Mess of Greens

full bellies | warm welcomes

New Orleans

Dining Out MoG: Cochon Butcher NOLA

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I’m kind of an obnoxious traveler when it comes to picking where we eat on our vacations…and I guess where we stay and what we do, too. 😉 (If you want to see the super involved and intense travel itineraries with choose-your-own-adventure outlines for each day that I made for Italy and Portland one day, just ask.) I guess these plans are only obnoxious if your idea of a vacation different than mine. On my trips to new places, especially places that I don’t expect to get to visit very often, I want to SEE and EAT everything that is local and delicious. Always at the top of the list are farmers markets and special groceries, food stalls, art and antique open air markets, breweries, and casual but delicious eateries.

On a less than 12 hour trip to New Orleans (which is possible because Laurel is only 2 hours north) to take our little person to the aquarium because he has an octopus and sea lion obsession, I STILL wanted to eat as much good food as possible. There wasn’t even time to traipse over from Downtown to the French Quarter, but thankfully Cafe Du Monde has a branch RIGHT next to the aquarium near a parking garage with MUCH shorter lines than the original location and then, just around the corner was Cochon Butcher, a place I’d been salivating over since I followed them on Instagram so we took the opportunity to pop in.

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Crawfish Elegante’

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I’ve shared so many of my Grandmother’s recipes here that I’m a bit worries my cousins are going to hunt me down for giving away family secrets. Well, I would be worried except that my cousins and I all feel the same way about our Grandmother… that she was the warmest, kindest, most loving woman on the planet and that if we can be just a little bit like her in our lives, we’ll be doing things right.

Somehow she made all of her children and her grandchildren believe that we were her absolute most favorite (and, you know what, I bet we ALL were.) She was forever sewing something for a friend, or cooking something delicious for one of us, or making up something fun for us to do together.

My cousin, Amy, gave us the most wonderful Christmas gift a couple of years ago…she painstakingly typed up and bound all of Grandmother’s recipes into a cookbook of sorts.I use it every week at least once, and I’d bet they do, too (if they haven’t memorized the recipes yet.) Grandmother has some Louisiana roots, which is why a bunch of her best recipes have a creole/New Orleans flair.

Her recipe for Crawfish Elegante’ is a super delicious, very versatile dish that can be made ahead, frozen, and eaten in a variety of ways. It’s perfect for spring when crawfish are in season, but also pretty great whenever as you can get frozen peeled crawfish at the store. Here, I’m sharing it as a dip with toasted New Orleans French Bread, but it’s also great over rice as a main dish OR as a filling for puff pastries. We also had it as a catfish topping this same night, and as my cousin Virginia would say “it didn’t suck.” 😉

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French Market Beignets

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this weekend was a big alumni party at the hopson commissary (which, btw, was the first location we scouted for our wedding 2.5 years ago) with  lots of drinking, and talking, and dancing. we ended up with five wonderful friends staying with us after the party, and what kind of southern hostess sends her friends away without breakfast? the bad kind, which, if you ever call me know that “them’s fightin’ words.” but of course, if it’s true I want to know so i can fix it. 😉
annnnnyway, going out and drinking is synonymous with a visit to New Orleans, so it just makes sense to look there for the perfect hangover brunch. 🙂 enter French Market Beignets.
until i met boone, i actually just bought the Cafe du Monde mix at the grocery store (and it’s SUPER easy to find in south Mississippi, where i grew up) but boone’s mom, a master baker, shirley, makes beignets from scratch every single Christmas morning as one of their most treasured family traditions and serves them on BEAUTIFUL milk class plates. merry christmas to us!
anyway, since we did Christmas in the Delta, boone didn’t get any beignets (because the recipe in the Joy of Cooking is awful. DO.NOT. TRY. IT.) but after called boone’s mom for the recipe before our friends came to town and were in dire need of brunch, we had the perfect chance to fix that.
if you’re wondering, making them from scratch is pretty simple, and so, so, so delishy.
French Market Doughnuts (call them Beignets and they’ll taste better)
Adapted from the Junior League of New Orleans Plantation Cookbook
 
What you need:
1 pkg (8 oz) yeast
1/2 cup warm water (just above your body’s temp)
1 egg beaten (at room temp)
4 Tbs sugar
1 C evaporated milk (each can is 11/2 C)
3 C Flour
Vegetable Oil (11/2– 2″ deep)
Powdered Sugar in a plastic bag
Note: you have to let this sit overnight, or at least for several hours, so plan accordingly!
What you do: 
Mix water and yeast by sprinkling the yeas on top of the warm water. Add 2 Tbs of sugar until the yeast rises and doubles (about 10 minutes). It will froth and bubble.

Add the other 2 Tbs of sugar, the egg, and the milk, then add in the flour one cup at a time so you can actually stir it. When you’re finished, the dough should be wettish ( a quote from Boone’s mom). at this point cover the dough and refrigerate it overnight so it rises.

it will be beautiful and much bigger.

Dump the dough onto a floured surface (obviously), and roll it out about 1/4″ thick.

 

using a knife or a pizza cutter (Cafe du Monde’s suggestion),  cut the dough into 2 1/2″ squares.
Heat the oil to 350 to 365 degrees (use a candy thermometer or your very own fry baby, which we DO have, but isn’t getting very hot these days) and then drop the dough into the hot oil to fry it. (boone put 3 in at a time, and that seemed to work well. They should flip over by themselves, BUT we used thongs when they didn’t.

 

dry the beignets off on a paper towel, then drop them into a bag of powdered sugar and toss. you won’t be sorry.

serve immediately so they don’t get cold… coffee and fruit are the very best things to pair them with in my opinion. but you don’t have to take MY word for it. 😉

this is jess’s plate by the way. does she have a possible future in food styling? i think so.

the king of cakes…

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so tomorrow is ash wednesday, marking the beginning of Lent. i’m not sure what’s gotten into me, but i’ve decided to give up sweets for all forty days. God help me.

in my own “last hurrah” to all things delicious (and as a tip of my hat to one of my favorite southern cities, new orleans), i decided to make two giant king cakes this weekend for our church’s mardi gras celebration. this way, i could use up my excess butter/sugar/eggs AND store up as many calories as possible. good idea? i think so. anyway, this is absolutely the most authentic recipe i’ve found (and growing up so close to new orleans, i know my king cake) so it’s totally worth the time and caloric intake. it’s just perfect.


well, it’s perfect if you think that using nearly a pound of butter and enough sugar to give anyone diabetes is ok…


i wish you could taste this over the interweb…


if you like what you see, leave a comment and i’ll email you my new recipe plus a few tweaks I added from other king cake versions i’ve tried. It’s sooo good..the dough has a lovely depth of flavor and stays moist for a relatively long time.

can you read this? I think if you click on it and open it in another window it should get bigger…
if not, leave me your email address below and I’ll send a bigger file to you! it’s so long and involved that it would take days to type out.
also, make a note to add lemon zest to the dough (1 1/2 tablespoons) and use brown sugar instead of white sugar in the filling to make it extra delicious. In case you’re wondering where i got it, I think this came from USA Today or something like it…enjoy friends!