Feelings, New Orleans: Solid Food, Wonderful & Romantic Atmosphereby Randi / September 4, 2014
Oh okra, you beautiful alien you
Oh lordy lord, how good is gumbo?! WHO DAT! When I was in New Orleans last month, gumbo was obviously being sold everywhere you looked. I had delicious Gumbo Z’Herbes at the famous Gumbo Shop, which is a naturally vegetarian (and vegan if the roux isn’t made with butter) traditional gumbo, with parsley and cabbage and other leafy greens. I loved it and I could eat something like it every day, but seeing the tremendous variety of more interesting non-veg gumbos made me hella jealous.
I was so happy to find a meaty vegan gumbo at Seed, my favorite restaurant in NOLA, which used sausage-y seitan and a darker, more tomato-based broth than the zerby one (how I pronounce it because I only had one semester of French). So, seriously on my first day back home, I decided to make gumbo that was inspired by the Seed version’s meatiness but that retained the vegetable-heavy, healthy soul of Tess D’Zerbervilles. It also showcases okra, in my mind a necessary gumbo ingredient, and uses a variety of beans. Also! The file powder came straight from a central grocery store in NOLA, so it’s all totally legit. (Yes is it Zatarain’s but like that’s how you Jazz It Up!)
FAVA BEAN, TEMPEH, & OKRA FILE GUMBO
So, I’ve heard that okra, file powder, and a roux are all different thickening options, so you are only supposed to – or you only need to – use one, because they do the same job. I refuse to cut good solid American jobs so we are using all of them buster!
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Ingredients
Directions
 So many sources of protein especially the baby’s bottom! |
 This is a roux a what a roux  If you are fancy, you can call this mirepoix. But only if you’re fancy  My new fave find  Frozen 2: The Fava Beans  Tempeh is the best food everrrrr  Kalesss  |
I hope you make this or something like it, because gumbo is the shizzzzzz and I don’t just mean the school where Elphaba and Galinda met. What are your thoughts about what defines gumbo? Is it the okra? The roux? The use of file? The fact that you have to eat it with a top hat on while listening to Iko Iko Un-Day? Let me know!
You know what, I’m gonna leave you with that song, because it is an even bigger part of New Orleans than gumbo…maybe.
(Admission: We heard this song everywhere we went (playing restaurants, played outside by street performers, anywhere) and it took awhile before I realized I was not correct in singing “Hey now hey now hey now hey now, Iko Iko Un-day, Giacomo’s in pastry cup with a sugar bowl in his hand,” how I had sung it for like…my life. I guess I just have sugar on the brain always?)
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Rosewater Baklava Hamantaschen for Purim: Helping Purim Beat Halloween From Here On Out
The hamantasch uncooked; see below for cooked
I don’t even know guys. This might be the best thing ever. A random and fortuitous amalgam of happenings brought forth this little miracle unto our lives. Such happenings include: Purim being this weekend; my having recently acquired rosewater; my dislike of Halloween; my pint of poppy seeds, intended for my hamantaschen filling, having gone rancid. So lucky! Such fortuitous.
So, yeah, almost Purim! Purim is to Halloween what Hannukah is to Christmas. They aren’t reeeeally substitutes, but they get passed off to impressionable, sad children as replacements. (Jews don’t like Halloween ostensibly because it’s super pagan (no worship of idols!) and Catholic in its origins, but I think it’s because they don’t want their children to eat so much candy that they’d get cavities and need to see the dentist who is the son of that yenta from synagogue who brags about her son being a dentist.) It’s about when King Ahasuerus got super drunk and ordered all the young ladies to line up so he could pick his favorite to be his wife, and he picked Esther, a Jew who didn’t let on that she was a Jew, who had been raised by her uncle Mordechai, which is a name that you always have to say with the required Yiddy question mark at the end. So the king’s Jafar, named Haman, decides to kill all the Jews, but then Esther tells her hubsking, ‘Hey I’m Jewish! You can’t kill the Jews!’ and the King is all ‘Oh man you are right! Jafar Haman get thee gone! You are evil! We are going to celebrate this holiday by making delicious cookies in the shape of your three-cornered hat! I don’t know why the celebratory traditional food should be in the villain’s honor, but there we are!’ So that is Purim.
I was planning on making regular traditional poppy seed filling for my hamantaschen, but my poppy seeds were rancid. Boo and hiss! But it turned out to be $3 well wasted, because I was forced to try something new and much more interesting. I recently bought but have never used rosewater, so this was the time. The time was now. I dove into my nut drawer and came to the surface with almonds, cashews, and pistachios. Perfect! I had a sudden vision of a Middle Eastern marketplace, like a live-action version of the “Sugar dates! Sugar dates & figs! Sugar dates & pistachios!” scene from “Aladdin”, with men offering me baklava that I would have to turn down because of the honey. (I know baklava is Greek but it is also found in central and southwest Asia so BACK OFF.) I have really weird visions. So I wanted the nuts chopped roughly and cooked in a syrup. I decided to use my very old very on-the-brink Magic Bullet to chop them because I figured it was too weak and senile to do much damage. However, by some Purim miracle, the little machine suddenly got its groove back and pulverized my nuts before I could stop it. So cray. I was left with ground nuts…which actually turned out to be even better! I can’t wait to make actual baklava using this; it is RIDICULOUS.
I kind of dislike crispy or crunchy cookies; I am all about the chewy (with few exceptions). To have chewy more than crispy dough here, I had to make decisions that led to poofy dough when cooked, spreading wildly like a badass hamantasch. It’s delicious and I suggest you try it!
I kind of dislike crispy or crunchy cookies; I am all about the chewy (with few exceptions). To have chewy more than crispy dough here, I had to make decisions that led to poofy dough when cooked, spreading wildly like a badass hamantasch. It’s delicious and I suggest you try it!
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HAMANTASCHEN DOUGH
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BAKLAVA FILLING
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ASSEMBLY
I hope you decide to try these! Happy Purim! |
 I love my pretty new colorful equipment! That’s all.
  If you run out of Saran wrap like I did, use a big Ziplock!
 Sometimes you feel like a ground up nuts.
 There’s thread on the PPK about what cool things people have found at TJ Maxx & similar places. I only get cooking supplies there, like these! Vanilla paste and rosewater for a few dollahs? Hollahhh.
   “My hat is has 3 corners, 3 corners has my hat. And if it’d not 3 corners, it would not be my hat!” That’s a song of Haman’s that we learned as small jews.
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Pre cookery. The few jelly-filled ones at the back are actually filled with an Earl Grey Apricot jam, courtesy of my friend Stephanie from Swell Baked Goods in Memphis. It is sooo delicious, as is everything she makes.
See they got pretty puffy but I like that! This is the cool way to do it. Happy day!
original comments: https://laughfrodisiac.weebly.com/my-own-creations/rosewater-baklava-hamantaschen-for-purim-helping-purim-beat-halloween-from-here-on-out#comments
Dinner at Vegan Hotel Saorsa 1875
Recently (okay not actually but time is moving too fast, Adam Sandler hit fast forward again or something) we had dinner at Saorsa 1875, the UK’s first vegan hotel as it bills itself, or the Saoirse Ronan hotel, as we call it. It’s located in Pitlochry, Scotland, a lovely tourist town with a great theatre (see here and here). You can’t have dinner here before seeing a show, though, because it’s a tasting menu restaurant where you need to sit and stay and enjoy, which we love. I guess you could see a matinee and then mosey and then have dinner. So all works out!
At our dinner, we were expecting the 5-course tasting menu we had been reading about since the hotel opened. But apparently that’s only on the weekends now, and we were there on a Monday, when it is 3 courses. A wee disappointment, the weeest really, and it’s also priced accordingly so it was a lot cheaper than we expected! It was still lovely, maybe not as weird Michelin-y tasting-y menu-y as we hoped, more ‘this is normal food that you’ll actually enjoy and will actually fill you’, which is nothing to sneeze at. Maybe we will one day go back for the fivers and see what weird shit they come up with, we love weird shit.
First of all, it’s important to know that there are hotel dogs around, so build in time to your visit for petting them properly. There’s one doggo who is sooo old and so sweet and just ugh so nice LOVES IT.
Saoirse operates dinnertime with like one seating, so all the 8-10 wee tables eat the same things at the same time, pretty much. Don’t worry, there are no family-style tables or anything (at least not since covid I think?) so you are spaced away from all the people coughing and generally being gross. While you wait for your table to be ready, you pet the dogs and you hang out at the bar, which has a really nice list of cocktails (both bar and bat). We tried a watermelony non-alc that was good, and I wanted to order another but couldn’t get anyone’s attention before we were ready to move into the main dining room.
I do wish that they had left us in the bar longer, because we sat at the tables awaiting the first course for about 30 minutes before it came, which whatever but no one was filling water or taking drink orders so I had to nearly diminish the reserves in my bag. That water was for the drive home! So service could deffo use a brush-up. Luckily they did bring little dinner rolls around. You had a choice of charcoal or beetroot, two simply incredible choices for bread, right? So I was like ‘puh puh puh porque no los dos???’ but luckily they were much more generous with the bread through the night than the water so I got to try both. Fill up on bread! My fave thing to do!
Okay then the real food started! First up was our baby corn salad – how ballsy is that considering how many people hate baby corn! I guess that might be an American thing because British people seem to love it? Correct me if I’m wrong! This salad had microgreens, big-balled caperberries (always think of Bridget Jones when faced with caperberries), and grilled baby corn. Okay grilling the bc is the way to go. It was a very decent starter salad, sharp and refreshing. I was still waiting for water during and after this course thoooo.
Onto the main! Let’s note that this was the summer menu (I’m a few months post), and though the first course felt appropriately refreshing and summery, the second felt very much appropriate for now, cold and dark winter. It was GREAT, actually, don’t get me wrong, but it didn’t feel seasonal. Here we have roast butternut squash (I know, like wintertime staple), with spicy pumpkin seed pesto, pickled celery, and lemon balm. First off, LOVING the pickled celery. Second, the pesto really was spicy! Way to go this country! It was a really nice mix of flavors, with the dark spicy pesto and the sharp pickled celery. The squash came two ways – cubed and on a bed of itself pureed. And best of all, the ‘chickpea’ listed in the description ended up being chickpea panisse, or a socca block, pick your romance language. I forking love socca so I was happy. It was so creamy and so good, much better than when I make it and you need to have a lot of water on hand because it swallows kinda dry. I think I need more oil/any oil. ANYWAY, a delicious wintry dish.
Again I waited for water for a long time, but the people are nice so I didn’t throw anything.
After another long wait, we got our dessert, and boy was it worth it!
Probably the best dish? I mean I am biased because it was dessert and it had the two dessert necessities – ice cream and chocolate. But man alive this was good! They really buried the lede with that printed menu just saying ‘chocolate torte’ and not the best part: the ice cream was BANANAS. No not ‘banana’, it was tonka bean and vanilla. I have never been able to try tonka bean anything despite really wanting to because it’s always in a dairy option so I was sooo excited to finally try it. And this ice cream was amaaazing. Like wish I could have bought a tub of it to bring home even though there’s no room in the freezer. We’d make it work. Amazing. The torte was fantastic too, like the densest richest chocolate torte ever. I could have done without the passionfruit gel on top because I think there are very very few times when chocolate and fruit actually go together so if it’s not banana or strawberry it’s just gonna be weird and incongruous. It was sour which I guess they wanted to counter all the sweet, but who wants to counter sweet? Crazy people!
But speaking of weird and incongruous but in a fun and good way: that last lump on the plate was all those things! Here we have peppercorn chocolate mousse. Like it’s nice chocolate mousse and there are peppercorns in there. Just for fun I guess. I don’t know if I liked it or just appreciated the weirdness but it was cool to try (once?).
We decided not to get the additional cheese plate, though many did. We were pretty full (and it costs more, and it was unclear if its 15 to share or 15 each person…it can’t possibly be 15 each person right? woof), though maybe next time I would try it, but only if I could get it before the actual dessert. Excuse me, but having a cheese plate after you’ve had ice cream and chocolate torte feels insane. Like who ever heard of eating an oat cake after you’ve had ice cream? It is nonsense to me. I know you disagree but man, if I’m having ice cream and chocolate why would I destroy that by eating anything else afterward? So weird.
So all in all it was a great dinner. Service left a bit to be desired, as it was pretty hard to get anyone’s attention for water or more drinks (and since they had interesting non-alcs I actually wanted one for the first time!), but they were nice and it was all nice. For £35 per person instead of the £60 for the 5 courses, we were pretty happy that we ended up there for a 3 course night. But hopefully one day we will be able to try the 5 and hopefully they will be weird and wonderful. This meal was much more normal, like regular food, which you know can be nice!
SAORSA 1875, PITLOCHRY, SCOTLAND, UK, CRUMBLING WORLD
Water speed: This is the one area that really could be improved! Like I said it was hard to get attention to ask for water or even to order drinks that we would pay money for! What a shame.
Service: See above but they were nice people. YOUR MA’S GOOD PEOPLE.
Bathrooms: There are two single-serves through the lobby of the hotel, pretty nice! Hotel bathrooms tend to be!
Food: Really good, even though we were expecting weird tasting menu shit, it was nice to eat food recognizable as food!
Bonus: Like I said, fully vegan hotel, dedicated to ethics, dogs around, Saoirse Ronan, what else could you want? They also do lunch, though it is a different vibe (burgers I think?). And one day I’ll be back for that tasting menu!
