February 2005 Archives
Review of Mandina's Restaurant
keywords: red beans and rice monday, restaurants, mid-city, canal street, streetcars, veal, po-boys, Mandina's.
Sometimes understated is best, and McGruder nails the point down here.
New Orleans Neighborhoods
keywords: cemeteries, st. louis #1, metairie cemetery
Keywords: sightseeing, canal street, streetcars, Mandina's, Hornets, Da Paper, Jarvis DeBerry.
Keywords: Louisiana and Jefferson Parish Schools, politics, homestead exemption, property tax.
This story on NPR's Morning Edition this morning really made me pause and think. The issue appears to be simple, as the summary of the spot states:
The Supreme Court hears a case that tests whether local governments may force homeowners to sell their land so that private companies can redevelop the area to create jobs and generate tax revenue. A group of homeowners in New London, Conn., argues that eminent domain should only be invoked for public projects such as roads or schools.
But it's not cut-and-dry, of course. In the segment, a man talks about the house his great-grandmother grew up in, which also was the corner grocery for the neighborhood. It kept bringing me back to thoughts of Modica's Grocery on the corner of Ridgelake and Codifer in Metairie, back when I was growing up.
Should government be allowed to expropriate private property for the sole purpose of selling it to another private entity? The city of New London makes a strong case for promoting economic development. But it's at the expense of homeowners. Tough call.
In a follow-up article to an incident from November, Da Paper summarizes recent actions by the Jefferson Parish School Board to fix their very-flawed "zero-tolerance" policy towards drugs.
The flurry of activity stems from this incident (from the article):
A girl at Geraldine Boudreaux Elementary School was suspended Nov. 29 after bringing to campus gelatin snacks resembling the alcohol-laced "Jell-O shots" that are sold in bars.
According to the district, the fourth-grader told school officials she was selling the treats to raise money for Christmas and that vodka and rum were present when her mother, Adrienne Noble, made them at home.
Noble has denied her daughter ever told school officials that account and that there was no alcohol present when the Jell-O was made.
The school system was humiliated by the national press for this foolish act, and no doubt are the targets of litigation. The girl's suspension stems from enforcement of a "look-alike" policy. Again, from the article:
The girl was suspended under the district's "look-alike" drug policy, which can punish students for having substances resembling actual drugs.
Board member Mark Morgan has proposed rewording that policy, which targets "any substance designed to look like or represented as a drug."
OK, hold on a second. A jello-shot looks like drugs? Maybe I'm just naiive, but to me a jello shot looks like...ummm, jello. It's a spoon of jello in a small plastic cup. You see those little plastic cups all the time, most often at a grocery store. They're used to give out free samples of food. When I stopped for a cup of coffee at CC's this morning, the gals behind the counter had cut up a banana muffin and put the pieces in said small plastic cups to entice customers.
Does that little plastic cup somehow transform foodstuffs into illegal substances? Hardly. It's the context. In a coffee shop, it's food. In a bar, it's booze. In a school, in the hands of a nine-year old girl, it's...well, it's jello. Arguing that this little girl was bringing booze to school is like accusing someone in possession of a postage stamp of distributing LSD. Sure, you can distribute LSD on a postage stamp, but is every postage stamp a hit of acid?
Then there's this whole notion that, because the mother has booze in the house that the jello should be suspect. Hey, I've got some great 16-year old Irish whiskey in the house, as well as some Absolut. That doesn't mean I put it in my fifth grader's lunch before he leaves the house. A lot of people keep a bottle or two of whiskey, rum, or vodka on their bar. In my house, the bar is what separates the kitchen from the den. That means there was vodka present this morning when I made my son's peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. Trying to infer that I laced his peanut butter with vodka based on this fact is just plain stupid.
There's another very crucial aspect to this story that Da Paper has never really addressed (not that one would expect real reporting from Da Paper). Just because a teacher says the little girl told her something is no reason to believe it is true. Teachers and school administrators are good at not only twisting around the words of a young child, but some of them are quite adept at lying. When this got to the level of school administration (assistant principal or principal), any half-intelligent administrator should have been able to sense that pursuing this case would lead to publicity and possibly litigation. A not-so-intelligent administrator would follow the policy to the letter and, when they realize they're about to be cast adrift by the school system, would doctor the story to cover their rear end. In some cases, it's not out of the realm of possibility that a teacher or principal would outright lie.
School officials are quick to circle the wagons, even if it means letting a nine-year-old hang out to dry. Parents beware.
Links mentioned in the podcast:
Calendars:
These recipes are dedicated to the memory of Chef Buster Holmes, whose Buster Holmes' Bar and Restaurant in the French Quarter defined what New Orleans Red Beans and Rice are all about. Chef Buster died on Monday, February 28, 1994, at the age of 89.
****
Creole Cooked Red Beans
1 lb dried red beans
1 ham bone
8-10 cups water
1 (8oz) can tomato sauce
2 tsp garlic salt
1/4 tsp Tabasco sauce
1 tsp Lea and Perrins Worcestershire sauce
1/2 lb ham, diced
1/2 lb hot sausage, sliced
1/2 lb smoked sausage, sliced
1/2 cup chopped celery
1 cup chopped onion
3 cloves garlic, pressed
2 bay leaves
salt and pepper to taste
1/4 cup chopped parsley
2 cups rice, cooked
Preparation of the beans:
Wash and sort the beans. Cover the beans with water and boil for 2 minutes. Remove from the heat and let the beans soak for at least 1 hour. Even if you plan to soak the beans overnight, this method keeps the beans from souring. This short-soak method helps retain the vitamins, cuts cooking time considerably, and produces beans with fewer hard skins than those soaked overnight. Add the salt and flavorings only after soaking. Salt has a tendendency to toughen the beans, which causes them to take longer to cook. In order to prevent the beans from boiling over, add 1 tbsp. bacon grease or butter, a piece of slab bacon, or seasoning ham with some fat on it. One cup of dried bean yields, depending on the variety and size of the beans, 2-23/4 cups cooked beans.
Nutritionally, beans are high in protein, but they require the addition of rice to be a complete protein.
After beans are prepared:
In a large pot place the ham bone, water, tomato sauce, garlic salt, Tabasco sauce, Worcestershire sauce and beans. Cook, uncovered, over low heat. In a skillet sauté the ham and sausage until the grease is rendered. Transfer the ham and sausage to the bean pot. To the grease in the skillet add the celery, onion, and garlic and sauté until soft. Pour this mixture into the bean pot. Add the bay leaves, salt, and pepper and continue cooking for 2 to 2 1/2 hours, or until the beans are soft and creamy. Add the water while cooking if necessary. Remove the bay leaves and add the parsley. Serve the beans over the rice. Serves 6-8.
****
Spiritual Saturday Podcast
keywords: Spiritual Saturday, St. Mary's Assumption Church, Archangels
keywords: old streetcars, old office buildings, UNO, po-boys, lakefront, "smokey mary," Milneburg, mardi gras fountain
you have your moments when you're a goof, but overall, you're not a bad guy.
Secretary of State Fox McKeithen Paralyzed After Fall
BATON ROUGE, La. -- Secretary of State Fox McKeithen's office says McKeithen is suffering from paralysis after falling at his home Thursday afternoon.
Doctors have told family members the bones in McKeithen's neck shifted. They do not know if the paralysis is temporary or permanent.
The family says McKeithen is currently going through a battery of tests.Fall
Weekend Warmup, Asian-Cajun Bistro, JazzFest Tickets, "Eating Raoul"
In her column this morning, La Grace asks hizzoner the Mayor:
Here's a question for the Nagin administration: How dumb do you think we are?
I'm not a lawyer, but my friends who are tell me that the old lawyer's adage "never ask a question that you don't know the answer to" is very true. I would submit that Ms. Grace should take this to heart and never ask a rhetorical question to which you might not like the answers.
In this case, it's an easy answer: You're pretty bloody dumb, both personally (Grace), and institutionally (Da Paper).
On a personal level, Ms. Grace has written some pretty dumb columns in her tenure on the opinion page of Da Paper. Today's column is one of them. Let's look at two sections:
Now, I can't speak for all those other people, but let me offer a few thoughts of my own.
The raises were destined to look bad in the first place, given the tight budget and the looming firefighter settlement. Throw in the fact that many of the employees in question were already making far more than their counterparts in prior administrations, and the move is even harder to defend. After all, we're talking about people who are already on the job, not being recruited, which was Nagin's original justification for salaries that in most cases already reached into the six figures.
Pretty strong stuff here. But go a couple of grafs down:
To be fair, it's worth noting that Nagin did make raises for rank-and-file city workers a priority in his first two budgets, and although the firefighter judgment is his problem to deal with, it's not of his making. And the nearly $80,000 annual cost of the now-vanished salary increases is small potatoes compared to the city's overall budget woes.
This is a good example of why the Nagin administration thinks you're dumb. You make the executive pay raise issue seem like such a huge disaster for Nagin because he's got financial woes and he looks like he's screwing firefighters. You then point out that, in the first two years of his administration, Nagin has gone to bat for those very workers you feel should be insulted by hizzonner's actions.
On Channel 4's morning news program this morning, Nagin offered this explanation: He brought people on at certain salary levels and promised to re-visit them in the third year of his term. He immediately went to bat for the rest of City Hall's workforce, and now it was time for that re-visit.
Before we get to the merits (or lack thereof) of the raises, let's talk a bit about the process. Grace feels mightly insulted that the Mayor and his staff would try to pull a fast one. What's interesting is that they got away with it. From the news article yesterday about the raises:
On Jan. 27 -- about a week after the raises appeared in the aides' paychecks -- Rice sent an e-mail to executive staffers saying: "This e-mail is to confirm that each of you has agreed to refuse to accept a . . . raise proposed by Mayor Nagin."
Those of you who, unlike Ms. Grace, work regularly with e-mail in a corporate environment, know well how this works. CAO Charles Rice, sent a very typical corporate e-mail. It's of the "unless I hear differently from you, I'm going to take this particular action." It was indeed sent to each individual. Their legal actions are as individuals. Now, were there instant messages or quick conversations in the hallway that explained what was happening? Could be, but Grace and company aren't going to discover them.
This puts Ms. Grace in the position of saying "I know you're lying but I can't prove it." What's worse is she writes a whole column supporting this thesis and invites others to tell her how dumb she is.
Careful what you wish for, Stephanie.
Special elections in New Orleans, OPSB, Nagin.
We all know that the Times-Picayune isn't all that proud of their website. After all, anyone who spends time in PhotoShop to turn a Riverfront streetcar into a Canal streetcar because they don't want to be bothered actually scanning a photo of Canal Street isn't what you call on the ball. Still, I went to www.nola.com to see what they had on the various upcoming local elections. You go to their election section and what do you get? Stories about the 3rd District Congressional race from last December.
And this is our daily newspaper. Sad.
Tech Tuesday - New Orleans Tech Scene, Louisiana Technology Council, MS .NET framework, iPodder and Doppler.
Explosion kills former Lebanon PM
Former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri has been killed in an apparent assassination in west Beirut.
The blast, which reports say killed about nine people and injured 100 others, may have been a car bomb.
It went off beside the derelict St Georges Hotel on the seafront, causing widespread damage.
Professor Cole points out that Hariri had a lot of shady financial dealings going on. At a time when assassinations are being done with small amounts of explosives in mobile phones and other very targeted techniques, this over-the-top bombing sounds more like the mob than terrorists.
Why I love Morning Edition: they do little things like mention how Virgin Mobile has a service now where, if you want to bail on a date, you can punch three numbers into your mobile phone and Virgin will call you back with a message explaining what to do and say to make it look believable that you're bailing.
Why I hate Morning Edition: Cokie Roberts. This woman truly has no shame. In "analyzing" the slection of Howard Dean as DNC chair, she talks about how the Republicans have gotten to a point where they can talk about abortion and make what they say acceptable to the general public, but not expose what they really mean.
Ms. Roberts, what you are describing is LYING. Why is it so difficult for you to call someone who is LYING a LIAR? It's not behavior that should be admired.
YatPundit Podcast for February 14, 2005
That's The Corrs, doing "What Can I Do?", a very appropriate tune for Valentines Day. It's Red Beans and Rice Monday here at YatPundit, and since it's also the feast day of St. Valentine, let's talk romance while we talk about food.
One of the things that people love about New Orleans' restaurants is that they pay for good food, not pretentious atmosphere. While that's an appealing thing most days of the year, there are times when this is can be a liability rather than an asset. Let's face it, some of the best restaurants in town are just not very romantic. With that in mind, today we'll give you the top five romantic restaurants in town.
Before we do the list, however, I want to talk about some of the restaurants that aren't on the list:
Antoine's and Galatoire's: These are two classic examples of fantastic traditional Creole cooking in a business-like atmosphere. Both restaurants have lovely old dining rooms that are busy and a bit noisy. You'll find large parties almost every evening that generate ambient noise even if they're not rowdy.
Emeril's: It's an old warehouse with an open, exposed ceiling. The acoustics are just nasty. If your sweetie is a food nut, you won't care, but if romance and atmosphere is what you're after, take a pass.
Neighborhood places like Liuzza's or Mandina's, or po-boy places like Mother's or Parasol's are crowded, noisy, and have decor that re-defines "no-frills."
The bottom line here is simple: If you want a fantastic New Orleans dinner experience, any of these places are winners. If you're looking for candlelight, soft music, quiet atmosphere, forget it. Pick one of the restaurants on the list, then come back to these when circumstances change.
OK, here's the list:
Number 5: The Dock at West End. If you time this one right, this is a great setting. Sunset on the Lakefront, waves lapping against the pilings, sailboats going by. The main downside is that it's hard to plan ahead for The Dock because of the factors of wind and weather. If it works for you, though, whatever you do, don't eat boiled seafood. You'll smell like it for the rest of the evening.
Number 4: The Rib Room at the Omni Royal Orleans. The lush decor, scenic view out onto Rue Royale, simple but tasty menu, all come together to make for a very intimate dinner experience. Not to mention that you're in a hotel, making it easy to escalate the tension if that's part of the evening's plans.
Number 3: Siam Cafe on Esplanade. Ethnic food and romantic dates don't always go together, so you better make sure your date likes Thai before even considering this one. Still, a table for two here is a very intimate dining experience.
Number 2: Tujague's on Decatur Street in the French Quarter. It's traditional and old-line, like Galatoire's or Antoine's, but the smaller dining room at Tujague's makes it more intimate. The front room is usually set for a single row of tables up against the side walls, and the back dining room is the ultimate in intimacy. Tujague's food is excellent, and the limited menu makes things simple--no hard choices to spoil the mood.
And the Number 1 Romantic Restaurant is Crescent City Steak House on Broad Street. Two words: Private Booths. Crescent City harkens back to a more civilized age, of private cars on trains, discreet encounters, and good food. The steaks here are just fantastic, and you can rest assured they'll cook it the way your sweetheart wants it.
So, pick one of these places for that all-important "mood" date, then move on to the more typical New Orleans restaurant when the atmosphere isn't such a high priority.
As always, we welcome your feedback and comments on our opinions, especially when we start talking about restaurants and hotels. Everyone has different experiences with places, and we need your input to factor into our top-five and top-ten lists. You can get in touch with us either by commenting on the blog, www.yatpundit.com or emailing us at comments at yatpundit dot com.
Canal and Rampart Streets.
YatPundit Podcast for Sunday, February 13th, 2005.
That's Sidney Bechet and His Blue Note Jazz Men, doing "Blue Horizon"
Welcome to the first installment of "Streetcar Sunday." I've named the segment after one of my serious passions in life, the streetcars of New Orleans. After all, since I wrote a book on the history of the Canal streetcar line, there's a strong connection there for me. But "Streetcar Sunday" won't be just about street railways; this is YatPundit's history segment, our link to the past.
So, I thought we'd begin at a specific location in town, the corner of Canal and N. Rampart Streets. Why this particular location? When I was doing this week's "feature photo" segment for CanalStreetCar (dot com), I chose a photo of one of the new 2000-series Von Dullen streetcars, on Canal Street, just past Canal and Rampart. The photo got me thinking of just how much has happened around that corner. Rampart Street was the outer edge of the original city, what is now the French Quarter. The neighborhood on the other side of the street was the old "Storyville" red-light district, where so many legends come from, as well as so much good Jazz. Right near that area is St. Louis Cemetery Number One, the "voodoo" cemetery of the sightseeing circuit.
As the city moved into the 20th century, Canal and Rampart became important as more than just a boundary between neighborhoods. It became a major transportation corner in the city's main transportation hub. The Southern Railway company built their station at Canal and Rampart, so streetcar lines made a point of stopping at Rampart. By the 1920s, there was a four-track terminal in the 100 block of N. Rampart, where the excursion trains from Spanish Fort ran in the summer, and the Orleans-Kenner railroad's commuter line terminated here. The New Orleans City Railroad's West End line terminated at Canal and Rampart. All in front of the Southern Railway station, which was the main way out of town if you were going to Atlanta, DC, or New York City. Just imagine the hustle-bustle of this intersection on a typical weekday in the summer during the "roaring twenties," as businessmen got on trains to go to points north, or families got on the West End or Spanish Fort lines for a day at the Lakefront.
N. Rampart Street isn't all about trains and streetcars, though. Bars, clubs, restaurants, churches and schools line the street. The corner of N. Rampart Street and Esplanade Avenue was the home of St. Aloysius College for over a century, until the school closed and its student body merged with Cor Jesu in Gentilly to become Brother Martin High School. Just a block down from St. Aloysius, on Rampart and Kerlerec Streets is the Lodge building of Etoile Polaire #1, Free and Accepted Masons, the oldest Masonic Lodge in Louisiana.
So much of this has been lost over the years. The trains haven't come to Canal Street since the 1950s, and the streetcars are only now returning. Still, the spirit is there, and can still be felt as you walk by Armstrong Park or into the Saenger Theater.
That's it for this "Streetcar Sunday" segment. We'll see you tomorrow, on "Red Beans and Rice Monday." Bye for now.
Lent in New Orleans; the Irish Channel Churches...
I'm doing a bit of testing here. I use two clients for blogging, w.bloggar for MovableType entries and Semagic for LJ entries. When I cranked YatPundit back up this week, I did a lot of behind-the-scenes work to the MT site. The biggest addition was MTBlacklist, which is my main line of defense against comment spam. I literally had to take the MT blogs off-line because of comment spam. MTBlacklist has only let five spam comments in since Wednesday, and it's got a great routine for identifying spam that does get past so it doesn't happen a second time.
The second addition to regular MT was the mods to the RSS 2.0 feed to handle podcasting. Podcast distribution is handled by a new type of client, of which iPodder appears to be the most common. You tell the podcasting client the URL of the RSS 2.0 feed that has the podcast you want, and it checks that URL, either on demand or on a schedule, for the audio file. What puts the MP3 file into the RSS feed is a tag that's not supported by MT, namely an "enclosure" tag. So, I needed to add a plugin to MT that scans for audio and video files and wraps them in the enclosure tag. To install the plugin, I had to install several perl mods via CPAN. That went OK, but it did get me started thinking about updates to programs such as perl and when the right time is to do them.
The third modification to basic MT was a plugin called LJCrosspost. It's a template modification that sends an MT entry to LJ. It works fine for a user LJ, but won't cross-post to a community. I'm going to delve into the script and see if I can work on it for communities.
OK, geek time over. I'm watching NUMB3RS, that's geeky enough... :-)
My lawyer (who is a friend of almost 30 years now) rides in Zulu, and he did some really nice coconuts this year. I don't know where Stroup gets the idea that you can't hollow out coconuts practically, because this one is light as a feather. Steve said they bought coconuts from someone who gets them from Vietnam. They have a factory process over there where they drill a hole, drain the milk, extract the meat, and are left with the shells. The factory trashes them, so someone worked out a deal to buy them and have them shipped to New Orleans. It probably costs more to get them here than it the actual price of the shells, but what the heck, we're talking Zulu here.
You gotta love Da Paper, though. Sheila Stroup is writing about how it won't work on the very day Zulu is throwing them. So typical of that gang.
as mentioned in the podcast, we'll be switching Thursday's and Friday's formats next week, doing the Weekend Warmup on Thursdays and Potpourri on Fridays. That way we can give people more lead time for the weekend.
Ash Wednesday is traditionally a day of fasting and reflection, as Lent begins for Christians. I've spent the day doing some work for clients, but also I've been working on my Movable Type blog, www.yatcom.com. I pretty much shut down my MT site for a couple of months because it was getting blasted by comment spam. Over the last week or so, I've become quite interested in podcasting, so I decided to clean up YatPundit and get it all straight. So, I added a spam filter for comments to the blog, a handler to syndicate podcasts, and a "lj-crosspost" module, which appears to be working.
I so totally enjoy LiveJournal and my friends on LJ that I didn't really feel a sense of loss when I took YatPundit offline, but if I'm going to podcast, I want the feed to come directly from my server rather than relying on LJ for that. So, what I'm going to do from here on out is to post podcasts and political entries via YatPundit and recipes and restaurant reviews via YatCuisine. The personal stuff that I regularly post to LJ will still be friends-only there. I'm looking forward to this resurrection of YatPundit!
let's see if this post cross-posts to my LiveJournal
