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From Eating Out
Posted by The Gurgling Cod, May 2, 2008 at 8:00 PM
Crawfish Monica, just one of the must-try foods at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Fest.
This weekend is the second weekend of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. The music ranges from the sublime (the gospel tent) to the ridiculous (Billy Joel on the Acura stage), but there is also food. In their wisdom, rather than providing the standard concessionaire fare, the guiding spirits of Jazz Fest have a competitive, juried process for getting food selling space inside the Fairgrounds. The entire thing takes place inside of a horse race track, which should give some sense of the scale. I had suggested an overview of these offering might be interesting for SE readers, and arrived at the fairgrounds with a roll of Tums and a fistful of cash, prepared to survey the entire range of offerings. A sacrifice, yes, but worth it for the sake of edifying SE readers. Unfortunately, not long after my arrival on Saturday, the skies opened up, which limited, but did not derail, my plan.
First and foremost, and a useful bit of wisdom from a grizzled Jazz Fest veteran, try to keep a Rose Mint Iced tea in your hands at all times. Wandering around outdoors all day is dehydrating, (when it's not raining, especially), and as you are likely to have many opportunities to drink alcohol, before, during, and after your time at the fairgrounds, a refreshing, hydrating drink is a good thing now and again.
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From Eating Out
Posted by The Gurgling Cod, March 12, 2008 at 8:30 AM
As a serious eater with a commute where a MetroCard is no help at all, I was pleased to see restaurant critic Frank Bruni go beyond Gotham with his Coast to Coast series in the New York Times dining section. I was more pleased to see that one of the spots was in New Orleans, which happened to coincide with a previously planned day-job-related trip there. Make no mistake. Unless it's during Jazzfest or Mardi Gras, it's hard to eat badly in New Orleans.* Pound for pound, it's hard to think of a place that has such depth of excellence from haute to street. I lived in New Orleans for a year in the 1990s, return as often as I can, and had many excellent meals there long before Bruni had to worry about the diacritics on crème brûlée. While I knew that there were dozens of options within yards of the conference I was attending, I was excited about Cochon, and excited about being part of the conversation about Cochon.
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From Recipes
Posted by The Gurgling Cod, December 29, 2007 at 4:43 PM
The final Sunday Night Soup of the year features a visit by the Titans of Tennessee to the Colts of Indianapolis. As it happens, these are the Gurgling Cod’s two least favorite NFL franchises. The Titans deliberately injured Patriot safety Rodney Harrison in the regular season finale last year, making it possible for the Colts to be the last team to beat the Patriots. The Titans need a win to make the playoffs, while the Colts have clinched a playoff berth. A win does the Colts no good, so expect to see members of the Terre Haute Youth Choir and the Evansville Jaycees getting plenty of snaps. Soupwise, a bit of a poser – we have discussed the uncompelling foodways of Indiana before. Tennessee is known to have good things to eat, but most are in solid form, such as BBQ. An exception would be Jack Daniels, but if you want to make a whiskey-based soup (JD is not a Bourbon), you are on your own. So instead of local, we will think seasonal.
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From Recipes
Posted by The Gurgling Cod, December 22, 2007 at 7:30 PM
Sunday Night Soups, where each week The Gurgling Cod shows up to offer a soup appropriate to the week's Sunday Night Football game on NBC.
The antepenultimate regular season Sunday Night Soup has SNS regulars the Redskins venturing to Minnesota to face the Vikings. The Vikings play indoors, which seems a shame, given the hardiness of their namesakes, and the franchise has languished since moving to a dome in the 1980s.
These teams have radically different foodsheds—the riches of the Chesapeake and the sweeping expanses of the northern reaches of America’s breadbasket. Flour comes from Minnesota, and crabs from Maryland, so breaded soft-shelled crabs would be an idea, but they are unwieldy in soup, and out of season, anyway. They will be teeing this one up not long before Santa kicks the tires and lights the fires, and that calls for something festive but not overwhelming. In other words, a perfect spot for Fergus Henderson’s leek, potato, and oyster soup.
This recipe is from his first book, published Stateside as The Whole Beast
. He has a newer book out as well, Beyond Nose to Tail, which is more attractively produced than the first but not as compelling to cook from. Despite what the newspapers tell you, there is nothing wrong with giving cookbooks not published within the last year, so if you have a cook on your list who likes to use everything but the squeak, start with the first one.
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From Recipes
Posted by The Gurgling Cod, December 20, 2007 at 3:45 PM
For those of you who may have been intrigued by the Charleston Punch but do not have plans to entertain groups of 300 people over the holidays, consider this saner yet festive alternative from The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook
.* Matt Lee and Ted Lee are Charleston denizens, but Matt developed the prototype of this punch for a black-tie holiday dinner at a Harvard eating club, so make of that what you will. It is possible that lower indigenous levels of gentility call for lower levels of alcohol.
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From Recipes
Posted by The Gurgling Cod, December 20, 2007 at 3:00 PM
The response to the New Orleans Junior League eggnog suggests that within the Serious Eats community there is a hitherto unexpressed interest in the alcoholic concoctions of nice Southern ladies. And why not? Without a flutter, they present recipes featuring booze in quantities that would make Dylan Thomas blanch. Witness the Cotillion Club Punch from the aforementioned Charleston Receipts. To make about 300 servings, you'll need:
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From Recipes
Posted by The Gurgling Cod, December 18, 2007 at 10:00 AM
Eggnog may be second only to fruitcake as a holiday punchline. And why not? It comes up most often as an explanation for otherwise inexplicable behavior at office parties, and the pre-made version in most grocery stores resembles an opaque, insipid quart of 10W-30 motor oil. For the first 30 or so years of my life, I never gave much eggnog much thought. Then, thanks to a lucky day at Myopic Books, the Gourmet's Guide to New Orleans came into my life. The name is misleading—it is, in fact, a Junior League cookbook. Charleston Receipts is probably the most famous Junior League cookbook, but as a rule, they are worth keeping an eye out for when you trawl the cookbook section at your favorite used book store. My copy is the 13th edition, from 1955, but I don't know when the eggnog recipe became part of the collection. After I read the recipe, I knew immediately I had to make it:
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From Recipes
Posted by The Gurgling Cod, December 15, 2007 at 5:00 PM
Sunday Night Soups, where each week The Gurgling Cod shows up to offer a soup appropriate to the week's upcoming Sunday Night Football game on NBC.
This weekend, Sunday Night Soups returns to its NFC East comfort zone. The Redskins head north on 95 and take exit 16W to the Meadowlands, where they will find the Giants waiting for them.
You can get many different kinds of soup in both D.C. and New York, the nominal homes of these franchises, which are in fact located in Landover, Maryland, and East Rutherford, New Jersey, respectively. Neither Landover nor East Rutherford has its own signature soup, and we did the Maryland crab thing last week.
One thing that does distinguish this matchup is a heavy University of Miami flavor. Players on both sides will be wearing patches or decals in honor of former Miami Hurricane Sean Taylor, the Redskins safety who was murdered last month in his home. The Redskins feature the inimitable Clinton Portis, as well as Santana Moss, both coming straight outta Coral Gables.
For the boys in blue, Miami product Jeremy Shockey is a tight end-cum-nightlife impresario, not to mention punter Jeff Feagles. More important, it's that ever-growing period known as "the holidays," where work, friends, and family conspire to pump you full of food in a way that might make you wonder if they plan to make a terrine out of your liver. Thus something with more nutritional merit than those Scotch eggs you scarfed at the last holiday party (wait—that was me) and a Floribbean flavor seems in order. Thus, black bean soup.
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From Recipes
Posted by The Gurgling Cod, December 8, 2007 at 1:30 PM
Sunday Night Soups, where each week The Gurgling Cod shows up to offer a soup appropriate to the week's Sunday Night Football game on NBC.
This Sunday evening sees the renewal of the Carbetbag bowl, as the Colts, former Charm City NFL franchisees, return home to face the Ravens, who stepped out on the long-suffering fans of Cleveland, where they were known as the Browns, but were required to leave their colors and nickname in Cleveland for the new Browns. Got that?
Brian Billick coaches the Ravens, and could be seen last week blowing kisses to Rodney Harrison after the Patriots safety snared an interception during the Patriots' Monday Night victory and drew the Ravens' coach's attention to the play he had just made. So some sort of lip-smackingly delicious soup seems warranted. Peyton Manning, of New Orleans, will also be participating in this contest and is likely to have an impact on the outcome.
The game is in Baltimore, which is in Maryland. As Thomas Cecil pointed out back in 1630, in Maryland, "The Sea, the Bayes of Chesopeack, and Delaware, and generally all the Rivers, doe abound with Fish of severall sorts; for many of them we have no English names: There are Whales, Sturgeons very large and good, and in great aboundance; Grampuses, Porpuses, Mullets, Ttruts, Soules, Place, Mackerell, Perch, Crabs, Oysters, Cockles, and Mussles."
Billick. Manning. Cecil. The circumstances warrant a crab gumbo. Back in October, we saw a chicken-based no-okra gumbo for Saints-Seahawks. This time, consider a crab and okra gumbo, like this one, adapted from Gourmet.
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From Recipes
Posted by The Gurgling Cod, December 1, 2007 at 2:00 PM
Sunday Night Soups, where each week The Gurgling Cod shows up to offer a soup appropriate to the week's Sunday Night Football game on NBC.
This week, the Patriots cede the Sunday Night spotlight to the 4-7 Bengals, who visit the Pittsburgh Steelers in a renewal of a hallowed Rust Belt rivaly. The AFC North is known for hard-nosed football, but Cincy and Pittsburgh have culinary traditions that do not translate easily into soups.
Under the circumstances, the best approach is to make a soup that keys on a single player, as with the pho bo for Cowboys–Bears back in September. A flamboyant Mexican soup honoring Chad "Ocho Cinco" Johnson would be one option, but we've done a posole recently, which unfortunately is where my even vaguely Mexican soup repertoire begins and ends.
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