Cross-posted from NolaNotes. She opens the post, I follow with the recipe and method. Enjoy! Every time I go to Galatoire’s, I find it hard to resist their Turtle Soup. My last bowl of it got me thinking about making it at home. So after talking it over with Pontchartain Pete, we decided to...
Quick quotes of the day: There’s flame coming out, it’s breathing and wheezing and whining, you realize the vehicle’s alive. It’s just hanging out there full of 3 1/2 million gallons of rocket fuel, ready to take flight. —STS-135 commander Chris Ferguson on arriving at the pad on launch morning. It starts out as...
While browsing Sunday’s Cocktail Bazaar at the Monteleone, Ann Tuennerman pointed out the table where the folks from the John E. Koerner Co. were displaying their goods. Koerner has been around over 100 years, with the third and fourth generations of the Koerner family now operating the business that was started in 1906. Ann...
Last word on bitters. I promise. I had talked in my previous posts on Tales of the Cocktail 2011 about Bitter Truth’s Creole Bitters, that they were touted as a modern (or retro-engineered, I’m not sure which) version of Peychaud’s Bitters, the long-standing New Orleans product without which the Sazerac cocktail cannot be made....
Bitters were the big buzz at Tales of the Cocktail 2008, the first one I attended. I was researching an article on absinthe (pdf); its reappearance and place in New Orleans drinking history. Bitters were back this year, although they probably never went away. “The Emperor’s New Bitters” was the Thursday afternoon seminar I...
The nation’s premier cocktail industry event keeps getting bigger and bigger. This year, over 300 media-types alone are present, representing outlets from all over the world. I’m looking forward to the seminar entitled “The Emperor’s New Bitters.” Bitters, as the name implies, are flavoring agents, usually highly concentrated, which add that “there’s something in...
Note: I’m covering day one in another post. It’s just the way it worked out. It was over way to quickly. One thing I noticed the first time I went to see the ponies at the Fairgrounds was, when I turned the corner coming into the grandstand and saw the pack running on the...
As I excitedly posted earlier, I was selected (at random, it turns out) to attend the NASA Tweetup for the launch of space shuttle mission STS-135. It’s historic, the mission for the shuttle Atlantis is the last flight of the space shuttle. Launch is set for Friday, July 8 at about 11:30 a.m. Eastern...
I’m not a engineer, or scientist of any sort and certainly not a proverbial “rocket scientist,” which worked out fine, as most of the things I’ve accomplished in life fall into the category of “it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that out.” Nonetheless, I’ve been selected to attend a NASA Tweetup and...
I’ve written a couple of posts through the years about absinthe, that old French spirit that remains shrouded in mystery and misinformation despite it being on the open market in the U.S. since 2007, after being legally unavailable here since 1916. (For a pretty thorough telling of how absinthe came to be banned and...
As post-Carnival depression sets in I like to go over all the pictures (blurry from cell phone) from the season and try to recapture some of the spirit. On Friday, as always, Hermes and Le Krewe D’etat rolled Uptown. The weather was sketchy but the showers held off most of the evening. We caught...
The New Orleans Carnival is descended from ancient religious rites of the Greek and Latin World. Ovid described the Greek shepherds of Arcadia who, five thousand years ago, celebrated a spring festival in hopes of better pastures and the remission of sins. –Henri Schindler, Mardi Gras in New Orleans, 1997. I was reading the...
This past weekend (27 degrees at dawn) I was invited to ride along with some commercial crabbers. Freezing hijinks ensued.
There’s some more Tut stuff I ran across after my previously posted article on E. John Bullard and NOMA’s coup of an exhibit back in 1977 of The Treasures of Tutankhamun. Just a couple of photos: my parent’s still have the exhibition catalog, which I snapped a pic of at Thanksgiving; and, this photo...
I was lucky enough to be invited to preview Furnishing Louisiana: Creole and Acadian Furniture, 1735-1835, the latest book from the Historic New Orleans Collection. It’s been in the works for over 30 years now, as furniture collectors (and scholars) Jack Holden and Pat Bacot, along with photographer Jim Zeitz, began documenting just about...
Louis Prima rose up out of New Orleans and tore through the entertainment world for nearly fifty years. Saturday, Dec. 4, saw Prima getting the attention he’s deserved from the city that he tirelessly promoted as he performed all over the world. New Orleans Musical Legends Park is a little nook of sorts at...
Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Willie Dixon, Son House, Howlin’ Wolf and Elmore James were some of the most influential musicians the world has ever seen. Along with many other bluesmen from the Mississippi Delta country, their music formed the foundation for what became rock ‘n roll, the American music that took over the...
I remember in 1977 when The Treasures of Tutankhamun came to NOMA. It was a big expedition; it may not have been my first visit to NOMA, but it certainly was the first one that stuck. One evening Dad piled us into the old 1968 Ford Country Squire station wagon—with the big V8 engine...
What had to be one of the most well-documented NOLA weather phenomena since the great snowfall of December 11, 2008, occurred yesterday as a double rainbow stretched over New Orleans during rush hour. I would have not seen it had not a disaster brought me across the lake earlier in the afternoon. Without going...
I was invited to spend Labor Day weekend with NOLAnotes and BSIComics at a friend’s camp in Intracoastal City, La. It’s pretty much directly south of Lafayette near ((but not on) the Gulf. The nearest towns are Abbeville, Erath and Delcambre, all pretty much Cajun fishing communities that have served to support the offshore...