Beignet, Done That, Went Back for More

I'd missed my lesson by Mayee Futterman last week, while we were at Vera's house.  I thought about missing it again this week, but decided not to, so I did get up a little earlier than usual and John and I got on the trolley to go into town. 

The electric trolleys run about every fifteen minutes or so, and there's an RTA app that not only shows you where you are, but where all the trolleys are along their lines and exactly where they are at all times. You can see when it's approaching your stop and when it's just left as well. 

It went all the way to Canal Street, which is the main street downtown, and there's a Cafe Beignet just a couple of blocks down Canal. After the plantation, my right hip, knee, and calf weren't particularly happy with me, so I just went slow and it was okay. The line coming out of the Cafe Beignet was so long, that I could be as slow as I wanted.

It gave us plenty of time to look around. A few of the things I saw were these bags of confectioner's sugar, the powdered sugar that goes on beignets under one of the counters they were using for memorabilia that you could also buy in the store. The interesting thing was that the slowness wasn't because of the kitchen. The ordering system makes it so that every customer has to sit and wait for their drinks before they can go away and someone else can make their order. So it was easy for us to at least grease our cog and just order the chicory coffee to go with our food.  

These beignet were quite a bit better than any we'd had so far on our trip. I love Cafe Beignet because of the yeast leavening instead of baking powder. But the ones we'd had in the afternoon were thin and had dried out a bit in the fryer. These were thick and soft and chewy in exactly the right way, and I realized that I really need to roll my beignet dough thicker to get more of what I want in a bit of fried dough.

I also knew I needed a bit of protein to go with my sugar this time, and happily got an egg and bacon sandwich on a very nice croissant. And, because I couldn't quite finish all my coffee with my breakfast, we decided to walk part of the way back toward the house and keep my leg from stiffening up more. 

We stopped by City Hall, which is where the Mardi Gras parade goes by actual stands that are built for the parade! They were finally taking the stands down, it's been more than a week, but the crews were out breaking things down and one of the remarkable things was that the work crews were all decorated in dozens of strands of beads. Looking under one of the stands and you could see why. There are *mountains* of beads mixed in with all the other things that were dropped from the parades.

I loved the sidewalk name, and just had to take a picture of it. John got an "Amelia" as well. So beautiful.

I got back in time for the crepe myrtle lesson! I am actually pretty happy with how this one turned out, but a lot of the "frilly flowers" of this series have kind of confounded me because with the way Mayee presented it, I couldn't really see which was the front and which was the back of the petal and how they related to each other. It took three lessons, I guess, for me to finally figure it out, and these actually made sense to me for once.

I liked how these turned out. I need to see more crepe myrtle to get it to come together, and I know that there are tiny myrtle that live in San Diego, where the trees are these gorgeous twisted figures but the flowers are tiny things. Beautiful, but tiny.

It took three hours and I was pretty exhausted by the end of it. We just hung around the room until it was nearly dinner time and we headed for Mr. Ed's, on St Charles. It was an old dining room, a restaurant for a city neighborhood. They had a flyer saying that with the shortage of oysters presently, they're raising their prices, and we decided to go for the charbroiled oysters one last time. 

John got the blackened catfish. I got the Southern Fried Platter, with two pieces of chicken, two pieces of catfish that turned into three, and four local pink shrimp. And a pile of jambalaya. It was an impressive meal. I was surprised that I ate all of the seafood. I hadn't had lunch, which might have explained why.

We enjoyed it all a lot, and then headed back to the trolley and the ride out to Creole Creamery. I had to try the lavender honey and the peanut butter fudge pie ice cream. John had a few he wanted still to try as well, and it was fun to get them and actually stay in the ice cream parlor while thunder and lightening played outside and then the skies opened up and poured.

Sadly, when we were ready to go, the rain fell even harder. It fell so hard that the water just sluiced over the road, and along all the drainages. A very brief fall of hail came down, but then went back to water. There were streams and rivers coming under fences for the paved bits of land, and all of it was running away. I was so impressed. I was also so soaked so quickly that I just stopped worrying about it and enjoyed being able to slosh through stream in my sneakers. I'd hidden my phone away and tucked my purse under my coat, so it just didn't matter anymore. The drainage here is amazing, and it manages the water beautifully, while I know that there's a limit to that, these folks have to live with the water every day, so on the whole they do it so well. 

John found a little hallway to hide in until it slowed and the trolley came. We dripped on the trolley. No one stared 'cause everyone in there was sopping wet. It was pretty funny. 

We got home, threw things into the dryer, over all the furniture, stuffed newspaper into soaked shoes, got the TV on, and I jumped into the shower. I am really happy with the amount of water I can use without guilt. And it surprised me how much I really wanted to write and process. Warm milk was useful, too, with my melatonin and we'll be up and packing in the morning and probably headed West again. There's supposed to be a tornado warning tonight, and a possible freeze in the morning. We'll see how it works out.