Friday, February 12, 2016.
Exploring Mandeville Seafood.
I have much more work to do at home than I do at the radio station, so I skip the commute and stay put. At late lunchtime, MA suggests that we go to Mandeville Seafood. She has sold an ad to the place, and the owner Jerry Caillouet wants to show me around. The first impression is that of cleanliness, even as the kitchen staff work its way through a large number of orders. It's the first Friday in Lent, and every restaurant with seafood as even a minor specialty is jammed today. Indeed, not even the Parking Witch herself (Mary Ann always finds a good place to park wherever she goes) can land without two or three orbits.
[caption id="attachment_50639" align="alignright" width="320"]
Jerry Caillouet at Mandeville Seafood with a few sacks of live crawfish in his walk-in cooler. [/caption]Mary Ann wastes no time in pulling together a menu. We have fried artichoke hearts--one of her favorite apps. (I wonder if there is confusion in restaurants these days between "app" meaning "appetizer" and "app" referring to the software on smart phones.)
MA orders a seafood muffuletta--a dish created thirty years ago at Parran's in Metairie, and now beginning to spread. It's a small muffuletta loaf filled with fried shrimp, oysters and catfish, with lettuce and a spicy mayonnaise. No olive salad. Really, this is a variation on a seafood loaf or poor boy. I open the bread and go straight for the fried catfish, which is very good, even though it comes from a farm in Mississippi.
[caption id="attachment_50640" align="alignleft" width="320"]
One of the many murals of New Orleans icons at Mandeville Seafood. [/caption]Mandeville Seafood is in the throes of crawfish season. The bugs are being delivered in big black sacks and run through the gauntlet that eliminates the weak specimens. MA gets a pound of crawfish. We find them tasty but small, but that's what I'd expect this time of year--even though we did have a few weeks lately of nice, big ones. The cold snaps recently have kept the crawfish from growing to full size.
We finish off the meal with little loaves, right out of the oven, of crawfish-jalapeno corn bread. Very tasty. Indeed, the only thing that doesn't impress us in this lunch is the seafood gumbo. And, of course, the plastic baskets to which casual seafood houses have turned for serving fried seafood.
We eat too much of all this, but how can that be avoided when you're in the midst of all these crisp fried eats?
I get home just soon enough to take a shower and a nap, so I feel sharp and ready to go when radio air time commences. We have two very busy hours, and then it's as if the station went off the air. Why and how this happens, I wish I knew. We don't even have the wintertime signal problem to deal with, since the sun now sets late enough for us to get all but the last few minutes of the show on the daytime, 360-degree signal.
We are both overstuffed from lunch. Mary Ann warms up another batch of an apparently endless supply of frozen vegetable soup, salvaged after we finally dislodge a hundred pounds of frost from the old refrigerator. The soup is not worth eating, and I figure out why. The beef stock is good, with some chunks of brisket floating around. But we have the wrong kind of vegetables. The cruciferous vegetables (cabbage and all its relatives) must be used sparingly, in favor of root vegetables, beans, and tomatoes. The likes of broccoli and Brussels sprouts lend too much of a bitter flavor. Also, something like this ought to include some pasta, the starch from which thickens the broth.
There are so many secrets to discover in good cooking.
Mandeville Seafood. Mandeville: 2020 LA Hwy 59. 985-624-8552.
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Saturday, February 13, 2016.
Dining In The Bar Gets Interesting.
It's a perfectly lovely day, with the sun shining and enough coolness to make me reluctant to end my afternoon walk, even after almost two hours. If the sun hadn't gone down, I probably would have kept on going.
Mary Ann had less luck with her kayaking on the Tchefuncte River. The winds are rougher than she expects, and the water colder. Frankly, I worry about her being out there. But she shrugs this off as another erroneous inventory of the situation from "Cautious McCaution," as she likes to portray me.
Our first meal of the day was the usual stuff at La Carreta: bean soup, avocado salad, and a large quantity of the great, thin chips with the spicy, lime-tinged salsa. I have huevos rancheros, which has caught my interest lately.
Dinner is Mary Ann's idea. She wants to just hang out in the bar at Forks and Corks in Covington, and nibble at bar snacks. The idea is that we will not eat as much that way. That sounds good to me. I was still a little low on appetite from our early lunch at La Carreta. And it's a good thing we don't want a dining room table, because there aren't any available. Mary Ann says her favorite aspect of dining at the bar is the comfortable chairs and the informal atmosphere.
Chef Marvin Tweedy volunteered to just send us what he said was "a few little appetizers." The first of these is a seafood martini dominated by big boiled shrimp with a tangy sauce somewhere between a remoulade and a ravigote.
Then we get something that puzzles even the waiter. "It's just another great impromptu dish from Marvin," he says. "We've never seen it before, and we'll never see it again." More's the pity. It's a big finger of red snapper set atop a wall of potato pancake, with a few other garnishes. It is delicious, and amounts to one-third of an entree.
Now we have a risotto topped with veal in what tastes like a half-finished demi-glace with a bit of wine and butter. Mary Ann doesn't like veal, but I do, and this is great with a glass of big, black Petite Sirah.
Dessert is a cheesecake made in house by the mother of one of the staff. It's creamy enough and tinged so deliciously of Luxardo cherries that even Mary Ann--not a dessert lover--says that it's actually worth the calories. I agree.
All this is delivered to a shaky cockail table, where we meet and greet a number of people coming and going, ranging from owner Osman Rodas to a trio of sommeliers from other restaurants to a number of people I'd never met. I am warming up to the dine-in-the-bar idea. But Mary Ann says she still ate too much. I guess if you have four courses, even if they're small they can amount to a substantial repast.
Forks & Corks. Covington: 141 TerraBella Blvd. 985-273-3663.
Jerry Caillouet at Mandeville Seafood with a few sacks of live crawfish in his walk-in cooler. [/caption]Mary Ann wastes no time in pulling together a menu. We have fried artichoke hearts--one of her favorite apps. (I wonder if there is confusion in restaurants these days between "app" meaning "appetizer" and "app" referring to the software on smart phones.)
MA orders a seafood muffuletta--a dish created thirty years ago at Parran's in Metairie, and now beginning to spread. It's a small muffuletta loaf filled with fried shrimp, oysters and catfish, with lettuce and a spicy mayonnaise. No olive salad. Really, this is a variation on a seafood loaf or poor boy. I open the bread and go straight for the fried catfish, which is very good, even though it comes from a farm in Mississippi.
[caption id="attachment_50640" align="alignleft" width="320"]
One of the many murals of New Orleans icons at Mandeville Seafood. [/caption]Mandeville Seafood is in the throes of crawfish season. The bugs are being delivered in big black sacks and run through the gauntlet that eliminates the weak specimens. MA gets a pound of crawfish. We find them tasty but small, but that's what I'd expect this time of year--even though we did have a few weeks lately of nice, big ones. The cold snaps recently have kept the crawfish from growing to full size.
We finish off the meal with little loaves, right out of the oven, of crawfish-jalapeno corn bread. Very tasty. Indeed, the only thing that doesn't impress us in this lunch is the seafood gumbo. And, of course, the plastic baskets to which casual seafood houses have turned for serving fried seafood.
We eat too much of all this, but how can that be avoided when you're in the midst of all these crisp fried eats?
I get home just soon enough to take a shower and a nap, so I feel sharp and ready to go when radio air time commences. We have two very busy hours, and then it's as if the station went off the air. Why and how this happens, I wish I knew. We don't even have the wintertime signal problem to deal with, since the sun now sets late enough for us to get all but the last few minutes of the show on the daytime, 360-degree signal.
We are both overstuffed from lunch. Mary Ann warms up another batch of an apparently endless supply of frozen vegetable soup, salvaged after we finally dislodge a hundred pounds of frost from the old refrigerator. The soup is not worth eating, and I figure out why. The beef stock is good, with some chunks of brisket floating around. But we have the wrong kind of vegetables. The cruciferous vegetables (cabbage and all its relatives) must be used sparingly, in favor of root vegetables, beans, and tomatoes. The likes of broccoli and Brussels sprouts lend too much of a bitter flavor. Also, something like this ought to include some pasta, the starch from which thickens the broth.
There are so many secrets to discover in good cooking.
