Crabby hands

My mouth is tingly and my hands are stained reddish brown. There's a pasty, spicy mixture caked under my fingernails. 

It's crab boil time. At Vaughan's Lounge.

Crabby Friday

Crab boil Friday night at Vaughans Lounge.

Deconstruction

This is a serving of key lime pie.

Yes, really. At the restaurant Borgne, the key lime pie is deconstructed - the customary graham cracker crust is just a dusting of crumbs alongside a merengue-top scoop of key lime filling.\

It tastes just as good, though.

Who wants pie?

Here's a pie I made using the blueberries I picked at my friend Krenkel's place in Picayune, Mississippi.

This weekend is the Southern Decadence Festival in New Orleans, so why not enjoy some PIE???

Giving a fig

It's fruit ripening season, and the markets are full of fresh wonderful fruit.

But so are the streets and sidewalks, if you know where to look. In my neighborhood, there are several fig trees, and while some of them are carefully tended by their owners, who harvest the fruit, there are others that bear gifts that no one notices....unless you happen to look carefully.

The other day, I plucked a handful of ripe figs from a tree on my block. These beauties are just here for the taking.

If you can beat the birds for them!

Fresh figs drizzled with honey and served with granola and yogurt.Yum!

Traveling

When I flew into Los Angeles last Tuesday, the region had been suffering from a heat wave, an unprecedented change-up from the usual June Gloom, at least that was how the mild, entitled dwellers of the Westside and beach communities felt about it.  But the heat broke that Tuesday. "Oh, look," said Dan my host, "we've been running the air conditioner all week. This is the first evening we can turn it off and open the windows."

And the evening was cool, just like I remember those Los Angeles summer nights, with a breeze lifting the curtains in the upstairs guest room. It was pleasant enough to eat outdoors in the patio, though I needed the light cotton sweater I'd brought.

Los Angeles light

I'm in Los Angeles for a few days. When I flew in, you could see the downtown buildings against a sky filled with smoke from nearby fires.

The fierce heat wave that had been going on has broken since I got here. Near the beach, at Palisades Park in Santa Monica, it was a cool breezy 78 degrees.

A dish of osh - Persian soup - at Attari Sandwich Shop in Westwood. Made with a variety of herbs, grains and pulses - lentils, beans, chickpeas - it;'s laced with thick yogurt and served with crispy caramelized onions on top.

The beach.

And rising above the beach, the mysterious Villa de Leon in Pacific Palisades.

The beach again, Castle Rock.

Hot tomatoes in the kitchen!

I came home from the Creole Tomato Festival with a bag of nice plump tomatoes, and I had to figure out what to do with them.

This morning, I had scrambled eggs with tomatoes and onions. I sprinkled a little cotija cheese on them. too.

Crumbly, salty cotija cheese

I used only half a tomato for my breakfast, so I added another tomato to the other half and made a tomato salsa.

On my kitchen counter, I had a mango and some fresh jalapeno chiles my friend Krenkel had given me from her garden. They'd been sitting on my counter long enough to get ripe. I ch

Chopped up the mango and two of the chiles, and diced up some red onion. I squeezed the juice of one lime into the mixture.

I didn't have any cilantro, but I do have a nice basil plant growing in pot outside my door. So I added some fresh chopped basil to the salsa.

Good - and pretty. Pretty good!

Hot tomatoes!

This weekend is the Creole Tomato Festival at the French Market in New Orleans. It celebrates locally grown Southern Louisiana tomatoes - sweet and sun-ripened and beautiful. There is a 'Creole cultivar, released by LSU in the '70s, but farmers around here have been using the term Creole to describe their home-grown tomatoes (and melons, squash, peppers and eggplants) for generations.

This weekend's festival encompassed many facets of the local culture, including three stages for music, an early morning 5K run, cooking demonstrations, and a Bloody Mary contest.

Blue, blue, my world is blue

 Today my friend Krenkel took me blueberry picking out on her family property in Picayune, Mississippi. When we pulled up to the place, her beautiful blue-eyed white cat meowed to greet us. His name is Blue.

It was hot and sweaty, and we needed Cutters to ward off the mosquitoes. But we settled into our work, along with her smart little grandson, Jason.  The ripe berries just fall away from the stem right into your hand, leaving the beautiful rosy-pink unripe berries to ripen later.

I came home with enough blueberries to freeze 16 cups; along with two and a half pints in the fridge!!!  What to do with them? Berries with my breakfast; blueberry pies, blueberry scones, blue berry clafouti?

She also cut me some of her beautiful hydrangeas.

Blue, blue, my world is blue!

Bywater shrimp boil

Around the corner and up the block there's an elegant restored house with a garden glimpsed through a sliver of a view through the iron fence.

It's owned by a couple of debonair bearded gentlemen I've met on occasion in the local watering hole. This Memorial Day, they hosted a kick-butt garden and pool party, New Orleans style, with a huge tub bubbling over a propane flame, filled with shrimp, potatoes and corn on the cob.

Dig in! Happy holiday!

Opa!

This Memorial Day weekend is also the weekend of the New Orleans Greek Festival, held on the grounds of the find Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Cathedral on the banks of Bayou St. John in the Lakeview neighborhood.

It was a hot and sunny Sunday when I arrived, parking under a wide spreading live oak on St. Bernard Avenue. The Festival was just getting into gear.

I bought myself a pomegranate frozen Daiquiri and browsed the little souvenir and trinket stands, where jewelry, antiques, belly-dancing gear, and magic charms to ward off the Evil Eye were on sale.

This is a family event, lots of kids and strollers. The place was well-kept, and there were nice tented areas to sit and keep the sun off. Even the portapotties were clean and fresh. The big indoor gym held a food hall with sales tables of pastries and a full Greek Dinner. Outdoors there were gyro and souvlaki stands, and a big charcoal fire over which two spits of whole lambs rotated.

The noon day heat soon overwhelmed the bouzouki music, however. I ended up bringing home a box of assorted pastries and a Greek dinner for later.

Opa! and Happy Memorial Day to everyone.

Ole sober

My friend Sylvia, me, and Miss Linda

In New Orleans, Yakamein is a neighborhood thing, a dish you get at corner stores or markets. It's a take-out thing, a styrofoam cup of beef broth, jacked up with soy and hot sauce, laden with spaghetti noodles, some meat if you're lucky, and a half a hardboiled egg. No one really knows its origins - food writers and folkways scholars speculate it might have been an adaptation of recipes brought back from the Korean War theatre by returning veterans, or, alternately, an evolved artifact of New Orleans' 19th century Chinatown, once home to railroad laborers.

Today's Yakamein is a rich, salty tincture, buzzing with sodium and the chemical zing of concentrated beef bouillon. It's also known as Ole Sober, because this assertive salty brew is a touted remedy for that aching head and unsettled stomach that follows too much revelry.

Mud bugs

Vaughans Lounge is kind of a magical place. You show up there, belly up to the bar for a $5 glass of wine or a $4 beer, and after a while someone might nudge you and say, "you know, they got a pot of chile over there." Or "Stick around, they doin' a crab boil. It's gonna come out in a minute." 

We showed up today and there was a stack of styrofoam food containers near the back bar, and after a while, the bartender, Krinkle, let us know they were full of steamed crawfish. "It's for the drag show later tonight," she said, "but these are ready now." 

We got a container of about thirty or so perfectly steamed crawfish. Our friend Ronald Lewis showed us how to eat them - break off the heads and suck the fat and juice out of them, then peel and eat the tail meat. A couple of bar-stools over, our friend L.J. was working through another big container of crawfish. 

The chef is Chris, who's been affiliated with the bar for decades. He makes chile and sloppy joes and spaghetti and red beans and rice and steamed crabs whenever the spirit moves him and the bar is full of customers.

Fried pickles

What's better than fried pickles?

Fried pickles and beer.

Fried oyster po'boys, of course, and firecracker shrimp - that is, shrimp fried and doused in Crystal hot sauce, on a po'boy.

Served here at Parasol's bar in the Irish Channel neighborhood of New Orleans.

Bully for us!

We were on a road trip to Oxford, Mississippi, three students and a professor making a pilgrimage to the home of author William Faulkner. It was lunchtime and we were hungry. We used our phones to Yelp as we approached Jackson, going north on I-55.

"How about barbecue?" someone suggested. "Something that's real Mississippi."

"This one comes up with 42 reviews and all of them five-star."

Stone Soup

Stone Soup at Vaughan's Lounge

You never know what you're going to find in New Orleans. That guy next to you at the bar might be a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. Or a scholar of medieval history. That man at the video poker game might be a Mardi Gras Indian chief. The guy who mows your lawn may be the leader of a second line Benevolent Social Club. The lady who just ordered another glass of wine might be the director of a non-profit assisting victims of sex trafficking, a mover and shaker in city politics, a voodoo queen, or the daughter of an old-time New Orleans aristocracy.

You truly never know.

Cultcha

What makes a po' boy a po' boy? Leidenheimer's French bread.  The bakery, which was established in 1896, makes New Orleans style french bread and also round sesame-seed flecked loaves for muffaletta sandwiches.

In 1996, the bakery's delivery trucks were painted with a cartoon of New Orleans cartoonist Bunny Matthews' 9th Ward characters Vic and Natly.

I snapped this delivery truck Uptown on Magazine Street.

Yeah, you right!

Photo from Associated Press

Today, President Obama had lunch at Willie Mae's Scotch House restaurant, in the Treme neighborhood of New Orleans. 

Willie Mae's is known for the best fried chicken in town - some say the world. Willie Mae Seaton received the 2005 James Beard American Classic award. Sadly,  just two months later, the federal flood after Hurricane Katrina destroyed her kitchen.

After the flood, volunteers pitched in to help rebuild, and today the restaurant is run by Willie Mae's granddaughter, Kerry Seaton.

We ate there a few weeks ago, and of course we ordered the famous fried chicken. It was amazing - the crunchy batter perfectly brown, with a hint of cayenne to it, the meat beneath it savory and juicy. But the sides were awesome, too. Butter beans came served on a big flat plate, creamy and seasoned with sage. I had mac and cheese, which was also served with a side of cooked peas - yes, they were khaki colored but oh they did taste great.

Welcome to New Orleans, Mr. President! I hope you enjoyed your visit. And I hope you had the butter beans!

Homework

 

I spent the whole day doing homework. Critiques, readings.

And then I went out and ate some of these.