Entries tagged with 'New Orleans'
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[Photograph: Darlene Barnes] Lost in a sensory memory while chopping pimento-stuffed olives, I slashed through my thumbnail. I should have known better—mixing politics and food preparation can be dangerous. I was making olive salad for muffulettas for the 70 guys at Alpha Sigma Phi. My boss, Louisiana native Darlene Barnes, pulled the recipe from Cooking Up a Storm, the epic, deeply moving post-Katrina roundup of recipes lost in the disaster, a collection compiled by veteran food writers at the Times-Picayune. While making that flat-out delicious recipe, I started thinking about the first time I had a muffuletta in New Orleans (at Central Grocery), about how much I love that city and how angry I was that five years later, there's...
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As far as festivals go, the kind that celebrates fried food on bread is a pretty good one. This Sunday is the third annual New Orleans Po-Boy Festival. What exactly is a po-boy? Well, the definition isn't too concrete. You can put almost anything on a crunchy French loaf with sauce and call it a po' boy. Oysters, fried green tomatoes, shrimp, roast beef, ham and cheese, catfish, duck, barbecued meats. A bunch of New Orleans purveyors—including Acme Oyster House, Emeril's Restaurant, and Parkway Bakery & Tavern—will be stuffing miscellaneous foods (even French fries) into bread this weekend. And if you're somehow not that into po-boys, the festival will also feature another New Orleans sandwich icon: the muffuletta. Next...
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[Photographs: Chichi Wang] I was busy on a recent trip out to Southern California, but not too busy to get my regular fix of crawdads at The Boiling Crab, a chain of New Orleans-inspired seafood shacks with locations throughout Texas and California. The Boiling Crab is known for two things: their sweet and succulent crawfish, and their signature method of service. Just about everything they serve is cooked and brought to you in a plastic bag, to be dissembled in one giant, messy feast at the table. From Dungeness and blue crab to shrimp and crawdads, the items of seafood are thrown into the bags with segments of lime, corn, and seasonings of your choice. As the name of...
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Photograph from dsb nola on Flickr From Putumayo World Music, in an interview with Kermit Ruffins, trumpeter in the Rebirth Brass Band and Barbecue Swingers: So you originally were barbecuing to have some hot food at the [Barbecue Swingers] shows, then the idea just caught on? Yep, the tailgating started [it] all. I would cook hot sausage for the guys during break time, and whatever was left over, we would give it to the fans. Then I bought a big grill and started cooking for everyone, still up [to] today! Sounds like my kind of show. [via Boing Boing]...
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Ever since devouring the Southern Foodways Alliance's excellent oral history of Louisiana's Boudin Trail, I've been champing at the bit to get me some. So when my pal Pableaux Johnson invited me on a culinary tour that included a swing through boudin country, I was on board quicker than you boil a batch of crawfish. This spicy sausage is like so many regional specialties, rarely making appearances outside the area in which it's such a big deal. I don't get that because boudin is one of the most ridiculously delicious sausages around, a mix of pork parts, rice, and assertive seasonings. It's most often found at country stores, though our first taste of incredible boudin was in New Orleans...
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While I dutifully made my way through the original Star Wars franchise during my preteen years and I managed a few rounds of Dungeons & Dragons before adolescence got in the way, I’ve never gotten very deep into comic books, hobbits, or many of the other things that many folks of my generation have embraced at a level that is, dare I say it, geekish. But as Derek Brown wrote recently on the Atlantic Food Channel, cocktails are an aspect of the culinary world that not only inspire their own level of geekery but even have their own equivalent of a Star Trek convention: Tales of the Cocktail. Now in its seventh year, Tales of the Cocktail attracts thousands of...
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I should have known the moment I landed in New Orleans last Friday night that lots of restaurant leftovers were looming. Why? Because when I order in a New Orleans restaurant, I convince myself that I might never get to that restaurant again. Which, of course, is preposterous and absolutely untrue. I have been to New Orleans probably 20 times in the last 30 years, for nonfood business purposes, on assignment to write about the city's astonishing food and music culture, and with my family. So convincing myself I might never get to these New Orleans restaurants again is the ultimate overeater's rationalization. It is true, however, that these days, now that I'm in eating-everything-just-less-of-it mode, I like to order...
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New Orleans–based NakedPizza is building a rather unique structure in the Crescent City next month: "During the month of May, a 25-foot-tall pyramid of junk-food debris will appear in the city of New Orleans. Part public art, part educational, and part 'we are mad as hell'..." [via Miss Modernage]...
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The good folks at Roadfood.com are putting on what sounds like a seriously delicious Louisiana Roadfood Festival this Saturday and Sunday along three blocks in New Orleans' French Quarter. Admission is free, you'll get to see and sample the world's longest oyster po' boy, brass bands are going to be rockin' the streets, and there's going to be lots of seriously delicious local Louisiana food sold in tasting size portions for $3 to $5. Organizers estimate that 20,000 serious eaters will show up in the course of the two days. All the proceeds from the festival are going to Cafe Reconcile, a restaurant in New Orleans that, among other things, trains at-risk and less fortunate folks to work in the...
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Tonight, we moved from New York to New Orleans, nicely timed with next week's Mardi Gras. This involved some of the tastiest, heartiest food ever filmed this season. Granted, there wasn't a lot of background New Orleans action—no music (except for a little brass), and no signs of Katrina or post-Katrina struggles, but I guess this wasn't a documentary. Emeril Lagasse was the guest judge, and like Eric Ripert, he was full of positive energy. As the crawfish king, he could have been patronizing in the Creole cuisine department, but he was quite the opposite. ("Home run dish"..."I loved his gumbo"..."This one captured the spirit of New Orleans.") And whoa, did he even say Bam! once? [Warning: Spoilers ahead.]...
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