Cafe Beignet

Beignet
 noun, Southern Louisiana
1. A square doughnut without a hole in a middle.
2. Has a mysterious quality of making people travel across the country just to eat one.
3. Melts in your mouth.

Although both Cafe Beignet and Cafe du Monde are great places offering beignets, I would like to give you advice that you may find helpful in the future - Cafe Beignet offers larger pastries. Case closed. 

 Sitting outside to enjoy our delicious breakfast.

 Alton's cat. (If you watch The Best Thing I Ever Ate, you know what I am talking about).

 Enjoy a cup of bitter chicory coffee with the sweet beignets. The making of the coffee is an old Acadian (settlers from Nova Scotia) custom where a ground up root of chicory was added to the then scarce coffee.

When in the South...

... do as the Southerners do. And we certainly did! We ate bagnets, went to the bayou, shopped at the French Market and ate raw oysters.
Dipped in a mix of a cocktail sauce, hot sauce, lemon juice and just enough horseradish to make you cry, put on a cracker and there you go - a true taste of New Orleans!

 Don't bother waiting in line for Acme Oyster House. The oysters are the same everywhere, silly! We really liked the LaBayou restaurant with the winders wide open right on the Bourbon street.

Heart attack breakfast

Everyone knows I like a good dessert, especially one that has European roots. Although I find American doughnuts little too sweet for me, I sure appreciate French pastries, such as beignets, or deep-fried pieces of dough covered with powdered sugar. Cafe du Monde, recommended at our hotel, is famous for those little pieces of goodness! Now, when a cafe shows up on the wikipedia page under the word "beignets", when it IS the VERY definition of beignets, you should not omit it when visiting New Orleans!

Let me tell you how to eat those little wonders. Step 1. Go to Cafe du Monde and keep in mind it will be very busy!
Step 2. Sit on the bench with a good view of Decatur St. Take couple sips of the famous cafe au lait made with chicory infused coffee.
Step 3. Hold the bag filled with beignets and powered sugar and shake it good to ensure even coverage!Step 4. Even if you want to eat all of your beignets at once, you have to control yourself and eat one at a time. Otherwise you will be covered with powdered sugar. Well, who are we kidding, you will be covered in powdered sugar anyway!

Step 5. Let it all go and devour those yummy pieces. You don't have to be well-mannered while eating those, everyone around you is doing the same thing!

Soft shell crab

Crabs shed their outer skeleton in order to grow for about a week at a time. Some species of crab can actually be eaten in that form, along with the soft shell that is covering them. While in N.O. Jeff wanted to try this delicacy and was not disappointed with it! Served battered and deep fried and with a dipping sauce was a very interesting addition to our culinary adventures!

Raw or grilled

That's your choice when ordering oysters. Which one are you going to have?
Char-grilled oysters are covered with cheese and served with buttery toast, so the choice seems pretty obvious, right? Wrong!
The Anna's Tasty Award goes to raw oysters at Acme Oyster House in N.O.! Served with sauce of ketchup, horseradish, lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce) and crackers are a true hit!

At work cracking them open!
Just waiting to be devoured.
Dipped in the sauce and on a cracker.
The grilled oysters were delicious too, but I thought that frying them covered in cheese took away from the natural seafood taste I was looking for.

The search for the perfect gumbo

Being a fan of gumbo I just had to have it when visiting New Orleans! Now, having only had gumbo made by my friend Boyd or myself, I was in for a surprise. The Louisiana gumbo is darker than the one I had before - the roux in it would sure be considered burned by the French. It is also much milder; I am not sure if the restaurants are trying to please the tourists or if this is how the traditional creole gumbo is made. The soup was traditionally served with rice on top but it was more of a broth - the familiar abundance of seafood and vegetables was surprisingly missing from my plate, although I did find a little crab!
Although I did not find my perfect gumbo, I found some pretty tasty ones when exploring the city. After trying the soup in several restaurants in French Quarter, my best choice goes to Felix's Restaurant and Oyster Bar on Iberville St. The wonderful flavor of the broth sure made up for lack of spicy sausage!

Muffuletta

American-style sandwiches are not my favorite thing in the world and I will tell you why.
1. I think the bread is either too light or too heavy and I haven't found a perfect balance anywhere yet.
2. They are filled with tons of meat. While it seems that the meat is what Americans usually desire on a sandwich, I feel that it takes away from other flavors - the cheese, veggies, spreads. Believe it or not, your palate wants to taste things other than meat sometimes too!
3. Last but not least is the issue of cheese. Where did all the flavorful cheese disappear to? Don't sandwiches deserve tasteful, interesting cheese?
There IS good news, though. It seems that I have found the best medicine for our sandwich boredom and it is called Muffuletta.

The muffuletta sandwich was developed in Central Grocery in New Orleans, an Italian grocery store founded in early 1900's. The muffulleta sandwich is prepared with muffuletta bread with sesame seeds, marinated olive oil salad, several kinds of meats and 2 kinds of cheeses. Although it is seemingly full of meat, the ham, pepperoni, capicola and salami are sliced thinly, as to not take away from other flavors of the sandwich. The olive oil salad is made of marinated veggies that usually would never see an inside of a sandwich, such as carrots or cauliflower. Talk about original and impressive! Now, dig in!

In the bayou

To get away from the negative temperatures, snow and wind, Jeff and I decided to take a trip to a place I have always wanted to visit - New Orleans. Having never been south my expectations were huge! And I have to say, the weather, food and people delivered! The people are honestly grateful for the tourists coming back to the area after the storm.

One of the best things we did was the tour of the swamp, just north-east of N.O., where we fed alligators some marshmallows.
This is just one of many houses on the bayou. "You're born into this lifestyle, you don't choose it" according to my tour guide. People there live from what they catch; trapping of coypu (rodent producing a flavorful meat called nutria), shrimping, craw-fishing. Saturday nights the river is hoppin' with dancing parties the cajun people throw. "They would give you a shirt off their backs, even if that's the last thing they have".
Remnants of the Hurricane Katrina. The bayou is still full of old boats, garbage and whole houses, even after years of cleanup. We saw a house that floated to the alligator breeding area and the owner had to be air lifted by helicopter to safety.
The beautiful bayou is full of wild animals and plant species.
One of the bayou's residents.