New Orleans, LA

Here’s something I have never heard of, read beans can make you sick. I ran across this article, Why Red Beans And Rice Can Be Nauseating. I knew red beans could make you fart and if you eat too much it’s like a fiber bomb but I didn’t know it could literally make you sick.

According to the article:

Scientists have discovered how lectins, a family of proteins believed to be a natural insecticide that is abundant in undercooked legumes and grains, can make you feel temporarily miserable.

I searched around to see what a lectin is. Lectins are carbohydrate-binding proteins or glycoproteins which are highly specific for their sugar moieties. Yeah, that didn’t help me either.

Have you heard of ricin? It was used by the Russians to kill a spy. They poked him with a special umbrella and it injected ricin into him. He died shortly after. Ricin comes from the castor bean and is highly toxic. Apparently, under cooked read beans can have something of the same effect.

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I took my wife to a restaurant here in Florida, near where we live. The place is called Po Boy’s Creole Cafe. It looked very promising. Inside it looked more like a sports bar than a New Orleans restaurant but they have some awesome black and white New Orleans prints on the walls.

The menu looked good too. Appetizers included fried pickles (mmmmm!), cajun popcorn and other goodness. Actually, you can view the menu yourself. I don’t see the fried pickles so they may not be selling them anymore. That’s a shame as that was my favorite item.

Anyway, my wife and I are both huge fans of red beans so we ordered the read beans and rice appetizer. The read beans came with great big chunks of tomato in it which kind of grossed us out. It was super thick and I didn’t like the flavor at all.

The wife likes nothing better than a shrimp po-boy so that’s what she ordered. It was kind of small, about 9 inches maybe, and not over stuffed but the breading was spiced decently and the shrimp weren’t over cooked.

I’m a muffuletta fanatic. The description of the muffuletta at this restaurant is:

MUFFULETTA: A New Orleans legend. A round, baked concoction of ham, salami, swiss, and provolone dressed with home-made olive dressing, creole mustard and mayo.

Close but no cigar. Mayo? On a muff? Blech. I asked if they could hold the mayo. The answer was, “No. We have them shipped in special from Louisiana. It’s very authentic. That’s where we get our read beans and rice, too!”

Ugh. I got it anyway. It had been too long since I had a muffuletta. It was an ok sandwich. The olive dressing was good and the meat was very thinly sliced. Worth eating but a far cry from New Orleans.

We’ve been back a few times since it’s so close but it’s not our favorite. Now that it looks like fried pickles aren’t on the menu, there’s not much point in going back.

A much better restaurant, and very authentic, is the Cajun Cafe on the Bayou. This place has EXCELLENT food!

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Dooky Chase’s to reopen after $500,000 in repair. According to the New Orleans City Business news, Leah Chase has been able to get the requires repairs funded and implemented. We’re coming up on the two year anniversary and while the article says no date is yet set, I hope it’s on the anniversary. That’s the kind of message the world needs about New Orleanians. The job will get done.

I watch Leah on PBS when I see that she’s on. Her show is “Creole Cooking with Leah Chase” and it’s a hoot to watch. She is one spunky lady. The article above says she is 84 and wikipedia says she was born on January 6, 1923.

She’s a local. She was born in my mom’s home town of Madisonville on the north shore. Even now, Madisonville is fairly rural (growing lot’s of very large homes right now, though) so I can imagine what it was ike in the 1920s. When I was kid, many of the roads were made up of little river rocks (and I’m not that old).

She moved to New Orleans when she was 18 and got a job at Colonial Restaurant . In 1945 she married Dooky and, after starting a family, she began working at his family’s restaurant, part-time. She soon took a more direct involvement and eventually changed the menu and became chef. The rest is history.

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