Beignets

I don't care too much for do-nuts but when I heard about the Beignets I decided to try them. Wonderful! Served fresh and hot with loads of powered sugar. Usually you can find them in New Orleans for about $2 for 3.

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Eating Out

Thanks to Katherine Nachod for the great restaurant guide in our registration bags. (And thanks to the team that stuffed the bags ... and to BNA for giving us such versatile bags!)

This evening Mary Hotchkiss and I tried out one of Katherine's recommendations, the Sun Ray Grill, described in the guide as a "delightful place" with an eclectic menu. We chose it because the range of cuisine sounded great -- and it was an easy walk from our hotel and moderately priced.

As Katherine suggested, we had the tableside guacamole, made by our waiter before our eyes. Fresh? You bet! Yummy, too! We also shared a portabella quesadilla -- also very good. The portions were generous and, with (non-alcoholic) drinks, the whole dinner was under 25 bucks.

Mary went to lunch with other bag stuffers at the Ugly Dog Cafe, also in the Warehouse District (on Tchoupitoulas). Huge portions, very reasonably priced. So add that to your list.

Having a bit of a coffee habit (even decaf), I was happy to go to the Starbucks across from the Convention Center early this morning before going to the Habitat work site. I was only disappointed at the end of the day that I couldn't get an iced drink there because it closed. I'm not used to Starbucks closing at 2:30 in the afternoon. I guess it's all a question of traffic. There's just not enough tourist business to justify staying open for whenever I yearn for a coffee drink. I hope our meeting is just another step in the recovery for New Orleans eateries (and drinkeries).

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Top Ten Restaurants in New Orleans

Katie Nachod and Georgia Chadwick forwarded this link with an article on the best restaurants in New Orleans. They are all well worth checking out!
http://cityguides.msn.com/citylife/article.aspx?cp-documentid=4973140

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Creole Tomatoes Are Here!

Creole tomatoes are in season and are available for sale at various supermarkets like Dorignac's in Metairie. However, I like to buy mine at the Crescent City Farmers' Market which is held twice a week. Please check out the website for information on the two locations and especially for recipes using fresh local items. http://www.crescentcityfarmersmarket.org/ The Saturday market (from 8 am-12 noon) is not too far from the convention center: http://www.crescentcityfarmersmarket.org/markets/saturday.php

The French Market http://www.frenchmarket.org/ in the French Quarter does not have fresh produce at this time. It has been under renovation and the website says fresh fruit and vegetables will return soon but not until after AALL. The annual Creole Tomato festival is held at the market each year. At present the French Market has a variety of shops, the world famous Cafe du Monde, and at the very end a flea market area. If you want to see what the French Market looked like when they did have fresh produce stands and butcher shops go to the LOUISiana Digital Library: http://louisdl.louislibraries.org/

Georgia Chadwick

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Hubig's pies

How can you wrong for $.89?

The New Yorker
April 16, 2007
New Orleans Journal: The Pie Men
Dan Baum

Hubig's pies cost eighty-nine cents apiece, and can be found at almost every cash register in southeast Louisiana. New Orleanians adore these packaged, deep-fried pies, endlessly debating the merits of the lemon filling versus the apple, or whether the pies should be eaten microwaved or cold. Some locals even dress up as Hubig's pies for Mardi Gras.

During our first two months here, Margaret and I ignored the Hubig's pie. We wrote off its popularity as the irrationality of hometown allegiance; we never understood Atlantans' affection for the Varsity hot-dog stand, or Cincinnati's love of Skyline chili, either. We assumed that Hubig's pies were made in some vast, soulless
factory from the cheapest imaginable ingredients. The building on Dauphine Street that we rode our bikes past every day, the one with a big neon sign, was, we figured, a distribution point, a downtown office, or a cute condo complex that retained the old insignia...

Gradually, it dawned on us that this was the actual factory, and we grew intrigued. Commerce has been largely banished from American residential areas, and industry almost completely. It's the rare American factory worker who can walk to work.

Otto Ramsey, one of the owners, gave us a tour of the cement-block bakery, which Simon Hubig opened in 1927. (The company is owned by the son and the nephew of the men who bought into the company in the nineteen-forties and fifties.) Hubig's cooks all its fillings, mostly from actual produce evaporated apples, fresh-frozen strawberries and cherries, whole raw sweet potatoes in the fall and buys locally as much as it can. (Much to Ramsey's regret, Hubig's makes do with canned peaches and pineapples.) The company now uses liquid corn sugar in addition to cane, but otherwise its recipes haven't changed. Hubig's dough is made with ninety-nine-per-cent animal fat. "We've got the trans fats down to 0.65 per cent," Ramsey said proudly.

A single, clankety machine turns out all the pies between seventy-five and seventy-eight a minute. A wizened man hand-loaded balls of dough into a hopper. A long sheet emerged onto a conveyor underneath, and the machine folded these around dollops of filling and then cut and pressed them into pies. Lined up in echelons of ten, the pies entered a fryer for four minutes before passing under a curtain of icing.

After cooling on a towering multi-level carrousel, they slid down a ramp, and a worker fed them onto a belt. "Time from fill to bag, two hours," Ramsey said. The wrappers are stamped with a date one week hence, at which point they are retrieved from stores and destroyed.

Ramsey has invested more than the family fortune in these high-calorie snacks. He started telling us about the cold-storage company that had warehoused the ingredients before Katrina, and had done so for generations; overwhelmed with sadness, he had to stop. "I'm sorry," he muttered, as he struggled to collect himself. When we asked later how his employees had gotten back to work after the storm, his voice caught again and tears ran down from under his glasses. "I don't know how they did it," he said quietly. "Some of them had lost everything. Yet when we needed them they were here." Ramsey lightened the mood by giving us a Hubig's lemon pie from the carrousel; it was still warm. We told several locals about this, and their eyes grew wide with envy.

After the tour, Ramsey's son Andrew came down from the upstairs office to meet us. Andrew is a burly young man who attended the New Orleans Police Academy so he could volunteer as a reserve cop. (The night before, he said, he'd arrested a man wanted for beating his wife.)

Seven Hubig's vans, nearly half the fleet, were lost in the flood, Andrew said. One van, which had arrived a week before Katrina and hadn't been paid for yet, ended up five miles away in St. Bernard Parish, overturned and caked in mud. Hubig's has been buying vans from the same dealer for the past twenty-five years, Andrew explained. "I called him up when we were getting ready to reopen and had to say, 'Not only can't we pay you for the brand-new van you just delivered to us but we need two more and can't pay for those, either.'" He stopped, an odd smile frozen on his face, trying not to burst into tears. "And you know what he said?" He paused again, lip quivering. "He said, 'What color?'"

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What season is it in New Orleans?

Well it is spring but New Orleans really has many more seasons than the usual four. In fact, when my son was being tested for first grade another mother mentioned her son had a hard time when asked "What are the four seasons?" He responded: deer season, duck season, Mardi Gras and I forgot what he said for the fourth season. I can think of a season no one wants to mention, so I won't. However, right now it is crawfish season, the end of strawberry season and Jazz Fest is coming up.
I don't make crawfish ettouffee very often because it is so rich but I made some last weekend... There are many variations on the recipe for this dish but mine is adapted from a book by Holly Berkowitz Clegg called From a Louisiana Kitchen which was reprinted in 1983. (Click on the picture of the recipe to see a close up of it.) Ms. Clegg has written a number of cookbooks and writes about Louisiana cooking for a variety of publications.
Here are my personal notes on her recipe. She mentions 1 pound peeled crawfish tails with fat - what most people use comes from local vendors in one pound plastic bags. The crawfish are peeled packaged surrounded in their fat. I rinse the crawfish before using them. I don't want that extra fat!
And I like a lighter tasting dish.
Instead of using 1/2 cup water, I use 1/2 cup canned chicken broth.
She simply lists juice of lemon and I specifically use one to two teaspoons.

I also add a few tablespoons of finely chopped celery to the mixture of green pepper, onions and garlic which are sauteed in butter.

That is what I do, the second photo is a picture of the finished product.

Georgia Chadwick
Law Library of Louisiana

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