The Gravy: In the Kitchen with Raphael Bas.

“In France, you go to the bakery. The king cake is right there, under your nose. It’s cooked, ready to go, some of them still warm. Looks beautiful. It’s easy to just grab it from there and consume it. Eat it! Bakeries are there for that. Patisseries.

But you see, February, it’s the month of crêpes in France. The sixth of February is the great crêpe day. It’s huge. It’s a national thing. Everyone makes crêpes. King cake, in France, is more of a January thing. We celebrate the kings in January, for the Epiphany, after New Year, and then it’s over. But here, the king cake is related to Mardi Gras, from the Epiphany to Mardi Gras, and in France I think we lost the tradition of this—at the end of January, that’s it, it’s done. After that we don’t have king cake. But in Nice, in the south of France, we celebrate Mardi Gras, with parades and floats and everything. It’s very traditional and they have their own king cake and it looks more like the New Orleans king cake, like a ring, but instead of all the sugar, they put fruit on it. That’s their king cake.

Historically somewhere, something got shifted. New Orleans kept traditions that we lost in France, and meanings changed. That’s true for food, and other things too, like Joan of Arc. People use symbols to further their own cause. Like Petin, during the German invasion, used Joan of Arc in order to get the people to accept the invasion. But De Gaulle, with the liberation, he took her, her image and icon, and used it. Today, Joan of Arc is mainly used by the right-wing. The fleur-de-lis is another one. In New Orleans, it’s a symbol you see everywhere and there is no shame; in France, people are very uncomfortable when they see a fleur-de-lis. If you tattoo a fleur-de-lis on your arm in France, for the general public, it will have a meaning like royalty, sovereignty, blue blood; like you belong to the bourgeoisie, to the upper crust. Here, it’s just a symbol of New Orleans and Louisiana.

When we eat king cake in France, we put a small porcelain figure, a favor, in it too. Everyone sits at the table, the whole family, and the youngest has to go under the table while the adults cut the cake. Whoever finds the favor becomes king or queen and has to choose a king or queen from around the table. That’s why there are always two paper crowns on the king cakes in France. The favor in the king cake used to be a fava bean, like they use for St. Joseph’s day here, but they can be all kinds of shapes now, often biblical, like the Virgin Mary, or a lamb, or a character from The Simpsons. Sometimes they’re really nice; people collect them. They can be $50 or $60 each. Hand-made, hand-painted.

I bake tarts. My grandmother taught me. Tarts, and clafoutis with cherries, because we used to have a cherry tree. And crêpes, I love crêpes. And salade de carottes, grated carrots. I love that.

The mistake we made with this king cake is we forgot the chimneys, the holes. So the almond cream burst out the sides. It could rise up to a point and then it burst. Also, it’s a little thin. This recipe is not exactly what it’s supposed to taste like, but it’s close.

This is off the record, but I never liked the New Orleans king cake. It’s too sweet for me.”

French King Cake (Galette des Rois)

1/2 cup sugar
3/4 cup almond meal (Whole Foods)
1 tablespoon corn starch
1 pinch sea salt
9 tablespoons unsalted butter, soft
1 drop almond extract
1 tablespoon Cointreau
2 large eggs
1 lb all-butter puff pastry, thawed
1 egg yolk
1 tablespoon water
1 porcelain trinket or dried bean
1 tablespoon confectioner’s sugar
1 tablespoon hot water

Prepare the almond cream filling: In a bowl, combine sugar, almond meal, corn starch and salt. Stir until smooth. Mix with butter. Add extract and Cointreau, then eggs, one at a time, mixing well. Cover and chill for at least 1 hour.

Roll out puff pastry and cut two 12-inch rounds. Place one round on parchment paper and cover with almond cream, staying 1 inch from the edge all around. Combine egg yolk with water in a cup and brush the outer rim of the dough, avoiding the actual edge (this will prevent the dough from rising). Bury the trinket in the almond cream. Place the second round of dough on top, pressing down all around the sides to seal. Make a decorative pattern by scoring (but not piercing) the galette. Brush the top with egg wash.

Pierce 5 holes in the top, one in the center and four around the sides. Refrigerate (or freeze) for at least 1 hour. Bake on top of a cookie sheet at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. In the final minutes of baking, brush with a mixture of confectioner’s sugar and hot water for a shiny finish.

The Gravy: In the Kitchen with June Yamagishi. Photo by Elsa Hahne.

“In Japan, we eat the golden-fried pork chop, tonkatsu. I don’t make that. I use a soy sauce base that is fruity and sweet, with apple, ginger and honey. This is the secret: Sake! Makes it sweet; makes meat tender.

When I’m in a restaurant, I always sit at the bar to see the cook and learn. Camellia Grill, they cook inside the counter and I like to sit down and stare.

When you grind your ginger, don’t peel it! With the skin. More flavor. John Gros can cook too! His gumbo is excellent, and we always gather, once every year, at John’s house, and bring a dish. I bring golden curry, curry with rice. Not Indian curry! My curry is Japanese style. More close to stew, with chicken, beef or pork, whatever you like. I don’t put much mushroom. I put onion, carrot and potato. Onion is most important. Cooking the onion first, about 20 minutes, make it caramel brown, kind of make it shrink. I use this sauce mix, Japanese roux, “Golden Curry”, and I put carrot chunks, potato chunks, put the water and boil for one hour. Before that, put seasoning stuff. Salt and pepper, and I use Tony Chachere’s a lot. When I do beef, I fry the beef in butter first. When I add the water, I add the beef back in.

My secret ingredients are this fruit sauce [Bull-Dog Vegetable & Fruit Sauce, Semi-Sweet] and this Japanese version of Worcestershire sauce, with tamarind. You can put it on steak, anything. Give it secret flavor.

Let me tell you my story. I was moving down here in 1995. Around that time, not many Japanese people lived here in New Orleans. I couldn’t find Japanese groceries, this kind of sauce stuff. And I wanted to eat it. I wanted this kind of flavor. I make it! Worcestershire sauce and ketchup, mixed up. That’s close.

When I go back to my home town, there’s a butcher close to my house. I always go there and get the fried beef croquettes. I love it! That’s my favorite. Ground beef with mashed potato, carrot, onion—same as for curry, but chopped up. Put together and put breading, panko, and deep-fry. I’m from a town close to Osaka, and Osaka is the food capital in Japan, like New Orleans. Anything is great, and cheap! I’ve been eating beef croquettes since I was two years old.

I learned to cook from my grand-mère. First time I get here and eat the red beans and rice, it reminds me of my grand-mère’s cooking. She always used the red beans. That’s why I moved down here. Because of my grand-mère’s red beans.

I started cooking when I moved to New Orleans. Makes me feel like cook. I cooked when I lived in Japan, but mostly I cooked New Orleans stuff; gumbo and jambalaya. When I moved down here, I really started cooking for myself: ‘Yeah, let’s cook this!’ But I don’t need to cook gumbo and jambalaya here. I cook in the Japanese style.

My home town Ise is by the sea with a lot of great seafood and special beef. Best beef in Japan, better than Kobe beef. Unbelievable; melt in your mouth. Ise shrimp, Ise ebi, is very good. I always hung out by the sea and the river as a kid. That’s familiar to me.

I like deep-fried shrimp. Shrimp cutlets, like Tiger shrimp. Peel it, open it and stretch out, like tempura, golden-fried with panko. Then I put this sauce, the fruit sauce, with mayo, mixed together.

I like complicated stuff. Complex stuff is crab cream croquettes with the bechamel sauce, your white sauce. That’s very hard to make. I try and try and try—still can’t make it. They’re too soft, they won’t make a chunk. You chill it in the refrigerator to make it more firm, then you cut it and deep-fry in panko. Outside flaky, inside creamy. That’s a problem. Just bechamel sauce and crab meat. Very hard! When I put it in the oil to fry, it breaks. Too soft! I have to guess.

Jason [Mingledorff] wrote a song and we were in Colorado before we cut the second album with Papa Grows Funk. We stayed in a condo, everybody. ‘Yeah, let’s cook something.’ ‘Hey, June, can you cook the yakiniku?’ Like Korean barbecue. ‘I’ll do that. No problem. Bring me to some store.’ But I couldn’t get yakiniku sauce, so I had to make a temporary sauce with soy sauce and sake and sugar. And then Jason said, ‘Hey guys, what do you think about this song’s title?’ I said, ‘What about the yakiniku?’ And that was it. And then I put the ingredients in the liner notes.”

Japanese Pork Chops

1 tablespoon grated fresh ginger
1 small apple, grated
2 tablespoons honey
2 tablespoons mirin
4 tablespoons sake
6 tablespoons soy sauce
2 center-cut pork chops
salt, pepper and Tony Chachere’s
1/2 cup flour
2 tablespoons olive oil

In a bowl, stir together ginger, apple, honey, mirin, sake and soy sauce. Set aside. Season pork chops with salt, pepper and Tony Chachere’s on both sides and press into flour in a wide bowl. Fry pork chops on both sides in olive oil over medium heat for about 3 minutes per side, covering pan with a lid after the first minute. Pour sauce over meat and continue to cook for 2 minutes, turning the meat in the sauce.

The Gravy: In the Kitchen with Mystikal. Photo by Elsa Hahne.

“I do most of the morning cooking. I’m the breakfast chef. I grew up in New Orleans, Uptown, in the 12th ward, a block off of Louisiana and a block off of Tchoupitoulas. My mom cooked everything. Gumbo, all the traditional New Orleans cuisine; the red beans, the crawfish etouffee. She got down, from the macaroni and cheese to the pork chop. As a matter of fact, when I came home, that was the first meal I wanted—stuffed bell peppers, macaroni, pork chop and peas. When I came home from prison! That was my come-home meal right there. When I was gone, that was one of the things I was missing the most, my momma’s food. And my business partner, Guillotine, his mom cooks too. She cooks all the wild game, coon and rabbit and deer. She can cook one of your shoes and make it tender. For real.

Eating in prison was horrible. We used to eat in our locker; we called it eating in our box. You can go to the kitchen and get beans—again!—beans, beans, beans, and that deterred me from liking red beans. Red beans used to be one of my favorite dishes, but after eating red beans every day, I don’t want to see a red bean again.

I eat horrible. Fast food, but my favorite dish is seafood. I like crab legs, and shrimp. Crawfish, I tear them out the frame. If you eat crawfish with me, you’d better be a professional because you won’t eat many. Whoever eats the fastest eats the most. And if you’re being slow, peeling one shell at a time, I got five-eight-twenty on you right quick. Keep up!

We just did a crawfish boil for Snoop [Dogg]. Oh man, we did some crawfish. He’s got like a 33-man production team that he travels with, so we hooked him up. We did a few hundred pounds of crawfish, and they tore it up. Loved it. We seasoned it to perfection.

I’m working on my mixtape, Fish Grease. I’m calling it Fish Grease because it’s the prelude to my album, and before you put French fries in the grease, you’ve got to heat it up. I’ve got to heat the streets up, and the mixtape will do that for me. The fish is the protein for your body, and that’s the music. Analogy—exactly.

We’re expecting another baby this December and that’s another plate we’ve got to fill up. She’s a great mom. I cook mostly for her. She wants her eggs fried hard and her meats cooked well, and we’re straight up with that. She went through a water and lemon phase, so I got good at squeezing lemons. We had to get a lemon budget. I had to get a bottomless sack of lemons, every week.

I picked up a lot of cooking tips in prison too. Different little spices and things you can do to kick things up. Like honey, I never would have put no damn honey in my tuna fish. Ever! But man, that shit gives it a twist.

You make a little side dish, we call it a hookup. When you’re in prison and you want to eat, and you don’t want to go in the kitchen. You just say, “You want a hookup?,” “Yeah, let’s hook something up.” You get your refried beans, and every meal is going to have a ramen soup at the bottom of it. Whether you make a penitentiary lasagna or burritos or whatever it is you’re making, some kind of tuna hookup, barbecue beef hookup, sloppy joe kind of thing. All kinds of concoctions. Six years, I became one of the best hookup persons in there. Was pretty much a chef in there for my comrades.

Some of our meals were expensive, $20-$30. That’s a lot of food in prison. As long as you have some refried beans, some beef sticks, you’re ready. Get yourself a few soups, and the macaroni and cheese is going down. We have a microwave and a microwave is all we need. That’s our heat source and we run with it. You’ve got to be like Robin Caruso [sic]—you’ve got to improvise! I became a coffee drinker in prison. The way I am now with it, prison did that. I was more of a sipper [before], but after that, shit. Like they say, when you’re in Rome, do like the Romans. I picked that up, and I never smoked no damn tobacco either, and now I’m chronic. I was a weed smoker. Hickory, chicory, dock.

You’ve got to come in the kitchen with the right attitude. Don’t come in here with your mouth all crooked. That food gonna get awful.

Now I’m going to make the pancakes. I add a little extract, vanilla or almond, whatever you like. Maybe a teaspoon—just an eyeful. One egg, and flour depends on how many you’re serving for. Milk to consistency, not too loosey goosey. Salt? Hell no! Get out of my kitchen. Scram! No, we’re going sweet. Who wants salty pancakes? Just the thought.

[Pouring coffee into an Obama cup] Bam! Three or four [tablespoons of sugar]. We’re going to sweeten his policy up. Come on, chicory. Now, that’s a cup of coffee!

Funny story, when I first came home, after the charge I had, I had to send out sex offender notifications, and people was inviting me to their house, ‘Welcome to the neighborhood!’ That shit supposed to be like a warning, like, this is a bad man in your neighborhood, time to be leery of him. Shit, I got some invites, people coming to the door.

Any meats, especially chicken, you have to clean it. You soak that shit. We soak our chicken in the sink. When I grew up, I used to wonder why my mama had food just sitting soaking in the sink. ‘You’ve got to wash that food, boy.’ Right.”

Magical Mystikal Breakfast

“All you have to do is ask. Closed mouths don’t get fed.”

Cook green onion sausage on a George Foreman grill until done.

Grill chicken breast strips on there too, squeezing some yellow mustard over it once the surface is cooked, then keep grilling until cooked through.

Prepare grits for 4 people according to directions on package, adding 1 stick of butter and four slices of yellow American cheese 5 minutes before serving—cover, let melt, stir.

Get yourself a can of Grands Flaky Layers biscuit dough from Wal-Mart, or make biscuits from scratch.

Prepare peppered bacon (bacon generously sprinkled with black pepper) in the oven, finishing it off for 1 minute (covered with a paper towel) in the microwave.

Make scrambled eggs by mixing four eggs and a splash of milk (and plenty of salt and black pepper) in a bowl; cook in a hot, greased pan—Mystikal calls these “military eggs” because they’re cooked hard, and “that’s what they used to look like when I was in the army.”

Pancakes

1 cup flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 egg
1 cup buttermilk (or milk—then use less)
1 teaspoon extract (vanilla or almond)
1/2 stick butter, for frying

Stir flour and baking powder together. Mix egg, buttermilk and extract in a separate bowl. Quickly stir everything together, being careful not to over-mix or let the batter sit too long. Melt about a tablespoon of butter in a frying pan for each pancake. Make pancakes large.

The Gravy: In the Kitchen with 10th Ward Buck. Photo by Elsa Hahne.

“I like hot. I like to use Crystal because I’ve experienced it and it’s not too salty. Some hot sauces have their own taste.

Men love spice. My Mardi Gras [sauce] is not too hot, where my women are starting to take onto it also.

We call it the Mardi Gras sauce because it has a little bit of everything. On the float, they throw the beads but they also throw teddy bears. You’re not going to get just one thing. You want the spice, you want the sweet, you want it all. If you’re human and you’re getting beads around your neck, you’re going to want the cayenne and the honey mustard and all that.

Since this is the best sauce we have, I wanted to call it something that’s real familiar with people. I experimented in the restaurant I had before this, Lucky Buck’s on the Westbank, that a friend and I opened after Katrina. That’s how I knew this would be a hit. We were selling sandwiches and red beans and all the stuff I know how to cook at home, but when I got into chicken, that became our best seller. Then we were like, ‘We’ll open a wing shop.’ It’s cheap, and your overhead is low.

Zatarain’s taught me to put the water on, do this, do that. On the package, it tells you step by step. And I was like, ‘Hold on, this is real simple. Let me start making my own. And when I eat stuff, I know what’s in it. If I don’t know what’s in it, I know what the taste is. If I found something I liked, I’d mock it and try to do the same thing. I don’t have to use somebody else’s. I can do my own.

I was going to Delgado, I went to cooking school because I wanted to enhance what I was doing. I could have trained up to be a chef, but I had my own restaurant [already] and I didn’t have time. So I switched my major to business management. Everybody in that program wanted to run their own restaurant and I already had my own.

I just found out how good a cook my mama is. The cook of the family was my auntie, until she passed away. She would do the gumbo, that’s the number-one- selling food in my family. Gumbo! So we’d be by my auntie’s all the time. Then, when she passed away, my mom took that role.

My grandmother is from Talladega, Alabama, and we’re from New Orleans. When we went there and saw her doing this and that to the animals, we were like ‘Ew, that’s gross, we don’t go after our own animals!’ I stopped eating crawfish for a while because I took the kids crawfishing and we had to take a piece of the crawfish tail and throw it back in, while it was still alive. For the family reunion, when they put the crabs in the pot, I walk off. If it’s a rat, you kill it, because that’s what we’re taught to do. Roach—kill it. But not the pig, and all the little animals we saw on Sesame Street.

One time, we went and caught this fish and brought it home and I added some seasoning and I fried it and my cousins, they was licking their fingers. ‘Brah, who put this together?’ I said, ‘Me, man.’ ‘Where you get this from?’ ‘We caught it.’ [fakes choking] That’s my family. They didn’t like the fact that I’d caught it. I waited until they finished eating, and they was licking their fingers, that’s how I knew I had something, because fish is real simple and basic. You can’t put too much on fish. When I put that fish together, I knew I had something. So I started doing red beans and fish, macaroni and fish, everything and fish, until I got this chicken idea. And chicken goes with everything. Some of my sauces, we try putting them with the pork chop, and it don’t work. I’ve got to get to that theory. But chicken, you can put it in anything.

I fry my chicken wings for nine minutes. What we do is, we drop 20 [frozen wings] and pre-fry them for about seven minutes, so you have some already ready. And when the customers come, you drop them two additional minutes. They shouldn’t be here more than four minutes waiting for their food.

Growing up in New Orleans, sometimes you don’t have a lot of food in the house, so you experiment with what you have. You take the salt and add it to the pepper; that was the first that everybody did. Then I noticed cayenne, and we put cayenne in everything. I started experimenting with different ingredients. Some were nasty, some were good, some were like winners, so we stood with the winners. When I opened my wing shop, I put about 40 flavors out and 30 of them won. We thought we were going to have between 10 and 15, but it was hard to knock certain ones off.

I learned this. If I’m putting pepper in the lemon pepper, then I’m killing the lemon pepper. I’m killing the lemon in the lemon pepper. So you don’t want to mix things that are the same. If I’m mixing fruit punch, I don’t put orange with orange, you want to add your apple, your banana, all that.”

10th Ward Buck’s Mardi Gras Sauce for Wings

2 cups honey mustard salad dressing
4 tablespoons Crystal hot sauce
2 tablespoons Weber Kick’n Chicken seasoning
1 tablespoon cayenne pepper

Mix everything together. Serve.

Note: The salad dressing should be mayo-y and quite sweet in order for the recipe to come out like 10th Ward Buck’s. I used Kraft, and ended up replacing 4 ounces of the dressing with 2 ounces honey and 2 ounces mayo in order to get my sauce to taste more like his.

Photo by Elsa Hahne.

“Painters mix stuff together, and you’ll find a lot of painters who are cooks because it’s an extension of this, instead of colors you’re mixing flavors. I got myself Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, but French cooking is like a mist before the eyes while Italian cooking is like a pat on the back. It’s a bit more rational. French cooking, a lot of it comes from the Roman period. I’ve cooked Roman recipes. Ham en croute with figs—not quite up to speed in the modern sense, but good.

The Romans did what the French did later on. They specialized in taking a fish and making it taste like chicken, or taking a chicken and making it taste like fish. In other words, they were more interested in the trickery of cooking. You take the food and change it into something that it originally isn’t. Quite frankly, I think the barbarian invasion of the Italian peninsula changed that, because the Germans were a little more practical. But the Romans liked trick food. Oysters that taste like ice cream—now, I’m kidding, but that’s what they’d do. And this survives in some way in French cooking, especially desserts. Taking coffee and flaming it, for instance. If you go to Antoine’s and get café brulot, that’s an example of that kind of drama and theatricality of cooking that the Romans really pushed.

I lost my Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking because I had managed to crush a mouse in it. I don’t know how that happened, but I opened it up one day and there was this flattened carcass of a mouse inside.

There’s a local thing here, barbecued shrimp, and this is not that dish. This is a lot simpler. It has garlic, red hot pepper, thyme and shrimp in it. That’s all there is. The Creole method is to cook everything to death and to combine all sorts of stuff together, my friend used to call it Creole goop. There’s a fusion of flavors. Italian cooking isn’t like that. It depends upon the least amount of effort and the least amount of ingredients. At a certain age, you just can’t keep going with all those creams and butters. You also have to cook something that doesn’t take all day to do.

This I got from a recipe book that I have in here. My take on it is very simple. You always hear, ‘serve with good, crusty bread.’ But what I do is I make a toast out of this [Pepperidge Farm] whole grain whole wheat bread. I find this has a sweetness that blends in with the shrimp taste, so that’s my contribution to this dish. We’ll put this on the bottom of the bowl and serve the shrimp on top because there’s an enormous amount of juice that’s created by the sautéing. The heads exude their goop, and it creates a sauce, and after you eat the shrimp you eat the bread. People here do a lot of boiling, but all that flavor goes out into the water and you never get it.

I buy my garlic at the supermarket already peeled. And there’s a thing that happens—have you ever had sauternes [wine]? Sauternes is made from grapes that are slightly turned; they call it the noble rot, and my garlic is slightly turned too, and there’s a depth of flavor because of that. It’s kind of like anchovy. But it gets cooked, and nobody gets the runs—so far.

I’ve had enough local cooking. My dad’s 100 in June and he doesn’t like anything anymore. He only likes his mother’s cooking. My grandmother made her own noodles, and great roasts and gravies. Her gravies were like a perfume. They were so good you could inhale them. My dad says the old-time cooking is gone; he says it’s all changed and I can see why, because the kids who go to culinary school learn to prepare food academically. It’s not neighborhood cooking anymore.

A friend of mine came over for dinner and she doesn’t like to eat with her fingers. She ate my shrimp with a knife and fork. I’m not recommending this, but it’s an interesting experience. So that’s how we do it now. We tell people, ‘Go ahead and use your fingers, but we’re going to use a knife and fork.’ [laughs]

I serve this to everybody that comes here. There’s no one who’s escaped it. Even my Anglo-Saxon friend who doesn’t like to eat with her fingers.

You don’t want to eat shrimp uncooked. I have eaten uncooked shrimp. There was a sushi bar over here and I said, ‘I want to try something I’ve never had.’ Shrimp, served raw. It was like eating snot. Jesus! It was the worst thing I’d ever put in my mouth. Amazing what a little heat will do.”

George Schmidt’s BBQ Shrimp

3/4 cup olive oil
1 head garlic, minced
1 teaspoon thyme
1 teaspoon red pepper flakes
2 pounds fresh shrimp, heads on
1 teaspoon coarse sea salt

Heat oil in a large skillet. Sauté garlic, thyme and red pepper flakes for a minute. Add shrimp. Sauté over medium to high heat for two to three minutes; cover and continue to cook for an additional two to three minutes. Sprinkle with salt. Serve hot, with juice, over whole grain toast.

Rusty Lazer Hits the Spot at Cake Cafe & Bakery. Photo by Elsa Hahne.

Cake Café & Bakery
2440 Chartres St.
(504) 943-0010

How often are you here?

I’ve been coming steadily for the last four months and I get shrimp and grits every time. Every single time. I’ve tried everything, but I eat shrimp and grits.

Do you know some of the people who work behind the counter?

The owner likes me because I’m always willing to sit with whatever people I have to to get a table and I always make friends with strangers.

When do you usually roll in?

Crawl in, you mean. Noon, or whatever. Coming here is my treat to myself after DJing until 5:30 in the morning.

What’s different today?

I’ve never seen this many pastries ever. I didn’t even know they have some of this stuff. The cases are usually empty when I get here.

Trixie Minx. Photo by Elsa Hahne.

“I have a problem with wine. Once I find a wine I love, well, eventually it goes away. They only make so many cases in a year, so it’s a constant hunt for that next beautiful bottle.

I started making cocktails in New Orleans because that’s what everyone wants. Everybody drinks. I got into bartending because a friend of mine managed a bar in the Quarter. They were hosting the Playboy Mardi Gras party and had to have two female bartenders—it’s in the contract—and they have to look a certain way. One of the bartenders got pregnant, so I had this crash course a week before Mardi Gras and learned how to make drinks. One of the playmates asked for drinks in baby talk, ‘I’d like a grey goosey…’ and that was bizarre—the best part of the party— communicating with that one, seeing her in action. She was a magical creature. I didn’t exactly learn the art of making cocktails, but I learned the speed. I can swing a cocktail in under a minute.

Essentially, I don’t like fruit. I like melon and bananas, but most fruits are too sweet. But if you cut them with alcohol, they’re amazing! A little bit of fruit juice and a little bit of alcohol is perfect. They should work on infused fruit instead of infused vodkas.

We didn’t drink much in my family. It was neighborhood block parties with margaritas and daiquiris, totally suburban fruity cocktails. I remember when I was five, maybe six, they gave me a virgin piña colada, and instead of asking the bartender for another one, I went around and took sips off of all the adult drinks. I got very cranky.

As a little girl, I had a very clear path in my head. Go to school, graduate and become a ballerina. That’s all I wanted to do. But then I broke my foot and I had an eating disorder, so it was a big mess. I have a cousin who’s orthodox [Jewish]. Before his wedding, he asked me not to talk about my lifestyle. Keep in mind, this was before burlesque; I was just a cocktail waitress back then. [laughs] It was the alcohol he didn’t want me to talk about, and it’s funny, because now I really can’t talk about it.

Alcohol has allowed me to pursue higher education. I was able to use all my cocktailing money and my bartending money to go to school and graduate. I hate to disappoint, but I’m sort of straightedge.

With as much cocktails as I make, my normal cocktail is actually whiskey and diet coke, or whiskey and water, sometimes whiskey and ginger ale. And if I’m feeling crazy—like, wild—I’ll get a dirty martini. Just vodka. No vermouth. Just salty vodka. The funny part is that every time I perform with Comic Relief, all we drink is Jack Daniels. The New Orleans Bingo! Show is all Jameson and with Fleur de Tease, we drink Jim Beam. Backstage, they’ll give you a certain amount of drinks for free or they’ll offer to buy you a bottle. If you get one bottle it has to be the group choice, and from performing with these people for so long, I’ve acquired a taste.

My Disco Lemonade recipe comes from bartending on Bourbon Street because there’s always somebody who comes to you and goes, ‘I don’t know what I want. I’m not sure what I like…’ and you have 20 people behind them who know exactly what they want, so you can’t discuss the finer hints and notes and flavors. I discovered that if a drink is blue, anybody likes it. It doesn’t matter what it tastes like; they just like the fact that they have a blue drink. And if you drink a lot, your tongue turns blue—and the more you drink, that becomes interesting in and of itself.

Then there’s the Trixie-Tini, which I didn’t come up with myself, it was made for me by Jamie Burton at the Royal Sonesta. Jamie actually created two drinks for me, both martinis. The Trixie-Tini is sweet and embodies everything feminine, and the Little Minx is spicy with hints of cinnamon.

Champagne is the drink of strippers. When I got married, I didn’t register. We asked for gift cards to Home Depot and Lowe’s—and don’t ever do that. Register! If you don’t register, people get what they think you need and apparently everyone thinks that I need champagne flutes. I have eight different sets. I can go forever. If you ever need a champagne flute, please come to my house. Please! We should start throwing them into the walls at this point.”

Trixie-Tini

Serve with a fresh strawberry.

1 1⁄4 parts Stoli Vanil
1⁄2 part lemon juice
2 strawberries, pureed
simple syrup to taste
top with champagne

Trixie’s Blue Disco Lemonade

Serve with a lemon wedge.

2 parts citrus vodka
1 part blue curacao
top with equal parts lemonade (or sour mix) and soda water (or lemon/lime soda)

The Gravy with Sean Yseult. Photo by Elsa Hahne.

“This is my dad’s skillet, and the only thing he left me in his will. He was an English professor, so
he didn’t have a lot to leave any of us. I guess he felt that I’d been self-sufficient in life.

When I toured with White Zombie I was a vegetarian. I became a vegetarian in high school because I got a scholarship for ballet and I lived on campus and I didn’t trust the food. I wasn’t strict, I’d eat a can of tuna sometimes, but I didn’t have money to eat in restaurants. Then I go to New York. We lived on the Lower East Side, and there were so many places you could eat for 75 cents. You’d get a falafel, a slice of pizza, or a cream cheese bagel, lots of coffee, that kind of vegetarian. Just street food.

When I moved here 14 years ago, I started making jambalaya right away. I was obsessed with it, and I’ve always made it with brown rice. Nobody’s complained. Locals, believe me, they’re like, ‘No way that’s brown rice!’

[To quail:] That looks crowded enough. They’re having a little party in there. Next time I’m going to lay them with all their feet the same way so it’ll be like Busby Berkeley; a formation dance.

I always read the food section of The Times-Picayune, read the recipes and clip a few and try things out. I do the shopping and when I go to the store, every single thing I buy is for something, and then I see Chris [Lee, from Supagroup] pulling out the asparagus: ‘No, no, put that back! I need that!’ So I get possessive over just about anything. He gets possessive about meat.

We make a serious breakfast. I roast asparagus and then I crack an egg on top and grate some cheese on top of that, put it back in the oven and let the egg bake. I do a lot of eggs and vegetables in the morning and if Chris is in charge there’ll usually be some bacon or sausage also.

I make a beef orange stew, but you have to make it three days in advance. You keep taking it out and heating it up and adding stuff and refrigerating it overnight. It’s French; I like French cooking. I make a roasted chicken with 40 cloves of garlic where you blanch the garlic; keep the skin on and boil it in water for 10 minutes. Fry the chicken up in some olive oil, a little thyme, then add all that garlic all around it, put a lid on it and cook it for 40 minutes. Take the chicken and garlic out and deglaze the pan with a little white wine and butter and you have a sauce.

My dad was quite the cook. He taught me how to make marinara sauce, and before he passed away he got really into bolognese. That I’ve tried, and really mastered. I’m really proud of my bolognese sauce. I used to think it was just a meat sauce, but there are all these steps where you let it absorb different liquids, almost like risotto. One time is white wine, one time is milk, and it takes hours, but it’s worth it as long as you have a lot of people coming over to appreciate it. I watched my dad make bolognese and for Chris’ and I’s wedding, we got some amazing Italian cookbooks.

Now, where did the thyme go?”

Sean’s Reindeer Gumbo (with choreographed quail)

Sean Yseult and Chris Lee get reindeer sausage by mail from his parents in Anchorage, Alaska.

Spice mix:
1 tablespoon salt
2 tablespoons dried basil
2 teaspoons paprika
1/2 tablespoon dried mustard
1/2 tablespoon chili powder
1/2 tablespoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon cayenne
1 teaspoon cumin
1 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon white pepper
1/2 teaspoon thyme

3 pounds semi-deboned quail
1 1/4 cup flour
4 + 4 tablespoons olive oil
1 large onion, chopped
1 large green bell pepper, chopped
1 red bell pepper, chopped
2-3 stalks celery, chopped
7 cups chicken broth
1 pound reindeer sausage/andouille
4 cloves garlic

Rub spice mix onto quail. Pour leftover spice mix into flour, mixing well. Lightly flour quail and fry in 4 tablespoons oil, browning both sides. Remove from skillet and set aside. Add remaining oil and flour into skillet. Make a 4-minute roux over high heat. Roux will look a yellowish brown from the start because of the spices, but try to make it a bit darker. Add onion, bell peppers and celery, lower heat, and stir for 5 minutes. Heat broth separately, then add vegetables to broth along with sausage and garlic. Simmer for 45 minutes. Cut each quail into four or eight pieces, add to pot. Simmer for 15 minutes. Serve over brown rice.

Renard Poche. Photo by Elsa Hahne.

“I don’t exactly have a name for this, but I guess we can call it a citrus fruit cocktail. How this came about is, I’ve always liked lemonade, and a few years ago I went through a really bad time, so I was looking online for natural anti-depressants. Citrus fruit was high on the list: citrus, salmon—even salt. I thought salt and sugar were depressants, but according to the research I did more recently, I found that a little salt can lift you. And actually, this has worked. I don’t know if it’s the power of suggestion, but it does. I had a few losses: my mother had passed, my daddy had passed, my brother had passed. Just a whole lot of stuff. When it rains it pours and this was soon after Katrina. Hard times. So that’s what led me to this. I’ve been doing it for over a year now and I think it’s fruitful—eh, I didn’t intend that.

I keep a supply. I fill this container, which is probably 64 ounces. When it runs out, I do it again. I’ll go through it in two days, three days sometimes, depending on what’s going on. Then I make another one. If I’m too lazy, or just don’t have time to do it, then I’ll just eat an orange straight up. So I’m consuming citrus fruit just about every day. This is like a pleasure food for me. If I’m in the studio practicing, I’ll have a 16-ounce glass like this and sip on it., might do two of them.

I’m kind of an old-school guy in a lot of ways, I had the manual citrus juicer. But when I lost it, I got this electric one, and I get a lot more juice out of the fruit now.

My sister has tasted this, and the keyboard player in my group, Keiko. She came over, we were rehearsing, or as Dr. John would say, ‘We was rehearsalin’,’ and she liked it a lot. This is nothing fancy, just a version of lemonade. I’m still vacillating, kind of experimenting, with what I prefer. It’s a little smoother with more orange balancing out the bite of the lime and lemon. Makes sense, right?

I want to get the perfect mixture. I write it down sometimes. Sometimes I do two oranges, one lemon and one lime, depending on availability. I’m going to sweeten this with stevia extract in the liquid form. My sister and my brother- in-law thought it was too sweet, so I backed off the stevia and found that I really enjoyed it more because now I’m getting more the taste of the fruit. Stevia extract has alcohol in it, 11 percent. I mention that to anybody who’s going to try it because maybe they can’t do alcohol for some reason. It’s not much, but I still feel like I should mention it.

I saw an acupuncturist once and he said you shouldn’t use ice, and I didn’t ask why because I assumed it was for your heart. My mother had a heart attack once and she said they told her not to drink anything too cold. So I try not to use ice, if I can. I try to have the state of mind to keep everything in the refrigerator.

I eat simple. I don’t have many guests. Like my sister visiting, she said, ‘Renard, all you eat is nuts and berries.’ Breakfast, five or six days out of the week, this is what I eat [taking packets of frozen fruit out of the freezer]. Dark cherries, blueberries, all these dark things are high in anti-oxidants. And it’s good to have fruit on an empty stomach, otherwise it ends up fermenting in the tract somewhere. It’s always fruit for breakfast. If I don’t do the berries, I’m doing peaches or apples or banana, that kind of thing. But two hours later, I’m eating real food. I have a fast metabolism, so I eat five or six times a day. I eat a lot of whole wheat pasta, or spinach pasta, and salmon. Also, I’m a bachelor and I like sardines. I bought seven packets last night and in two weeks, they’ll be gone. I eat salad, with the yellow, orange and red peppers, grape tomatoes and spinach, romaine and assorted greens, then I’ll add walnuts and dried cranberries, olives and I’ll pour some of the olive juice on it. Quick and easy. I always like the dark vegetables because they have more nutrients.

My parents cooked, but it was more like soul food. Occasionally now, I’ll eat soul food. Fried chicken, that might happen once or twice a month. The philosophy I follow is that 85 percent of what I eat is good. The other 15 can be bad.

Renard’s Citrus Cocktail

2 large lemons
1 large orange
4 large key limes (or 1 lime)
1 1/2 quart water
1/2 tsp stevia extract (or 6 envelopes stevia powder)

Juice citrus. Add juice to water along with some pulp. Sweeten with stevia. Enjoy cold in a tall glass.

Photo by Elsa Hahne.

I was born in Natchez. We always ate well because my mother was a great cook. She was one of the first housewives in Natchez to have Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. In fact, I’ve got it here. I got all her books after she passed away in ‘04. Her name was Katherine, but everybody called her Kitty. Here, I wanted to show you. I saved this old clipping. My mother won a new pair of high heels from Burns shoe store on Main Street in Natchez with her chicken recipe. It was a housewife competition, and this was the ‘60s. Maybe she adapted duck à l’orange and just added the bacon. As far as I know she invented it. She used to make it around the holidays and it made the house smell great. This was the first time she entered a competition. I was 12.

My mother was a strong, determined person. She’d bring us to New Orleans and take us to Antoine’s and teach us culture. We grew up learning all the ballroom dances. After we’d gone off to college, she started her own travel agency. This was back when travel agents could do pretty well because you didn’t have computers. She traveled the world.

I make her chicken a couple of times a year, but I cook a variety of things. I love French cooking. To me, if you want to be a good cook, you have to learn some French technique. When I first went to culinary school at Delgado, Mastering the Art of French Cooking was my bible. It really breaks down the basics of stocks and sauces. I made this [turning pages], Lobster Thermidor, on Christmas eve. Only a French chef could come up with this because it’s nothing but butter and cream and reduction sauces involving the fat in the head of the lobsters.

I have an outdoor kitchen. We used to have a small patio and when we put the swimming pool in, I saved the lumber and built the cooking shed out back. I’m really getting into charcuterie. I want to get better at making pâtés. I want to master pâté en croute, just one time. Just to say I could do it. I’ve smoked meats for years and I’ve made galantines and boulettes, which are almost like a mousseline. Galantine is where you debone a bird and take the meat and make a stuffing and keep the skin intact, pull it back together, wrap it with bacon and toothpicks and bake it.

I already had a cast-iron smoker that handles 50-60 pounds of meat, and I’ve always cooked barbecue. Then my brother-in-law gave me a stainless steel propane grill, and I have a crawfish boiling pot that can cook a whole sack at a time. The place where I get my fresh chickens, in Reserve, has all these great outdoor cooking accessories, so that’s where I got the two-top burner. It’s pretty much a complete outdoor kitchen, with all I need. I like to collect my tools. Every since I got into this, I go to restaurant supply places just like I go to music stores. These are my mother’s poultry scissors that she bought in Italy.

I’ve tried not to mess with this recipe too much. It’s basically the same as my mom’s, except for the zest, and the Worchestershire, and the hot sauce, and the horseradish. I can’t help it; it’s my New Orleans influence. My mom’s recipe says bacon, but I use andouille to give it that Laplace touch.

Mother Kitty’s Curry Glazed Chicken

1 (10.5-oz) can beef consommé
2 1/2 tablespoons flour
1/4 cup orange marmalade
1 onion, finely diced
6 oz andouille, finely diced
1 tablespoon curry powder
2 tablespoons Heinz chili sauce
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 teaspoon prepared horseradish
1 teaspoon hot sauce
1 teaspoon Worchestershire sauce
1 teaspoon orange and/or lemon zest
2 chickens, quartered, brushed with butter and seasoned with salt and pepper

Whisk together consommé and flour. Add remaining ingredients, except for chicken. Simmer to thicken, about five minutes. Set aside. Bake chicken at 400 degrees for 20 minutes. Remove juices. Spoon half of the curry glaze over chicken and bake for 20 minutes. Spoon remaining glaze over chicken and bake for another 20 minutes.