Upon arrival at our 'cottage' we are greeted by Chef Poppy Tooker, shown our station and asked what color wine we'd llike, which turned into a bottomless glass. Poppy, is cute and bubbly, friendly as Hell and exhausted from just beating Chef Bobby Flay in a cooking competition for Gumbo. We are learning how to cook a crawfish dish that is becoming a lost art because of the time it takes to cook, but it is an old traditional cajun meal and we are excited to learn it and more exccited to eat it!! Once everyone arrives the class begins, there a few locals and a few out of towners like us, 12 in all.
(Over to Dean)
As you will see from the pics, this kitchen is gorgeous. We are sitting around a large island with a gas cooktop so you can see (and certainly smell) all of the action as it happens. As we mentioned when we checked in to the House, our chef, Poppy Tooker, was doing an interview and a demonstration with The Food Network. Well, as my wife mentioned, they sprung Iron Chef Bobby Flay who they brought to challenge Poppy to a Gumbo cookoff. She won and was quite excited (and exhausted) to beat an Iron Chef in a cooking competiton. Awesome. Apparently the show will air this summer so if you are a fan of The Food Network, watch for it and you will see the kitchen and house where we stayed while in New Orleans.
Well, as soon as Poppy began to cook, her tiredness slipped away and her passion for cooking shone through. Our first task was help her peel all the crawfish. As Selena mentions, cooking with crawfish is a lost art and the reason why is that it is a lot of work. To clean a crawfish, you have to touch it seven different times, with the seventh time being when you put it in your mouth. So we got to eat the crawfish meat after cleaning them and the remaining parts she made a very nice crawfish stock with it so no part of the crawfish was wasted. Our first official course was a Crawfish Cucumber salad on a bed of iceberg lettuce. Wow! This was all prepared right in front of us-an amazing taste. The pictures say it all. Every step of the way, she explained how she does things and throwing out secret tidbits like free candy at a parade. We have to put our heads together to try and remember all the secrets that night.
The main event for the night was her Crawfish Bisque. This is what she prepared for the couple of hours that we were in the kitchen. If you are interested, the recipe is at this link on the right side of the page: http://www.recipelink.com/mf/14/9399 The most interesting part of this dish is you use the cleaned heads of the crawfish and fill them with the stuffing that she made in front of us. We had to stuff the heads and then roll them around in flour. After this, we went for a tour of the House on the Bayou and then returned to the dining room to eat. If you looked at the recipe, you can see that this dish is A LOT of work. However, it is worth it. The bisque was amazing to say the least. It was fantastic to be immersed into the food culture in which New Orleans is famous.
After this, Selena and I returned to the French Quarter where we ventured through the warm night air and ventured through the streets such as Pirates Alley where we visited a cool Pirates Bar. We ran through the streets taking pictures of everything and anything. I think we must have taken 250 pictures in all that night. We will post some of them soon.
Again, thanks for reading!
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