Monday, March 18, 2013.
I Teach A Cooking Class In An Actual School.
Judy Achary--the mother of one of Jude's classmates when they were preteens--wrote me a few weeks ago with an idea. She's a teacher at the new Lakeshore High School, a sprawling, handsome facility opened a couple of years ago. Although it looks like any other high school (if much newer and more spacious), the curriculum is directed less toward classical academics and more towards careers.
One of this is the culinary arts. That's Judy's lookout. She has a very impressive place to teach: the kitchen is bigger and better equipped than those of most restaurants. She has been able to pull in the likes of John Besh and Tory McPhail to give special classes. I wish she hadn't told me that. How could I compare with those good-looking, much younger superstar chefs?
The best thing that happened to cooking and dining around New Orleans during the years I've covered them was the much enhanced professionalism of cooks. When I came in, an overwhelming majority of chefs had no training at all other than what they picked up washing dishes and moving up in their kitchens. Many of them were illiterate. No wonder a lot of restaurants used to say that they didn't have a chef, just cooks.
The dozen and a half students sitting in their chairs before me are in their mid-to-late teens. My main point concerned all the great dished you can make through the magic of deglazing pans, which I demonstrated with pork tenderloin. I used to teach religion classes to students this age, but they were nowhere near as interested in what I had to say as these young people were. All of them are apprenticed to restaurants now. Some knew enough about cooking and taste to say that the food in their workplaces was less than perfect. Great! Maybe a restaurant critic or two might come out of this.
I got home in just enough time to get the radio show on the air. After it was over, Mary Ann and I repaired the condition that we hadn't been to Zea for weeks. I've had very little of the seafood menu I talk about so much in their commercials. I wouldn't do that if I didn't really like all that Lenten fare. We caught up with it by starting with a new dish, the country-style oysters. These are fried, set atop what look like cornbread muffins but actually were fried hushpuppies, and moistened with a creamy-looking sauce with oysters.
I kept that flavor profile going with their oyster-artichoke soup. Very creamy and thick. I would not be surprised if the soup doubled as the sauce on the country oysters I just had. But no complaints. Oysters and artichokes are made for one another.
The final course was the tuna stack. Still good, but the cook who put this one together did a rather sloppy job of it, and the usually sharp presentation had lost its integrity.
I think all Mary Ann had to eat was an order of guacamole. No wonder she's so often in an angry mood. One cannot live by guacamole and chips alone.
Zea. Covington: 110 Lake Dr. 985-327-0520.
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