Musings on food, cooking, and dining by a New Orleans Foodie

In my opinion, there are two dishes that can take ANY leftovers and turn them into something special. No, I'm not talking about leftover spaghetti or hamburger helper, but specifically, leftover ingredients. And those two dishes? Omelettes and quesadillas. What other creations can you stuff with any random ingredient and look like a genius? Sure, you can make variations, like enchiladas or frittatas, but I'm going to stick with the basics. Last week I made an omelette with some green onion, cheddar cheese and leftover crawfish tails. On Sunday, I made quesadillas. Here's how they came to be...

On Saturday afternoon my friend Kellie invited me to a birthday party that she and some others were throwing for their friend. The party was out at the riverfront, near the zoo, on a day with perfect weather. Knowing the usual group of friends that I socialize with, I didn't expect a whole lot, but figured the company would be good, so I went. What I found was a complete shock and an eye-opening experience. The birthday picnic was complete with balloons, water-guns and decorations, but best of all was the food. The table was covered with gourmet salads and wedges of cheese from Whole Foods. There were pans of fish and shrimp kabobs marinating and waiting for their turn on the grill. Corona beer was plentiful and so were the pitchers of margaritas, one after another. Last but not least was dessert; individual servings of crème brule for everyone and an ice chest that held six cold bottles of Vueve Cliquot champagne. Quite a shocking event, and I didn't have to do any planning! I was so impressed that I invited everyone over to my house on Sunday for the usual day of cooking.

On Sunday, I went and met Tom at Fat Harry's to watch the second half of the Saints game (I watched the first half at home). After the game, we went back to my house to start cooking for the crowd. I made some black beans and rice and defrosted a chicken breast as well as made a marinade for a couple of steaks. The menu for the day - gourmet quesadillas.

The crowd showed up, leftovers in hand. They brought the tiki torches from Saturday as well as all of the food that didn't get cooked. The best part? Everyone brought liquor! Damn, I am used to feeding people, but it was refreshing for everyone to pitch in. We had Portobello's, eggplant, shrimp, fish and margaritas in addition to the quesadillas I made. In the end, there were three different varieties - steak, bleu cheese, red onion and portobello mushrooms; chicken and cheese; and finally, veggie quesadillas. All made with ingredients (mostly) either left over from Saturday or meat found in my kitchen. They came out fantastic! Tom brought over a couple of bottles of red wine and one bottle of dessert wine from his collection, and we finished off one bottle of red from my house along with a half a jug of tequila and a whole lot of beer. For dessert, Alan, a new friend, brought all of the ingredients and made a fantastic tray of bread pudding.

Sunday turned out fantastic and I had a great time with some new friends. There was plenty of beer left, so I'll have to invite everyone over soon (or maybe I'll just finish it myself). I'm still cleaning the kitchen, but it was worth it. Now for next time, if I can only get everyone to clean :)

Yesterday my mom was in the area and helped me out by picking up my mail from my grandparent's house. As I was looking through the bag I found a postcard from Brooks Brothers for a suit sale. Since I need a new suit or two anyway, the offer sounded perfect, that is until I read the fine print. The sale offers $400 off a second suit when you buy one valued at $698 or more. Now back when I was making money and buying suits at Brooks Brothers, I might have taken advantage of the offer, but at this point I really just need to spend some money on new dress shirts. I then started thinking and telling my mother how it wouldn't fit into my budget to buy new shirts right now. Is that the truth? Sort of, I guess.

See, my regular salary keeps things pretty tight, with little room to do or buy anything extra. My weekend bartending job gives me the extra cash to do the drinking and eating that I have become accustomed. I just can't bring myself to spend that cash on necessities, like shirts and ties. I can however allow that money to go to a more noble cause, like liquor.

Yesterday afternoon after work, I stopped by Martin Wine Cellar to pick up some more tequila. I opted for a bottle of one of my favorites, El Tesoro Platinum. I also was in need of an orange liquor but didn't want to spend the money on Cointreau, so my intention was to get a bottle of triple sec. I instead compromised and picked out a bottle of Patron Citronage, a new orange liquor bottled and imported from Mexico by Patron Spirits. It was a bit more costly than triple sec but not as pricey as the French imported Cointreau. And as the Patron website states, "what do the French know about making margaritas?"

I guess the whole point to my mindless dribble is that you have to have priorities. I could've easily spent that money on a dress shirt and tie, but I'm not sure I wouldn't have wanted to caress my new shirt like I did my beautiful bottle of hand made, triple distilled, 100% blue agave tequila (do you get this excited about tequila?). Anyway, at about $32 a bottle, it's pretty cheap compared to me drinking margaritas at a restaurant for eight bucks a pop. And I'm a pretty experienced drinker. So put it in perspective. What's going to give you the most pleasure? I know I work an extra job just to spend that money on me, so should I feel guilty about passing up some necessities? I don't... hell, you gotta live life, you just don't know when you won't be around to enjoy it any longer. If you haven't done so already, it's time to figure out what your priorities are...

Well, I've got good news and bad news... let's go with the good news first. I am working with a great photographer, Kevin R. Roberts to showcase some of his New Orleans photographs on my web page. He's got stock photography of just about every neighborhood joint and a lot more. I look forward to getting some of his pictures up and running. I have also been perusing his Neighborhood Restaurant Guide, a great book that has pictures and a narrative of many of the best New Orleans neighborhood restaurants; I should have some of them for sale soon, a bargain for about 8 bucks.

Ok, so here is the bad news. Some fuck- faced lowlife decided to root around in my car this Saturday and helped himself to my Canon digital camera. I religiously lock my car, but I can't understand what happened. At least he didn't have to break the window. Imagine the irony.... I NEVER leave anything in my car, especially after the last time it was broken into, but accidently left my camera in the center console after evacuating from the hurricane. I just didn't want it to get stolen from my home in the case someone looted my house. However, I still have all of my Nikon pro photography gear, I'm just not equipped to scan in my negatives or slides. So no more food pics from me for a while (that might not necessarily be a bad thing). The joke's on the thief though... the camera battery charger was sitting on my back seat, and he (or she) missed it! HA, I'd love to see you take pics with a dead battery, asshole! I guess it's a good thing I already downloaded the naughty pics (of the poor-boys that weren't dressed).

Oh yea, and the hard drive on my laptop crashed, but I think I have most everything backed up except for some recent pics. There is still a month left with the warranty, but I spent about an hour on the phone yesterday with a Dell technichal service moron who had me attempt to remove the hard drive and play with it. Gee, it's a good thing I paid Dell so much extra for the damned "in-home service" warranty. What a friggin farce. Don't waste your money on the warranty.

So what does all of this have to do with food? Not a whole lot, but I feel much better now. By the way, my birthday is on October 26, so if you have a Canon S200 2 megapixel digital camera you are no longer using... feel free to sell it to me at a reasonable price, I still have my battery charger and the original box and cables. Thanks for listening!

Keeping in my quest to hit some New Orleans neighborhood restaurants, Tom and I went to Mandina's for lunch on Saturday for lunch. On our journey through Kevin R. Robert's Neighborhood Restaurant Guide (I'll get a bunch of them if anyone wants to buy one - let me know), I decided that Mandina's would be a good experience. As usual, it was good, but I wouldn't call it spectacular. Tom started out with some turtle soup and we both had an Abita Fall Fest draft beer. For the main course (I guess you can call it that), we both ordered the hot roast beef poor boy and an order of fries. The poor boy was tasty and it was done right, the bread was perfect and there was just enough juice to make it sloppy. I was a bit under-whelmed with the roast beef. I found it sliced a little too thick and a little short on flavor. As Tom noted (as well as Tom Fitzmorris), there are very few places in town who cook their own roast beef. The roast beef from Mandina's was obviously the "stock" roast beef. The fries worked great to soak up the extra juice on my plate, even though they were the Sysco variety. In the end, it was a pretty good meal. In retrospect, I probably should've ordered my favorite, the 1/2 fried shrimp and 1/2 fried oyster poor boy, but the roast beef was adequate for a change. I'll go back again soon, but there are still plenty of neighborhood restaurants I still need to hit.

Because of the nice weather, I decided to avoid the interstate to make it home, instead opting to drive down Carrolton to St. Charles. There was one place that I wanted to stop on the way home and I figured it was the perfect time. The Union Supermarket on S. Carrolton is a completely Hispanic supermarket that carries all of the products that you can't find anywhere else in the city. Stepping in was like going to a whole other country and I figured since Tom is from Chicago and speaks decent Spanish, it was the perfect opportunity. The place was great! Small isles packed with every Spanish, Mexican and Latin American ingredient you could think about. Each isle had its own distinct smell and its own technique for maneuvering around the shoppers with their miniature grocery carts. In the back of the store was a deli with fresh meats and fish and a lunch counter that had every some tasty looking Mexican and Cuban hot plates, sandwiches and tacos. I found a couple of things to buy, but it won't be long before I return to try out the tacos. If I hadn't just returned from eating a big meal, I might've succumbed to ordering a few tacos. Don't worry, I'll be back soon.

Well, I'm back to New Orleans from my evacuation to Hammond. Wasn't much of a hurricane from our perspective, but the evacuation turned out pretty well. Because of the heavy traffic flow (about 600,000 people were trying to leave at the same time), I waited until about 6:30 pm on Tuesday to get out of town. I brought along a friend of mine, so we packed up the car and went. The destination was my family estate (ok, so it's my parent's house on a few acres of land) in Hammond. Against my Mother's advice, the stress of the traffic was too much to handle, so we opened up the ice chest for beer only a few minutes into the trip. The traffice wasn't too bad, but quite a bother. It took us about 3 hours to make the trip that usually takes one hour. Our only stop was for margaritas and dinner at Caretta's grill in Mandeville.

Wednesday felt a little like a Saturday with a hangover. I was still tired from the week so I slept late, then went down to the kitchen to make crawfish omelettes. They turned out great. Some seasoned crawfish, green onion and cheddar cheese along with three eggs cooked and folded into a tasty breakfast treat.

I went upstairs and took a nap, right through lunch, but when I woke up it was time to start drinking beer and prepping for dinner. Dinner ended up being about 17 of us in all - friends and family. The total consumprion included venison, rack of lamb, shrimp, fish, baked ham, twice baked potato casserole, roasted potatoes and a myriad of alcoholic beverages, including many margaritas and a lot of beer. So much alcohol in fact, that it aided me in sleeping in a time of such despair, even if we didn't get any rain.

Thursday morning returned me to my uptown home to find everything intact. The city was still deserted and so were the restaurants and bars. It was by far the creepiest feeling I've had in a while, but also quite exciting to be one of the few people in town. The comfort came with the sheer number of police officers that stood at corners or patrolled the streets. It had to be one of the safest feelings I have had while roaming the streets of NOLA. None of the usual hangouts were open and I was hungry. Fat Harry's wasn't even open, so I figured I could get a pretty good burger at Igor's on St. Charles. We didn't make it too far before we were sidetracked into Superior Grill. I guess my craving for more margaritas with some chips and cheese probably did it. Lots of chips, a bowl of cheese and some beef quesadillas later and I was good for the day. Not bad for a hurricane.

Ok, so the Saints lost, but my weekend was a winner... where do I start?

Friday was an Abita Beer pub crawl in the French Quarter. Abita does about four of them a year and I've missed the last couple because of my Friday night bartending at Sugar Magnolia. Since I no longer have any Friday night obligations, I went. It started at the Bourbon House restaurant and crawled to four other bars on Bourbon Street. The beer was only a dollar and included a free t-shirt. We didn't make it to all of the bars, but I did make it home safely.

You can imagine that after an evening of overindulgence I was ready to eat. I hadn't eaten anything since lunch on Friday, something very uncharacteristic of me (I tend to want to eat when I am drinking), so when I woke up on Saturday morning my mind started thinking of all of the possibilities. I managed to narrow it down to chinese food from August Moon (a great hangover food) or a poor boy. After hearing a friend of mine talk about Liuzza's by the Track, I couldn't pass it up. I called my friend Tom, who is usually up for eating and we jumped in the car and went. Each of us had the same thing, a cup of gumbo, the garlic oyster poor boy and "real" french fries (as labeled on the menu). While it wasn't the best I've ever had, the gumbo had a fantastic flavor and was packed with andouille, chicken, shrimp and oysters. I couldn't have asked for a better appetizer. For a poor boy, I just couldn't pass up the garlic oyster poor boy, a sandwich with fried oysters basted in garlic butter sauce. Of course I got it dressed. Yummy stuff. Now for those not in New Orleans, the thing that makes a poor boy (a.k.a. po' boy) sandwich different is the bread. When heated, the bread should be a bit crispy on the outside and soft on the inside. In the opinion of the experts (me included), the bread is the defining characteristic of a true New Orleans poor boy. And this one is of the better ones in town.

The best part of the weekend had to be my debut in my new bartending gig at Allegro Bistro during Saints home games. For anyone who has been to a Saints game, Allegro is the place to be before and after the game. I couldn't have asked for a better gig. I got to serve drinks, make a ton of money and stand around and watch beautiful women drink a lot and make fools of themselves in front of everyone. I'll keep you posted.