Deanies and Krewe Du Vieux

So I returned to Deanie's for supper after Krewe du Vieux and I still really like it. It's clean, low-key, and has excellent, friendly service, as well as a good menu and even better prices. I'll happily recommend it to just about anyone, and those broiled oysters are yum-yum delicious.


I had the seafood salad with broiled shrimp, lump crab meat, marinated artichokes, and fig-balsamic dressing and it was exceedingly tasty. I generally do not like iceberg in any way shape or form but it is acceptable and even yummy when applied to a real thing seafood salad. I also just plain love the fig-balsamic dressing here: it's thick and delicious, almost like a compote. One flaw: Deanies for the love of God do not put cheddar cheese on a salad, it is wrong and a crime against humanity. Or I could just tell em' not to put it on next time, but whatever, that would take effort.

Anyway, about Krewe Du Vieux!

So I've never experienced a Mardi Gras Parade in my life, unless you count St. Patricks Day when I was four years old (and that didn't really count, although I still have some of the beads.)

Therefore I was super excited for Krewe du Vieux last Saturday - the first parade of the season, the first shindig of the year. "Everyone's starting to feel carnival coming on," a friend of mine told me as we discussed, "everyone's going to start getting weird."

Krewe du Vieux is supposedly the bawdiest of the New Orleans parades, mixing satire with outright horniness, glowing giant dildos with existential humor and free stuff. This year's theme was The Stimulus Package and every float (drawn by mules) was a variant on the themes of financial hard-times/ being forcibly entered and outraged by the federal government. People dressed up like alligators, great white sharks, giant animate penises, Monopoly-men with tremendous F-sized boobies and god knows what else. I got plenty of beads mostly for existing and was only molested once or twice and I probably deserved it anyway.

I ended up really getting into the spirit of things and jumping right into the parade, wherein I ended up dancing behind a really excellent jazz band all the way down Royal and halfway up until Decautur. I danced around like a total idiot (not even drunk) and merrily danced up on various individuals I had never met before in my life, including but not limited to frat boys, kinky grandmas, squealing sorority girls and souls sista's, all of them appreciating my own unique Funky Butt. I was so proud of myself when some tourists looked at me and said, knowingly, "Oh she must be from around here." I guess I sort of am now - what a thought.

Frat boys: you may look but you may not touch unless explicitly invited DO NOT FOLLOW ME INTO THE PARADE HE-LLO.

Krewe du Vieux photos here!

Snow in New Orleans!?

Photo by Kyle Bella

What a bizarre day. The entire motive for my none-too-soon escape from Western Massachusetts was avoiding the white stuff: avoiding those grey slushy days where white gunk keeps pissing down out of the sky, soaking into my clothes and shoes, soaking the bottom of my jeans into never-drying, dampish mass.

I loathed the snow and cold more then just about anyone at Simon's Rock, I think - I enjoyed the winter-wonderlandish aspects of it for roughly five minutes and then the bitching would commence as I pulled 12 and a half layers on over my skinny, always freezing frame. (I am like those Italian greyhound dogs who wear loosely fitting sweaters and quiver on lady's couches, just like that.)

So when I woke up this morning and looked out the window, I assumed I was going completely insane.

Which I was not. No, that was real honest to Jesus snow coming out of the sky, in the Southern sunny states I had run to to escape such an eventuality - flurries and snowflakes, all that cheery shit that makes my eyebrow twitch - and furthermore I was going to have to actually go out into it. To take a final exam. The snow it seemed had followed me like some malovelent weather spirit, all the way from the Berkshires to the Big Easy. I wonder if it will perhaps begin snowing the next time I am sipping a Mai-Tai on a tropical isle. Probably.

Anyway, I slogged off to the street car stand through the slush, astonished/aghast that it was actually sticking - and was very happy to find the streetcars were running, pushing through the snow clouds like battering rams. The streetcar driver admittedly couldn't see a damn thing beyond the window - the snow was just slamming into the glass and adhering to it - but we soldiered on anyway. Unfortunately the risk of crunching into someone was greatly improved by all the paparazzi: tons of fresh faced Citizen Journalists emerging from their homes to stand right in front of the streetcar and take pictures of its picturesque form emerging nobly out of the blizzard. This meant that all of us inside the car started yelling profanities and GET OUT DA WAY YOU GODDAMN FOOL at the person ahead of us, who always jumped aside at the very last possible second with a real swell picture. This made for a stressful start to the morning.

We did end up getting to Tulane, and I was amused to see all the other Northeasterners complaining about the weather: "I came here to get AWAY from the snow! It's not ALLOWED to do this! I'm calling my daddy's public defense lawyer," et all. I merely smiled grimly, wrapped all my possessions in plastic bags, and soldiered on through the dampness and the slushiness and the wintery misery. I knew the score. I'd been here before.

It's all blown over now and it was a bit of an experience - how often do you get to see the Big Easy carpeted in an angel-butt pure veneer of pure driven snow? But I still can't stand being cold.

hola como estas new orleans

For those of you who are totally ignorant: New Orleans is a great, great food city. New Orleans may not boast the sheer number of restaurants that places like San Francisco and New York City do, but it makes up for it with style: New Orleans has its own distinct cuisine that just so happens to be among the most delicious in the world. Utilizing a knock out combination of cooking styles - ranging from Cajun to Creole to French to African to Italian to soul food and so much more - NOLA'S cuisine is the USA's finest indigenous cooking style.

Rich as sin but purely satisfying, New Orleans cuisine isn't much concerned with notions of low-calorie or all-natural or delicate-nibbles. It thrives on the elemental flavors, the ones that get deep down into the human lizard brain: fat and butter, cheese and cream, meat and lobster, chili spice and decadent sweetness. Although many contemprary chefs have created excellent riffs on classic rich Creole cuisine, New Orleans food has retained a refreshing authenticity to its original spirit.

And authentic it is: good food in New Orleans can be found at the grungy gas station in the ghetto or at the revered Creole dining rooms of the French quarter. You can spend very little or you can spend a hell of a lot, and you'll still find yourself a very excellent meal. Fried oysters and white bread from the dive oyster bar coexist with John Besh's decadent oyster preparations at August: both stem from the same cultural origins and the same love of fresh and unashamed cuisine. New Orleans peo

People in New Orleans care about food, in the single-minded and rabid way citizens of all great food cities do. Screaming arguments can be easily begun over here by disagreements over the towns best gumbo, po-boy, or BBQ shrimp, and you better believe everyone has an opinion. This is a town devoted to edibles and that is a large part of why I've decided to move here - it's one of the Big American Food Cities.

Anyways, my posts from here on out will involve a whole lot of New Orleans eating.....(I'm going back to August this weekend since I am a little snot.) I'm hoping to get a grasp on what makes this city tick one way or another, and a big part of that involves delicious food. I do live a life of travail and injustice.

(It is currently tropical storming over here as we catch a smack or two of Ike, which I am not loving so much, although it's a bit of a change from Sacramento's non-existent weather. And hey, at least I'm not cold anymore.)