Cochon - visits 2 and 3...

Visit 2. A short quick lunch with a friend from DC who was visiting family in Louisiana.
(You know who you are...)

Ordered Crawfish Pie, the Grits and Sausage, and the Gumbo. The Gumbo is quite good but the crawfish pie is sublime. Flaky pastry in the shape of an empanada. The filling is a saucy seasoned (slightly creamy) mixture of rice and crawfish. There is a the distinctive smell of the swampiness of crawfish that is paired with some creole seasoned sauce. Divine. More delicate than a crawfish etouffee - but close. I would eat a bowl of the filling if they put it on the menu.

Visit 3. Dinner with colleagues. The new things we ordered included the ribs, the beef brisket with potato salad, the grilled shrimp. I revisited the boudin, the sausage/grits, the crawfish pie. The sauce with the beef brisket was delicious. The brisket was a bit fatty for my taste... The grilled shrimp was fine but nothing to write home about. The crawfish pie was sublime, still. And I wiped up all the housemade mustard with the boudin.

I think I'm going to make it back to Cochon one more time - perhaps for lunch tomorrow...

I also ate at a restaurant called Irenes - at the recommendation of the Cochon bartender. Charming French/Italian restaurant in the French Quarter but it manages to be patronized by a largely local clientele. The dish I'm going to try to make at home: Sweet Potato Soup with Andouille sausage.

New Orleans - Cochon

I ate breakfast (large bowl of steel-cut oats) at 4:30 AM in Portland, OR.
I ate my next meal at 3:00 PM (Pacific) or 5:00 PM (Central) in New Orleans, LA at Cochon.

In preparation for this trip, I checked the usual restaurant websites for New Orleans eateries and found a review for Cochon in the New York Times. Open for less than a month, Cochon is the second restaurant of a well-established New Orleans chef. It also happens to be less than 1/4 mile from my hotel. Hoorah!!!!

I arrived around 5pm. The restaurant was empty. The servers were having their daily meeting. I sat at the bar and the congenial (and cute) bartender guided me through the menu. Small plates compose the majority of the menu.

I started with the Eggplant and Shrimp Dressing and the Fried Boudin.

Boudin is a Cajun dish of pork and rice mushed together with cajun seasonings. Based on quick googling, it looks like it is prepared in 'balls' or in 'links' with natural casings. The Cochon version of Boudin were fried balls - slightly larger than hushpuppies at Long John Silvers. They were served with house-made mustard. Delicious. The inside of the fried ball was soft with smokily aromatic shredded pork and probably some other ingredients in addition to rice. I thought I saw something that looked like OFFAL but I didn't inquire. The outside was crunchy-tasty. The mustard was an excellently paired condiment and delicious in itself.

The Eggplant and Shrimp Dressing was served in a mini casserole style dish. I wish I were more familiar with cajun seasongs to figure out what was all in there. But the dressing was held together by corn-meal or cornbread and there were small chunks of shrimp (and possibly ham?) throughout the dressing. The eggplant provided the silky texture - but wasn't present as whole pieces.

Then I ordered the sausage with grits. The sausage was different than most sausages I've eaten recently (okay, I don't eat that much meat, but still...). It was simply spiced. There wasn't much heat but it was distinctive without being overpowering. The grits were awesomely creamy. It makes me think I should learn how to cook grits - because I'm sure they are easy.
There was a light sauce around the whole plate - I think it incorporated a touch of their house-made mustard because there were grainy flecks in the sauce. But I'm not sure if it really added much to the sausage-grits combo - I couldn't find anything distinctive about the sauce.

(But I think my palate was blown at this point with wine and this drink that the bartender gave to me made of North Carolina moonshine which was reminiscent of Pimms).

I ended with the pineapple upside down cake. It's tasty - but too sweet for my palate. It has hardened carmelized sugar on top of the cake. It is paired with a coconut lime sorbet. The sorbet was more coconut than lime - and reminded me of a Thai-coconut milk desert. Excellent - I would order it again but I would have liked more lime-y tang. Maybe I'd ask the bartender for a lime and sqeeze it over the sorbet...

The service was friendly and casual but very proper. Even though I was the only one eating in the restaurant, everything was served with enthusiasm. I also shouldn't have eaten that much.

But I feel fine, now. And I'm going back for lunch tomorrow for BlackEyed Pea and Pork Gumbo. And for lunch the next day - the Oyster and Bacon Sandwich?

One-A-Day, or, I've got a lot of time on my hands...

One-A-Day
Originally uploaded by jc-pdx.

The challenge has been to draw for at least 15-mins everyday.

My subjects come from magazine photos. Cat Power. Some preacher dude. Miles Davis. National Geographic. Tom Ze. Now that the weather is nice in Portland (well sorta) I've been doing drawing sprints on the back patio. Better to have charcoal dust and eraster detritus outside than inside.

The two paintings were rainy Sunday experiments. The (more) abstract one was based on the simple premise of tons of paint, and no muddy colors. The second painting was based on the rhododendron (?) bush outside of my window. It has HUGE pink flowers, but I think that the shoots bearing new leaves are more interesting. I painted from memory. Of course, when I returned to take a look, the shoots look nothing like my rendition.