GourmandeMom™

GourmandeMom Olympics Day 1: La Condesa

Although I have attended a very swell fundraiser for The Creative Fund on the second level - up at Malverde - I had never been to, i.e., dined at, La Condesa.   Until Monday.  [And I actually did that early Monday morning swim I mentally committed to on Sunday night after the over-indulgence weekend - part of my Olympic week activities...something to help justify the grueling week ahead of rigorous study of wining and dining.]

And though La Condesa sort of qualifies as a "chain" -- there is that location in Napa Valley after all -- culinarily insightful and hard (food) grader friend (Melissa) had La Condesa on the maybe-a-place-to-go list when I had to recommend food venues in Austin for a visiting food-focused Londoner.  It was high time I actually walked in the door and checked it out.

Well, just as I love everything there is to love about Mexican breakfast, this really is the kind of food I could eat almost every day.   Like that array of guacamoles...lump crabmeat and diced apple being a favorite.

The proclivity to this kind of food may have to do with just how light and fresh and evocative the ingredients are, such as mango, jicama, "epazote-grilled carrot" for a salad, and a torta with "adobo-braised beef short ribs, black bean purée, arugula, queso mixto, pickled jalapeño, salsa chipotle."  I had the roasted chicken salad - reminder of salads of my Junior Year in France past...but nothing like those salads really at all: "rotisserie chicken, local arugula, cabbage, escarole, green beans, jicama, radish, corn, grape tomato, avocado, queso fresco, mustard vinaigrette." 

(Paris trip) Amy, who dashed downtown to join me, had tacos "Acelgas" - "spinach, giant white butter beans, pico de gallo, toasted garlic, salsa verde."   Amy pronounced the butter beans very well executed and the sides of beans and rice out of the ordinary.   My salad was as light and as fresh as it sounds, and the rotisserie chicken nothing like (i.e., much tastier than) the usual standby rotisserie chicken I resort to many nights - alternating between that of Randall's (bleah) and Central Market (better).

At lunch La Condesa is definitely a downtown crowd, the work lunch I had forgotten about during my current sabbatical of sorts at the home office (where I am most days for lunch eating Pepperidge Farm Goldfish in front of a Food Network show as a prelude to (mostly) healthy real lunch).

I want to give La Condesa a try at night - all aglow and with the evening vibe of downtown Austin going on - and a nice bottle of rose on the table.   But it is definitely a place I need to try again - and maybe even again and again. 

Next:  "Twofer Tuesday" --  Foreign & Domestic and Aviary 

 

 

(My) New New Orleans - Part I

I remember the phone call from my dad the day Katrina hit.  I was sitting in my office in downtown Austin. 

“It’s gone. It’s all over.”

By this I knew he meant that every feeling, taste, and vista that was our idea of our New Orleans would never be the same.  But I could not really grasp then that even if it, the city, was not literally wiped off the map, the fine network of individual lives that have to get all bound up together to create a culture, a history – a soul...all those layers were maybe all gone.   I couldn't bear to watch the news.

Growing up in West Texas I felt like I had a secret double life.  Ok, if not exactly a double life at least an alternate reality.  That alternate reality was New Orleans.  We lived our daily lives in a small town of about 70,000 in the dry heat of West Texas.  With no good coffee.  Lots of Tex-Mex restaurants.  But no other type of real restaurant to speak of.  We did not have gorgeous mossy towering oak trees or jazz in sultry courtyards or freakishly large crepe myrtles bowing down under the weight of a ton of bright hot pink blossoms.  In short, we had no sultry.  We had mesquite trees. 

But several times a year, and mostly the summer, we would be with the New Orleans people.  When we did this pilgrimage by car, as we were crossing the Sabine River I would lift my feet off the floor of the car and not put them down until they landed, figuratively, on Louisiana soil, which crossing the Sabine River means you have done.  We would cross the Atchafalaya Swamp Freeway.  That 18.2 mile stretch of I-10 built over and in a swamp.  And if you have to take an engineering marvel of a freeway, built in a swamp, to get somewhere, you get the feeling that you're headed into some serious foreign territory.

After we would exit I-10 East onto Carrollton Avenue, there was the obligatory stop at Ye Olde College Inn for the iconic roast beef po-boy (fully “dressed” of course, with mayonnaise).  No way to describe just how good mayonnaise tastes mixed in with au jus and the feeling of it all running down your forearms as you lift the sandwich up to take that first bite, when the outside of the French bread is still flaky crusty and the inside is hot, savory roast beef in a hot mess of mayonnaise and gravy juice stuff.  It's pretty good.  Or it was.  This po-boy does not exist there, that way, anymore. 

With that fix, we could continue on down Carrollton Avenue, down to the end to make that left turn onto St. Charles Avenue and into Uptown and around Audubon Park, into Uptown's towering oak trees, sidewalks and front porches, crawfish boils, Sunday walks to mass at a grand cathedral at Loyola University, and Mardi Gras beads from the last parade hanging from the trees still.  No tumbleweeds.  No dust.

Here, being Catholic (as we were, are) meant you were not a curious minority as can be the case out in West Texas.  Here in New Orleans we were part of the vast majority where memories and rituals of rosaries, candles, adorations of Mary, altars, and feasts for St. Joseph were merged into a collective communal memory of a very rich food life.  

 
This life also had relatives who did not timidly hug upon greeting you upon your arrival but kissed you on the cheek (!)...a life full of tales of crewes and their exotic, regal names - Rex, Babylon, Hermes - Mardi Gras queens and kings, bacon grease, alligator hunting, duck hunting, tracts and horses and boudin and cattle drives. 

All this is bound up in the memory of thick New Orleans accents around command central that was my grandmother’s large oval Scandinavian design table.  Here it became very obvious that the far cooler cousins of my vintage (there are 32 (first) cousins) – the ones who lived in Lafayette - had a firm command over their food personas at a very early age. 

At no more than 11 or 12 (in the 1970s) they were drinking something they called "café au lait" with breakfast and had strong opinions about how much filé to add to their gumbo.  They might as well have been smoking Marlboros at the table as shocked as I was by this libertine activity. 

To make up for the deprivation in West Texas these trips to New Orleans were Dionysian food fests.  We cannot eat this way now.  But eat this way we did then. 

There was this extraordinary ice cream place:  "Haagen-Dazs."  Exotic for us in the 1970s.  There was a French pastry shop, on Carrollton close to where the original Camellia Grill is now.  There were meals at all the old standards, by today's standards:   The Gumbo Shop on rue St. Peter in the Quarter and that praline sundae (a caramel sauce with pecans floating in it poured over a single scoop of vanilla ice cream in an icy cold metal dish), beignets out at Morning Call in Metairie, brunch at Brennans and Commander’s Palace – where Ella Brennan back then would be holding court - and The Bon Ton, Christian's, Casamento's, Stephen & Martin.  And a long ago lost tradition and lost art: nectar sodas at the K&B. 

I just went back to New Orleans for only the third or fourth time since Katrina.  This visit, I note the city is looking pretty darn perky: Starbucks is packed on Maple Street, Carrollton Avenue has been repaved - no more bone-crushing potholes - and there is a construction boom for high-end real estate around the Metairie Country Club. 

I find I am more accepting of New Orleans with her frailties still laid bare - the canopy of lush foliage over St. Charles Avenue is still not quite as lush, the "neutral ground" - that patch of green that divides St. Charles Avenue and hosts the trolley car tracks - is still sad and unkempt to my eye, for example.  But there is so much renovation and reinvention too:  The Roosevelt Hotel is all spiffy and chic now, for example.  We were told they will soon have live jazz in the evenings in the ornate yet hip grand lobby.  The Sazerac Bar, which looked pretty dang comfy and mod enough already, will be getting a makeover soon to match the rest of the way more mod furnishings elsewhere in the public spaces of the hotel.  (I'm not entirely sold on this idea in terms of historic preservation, but it's a good educational reason to visit again.)

And so I am way ready to get way more acquainted with the new New Orleans - its urban renewal to be sure but especially the restaurant scene. 

This all started with one lunch.  At Cochon.  And one really spectacular cocktail. 

This part of my old New Orleans has definitely not changed.

To be continued ... with Part II, or "Mom, did you really have to ask the waiter if he liked the gumbo??"

Favorite Foods....Mexican Breakfast

My son from time to time, knowing my obsession over food stuff and food activities, thinks to ask me what my favorite food is.   Of course, at that very moment, it is impossible to think of just one thing.  Favorite foods, like picking a favorite restaurant, are so subjective, based on such things as the time of day and how carb-deprived you may be right then when asked the question, as to be completely arbitrary. 

For example, a great restaurant experience, such as I had at Barley Swine last week, could be so spectacular because of a number of reasons: a bad day made good, the unexpectedness of it, the really cute male wait staff in their jeans and black shirts and the loving way in which they described the kick ass, gorgeous food (such as those paper-thin sliced watermelon radishes....oh....see below), and the timing of the seating at the bar.  Whatever.  Yet, that same experience, my guy friend who had gone with me one week later would not even remember where we ate.  There are many problems with this, but we won't go there.

Note the lovely "watermelon radish."    It's the thing that looks like a watermelon.

Yet on New Year's Day, I would, after an exhilarating bike ride on a chilly day in Austin under icy blue skies and a wind that made the hills really hurt, join my friend Melissa and her husband for (late) breakfast. The choices were Peruvian brunch or "Mexican Dive."  

I hoped they would pick the spaceship restaurant on a freeway frontage road.  They did.   Los Jalisciences, Taqueria No. 3.   And there, amidst the spectacular hot sauce and another spicy green avocado like sauce, and a basket of those thick chips, not the flimsy flaky lightweight chips, and the Christmas glitter, shiny decorations and posters, and the jukebox playing a tune every now and then, I recalled one of my favorite foods of all time:  Mexican Breakfast.

(Now, when you drive up to this type of building, you just know you are in for a good food time.

The pool for the motel is just off to the right.

The fact that Melissa, teacher of global cuisines and master of all things Mexican cuisine related (or maybe Oaxaca-related is more accurate), approves (at least when the kitchen as their A game on), and says that the hot sauce is "really good," well, I'm in.)

 

 

The only really hard question was what to order of the classics:

Migas, Chilaquiles, or Huevos Mexicanos.

There were plenty of other choices, but for me these are the only real options if you're having Mexican Breakfast. 

Which reminds me that this love is longstanding and well-documented - way back to the late 1980s.  Much like my French family in Tours for my Junior Year in France program introductory phase to Paris - who first called me "gourmande" - the family I stayed with in Cuernavaca, Mexico when getting some extra help for Spanish proficiency for my M.A. in Latin American Studies, found my love for Mexican Breakfast very endearing.   I don't recall the Spanish word for "gourmande" being used.  I do recall an extra helping of tortillas and maybe more huevos being put on my plate....I think they just loved how much I loved breakfast. And love it, enthusiastically and vocally, I did.

The ladies from Ohio staying there with me at this house for our study program were aghast at the spiciness.  They spooned on the homemade salsa very, very carefully, if at all.  Me?  I was over the moon.  The purpose of chips and of these eggs was, seriously, just to soak up this treat of homemade Mexican salsa, in Mexico, in this house of great generosity and kindness - and great food.  So when Ohio Ladies said "No more, no mas," I said "Si si, me gusta muchisimo. More please!" 

At Los Jalisciences, I ordered the chilaquiles, recalling another M.A. culinary experience in the late 1980s of having chilaquiles, with chicken, at a journalism professor's house.  What's not to love about thick, homemade strips of tortillas, soaking up tomatillo salsa, for, like hours, and then cheese and chicken layered in there.  Melissa enlightens me that although I ordered huevos for my chilaquiles, the classic chilaquiles dish is just using leftover tortilla strips and mixing in the salsa, over and over, until the tortilla strips have soaked up the sauce. 

Really, could I have ordered anything worse when I had just hidden the bread knife to keep me away from the Poilane bread in my recommitment to low-carb?   No.   But order them I did, enjoyed them I did, and then much enjoyed reminiscing with Melissa about the late 1980s when I first met her and all the great food memories since.

I did not eat for the rest of the day.