Entries Tagged as 'louisiana'

Crabcakes

April 19th, 2008 · 2 Comments


Crab Cakes, Bourbon House, French Quarter, New Orleans

You probably don’t know this, but I love crab cakes. Louisiana has fabulous crab cakes, so I try to order them whenever I can while visiting. So far of the trips I’ve been down there, my most memorable crabcakes have been:

  • Red Fish Grill where I had some delicious Louisiana blue crabmeat cakes
  • Mr. B’s Bistro – A pan sauteed jumbo lump crabcake served with our classic ravigote sauce
  • Bourbon House – deviled crab cakes served with creole ravigote and marinated crab claws (pictured above)

Mr. B’s and Bourbon House are both part of the Brennan’s empire. I wonder if that’s why they both serve their crabcakes with ravigote. In any case, the New Orleans is not stingy with the crabmeat like other places I’ve been where the crabcake is mostly cake and not crab. YUM!

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Louisiana Swamp Tour

April 10th, 2008 · No Comments

I was talking with Tien before going to New Orleans and he said that he and Shannan had gone on a Louisiana swamp tour when they were down there and had a really great time. You can see from his photographs that they saw a lot of alligators on their tour and were having a good time, so I signed up.

Tien recommended the small, high-speed air boat. Listening to him as much as I normally do, I went ahead and booked the slow, covered, 40-person boat. Actually, it wasn’t because I don’t take his advice, but because the slow boat was $30 less. I also went for the option where the tour sent someone to the hotel to pick me up, so that cost a little more than Tien paid. When I got out to the swamp, it turned out there was a mixup with scheduling and I got upgraded to the high-speed air boat for free.

I don’t think that this is a bad tour to go on, but I didn’t enjoy it that much. It was neat to see the bayou, the swamp, the marshlands, whatever you want to call it, but the night before the morning tour was a horrible storm. Thunder and lightening so loud and bright that it woke us up at the hotel. What this did was drive away a lot of the birds and wildlife, raise the waterline and bring a lot of salt water into the area. Unfortunately, we only saw a few birds and the eyes of two alligators as they swam away from us. Plus, it was freezing. I brought a light jacket with me, but most of the time in my head I was just thinking “OMG! It’s so cold! Let’s go back to the dock already! There’s nothing out here!” After 15 minutes we kind of got the idea that there was nothing more to see.. but then we had 1 hour and 45 minutes left of the tour.

Our tour guide was a local guy.. maybe about 25 years old.. who had obviously grown up on the bayou and told a lot of stories of life there. He spent a lot of time telling us how redneck and coonass he was.

I would still recommend the tour because I personally know people that have been on it and had a great time. Just hope for good weather just before the tour and for sun during the tour.

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Books of 2004

December 31st, 2004 · 3 Comments

This year I set my hands on 50 books and finished 31 of them. Here’s a complete list.

  • Naked Pictures of Famous People by Jon Stewart
  • Great Expectations: Novelization by Deborah Chiel finished 12.16.04
  • Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck finished 12.05.04
  • And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie finished 11.30.04
  • Population: 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time by Michael Perry finished 11.27.04
  • The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald finished 11.27.04
  • Minipops : Famous People Drawn Really Small by Craig Robinson
  • A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith finished 11.05.04
  • Never a City So Real : A Walk in Chicago by Alex Kotlowitz finished 10.15.04
  • The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents America (The Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction by the writers of The Daily Show & Jon Stewart
  • The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathon Lethem finished 10.02.04
  • In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez finished 08.29.04
  • An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving and Other Stories by Louisa May Alcott finished 08.24.04
  • Old Yeller by Fred Gipson finished 08.08.04
  • The Risk Pool by Richard Russo finished 07.29.04
  • Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss finished 07.21.04
  • The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin finished 07.18.04
  • The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton finished 07.11.04
  • A Cook’s Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal by Anthony Bourdain finished 07.06.04
  • Middlesex : A Novel by Jeffrey Eugenides finished 06.18.04
  • High Fidelity by Nick Hornby finished 05.27.04
  • The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson finished 05.19.04
  • New Pocket Hawaiian Dictionary: With a Concise Grammar and Given Names in Hawaiian by Mary Kawena Pukui & Samuel H. Elbert
  • Discover Kaua’i: The Garden Isle by Stu Dawrs
  • A Pocket Guide to Hawaii’s Birds by H. Douglas Pratt finished 05.05.04
  • A Pocket Guide to Hawaii’s Underwater Paradise by John P. Hoover finished 05.05.04
  • Hawaii Blossoms by Dorothy Hargreaves & Hargreaves finished 05.03.04
  • Atonement : A Novel by Ian McEwan finished 04.24.04
  • Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right by Al Franken finished 04.20.04
  • The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan finished 04.08.04
  • Chocolat by Joanne Harris finished 03.15.04
  • Honky by Dalton Conley finished 02.03.04
  • 97 Orchard Street, New York : Stories of Immigrant Life by Linda Granfield (Author) and Arlene Alda (Photographer) finished 01.26.04
  • The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown finished 01.24.04
  • Greenwich Village: A Guide to America’s Legendary Left Bank by Judith Stonehil finished 01.19.04
  • The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom finished 01.11.04

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