Chillin' on a quiet rainy night

Walked by Saint Louis Cathedral in the cool light rain tonight, nicely free of tourist crowds.

Then picked up dinner on the way home.  Life is better with a Catfish Po'Boy now and then.

Good night :)

Taking random pictures from a Schwinn

NOLA neighborhood pictures taken this weekend before the sun went away.

Still quite a few Katrina scars left in Bywater.  Haven't tried going across the canal to the Lower Ninth.  Not sure what the point of that visit would be other than voyeurism.

Still need to do the mandatory cemetary visit, but I'd say the abandoned churches are pretty spooky too.

I wanted to go see that big ship in the distance but these levees are literally a fortress.  No river view here.

Going to have to start buying lard

Wish I took notes like this in oh, i dunno, engineering school....

Well the cooking classes were a bit touristy, but no surprise given that they're smack in the middle of the French Quarter.  And no, they weren't hands-on because I don't have seven friends with me willing to shell out $110 each for that experience - so just a demo cook thing.  But pretty well done.  Here's random things I learned in my two days of class:

• FILÉ - sauce thickener made from sassafrass, thus green and imparting some taste.  Told it's a Louisiana custom to have out so that each person can thicken his or her gumbo to taste.  But watch out for adding it to boiling fluid, it will congeal things into crapola immediately (tip).
• MAKING A ROUX - it's usually just called for in that way in recipes ("Step 1: Make a roux. Step 2:...") and it looks pretty tricky.  It's basically toasting flour in a suspension of fat to make a dark creamy base.  For meat gumbos the Sunday chef was really pushing lard as the fat, with hi-temp vegetable oils used for seafood gumbo.  She pretty much had me convinced that lard was the way to go, it's not that bad for you.  Food science is reconsidering all those old prejudices, etc.  Anyway - stir, stir, stir is the trick.  It's tedious.  Don't burn it, though.  It sneaks up on you.
• GUMBO - from the Sengalese word for Okra.  But for some reason almost never made with Okra.  Here in school, we learn the virtues of the "trinity" of onion, celery and bell pepper.  Tons of those.  What's interesting to me is the layering dynamics of making the gumbo.  Second layer stops the cooking on the first.  Third layer wilts the second.  Slow cooking in layers in enormous pots is the product of traditional Senegal/Gambia cooking methods combined with plantation economies.  It defines Creole cooking.
• JAMBALAYA - tons more trinity vegetables, some more Andouille sausage.  I like it, but making a gumbo seems more interesting to me.  I'm actually having trouble remebering the jambalaya.
• RED BEANS AND RICE -  did this on Monday, which is traditional because it had something to do with Monday being laundry day on the plantation and the massive pots and fires used for laundry would also be involved with slow-cooking tons of beans.  Not sure on that.  Learned I gotta soak my beans overnight from now on.  And a helpful tip on stirring slow-cook pots: poke the bottom of the pot and see if anything's sticking.  If it is, don't scrape it up because that just brings the burnt taste out.
• CORNBREAD - I like cornbread so much.  Why I don't make this stuff every week makes no sense.  It's easy and you can do all sorts of stuff with it.
• BREAD PUDDING - OK, but not in the way cornbread is OK.
• PECAN PIE - good
• PRALINES - good, but tricky to execute.  Also not food, candy.

I got a lot out of the history lessons of the class, how the changing colonial powers and immigrant groups brought the various signatures of Louisiana cooking.  I also got a lot of calories for my money.  Recommended.

Up for Sunday

I went to mass at St. Patrick's Church in the CBD, built in the 1830's according to Wikipedia.  In that New Orleans Spanish-colonial stucco.  It was odd to me.  Maybe I'm just very sheltered but I've never been to a Catholic mass before where there was no music at all except for a quick blast of an organ when the priest walks in and out.  It was odd to hear the deacon just read through all three parts of the liturgy and in between just read different stuff with no song.  And then at communion, a bell rings and the whole church just stands up in silence (confusing!) and lines up to kneel in groups of 20 or so up at the alter and get served.  Is this the old church the way my parents' generation knew it before the 60's reforms?  Gosh I might as well have gone all-out and waited for the Latin mass that followed this one.

Anyway, pretty church though. Inside and out.

Two-wheeled

Second order of business Saturday is to find the bicycle shop.  It requires a walk from the warehouse disctrict clear across the French Quarter, which after block-after-block of tourist hell suddenly starts getting reasonable on the east end and then gives way to the Marigny disctrict at Frenchmen St, kind of a not-quite-but-pretty-close anti-Bourbon St.  Nice place for a bike shop.

The shop features a random dog, substantially more pleasant to converse with than the employees.  But hey, its Nawlins.  Regrettably, the spiffy Surly track bike pictured here would not be my rental.  No, that honor would be bestowed upon this mighty steed:

Looks like it's Andy for the Schwinn!  The front shock has essentially no damping and the frame geometry is right off the rack at WalMart, so sure go ahead and say what you will.  But know this - that big dumpy saddle is quite comfortable on NOLA city streets, which are horrible.  After a day of riding, that racy Surly was looking a little less comfy.  But easy seat aside, the thing resonates every little bump in the asphalt through my joints like any lousy cheap-o aluminum frame bike.

Bike rental is a must-do for me now in any city.  I did a couple days in Seattle last summer and it was awesome.  Same here.  Leave the bike shop and start rolling further east through the Marigny and Bywater - neighborhoods I never would have walked to (and this city does not appear to have any buses at all) - and it's so awesome.  What a cool place.  Then ride back through the Quarter and the narrow, traffic-choked one-way streets become like an urban-biking proving grounds.  Splitting the hairs between the stopped cars and the parked cars (puhleeze don't pop open, door up there!), riding a foot off of moving cars, passing horsey carriages, disobeying almost all traffic regulation for no reason.  All from the bicycle-hooligan bag of tricks I picked up in my riding days in Madison/Chicago.  So beyond this basic enjoyment of riding, the big pro is I can get to all the neighborhoods now, double back when I don't find what I'm looking for, loop through all the endless photogenic sidestreets, etc.  But to recommend it to anyone I'd have to say you need to be comfortable riding with traffic.

At any rate, here's Bourbon Street early going on a Saturday night. 

About all I needed to see.  It's like a condensed version of the worst of Las Vegas.  The douchebaggery is so rampant that I figure it could only exist in the world as a parody of itself.  Looking at it that way, I'm cool with it.  Like Vegas, everyone should experience it once and assume that you'd be having so much more fun if you were the guy urinating against that pickup truck.  I'll head back to Frenchmen and the Spotted Cat, which has a pretty wailing dixieland jazz group going with no cover.  Abita time.  And of course a blurry, oops-I-forgot-it-detected-night-conditions-and-set-the-exposure-crazy-long-and-I-moved-the-camera-before-it-was-done-but-oh-well-it-might-be-a-cool-picture-anyway-like-I-meant-to-do-it.

Long day.

In no way having a midlife crisis, no sir not me

First order of business for my visit to New Orleans is to go here, so that I can demo-ride one of these:

Fortunately, I had just happened to pack along these...

The 40-min ride made very happy, even if it was in the middle of a city with really bad streets.  It was just fun.  So I bought the thing.  It should be ready to roll on Tuesday.  Now how am I going to get it home?

In New Orleans

Saturday goes like this...up at 4 AM, into the shuttle van, out of the shuttle van, into the airport, into the airplane, up in the air, down on the ground, into the big airport mobbed with spring breakers headed to Punta Cana, hide but not sleep, into another airplane, up in the air, down on the ground, get my bag, step outside...and it is warm.

I am sick, much to the delight of the people sitting aside me on the flights I'm sure, but I'm remembering to cough into my arm so it's OK right.  Perfect clear sunny skies here and basically T-shirt weather until 5:00 or so.

My first task is to navigate the "CBD" neighborhoods on the west end of the French Quarter, as I have some important business to tend to today.  There is a convention in town, the Orthopedic Surgeons are here in force.  There is also an Italian parade in the Quarter tonight.  Oh boy.

Out

Today was a tough day. After a nice lunch and many nice (and just as many difficult) goodbyes, I was walked out of the GM Proving Grounds.

There's a lot of feelings leaving a job that has taken over so much of your life and your identity. There are a lot of good people back there who were really sorry to see me leave, it showed in their words today. How did I get to the point that I absolutely had to get myself out of that environment? At what point do you run out of luck always moving away from good people?

Too much. It was a lonely last ride home from Milford.

Tomorrow, travel.