It’s called, TweetMyBumper.com, and it’s a site that makes bumper stickers that feature your twitter username. Its tagline is, “Follow me in traffic. Follow me on twitter.”

Springwise loved us today. I love them back!

Whether you like ‘lini or ‘li (or both), today’s MAKE is the basic brock.

Set your oven to broil. Take out a sheet pan, and cut the florets off the top of the broccoli stalk directly onto the pan (I only cook fresh veg, so I’m not sure how frozen broccoli would turn out; let me know?). You could toss the veggies in a little olive oil, but I just sprayed them with olive oil flavored cooking spray (coat them well). Next, sprinkle liberally with salt (I only use Kosher) and freshly ground black pepper.

Slide the veggies under the broiler. After five minutes, move the veggies around a bit and cook for five minutes more. You want to see bits of brown. If you only see green, they’re not fully cooked. If you see black, they’ve cooked too long.

I bet you’ll love this preparation. Steaming takes forever, and boiling can make broccoli soggy. Roasting is quick and easy, and imparts a mild, nutty flavor to the vegetable. I noticed Beez popping the leftover florets in her mouth after dinner. It’s nice to see you again. It’s been too long.

If you’re still with me, it’s nice to see you again. For those who may have drifted away, I’m coming back for you.

bk

I have been to Herbsaint twice now. The first time, Jenna and I left and had to record our gushed comments on praise in a note on my phone, so profuse were they that I worried about forgetting them all. The second time, I had an unprecedented kind of love affair with my dessert. And yet, I have had a lot of trouble sitting down to write this review. I adore this place, and my conundrum is this: must I dissect this emotion and justify precisely why I feel the way I do? But I’ll humor you, because if there are any cynics out there reading this, the least I can do is convert them to believers.

Herbsaint is located in the Warehouse District of New Orleans, on St. Charles Avenue where it’s one way. The dining room is incredibly bright and airy, with huge windows that let sunlight just flood in and coat every crevice of the room. The room has a luxurious, clean, organic kind of openness that makes it a pleasure to just sit in: it somehow strikes that balance between serene oasis and chic hotspot. So when you take your seat at the table with the white linen tablecloth right by the window overlooking St. Charles, either your standards for a good meal have just shot out the roof or you are so aesthetically satisfied that you are content to just steep in this atmosphere…

…that is, until the people at the table next to you get their first plates. A whiff of delicate fried frog legs with fines herbes and the sight of an impressively dark-rouxed gumbo are sensually stunning and incite a carnal but innocent kind of jealousy. Luckily, when this happened to Jenna and me, it was after we had placed our orders – providentially enough, for the same two dishes. In between bites, the couple at the next table glanced over at us and said, “It sounds like you really know your food!” We laughed and befriended them. As it turns out, they teach at Cornell College in Iowa, and every January, they come live in New Orleans for a month so they can stock up on the food and culture that are apparently lacking back home. We gleefully talked food with our kindred spirits as we gazed lovingly at their food. Ours could not come soon enough.

Now, that is not to say that the service was anything short of superb. We owed our impatience solely to an acute kind of hunger that was sharpened at the sight of some truly beautiful food. At long last, I found myself peering down at my plate full of frog legs as Jenna, across the table, melted in a love-puddle around her gumbo. This being my first dining venture into amphibian territory, I rolled up my sleeves and dove in. Frog legs look a lot like anorexic chicken legs, I think. These ones were fried in an ethereal take on Southern fried chicken batter, topped with a generous handful of fresh herbs, and piled in a pool of spicy, hot oil. As I bit in, I was overjoyed by the texture of the batter… until I got a bone in my mouth. Turns out, I’m not a natural when it comes to eating frog, and my rabid hunger got the best of me. That kind of put a damper on my mood (I have always found unwanted bones and stray shells to be overly offputting), and I found the oil to be gratuitous and overbearing. I did, however, fall in LOVE with the meat, trappings aside: it’s true that it does taste like chicken, kind of, but it’s more chewy; I found its mouthfeel to be quite different, as chicken is generally kind of stringy when broken, whereas frog just falls off the bone in succulent bite-sized parcels.

I felt the same kind of visceral attraction to my second course that I did when my frog legs arrived, but I also felt a degree of surprising restraint: it was one of those almost-too-beautiful-to-touch deals. A small bundle of house-made spaghetti languished in a pool of creamy butter-yellow that was spangled with tiny bits of crushed red pepper and bits of guanciale. Resting jauntily atop this was a golden brown fried poached egg – can you imagine!? The waiter instructed me to break the egg perfectly down the middle, and when I did, it oozed generously in a yolky rush – essentially, a deconstructed carbonara. The spaghetti was tender but not gooey; the sauce was creamy and comforting but with a subtle punch that made it multi-faceted rather than single-noted; the egg, which had been lightly breaded, was delicate and crispy, a wonderful punctuation to each luscious pasta bite. Having never eaten guanciale before, I was a bit startled by it, as it is leaner, less greasy, and unabashedly richer – almost pungent – in flavor. Of course, it’s a delicacy, but it will take just a bit of getting used to, my being so accustomed to bacon.

Actually, I think I’ll cut this entry short here. I know reviews are traditionally written in one fell swoop, but the truth is that this is being published on a blog. You are most likely reading this from your RSS, leafing through a bounty of new posts, and I am aware of this: blog posts just aren’t meant to be prolific. I wish I could have cut to the chase with what I’ll write next. SO: I’m going to just start a fresh post for those of you with taxed attention spans. Sneaky…

La Petite Grocery has always been for me like one of those classic films that I never got around to seeing. It seemed as though people were constantly talking about it, and every time it came into conversation, I felt slightly ignorant for not having checked it out yet. I even developed a routine of looking at it wistfully as I drove past it everyday – my neck would crane and my eyes would linger even as my head told me to focus on the road. Case in point: it’s a place I’ve been dying to visit. So it should come as no surprise that last week, I made dinner reservations and spent all of Friday gazing at the menu. We arrived that night and were promptly seated in the dimly-lit main dining room.

You might be surprised at this point to hear that agony immediately ensued. Ironically, the reason for my stress was exactly what had previously caused me such exuberance: the menu. As I pored over my options, I was thrown into a panicked frenzy of indecision that was only exacerbated when the chef came out to bring us a special amuse-bouche and say hello. I had already decided on what I was going to order, but a taste of an entrée special – drum with horseradish-crabmeat crust and beet purée – convinced me otherwise. I had to have it. (More on that in a bit.)

For my first course, I finally decided on steak tartare with red wine mustard and a quail egg, which came with a halo of accompanying toasts. The egg was a yummy but ancillary touch that didn’t contribute much to my overall impression of the dish. The steak was made perfectly, a lovely pomegranate-colored heap of heaven, the inherent sweetness of the high-quality beef tempered by a smattering of fresh, crisp parsley. The red wine mustard was the most brilliant element of all, as the vinegar of the mustard made a perfect union with the deep-dark-deliciousness of the wine. The result was a dynamic microcosm of universal harmony.

Lexie got the baked blue crab with Brie. On a spectrum, it was about as far as it could be from my pretty, light (relatively), slightly clever steak. Baked like a casserole and topped with chives and bread crumbs that cooked to a golden-brown in the oven, it certainly wasn’t beautiful. Taste-wise, though, it was superb. Crab and Brie are never a more classic combination than in this dish; the abundant morsels of tender crab melded with the molten cheese to form a creamy, luscious mass that was rich but not hedonistically so. Clever? No, but extremely soothing and delicious in a pure enough form that did not require ingenuity.

I effused a solitary squeal of excitement as my entrée was delivered. Like a WWII-era wife, I was overjoyed to be wholly reunited with the wonder that had so fleetingly delighted me, then vanished no sooner than I had fallen in love.

The drum was crisply pan-fried on the outside, flaky and white on the inside, and didn’t taste even slightly fishy. The beet purée was velveteen in consistency and utterly perfect in color, transforming what could have been a monochrome plate of golden seafood into a festive work of art, replete with an afterthought of tiny cubed beets. Those coral-colored crescents are as yet unidentified, though they were fruity and citrusy but dense rather than pulpy. I adored them. Give me more! While I had no regrets about ordering more of that captivating amuse, I found there to be too much fish and not enough of the tangy pink elusive fruit, so even though it was visually pleasing, the flavor didn’t ultimately do justice to the quality of the ingredients. I wished there could have been just a hint of saltiness or spiciness to cut the overall sweetness, which could have been provided by the horseradish, which was lacking. A good dish, but it grew too overbearing for me to finish the plate.

Lexie got the hangar steak, which was close in its heart-rending tenderness to the brisket at Boucherie but French as opposed to Southern in taste. Just look at the meat! I could make a painting of this steak, so perfect in its pinkness and so unmarred by charring or uneven cooking. The caramelized onions were there more for flavor than for dignified presence, imparting the meat with more juice and sweetness than the sauce alone could have done. Many have revered the fries as the best in town, with potato skin edges and a generous dusting (oxymoron?) of mouth-wateringly coarse salt and none of the garlicky-parmesan stuff at Boucherie. Though the two share similar consistencies, if you are a true French fry savant as I am, they’re like apples and oranges. No, really. The truffle aioli that comes on the side is a joyous revelation that I’d buy in bulk.

I walked out of the restaurant feeling very satisfied with the four individual plates I had tasted but also slightly confused. After this nice meal, I still didn’t feel quite familiar with the menu. There had been a wide range of interest – from classic French bistro food like the baked crab and the hangar steak to the novelty of the drum – but not really a central vision. I realized that I craved a common thread among all the plates even more than I had craved my amuse-bouche; I wanted each dish to pivot around this main theme but to vary individually in flavor and technique. The steak tartare was clear testimony to the chef’s talent in creating intricate flavor combinations and the baked blue crab was so simply yummy that it could feasibly be prescribed as a substitute for antidepressants, but while the execution of some of these dishes was the high point of the meal, there was a lack of coherence that left a bit to be desired, even after I’d been sated. I do look forward to returning to taste the things I didn’t get to order; I just hope to see a more holistic and fine-tuned vision for the restaurant in the future.