans. How come they seem so difficult to cook? I've burned them, had them totally raw, flavorless, you name it. I think, after many, many attempts, I've figured out a decent method for making really good green beans.

First, get a pan screaming hot. I mean really f'ing hot. Get some olive oil in there, or some oil that won't light on fire when it's really hot. Throw in the green beans, and toss in some salt. Don't touch them for ~30-45 seconds. Then start stirring and let them brown a bit. After another minute, add about 1/4 cup of water and turn down the heat. Cover for a few minutes to let the green beans cook through. Then, the key ingredients: shrimp paste and cock sauce (no, not THAT kind, you sicko, the chili garlic variety!), and chopped garlic. Let that all cook down for a few minutes, and you're done!

Neptune Oyster

So after our sub-par New Orleans oyster experience, we were craving some "real" oysters (sorry NOLA, we love ya, but your oysters are yucky). We've been wanting to go to Neptune Oyster for a while, and finally made it yesterday.

Menus:


Started out with several varieties:
Island Creeks, kumamotos, Royal Miyagi, and two other kinds I can't remember :-(


Blue marlin tartare, with stone fruit, pea puree, and parmesan arancini (which was more like a patty). The tartare had ginger bits, and was extremely tasty.


Fried soft shell crab. Although the crab itself was just a tiny tad tough, the preparation was incredible. The avocado crab salad made a perfect bed for the fried crab, and the sweet corn provided a great sweet accompaniment.


We really enjoyed this meal. For drinks, we had glasses of muscadet and chenin blanc with the oysters (muscadet was a great match). With the soft shell crab, we asked to split a glass of the d'Arenberg hermit crab. The waitress gave us two very generous half glasses of this very tasty wine. Overall, we felt this was a very good value, and we're really glad we finally made it!

One nice-ish dinner

We've been trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to eat lighter meals. We did manage to put together a nice small meal not long ago:

Flan with whipped potato and caviar. The flan was surprisingly successful--2 eggs, ~1/3 can of evaporated milk, salt and pepper blended together. The key was using the hand blender, and not beating extra air into the mix. I tossed in some sauteed shallots, then baked it in a water bath (in the toaster oven!). The egg came out custardy and smooth. We topped it with some mashed potato and some type of fish egg we got as a gift. Really yummy.


Veggie soup "foamed" in the iSi whip. We cooked down red pepper, onion, tomato, garlic, and some broth, then blended it up. For the shrimp, we made a chorizo oil, then slow-cooked the shrimp in the oil. They had an amazing flavor.

Some relatively recent dinners

We've been trying to cook more this summer. It's certainly easier than during the school year, when I eat complete crap most days. I now present a few of our more successful dishes:

Shrimp and mashed potatoes in a garlic cream sauce. We cooked the shrimp in the garlic cream over very low heat. Mmmmmmm.


Cauliflower soup with sauteed ramps.


Pork chop with jicama slaw and mashed potatoes. We recently tried jicama for the first time, and it makes a great refreshing salad.


Thai tomato soup, seasoned with ginger, garlic, coconut, lime, chili garlic sauce, fish sauce, topped with fresh scallions:


Leftover bbq pork, served over polenta with a fried egg and hot sauce.


We had some leftover thai tomato soup, so we lightly poached some cod in it, and garnished with watercress.


More pork chop, with sauteed apples, and an apple celerly root slaw.


One really tasty dessert: grilled white nectarines with melon-ginger-yogurt soup.

Eating at Tales (aka what we did when we weren't drunking)

People aren't kidding when they say New Orleans has great food. We ate some fantastic food, but I wish we could have tried more. Here's my best attempt to remember all our meals:
Started out at Napolean House. Great atmosphere, exactly what you'd think of a New Orleans institution. The muffaletta was quite good, but I can imagine a better one (it was a bit doughy). Jambalaya and gumbo were very tasty.

Afternoon snack at Acme Oyster:
Oysters were not very good, in my opinion...bland and mushy. I highly prefer East or West coast oysters:

Oyster po-boy was pretty tasty though:


Dinner at Cochon. Oh my, this place is sooooooo good. We tried almost every appetizer, a bunch of entrees, several sides, and desserts too. Also, we had a great sparkling gruener veltliner, some other wine, and got into a shot war with a table of New Yorkers. More good times. Anyway, it was so good, we went back two nights later and got some pictures:
Fried pig ear: nice texture, decent flavor, but I still prefer chinese style...


Fried rabbit liver with pepper jelly and mint. WOW. I could eat many, many orders of this:


Head cheese, compliments of the chef. Possibly the best I've ever tried. So soft and flavorful:


Pickled pork tongue with tomato salad. Great flavor on the tongue (haha), but the tomatoes were a bit unripe:


Ribs with pickled watermelon rind. The meat was juicy and tender, and the sweet, tangy watermelon rind made a great accompaniment:


Crawfish pie. Also very yummy, the pastry was fantastic:


Jalapeno spoonbread with okra and beans: probably my least favorite dish, but still quite good:


Crawfish and green tomato casserole: incredibly good. The sides at Cochon are amazing.


Eggplant and shrimp: this may have been the best thing we ate all trip. It's a mixture of eggplant, shrimp, grits, peppers, scallions, and topped with cheese. It is so ridiculously good, I can't even explain it.


I was too full to appreciate dessert the first night, and we didn't even try on the second visit.

Thursday lunch didn't sit well with me (I can't imagine why, after only ~15 drinks the day before). We went to Mr. B's Bistro for the bbq shrimp and pasta jambalaya. They tasted good enough that I wanted to go back when I was in better shape, which we did a couple days later.

bbq shrimp in New Orleans is basically jumbo shrimp swimming in a butter and pepper sauce. So messy and delicious, with bread to soak up the sauce. This isn't diet food!


Mr B's also makes a great pasta jambalaya, with spinach fettuccini, really nice andouille sausage, shrimp, and chicken (dry and useless):


We also had dinner at Herbsaint, which has co-owners with Cochon. Although a bit fancier than Cochon, the food wasn't quite as good. Appetizers were generally solid, but some of the entrees were just okay.

Johnny's Po-boy: we got a hot sausage and a roast beef po-boy. I thought the hot sausage was unexpectedly delicious, but the roast beef was a bit dry.

Oh yeah, we also ate at Subway. Mmmmmm.

Tales of the Cocktail 2008

Last week we spent four days in New Orleans at Tales of the Cocktail. We had a great Boston group, and got a chance to meet a bunch of new people. Immediately after arriving at the airport, we headed out for lunch at Napolean House, complete with muffaletta sandwiches, gumbo, and Pimm's cups. Yum. After checking in at the Hotel Monteleone (haha), we stopped in a few tasting rooms. Some of the drinks were decent, but a lot were just blah. We'll have to work our way through all the booklets and recipes we brought back. I got a some pictures at a couple of the more interesting tasting rooms:

Cruzan rum:


They had samples of intermediates in the distilling process, and we got to smell all the nasty stuff they pull off as they make the final product. Very informative.

G'vine:

A gin made from grapes, infused with flowers from grape vines. It was really cool to smell the different components of the gin, then taste the final product.

We also enjoyed the Don Julio tequila, especially the bianco. We didn't stick around long enough to try the Rare, because the rep wouldn't stop blabbing.

Some of the drinking highlights/lowlights of the trip included:
Daquiri party: stickiest floor I have ever stood on. Seriously, our feet were glued to the floor. Daquiris were unmemorable.
Old Absinthe House: we ended up here on several evenings. Mostly we sent other people nasty drinks such as jaeger bombs. I stuck with beer, but vaguely remember having some Averna and green chartreuse.
St. Germain suite: We went the first night, and it was surprising how many bartenders acted like they'd never seen alcohol before. Many of them were severely fucked up. A considerable amount of drinking out of bottles occurred (tequila, scotch, averna, st. germain, and averna mixed with st. germain...yuck). Good times, though :-) Oh, and they had great posters:

We got a hurricane on Bourbon St just for shits and grins. We avoided the hand grenades though.
Vaughn's: we drank them out of Miller High Life. 'Nuf said.
The total shitshow that was Bartender's Breakfast: approximately 700 degrees and humid (INDOORS!!!). The bartenders ran out of mixers, and were just pouring booze into buckets. I sort of remember having a watermelon, maple syrup, and gin drink. It wasn't as bad as it sounds, but I don't think I'll try it at home.
If you count coffee drinking, Saturday night/Sunday morning at Cafe du Monde was one of the most hilarious experiences I can remember. Powdered sugar fights, randomly singing "ole, ole, ole" (that soccer chant...I know you know what I mean), dudes in black trench coats with light sabre umbrellas, etc.

Our livers are still recovering, but it was an absolutely fantastic time. So much fun.