FLUFFY LUV PATTIES...

...or the greatest chocolate chip cookies known to mankind. How many people can honestly say that they themselves created the best chocolate chip cookie they've ever tasted? I am a lucky girl indeed. Jenna and I make these whenever we're together. They are so called because, well, they are chewy and perfectly fluffy (which is to say, not dense in the least bit), so full of love that one can even misspell the word, with a flavor vaguely redolent of tollhouse cookies but infinitely better because, duh, they're fresh. Mmmmm the butter. There's just enough salt in there that you get that very subtle aftertaste that prevents the cookie from being cloying. Here we are with the cookies; obviously, we hadn't stirred in the chocolate chips during the photo shoot, since they looked so much prettier in that freshly-poured puddle:





Okay, yeah, we were too hyper to scrape that little clump of flour off the side of the bowl (honestly, we didn't even notice it was there; I'm just now noticing it), but the cookies didn't suffer for it, I promise. The patch of white on my cheek is thanks to the flour that Jenna hurled at me vindictively.

St. James, and an overload on hyperlinks

I really don't need to write yet another blog entry about either this place or this sandwich, considering the relative frequency at which they appear in my thoughts and in my writing (also here)

So a picture (or a few) will have to suffice, courtesy of the fantastic and utterly adorable digital camera that was given to me for Christmas by my fantastic and utterly adorable mother! As you may have surmised, I got the mozzarella. After having tried sandwiches with roast beef and smokey blue cheese, with turkey and avocado and basil and tomato and sharp white cheddar (varying between Beecher's and Grafton), and with gruyere and caramelized onions on a really nutty grainy bread (like a dressed-up, all-grown-up grilled cheese), I see now that this one is my favorite. As I wrote that last sentence, "gruyere" was just on the tip of my tongue and I was going crazy trying to think of the name of this fantastic cheese that I eat all the time. I found the St. James website and was blown away by how engaging and interactive and well-designed it is. It's only fitting, I guess. You should definitely investigate. Now I'd die for the piave with salami rosa, spicy radish sprouts, garlic mayo, and dijon mustard on toasted rye. MMMM. Next time, I might just try that one (although I keep saying that about literally every single thing on the menu and really just hope one day I'll be brave (and rich) enough to walk in and order each and every thing.

But I digress. Hopefully my pictures are sufficient testimony to the Fra Mani salami and fresh basil pine nut pesto and lovely white meltiness that completely blankets the ciabatta. There's also a photo of my really yummy blood orange soda, simply because it tastes the way a sundress feels at Jazz Fest.




Note the impossibly poetic layers of salami and cheese, with the pesto as a tasteful and artfully executed garnish that isn't overpowering at all. It's the ultimate sidekick -- supportive but not overbearing.


And here's the drink of perfection.

P1 and other wonders

I've realized something recently. 99% of the time, when we decide to allot more attention, time, and effort to something, we burn out, get fed up, and become utterly exasperated with that which previously commanded our extra attention. It can happen with everything from schoolwork to relationships. Things just get old. But here I am, and I've started a food blog on a whim, and given that I'm a pretty driven girl, I'm devoting myself to maintaining this, if for no other reason than that it is hopefully preparing me for my career. Yet I haven't even begun to burn out. The reality of writing this has bolstered my initial interest, and it has lodged food into my permanent consciousness to the point where I deliberately seek out inspiration for my frequent little quips. Amen!

Moving on. For those of you who don't know, there's this incredible art biennial here in New Orleans called Prospect.1 (is that properly punctuated? I can't seem to ever get it right). There are literally artists from the world over using every medium you can dream of, displaying their art at tons and tons of venues across the city. It's a big deal. A darling family friend, David Buckingham, has his art over at the Universal Furniture Store. He uses found metal to craft these wild, fantastic, sometimes quite offensive wonders. This is what he has at P1 (from Pulp Fiction):

Anyway, at the CAC, there are these two sculptures of sorts made by Lee Bul. The first is this glorious, delightful, frivolous, borderline garish chandelier-esque structure, draped elaborately with glass and beads and chains that reflect light in every which way. Its framework is spirally and ornate, reminiscent of pirate ships or even a tiny metropolis, bedecked in jewels.

Opposite this ostentatious masterpiece is its counterpart, a hulking blackblackblack bunker. It looks like a miniature cave, with a molded fiberglass shell and rocky peaks. On its own, it's morbid and base and slightly confounding at first glance -- an abstract manifestation of the elephant in the room, this gargantuan behemoth that seems out of place on the mirrored floor of the gallery. Two things contradict this first impression, though: first, its simple juxtaposition with what we will refer to as the chandelier calls in a yin and yang perspective that helps add insight and intrigue. More importantly, though, is the realization that the bunker is more than something to look at. Walk inside, put on the headset, and whisper -- strike up a conversation -- break out in a spontaneous tap dance. Every slight sound that is captured in that cave is magnified by about a thousand times, so that even if you're restricting your noise to the most basic and quiet noises necessitated by life itself, you hear this uproarious, unnerving, discordant cacophony in the headset. It's just wild.

And, okay, so this is a food blog, not an art blog. I'm here to talk to you about dishes and techniques and chefs on whom I have crushes, not so much about sculptures and structures that have caught my eye. But all this build-up does, indeed, have a culinary purpose. Because in my later reflections on those two pieces, I felt that kind of singular, rare inspiration that makes you truly proud to find. The notion of that dichotomy captivated me, and I started dreaming up flavors that reflected a similar duality. Here's a short list of my inspiration thus far, the first item as the chandelier and the second as the bunker:
* Ebullient champagne / dark amber beer
* Fluffy vanilla meringue / dense, flourless chocolate cake
* Shaved hearts of palm with fresh lemon juice / warm, earthy beets (can you tell Lilette inspired this one?)
* Tangy, zingy, flaky-white ceviche / decadent grits and grillades
* Tart balsamic vinegar / velvety olive oil
* Mahony's ethereal onion rings / Mahony's roast beef po-boy with wine-y dark gravy
* Wasabi / roux
* Sorbet / foie gras
* Passionfruit / eggplant

Take the idea and run with it! Let me know if you have any whimsical ideas of your own.

Feast your eyes, lambs

...because unless you're ridiculously fortunate, your eyes will be the only things feasting on this marvelous array of foods from French Laundry in the Napa Valley.


My family used to vacation in Sorrento, Maine, and we'd always stop at this restaurant on the water where one could get the freshest of fresh Maine lobster for a ridiculously low price, considering. You sat with bibs at picnic tables, swabbing your lobster in melted butter, while water rushed over rocks in the river. So of course, lobster is sentimental for me as it is. It's like dessert, no matter how you do it. In this case, it's poached in butter and served with King Richard leeks, pommes maxims (imagine a gourmet potato chip), and red beet essence. Mmmm.


It seems that this is essentially a glorified chocolate-mint ice cream sandwich, done with Thomas Keller's unique finesse.


These are the truffles they serve you at the end of your meal. The ones second from the left look like Sucre's port chocolates. They're all beautiful. For some reason, the one on the right cracks me up -- it's faceted like a precious gem!

Credit to Google Images. I wish I could say I'd taken them.

M.F.K. Fisher, a food writer in a league of her own.

It seems that this woman is appearing far too serendipitously in snippets of my conversation these days: with my poetry teacher; with my women's history teacher; over a bowl of buttered spaghetti, a simple dish that Fisher champions, with my mom; with my classmates, who are curious as to why I am lugging around this 800-page volume entitled The Art of Eating; and, today, with Julia Reed, a food columnist at Newsweek who spoke at my school. In any case, Fisher is a major part of my life right now, and given that I am far too broke from Christmas shopping to enjoy an actual meal out right now, the next best foodie thing to write about is a fellow epicure.

Perhaps this excerpt from The Gastronomical Me sums it up best: "It seems to me that our basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it... and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied... and it is all one."

A more serious or self-respecting gourmet might spend seven pages elaborating on how and why P is for Pasta, or Parmigiano Reggiano, or Panna Cotta, or Pâté. Fisher, though, is an entirely different story, and although she does pay homage to Pâté in a single page, she chooses to devote seven pages to a chapter entitled P is for Peas. (Later on, I might add, she spends only four pages on how R is for Romantic, glossing briefly over the inextricable connection between food and love.) Such is Fisher's eccentric and whimsical Alphabet for Gourmets, in which letter designations exactingly and comically refrain from the trite, so that C is for Cautious rather than Coulis and H is for Happy as opposed to Hamachi. Perhaps it's not the most elevated book out there as food literature goes, but it is undoubtedly among the most genuine, and that, in short, is Fisher's hook.

What is most alluring about Fisher is her effervescent wit and infectious passion. Important to note is the fact that Fisher is not just a food writer the way Brett Anderson is for the Times-Picayune. As opposed to an author of ephemerally significant newspaper reviews, she is a writer unto herself; her subject of choice just happens to be food rather than star-crossed lovers or the American Dream. Her writing style has an effect similar to that of an effortless host: instantly relaxing, humbled, and infinitely inviting in its lack of pretension. Rather than elevate herself superficially with typical food jargon, she has a no-nonsense but all-joie de vivre approach, so that one can read it without a familiarity with typical culinary semantics. She's a real human being, concerned more with the sentimentality of a certain meal than with emulsions or aromatics, who can devote solid, sincere writing in praise of kasha, the simple oatmeal-esque dish pervasive in Eastern Europe, just as well as she can effortlessly discuss the gastronomical benefits of beluga caviar or pâté de foie gras truffé en brioche. Regardless of her topic, there is a sheer joy that glimmers through every word, and why wouldn't you want to read that?

...as I aimlessly research chefs in a deft procrastination attempt,

I keep finding little morsels of enlightenment that make the procrastination completely worthwhile.

Allow me to introduce him. He is Graham Elliot Bowles, and he deserves his own Wikipedia page. Known for his chef-dom at Chicago restaurant Avenues in the Peninsula, he also presides over the eponymous graham elliot, where he upholds his reputation for serving unexpected things that tickle one's palate and seduce one's imagination.

As a high school senior, I haven't had the good fortune to dabble in his gastronomical ventures, so I'm relying on Frank Bruni's NY Times review to do the trick:
"Mr. Bowles has been known to serve crushed Altoids instead of mint jelly with lamb and to present diners with lollipops of foie gras encrusted with Pop Rocks. His cooking typifies another facet of this cuisine: the way it recruits junk food into the service of fancier dishes or creates highbrow versions of lowbrow classics.
'Why not go to the store and get the curiously strong mint?" Mr. Bowles said in a telephone interview, going on to reject "that horribly boring quote, 'I love to use farm-fresh products and local ingredients and European technique.''"

Irreverence and innovation, as anyone knows, are two surefire ways to win my heart.
Below, a deconstructed Caesar salad from graham elliot:
I like that the crouton is standing there like this immovable monument amid the frivolous ruffles of lettuce and anchovy.

passionfruit sponge between spirals of dehydrated prosciutto

thank you, grant achatz.
(i stalk)

A flurry of thoughts

Nothing really compares to the bliss of that mixture made by Crystal hot sauce and mayonnaise. It's too humble to realize its magnificence, but it is always there in its glorified state of almost-aioli to make my po-boy that much better.

My mind, body, and appetite almost collectively shut down Wednesday night when Grant Achatz of Alinea fame showed up as the guest judge on Top Chef. I wrote about Alinea a little while ago; though I have never been to the restaurant itself (I've never even been to Chicago), I have been enamored of molecular gastronomy for a while now. There was a fantastic article about it last year in the New York Times called "Food 2.0: Chefs as Chemists" (the link should be foot-noted) with which I completely credit my infatuation. The article mainly focused on Wylie Dufresne of WD-50 in the Lower East Side, but I've had a special culinary crush on Achatz ever since I stumbled upon him.

I think my fascination with molecular gastronomy is rooted in a deep appreciation for the whimsy and intellect that seem attributable to that kind of conceptual cooking. Suddenly, food is no longer food; food can't be divvied up into convenient pigeonholes. Molecular gastronomy is its own realm, not necessarily in terms of taste but undoubtedly in terms of thought. It seems as though every dish I've heard of -- from the knot foie that was mentioned in the Times article to the potato-and-truffle dish that quickly stole my heart -- is infused with a certain vivacity and wit. Tongue-in-cheek, refreshing... I like it all.

Now, of course, I just need to taste it, since all my observations are purely speculative...

Raphe and I went back to Mahony's today and it's quickly rising into my canon of favorite po-boy shops. I realized today that it has a unique inviting quality; Domilise's still trumps them all in terms of flavor, but I go so rarely because the atmosphere there is dark and almost intimidating. At Mahony's, I feel more than welcome to hunker down, watch a football game with my little brother, and ask to have the rest of the onion rings wrapped up (they make for surprisingly good leftovers when they're toasted!). My sandwich comprised of grilled shrimp with fried green tomatoes and remoulade... mmmm. I'm living on the edge and stepping out of my po-boy comfort zone! And, today, I'm quite glad I did.

Now I get to look forward to cozying up with M.F.K. Fisher's The Art of Eating -- my poetry teacher told me about her and I am SO excited to delve into Gastronomical Me. She has everything at this point to suggest that I would desperately want to befriend her if she was still alive. Maybe I'm flattering myself, but she sounds like a kindred spirit.

Looking forward

to a day of great food. Today is the second annual Po-Boy Fest over on Oak Street -- I didn't go last year since I heard about it too late, but apparently it is a bastion of every possible variation on the po-boy theme. I'm hoping the samples are small because I'm not sure how many different regular-size po-boys I could eat...

Then tonight I'm hosting a potluck! Those are always fun because they are an excuse to eat comfy simple food. I'm making spaghettini with garlic-infused olive oil, red pepper flakes, and mushrooms. Mmmm. Should be delightful.

ALSO: my first issue of Food & Wine came in the mail yesterday and I'm in the process of reading it cover to cover. It practically oozes fabulosity. I'm loving reading about the ten best restaurant dishes of 2008- each one is inspirational in its own right, although it's all I can do not to eat my hand. One of the dishes -- a lovely crawfish ravioli -- is actually from Bistro Daisy here in New Orleans. I guess I'll have to make it a point to go there sometime soon. I'm particularly enamored of the duck-fat fried chicken... who can possibly resist an upscale, clever take on a comfort-food classic? Now I just have to wait for the first issue of Gourmet to arrive before I can be truly immersed in love and hunger.

carbs>!?!

This is a photo of that Cuban beef sandwich I had at Surrey's about a million years ago. By the way, I was there again this morning and had some phenomenal shrimp and grits... next up on the Surrey's lineup is their huge banana pancake. You can get it with peanut butter (!!!). How much better does breakfast get?

I was so hungry on Friday that I ended up researching cheeseburgers on the Internet and this is what I came up with. It is allegedly the biggest cheeseburger ever made. Don't you just love it?

Today was a good eating day. I had yet another baking flurry and made some delicious lemon pound cake with sour cream. The sour cream made the inside really moist and soft, but the top baked perfectly golden and crispy, almost caramelized. It's perfect when it's reheated in the toaster oven and drizzled with some glaze I made just by mixing two cups of powdered sugar with about five tablespoons of fresh lemon juice. SO delectable. We also had spaghetti bolognese for dinner that was just sumptuous and will make just perfect leftovers...

Hope everyone's weekend was grand and restful.

National Cupcake Day and other baking sprees...

I realized today that I completely forgot to mention National Cupcake Day, which happened several weeks back on October 18! That was a Saturday, so the night before school on Friday, I slaved away at a triple batch of bittersweet, dense chocolate cupcakes with cream cheese icing so that all my classmates and teachers could celebrate. Imagine a giant Tupperware of about 40 or 50 cupcakes, accompanied by two smaller Tupperwares filled with cream cheese icing to be added accordingly. It was quite an absurd scene, but it did earn me a round of applause in senior study...

Anyway, this realization occurred to me because today, I had a similar such experience with a baking tantrum. It would appear that I am becoming increasingly and unknowingly domesticated. In the middle of poetry class, it dawned on me that I wanted to have chocolate soup. Stream of consciousness: chocolate soup --> chocolate soup for the class --> announcing this thought out loud --> this thought being met by a few dubious glances --> me reevaluating my plan for socialized desserts --> me settling on the idea of creating variations on the brownie theme. I ended up with the following:

First, a batch of a chocolate brownie-cake -- less chewy and melty than usual brownies, but equivalently glorious in its novelty -- with white chocolate peppermint icing and a preposterous amount of dark chocolate ganache that has since solidified in the fridge. Imagine: a glorified peppermint patty. It really doesn't get much better.

Second, a batch of my more famous fudgy brownies smeared with some really delectable homemade peanut butter frosting -- PB and powdered sugar and butter, oh my! -- as well as a thinner, sweeter bittersweet chocolate glaze. These are ideal because they're baked in a 13x9x2 pan, so the batter spreads pretty thin = easy nibbles. Okay, so they wouldn't make the most impressive birthday cake, but still...

Things I have eaten lately

-A really awful peanut butter and honey sandwich. I woke up on Spirit Day to find that our entire bread loaf was moldy, so I had to resort to getting two slices from the cafeteria at 8 in the morning. I stored them, uncovered, in my locker, and by the time I took them out at lunchtime, they were crusty and dry. Exacerbating the situation was the fact that I had to use the handle of a plastic fork to spread the peanut butter. It was poorly distributed and wretched.

-Some delectable leftovers from a lunch Mom had at St. James Cheese Company: prosciutto, buffalo mozzarella, the smallest little tomatoes I've ever seen (grape? no. cherry? no. I'd say... blueberry tomatoes. wait, those don't exist), pesto... mmm. Can't get enough.

-A ROAST! With mashed potatoes. Nothing like comfort food.

-PJ's has started carrying sunrise muffins. They're deep and dark (must be molasses-y) with carrots and raisins and (I think) coconuts mixed into the batter. Presumably lots of brown sugar. The top is crunchy. Delicious.

-Some special Moroccan Mint tea that Sean got for me at this lounge near his apartment. It's so perfectly sensuous with all kinds of layers of flavor wrapped up into a single tea bag.

-Oh, and gooey just-baked chocolate chip cookies... or someone's leftover flourless chocolate birthday cake (which, by the way, is really just sneaky fudge in the shape of a cake). Jealous?

Oh, and

http://www.alinea-restaurant.com/index.html

Molecular gastronomy, meet reckless conceptualization.

Some pictures, which I must attribute to blogs and photographers only Google Images could find:

The item on top is short rib. The red sheet below consists of Campari, beet root juice, cranberry, salt, sugar... etc. The chef then added agar agar, which gives the sauce its suddenly jellyish consistency, thus allowing it to be manipulated as such.

This is a photographic representation of the 24-course meal that Alinea calls "the tour." If you want to actually read about each of the dishes, feel free -- I found the description here: http://www.foodite.com/foodite/2006/09/alinea.html#more

Potato soup chilled to 30 degrees Fahrenheit, served with a ball of potato heated up to 275 degrees Fahrenheit, a single black truffle, and Parmesan cheese. It's designed to be eaten in a single bite so that one has time to enjoy the nuances of flavor as they naturally progress.

Hearts of palm. (!!!!!) Who knew?

Bacon. Somehow, the assortment looks at first like a stage of dancers in frilly green tutus. Why? No one knows, but I for one will not ask any questions...

Crab apple.

Chocolate, passionfruit, lemongrass...!

What sweeps me away is the utterly romantic notion that food can be as much an artistic medium as oil paints -- it's an idea I've always believed but never seen in practice to such a degree as this. I'm dying to go and aching to figure out some sort of bribe involving someone taking me to Chicago to eat at this restaurant... hmm. Let me know if you have a brainstorm.

It makes me sad

that my last blog was photoless; a meal isn't much of a meal without color, so presumably, a meal-enjoyed-vicariously probably can't be enjoyed as much with no visuals. Because, really, saying you ate a delicious filet mignon isn't enough -- I'd much rather see the steak myself. Maybe it's a psychological thing, and we insist on seeing these photos so that we can make our own judgments because we're too stubborn to follow someone else's, but prose -- phenomenal or not -- is just insufficient, I think.

Which leads me to my next point. As you may or may not have noticed, next on my list of delicious delectables to discuss was lunch at Max Brenner's. Yes, THE Max Brenner's -- known by some as Chocolate by the Bald Man, where pipes literally run across the entirety of the restaurant pumping none other than 100% chocolate. But I smashed my camera in the trunk door of a rather large SUV, so I'm waiting... waiting... waiting on Margo to post the photos online before I can act on the passion and enlightenment incited by that one meal.

So I think I'll wrap this one up here, to leave you guys as aggravated with the lack of any significant meaning as I am with the lack of my very significant camera... because while prose alone doesn't suffice in the tantalizing-description-of-scrumptious-meals department, it does just fine in the spitefully-evoking-frustration-and-angst department.

Hope your week has been as marvelous as mine has. I'm about to head to dinner at Baru, a Latin-Caribbean bistro with a tapas menu for which I wake up every morning, but for which I'd gladly die if it came down to that. I plan on ordering everything... more on that later!

Yes, Cameron

I will marry you. I was wondering when you'd ask.



...not food-related at all, but we just watched Ferris Bueller's Day Off and I was far too overcome to not publicly accept his proposal.

For dinner, we had a veritable smorgasbord of nostalgic New Orleanian food (even though technically we now know that we should all be home in a few days): Langenstein's red beans, which I sometimes (but only sometimes, in all fairness, because I am a waxing diabetic and consequently favor my sweets a bit more) believe to be better than ice cream. Also present was some delicious chicken and andouille gumbo, which was so delectable and so perfectly seasoned and so singularly New Orleans, and which inspired musings on the delightful shreddedness of the chicken (which happens naturally when you cook it down long enough; it's actually so so so comforting and not at all repelling). For dessert were stuffed green bell peppers (and I don't even really like green bell peppers)- this stuffing? It's like nothing I could've fathomed before. You know the sheer incomprehensibility of the universe, because humans have never experienced anything to which we can liken it? It's kind of like that.

Oh, and Grace and I did go on an *EMERGENCY* run earlier to the grocery store when we were seized with cravings for Ben & Jerry's. It all started when she imparted to me the gorgeous secret that is Chubby Hubby. Thank God she was wrong when she said it was discontinued, because where else can you find chocolate-covered, peanut-butter-stuffed pretzels in ice cream? Nowhere, I tell you. Nowhere.

P.S. Rum raisin ice cream is officially for old people only.

Andrew love, this is for you

since evidently you will refuse to believe in the value of our friendship until you are mentioned by name in this blog. Pause for a moment and reflect about the patheticness of that statement. Consider also the fact that we have shared no earth-shattering culinary experiences anyway.

That said, I will make it known to everyone that, as soon as I make it up to New York City (whenever that may be), I will look forward to what could only be a whimsical romp and gourmet extravaganza. What's planned? A jaunty little spree over to La Maison du Chocolat for some binging -- a skip through Central Park -- a wild-eyed wondrous whirl through the MoMA -- and lunch at Max Brenner's.

Did you know that Max Brenner wants to start a chocolate nation? The dessert menu is twelve pages. I carry it around in my purse (no, actually, the saddest part is the fact that that's true) because it makes me happy when skies are gray.

Anyway, Max Brenner and his fancy-free creations fill me with inspiration.