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Sarah Mae with her three degrees
Category Archives: Foodies
Fun with food and drink
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I was reading some of my favorite blogs on Friday evening when I came across this post from NOLA Defender blog . Free admission to several Museums in the city? Sounds like us! We looked thru the list and chose … Continue reading
Oysters in June
Despite the fact that it’s held in June – which, according to local standards, is a month with no “R” in it and therefore not good for oysters – New Orleans Oyster Festival rocks! I enjoyed attending because it doesn’t have the crowds that popular New Orleans festivals attract.
This particular festival was born out of tragedy in 2010. The BP Oil spill alienated Louisiana’s seafood industry – and still does – due to (in my opinion) consumer ignorance.
Using the same strength that helped this area come back from Katrina, the Louisiana Seafood Board and the Louisiana Department of Wildlife & Fisheries along with a slew of local supporters decided in June of 2010 to show that the Oyster industry was down but not out.
As the following photographs will show, there were plenty of oysters to be enjoyed, prepared in a variety of recipes. My only regret is that the local chefs haven’t come up with a good, cold oyster dish aside from shucked oysters.
We arrived at 11 A.M. knowing that the heat was going to continue to rise. The organizers of this festival did very well in providing a number of shady spots for diners and festival goers to get away from the heartless sun. Every table in the tents had linen table cloths and free fans to keep the festival goers cool.
Our first stop was one that got my attention: Redfish Grill’s Oyster Shooter with Grey Goose. Yum!!!
Here I am trying to take a picture of my oyster shooter. It was delightful, by the way.
Here is my tiny-chef daughter celebrating her oyster shooter.
Our next stop was the most visible sites of the fest: Drago’s with their charbroiled oysters.
They were delectable
Hungry for yet more oysters, we headed over to Luke for the Oyster Poboy with smoked tomato relish.
It did not disappoint us. In fact, there was a slice of bacon in the sandwich which we knew came from hogs raised on the northshore….yum, fresh pork!
I was impressed with the professionalism of the Luke staff.
By this time the Treme Brass Band had taken the stage and got the crowd into their fantastic New Orleans music.
By now it was noon and my daughter and I decided to take shelter under the cooking demo tent to cool off.
Hubby opted to roam the area in search of interesting pictures. Here are his results:
The blue guy really isn’t as wacko as he seems in this picture. 
In this picture you can see me motioning that my beer is empty.
By now we were ready for more oyster dishes, so we headed for the Court of Two Sisters Booth for both Oyster Pie and Crawfish Louise.
I asked if they would divulge the recipe for the Crawfish Louise and they promised that they would when I visited the restaurant. Tiny Chef and I figured it out while eating it.
Our next choice of food was our mistake of the day.
The oysters had the consistency of liver, they were tasteless and the spinach/artichoke “bruschetta” was plain. Don’t waste your money.
The oyster shucking contest was next and was fun to watch, chiefly because Joe Cahn was the MC.
Shuckers lining up to shuck
This guys was my favorite, but he didn’t make it.
The Shucker Winner was from Desire. A humble man who shucked 20 oysters in 2 minutes.
Joe Cahn enjoyed his role as oyster taster.
What follows next is a series of pictures of people I found “interesting”.
A chef from Antoine’s
This picture is blurry, but I needed to show it to show men what NOT TO WEAR in public.
Later we ran into a friend that gave us access to the Acme Oyster House VIP area to watch the Bucktown Allstars. We found this group of derelicts interesting:
Eventually the NOPD ran them off
Our day didn’t go without catching a few local “celebrities”>
Chef Andrea Apuzzo and Joe Cahn
Monica Pierre, local radio host and award winning woman.
By this time it was 3 pm and we were as fried as the oysters, so we decided to head home. All three of us are sunburned in one way or another, but it was fun. We’re looking forward to next week’s Vieux To Do featuring three festivals in one.
for the fishermen
On WWL-TV this morning, there was a quick video about the release of a seafood cookbook fundraiser, sponsored by the Louisiana Seafood Festival Foundation with the proceeds benefiting the Friends of the Fishermen Fund.
The cookbook can be purchased at any Rouse’s grocery and costs $9.95. It is a softcover book, however it contains excellent seafood recipes from most of the famous chef’s cooking in the New Orleans area. I purchased one this morning and already have a dozen pages marked to try out recipes. These would make great Christmas gifts too, for the cooks on your list. One thing I noticed as I read the local chef’s biographies is that many of them are graduates of New Orleans’ own Delgado Culinary School!
The Louisiana Seafood Festival will be held in the French Quarter the weekend of June 11-12. Check it out and help support our local fishermen.
J’anita’s
Hubby and I went to the aquarium today and after seeing all those fish, I was hungry for fish!! So we headed over to Janita’s at the Rendon Inn on Eve Street. It’s run by two great people: Craig & Kimmie Giesecke. Craig has a “beer and food” blog here. Click on pictures for larger versions
Their menu will make your mouth water just reading it!
These two are amazing chefs!!
After reading over the menu and talking to the fantastic bartender, we decided on our meal: Billy would have the Swamp Rueben and I wanted the Brown Redfish and Chips. Lemme tell ya, we were NOT disappointed!
Billy’s sandwich was delicious. He got a cup of Kimmie’s veggie soup to go with it and I have to tell you – a food lover and cook – it was GOOOD!
My redfish and chips was deluxe!
They’re also a great late nite place, folks, so there’s no reason to not check it out.
Their address is on Eve Street in NOLA
La Provence
Just got back from spending our Valentines dinner at La Provence Restaurant in Big Branch (near Mandeville), Louisiana. As usual the service was attentive without being obtrusive, the food was perfect and the experience was so very wonderful. Hubby and I opted not to bring our cameras with us to document our meal this time. Instead, I’m going to do a ‘rerun’ of our last visit there in March of ’09. I had the same meal tonite as I had in the following post. Hubby had a dish containing a fish called tripletail and it was fantastic! So what follows is our experience at LaProvence Restaurant a few years ago and it was just as wonderful as tonite:
March, 2009
Tonight hubby and I dined at our favorite restaurant to celebrate our third anniversary: La Provence in the Lacombe/Big Branch area of St. Tammany Parish.
To all of your big city folks in NOLA: make plans to take a day trip on a Sunday afternoon and enjoy a laid back, delicious Sunday Brunch during the beautiful weather we’ve been having before it gets too hot. (we’ve already made reservations for April 5th) You will not be disappointed
click on the pictures for full-size versions
Springtime in St. Tammany Parish is as close to Eden as you can get. To complement the climate, imagine yourself sitting in this patio, choosing from this menu:
Please ignore the date of “March 1″ because this is the current menu used each Sunday, not just March 1st.
La Provence has a new Chef de Cuisine, a very talented young man named Erick Loos IV who is an extremely brilliant chef. Allow me to validate my opinions with pictures and words.
Just as important as the presentation and quality of the food is service. The waitstaff is attentive without being exaggeratedly annoying ala any of Emeril’s establishments. Our waitress was Kelly and she was extremely sweet and professional.
Upon seating, restaurant guests are treated to a great little starter of chicken liver mousse and warm crostini. Nice……
While we were dining on our crostini and mousse, Kelly surprised us with the offering of a pissaladiere, which is a warm tarte of onions, anchovies, olives, fresh arugula. Not sure if this is an invention of Chef Erick, but this is a beautiful dish which is also offered in the Sunday Brunch Menu
I could eat this all day…….while I was eating it, I imagined the delectably light crust with chocolate and powdered sugar or shrimp and cheese or muffaletta ingredients. An ambrosial dish.
As we enjoyed our pissaladiere, we were greeted by LaProvence Restaurant manager Dale Harvey. Another Slidell native, Dale is a great manager (front of the house man) for LaProvence. He has the personality to put everyone at ease and truely cares about his customers. We discussed our Katrina experiences (anyone who lived down here before-during-after the storm does that) and the menu along with our hope of procuring a pic with the owner to share with my daughter at Chef John Folse’s School of Culinary Arts(more like a "nah-nah, look what I did, actually". ) We found out that Chef Besh just might show up on this evening.
I want to stop here to share the fact that hubby and I are typical Southeast Louisiana natives in the fact that we plan our lives around food. As the saying goes, in Louisiana we live to eat, whereas in the rest of the country they eat to live. This trip to LaProvence had us excited for a few months after the reservations were cast. So the anticipation that we could actually meet John Besh in person was exciting to us because of his reputation as a good cook as well as the fact that he's a "Slidell boy". The Food Network stuff comes in second for us because the star factor is really not important to anyone who loves well done cuisine. I don't like using the word of “foodie” to describe ourselves because it’s such a pretentious word.
Back to our trek to Big Branch’s best restaurant (probably their only one besides a quick stop), after chatting with Dale, we had to decide upon our appetizer.
I apologize for the quality of the photos to come. We were not sure of the grade of the photographs until we got home. We WILL assure you that presentation was of the utmost importance to the LaProvence staff which they met exceedingly well
I chose the Shrimp Tajine because of the flavor (I’d had it before) and presentation. This appetizer includes a “merguez” made of shrimp which is
incredibly delectable
Hubby got the Charbroiled Oysters.
I got to taste an oyster and it was sooooooooooooooo good!!!
Delicious is not a good enough word to describe what we experienced.
Entrees were next
Decisions…decisions…..I chose the tenderloin of beef (medium rare) because I craved red meat; my honey got the scallops with risotto.
Served with bone marrow, porcini mushtrooms and “pommes dauphinois”, I can’t tell you what the best thing on this plate was. The bone marrow was mouth watering, the beef perfectly cooked; but those potatoes blew me away! (I guess that goes back to my Irish roots, my obsession with potatoes)
Billy now loves Risotto. I explained to him how this is a dish of love – because you have to tend to it like a child – until it is complete. Those scallops were buttery, sweet and cooked to perfection. The asparagus came from either the garden outside the restaurant or their farm in Folsom. I’m getting this dish on our next foray to LaProvence!
By this time we were giddy with the taste of food so well thought out.
I neglected to mention the great wine that we shared with our food.
Wonderful wine from that great year of 2005 (thanks, Katrina).
It really was a nice, dry red wine which complemented both of our dishes: meat and fish.
Dessert was awesome!!
Unfortuneately our dessert pix came out too blurry because we didn’t take into consideration the lighting, but I will tell you that the Torte aux Chocolate and the Strawberry Sorbet were orgasmic. Ask anyone who was there.
Thinking that the best of our evening had passed, Mr. Dale came back to our table and said that we were summoned to the kitchen. WOW
As we entered the kitchen we were applauded by the kitchen staff. What a fantastic end to a beautiful meal. Our thanks to all who participated to make this one of the most memorable meals and we applaud YOU!.
my apologies to Chef Erick for the quality of the photographs….your food ROCKS, Erick!!!
Here are links to previous posts about LaProvence and Chef Besh
This one describes our first visit to LaProvence as well as containing a video about their
Biodynamic Farm
I discuss the release of the new line of Besh products at Rouses here
MVB – Most Valuable Burger
Hi everybody. You don’t know me yet, but you will soon enough as I’ll occasionally be writing posts here at NolaFemmes. My regular home is over here. I don’t usually write much about food, but I’m always taken with unique New Orleans experiences, so here we go.
For my first post, I thought I’d write about MVB – Most Valuable Burger. It’s a pop-up restaurant that takes over Slim Goodie’s on Sundays starting at 5 p.m. So, if you’ve driven by Slim’s on a Sunday during the last few months and noticed a crazy long line outside, this is exactly why.
A pop-up restaurant (and I didn’t know this until recently) is one that operates when another, more established restaurant is regularly closed. It saves on a lot of costs so that new ventures can build a following and experiment with their menus.
But this is what I know. I am a fan of MVB after eating there last Sunday. I plan to eat there often while it’s operating in Slim Goodie’s and I would definitely frequent any place they open on their own. Let me tell you why.
My friend Jamey and I decided to mosey on over to Slim’s to check MVB out. We got there about 5:15, which we both knew was pretty dumb, considering we’d seen the line there before. And there was a line, a long one. It got a tiny bit shorter when it started to rain, but most people held their ground. They were determined, as we were. The fine folks of MVB passed a basket of fries down the line to thank us while we waited and to tantalize us as well. Actually, they sent two basket of fries down the line while Jamey and I were waiting. The fries were amazing – I heard several people say, “Well I definitely can’t leave after that.”
It’s BYOB, as several people clearly already knew – they came prepared. Next time, I might grab a Strawberry Abita or two to take with me.
So, we got a table at about 6 p.m. I was starving by then, but excited to try out the menu. And I’ll hand this to the staff – they were entirely conscious of the line outside and were moving fast, but they never made us feel rushed once we got our table, which I really appreciated.
The menu was simple and absolutely overwhelming. Apparently, there are new additions every week. I’d seen a Tweet earlier in the day from MVB about the salted caramel shakes, so I already knew I was ordering that.
The only thing that can cure this Vegas hangover is a pimento cheese burger and a salted caramel shake. See you all at 5:00. 12:22 PM Jan 30th
They have a deal – $13 for a burger and fries and a shake, so that was that. Jamey also got the deal, but got a vanilla shake rather than the crazy fancy special shake like me. Our shakes were incredible (especially mine). I’m going to be really sad if it’s not available next time, but who knows what they’ll have instead?
Our food arrived pretty quickly and was absolutely incredible. The burger was one of the best I’ve ever eaten – flavored just right and juicy. The bun, which I learned is a potato bun from Maple St. Patisserie, was the perfect touch. And the fries were just as good as our tantalizing taste outside — soft, salty skinny fries with a nice bite to them. Everything was both gourmet and simple, decadent and no-nonsense. What an amazing contradiction.
The lagniappe at the end was the perfect touch. I won’t spoil what it is, but I promise it is absolutely divine. I was stuffed, but I made room without hesitation.
MVP won’t be operating again till the 13th, but I definitely suggest you go. Get there early, as they stop serving when they’re sold out. As this Tweet attests from last Sunday, that can happen in a matter of hours:
Sold out. 8:47 PM Jan 30th
MVP is perfect for a night when you’re feeling like having an adventure in dining. Bring your beer of choice, your favorite dining companion (though I’d caution against large groups because seating could be tough), and — most importantly — your appetite.
Sunday Postscripts
Ok, New Orleanians, after a several week absence, Sunday Postscripts is back….. here are a few links from the NOLA blogosphere I want to pass along in case you missed them.
Food
Weigh in on your favorite gumbo in the city at NOLA Eats and find out the favorites of other locals. Who makes your favorite gumbo?
Yesterday I went to The Mirliton Fest (which was a blast!) where I had the great pleasure of eating mirliton shrimp and grits cooked up by Chef Anne of Karma Kitchen. I just want to give her a little shout-out here because, lawdy, was that one fantastic, salivating dish!
Architecture
Architecture Research, a wonderful local architecture blog, talks about the November issue of The Atlantic which features an article about the new post-K domestic architecture in New Orleans.
In the same vein, catch up on what’s happening with Brad Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation ~ thanks to Good NOLA for the shout out.
Healthcare
Valentine Pierce and her mom have been dealing with disturbing and all too common issues navigating Medicare and Medicaid coverage for the elderly. Read her post Hell and Damnation: Medicare and Medicaid. Oh, we don’t need healthcare reform? Mmmkay.
SAINTS!
Are you a Saints fan? (Is the Pope…..yeah, you know the rest!) Check out Chicks in the Huddle,a sports blog from a woman’s perspective, for their evaluation and prediction of today’s Saints – Panthers game.
GEAUX SAINTS!
Dat’s all!
UPDATE: Yay for Chicks in the Huddle ~ they predicted Saints to win 31 – 20, Final score: Saints 30 – Panthers 20! WOMAN POWER!!
Hollygrove Market
I was in upstate New York recently and my friend made the most delicious dinners. She puzzled over what to do with white beets. I thought to myself, “You buy things before knowing what you’ll cook with them?” But then she explained that she’s part of a Community Supported Agriculture, or CSA. Each week, she goes to a local farm and buys a pre-filled box of local fruits and vegetables.
The salad she made with those beets was the best beet dish I’ve ever eaten. I was inspired.
I returned to NOLA and sought out our own CSA. Alas, we do not have one. But, we do have something similar at Hollygrove Market. Every Saturday morning, the market sells CSA-style boxes (or bags) of local fruits and vegetables from several local farms for $25. I’ve been three Saturdays in a row. They open at 10am and usually sell out of boxes within 2 hours. They also sell other fruits and vegetables, fresh breads, and dairy products.
Here’s what was in this week’s box:
Three pears, six satsumas, a bag of brown jasmine rice (instead of white popcorn rice), a bag of black-eyed peas (my choice of peas or beans), two ears of corn, a zucchini, a yellow squash, two patty pan squashes, two tomatoes, two green peppers, a bag of okra, and a container of white button mushrooms.
I’ve never cooked with patty pan squash. And I have found that I love the thought of being given the opportunity of working with something new, something that’s not too daunting. And I love even more that most of the what’s in each box are things I’m familiar with, even if some are things I’ve never cooked with before.
And for the last two weeks since we started getting the boxes, we’re eating more fruits and vegetables. We’ve eaten out just once in the last two weeks, and that includes having had company in town to feed! THAT is a big deal.
So, are you looking for fresh and delicious local fruits and vegetables? With maybe a slight twist that pushes you to try new things? At a price that is more than worth it?
Then get to Hollygrove Market next Saturday and get in line for the best kept secret in the city right now. I’ll see you there!
Hey, NoLA Foodies!
There’s a new foodie website in town called NoLA Eats recently launched by NoLA native Leslie J. Almeida. I discovered it today via Miss Malaprop, a great local website dedicated to Indie design and eco-friendly living.
Apparently Leslie has been hosting monthly NOLA Eats dinners and events in local restaurants for several years. On her About Page you’ll find quite an impressive listing of past dinners in New Orleans and other mouth-watering information.
A dinner is scheduled for this Saturday at La Côte Brasserie. Yum! My Twitter friends and I who lunch frequently at local eateries may have to plan making a gumbo of the two groups one day soon.
Good luck with your new site, Leslie!
