First, I really want to thank all our guests from Saturday night. We had a big crowd, and together we raised a significant chunk of money for Doctors Without Borders and their Emergency Relief Fund. As a New Orleanian who received assistance during the levee failures from Hurricane Katrina, I am so relieved to be in a position to "pass it forward" toward Haiti and the amazing work the dedicated krewe of doctors who volunteer to heal the injured and sick on behalf of Doctors Without Borders. Whether it's Haiti today, or any other desperately poor and beleagured by tragedy place, those Doctors are already there, healing and coping with situations we can scarcely imagine. Thanks for your support of The Green Goddess, and we are glad to send it along to the greatest need.

Sure it's a football game, this event called Super Bowl XLIV, primarily and center stage, and I could go into geekdom football analysis about why I have the utmost confidence in my coach, Sean Payton, and his ridiculously resilient team who will not be denied this victory, strictly based on Xs and Os. But here in New Orleans it means so much more than merely a football game. This effort by our lovable team, known as the New Orleans Saints, stands as a portrait of the gritty determination of my city -- the 5, the 0, the 4, Dat's New Orleans BABY! -- to rise from a disaster of terrible and unforseen tragic consequences to get our funky pride rollin' again. Because we know that America should know that without New Orleans, America is unimaginable. No geographic triumph if the Louisiana Purchase is not made to get the free agent rights to the Crescent City. No sweet improvisational blues of swingin' jazz if not for New Orleans. No freakin' NFL if the two Louisiana Senators of 1967 don't give cover to the NFL to win anti-trust, anti-monopoly lawsuits so that the upstart AFL and the NFL can merge, which led to the modern era Super Bowls and the explosion of football as The Game for the American populace, although N.O. had long been a football hotbed. No "end of the world" blues here in the scavenger city of New Orleans, where tragedy and joy are as intertwined as lovers, and where there's always a place in New Orleans for poets as true as Walt Whitman, Bob Dylan, Charles Bukowski and so many more, Andrei Codrescu, Hunter Thompson, and William Faulkner, Lafcadio Hearn and Tennessee Williams to name just a few writers who drank our humid, fetid air and understood our proud determinations. Truly I could go on and on about the role of New Orleans in American culture in architecture, engineering, music and any major intersection of life that matters, simply to prove how much we signify to the world. To think that back in the Autumn of 2005, when I thought that the great Fats Domino song, "Walkin' to New Orleans" might become a dirge to a modern Atlantis, and all the sorrow we experienced, and all the bullshit we endured, and that mother-bleepin barge sitting on the WRONG SIDE of the Lower Ninth Ward Levee with kids' bicycles strewn in treetops and houses sitting on crushed cars and that terrible stinky, thin black line of flood water limning my city, to think back on all that we have overcome as a city AND to see my Saints finally represent the "Never Say Die" spirit of New Orleans and our Mardi Gras Indians, our joy at sharing life, our bustle in the streets to celebrate life & death, it's a DREAM COME TRUE!

WHO DAT SAY DEY GONNA BEAT DEM SAINTS!!! It's more than a cheer, it's become the lifeblood of my city. Hey man, I could not be more proud to be dug into my life here in New Orleans, starting up a new businesss that hires cooks, that buys from local purveyors to create a smidgen of more jobs, that generates tax dollars for the City of New Orleans, that gives visitors and locals alike a reason to get excited about the possibilities of fine dining in New Orleans. I can tell you, we aim to WIN EVERY SINGLE DAY at the Green Goddess, and it's so cool to see my football team in the Saints be just as aggressive as we are, just as proud, and just as ridiculously focused on improving and proving that there's no such thing as limitations!

Sure, it's just a game, and ultimately, it's the players who do amazing things to beat the other team"s amazing athletes by an inch or so, during a series of huge plays, those games within the game will determine the winner of Super Bowl 44. All I know is we are so delighted to see our guys from New Orleans with the chance to win it all, that we are just swelled up with pride & joy down here. I have complete confidence in my team, and even more confidence that the citizens of New Orleans are ready for the hard work to turn our rebounding city into a GREAT BEACON for the rest of the world. It's happenin' here & now! Pedal to the metal, baby! Let's get this thing done, Saints, and hey you politicians who just won the elections down here, understand that NOW'S THE TIME to handle up on government BY THE PEOPLE, FOR THE PEOPLE, and we are watching you city officials like Sean Payton breaking down the weakness of the opposing team's defense. Don't run from what we gotta do!

If there is a city more breathtakingly ALIVE than New Orleans RIGHT NOW, I don't think I believe that could be true... What a thrill... WHO DAT, baby, WHO DAT!!!!!!!!

The Green Goddess would appear, at first glance, to be poised to be monstrously busy during Carnival time. We are located just two blocks off Canal Street, where all the parades roll as they come downtown. Our prices are more affordable than most of our fellow fine dining restaurants, and we have a crazy array of handcrafted cocktails, unusual wines and beers, and our food comes out pretty fast. However, all indications are that we will be relatively quiet during Carnival -- we were dead slow during Krewe du Vieux (in fact, it was the worst night of an otherwise jamming week...). Thus far, it looks like we will be quiet, entertaining just a few great tables per night, as judged by how it's going tonight for Friday during Oshun and the first parade rolling from the Uptown route.

Talking with quite a few other French Quarter restaurants, everybody says that it's always pretty slow once the parades start. Sometimes, they say, first turn can be decent since the parades usually don't arrive until 8 pm or so. True, it's our first year in business during Carnival, so we really don't know what to expect; however, it appears that we will be your groovy, peaceful oasis for dining fun in the french Quarter during the entire Mardi Gras season.

Hey, I'd love to be proved wrong about that and be busy, busy, busy. In fact, Valentine's Day, which falls during Bacchus Sunday here in New Orleans, may prove to be very underwhelming for us. I am fine with that, as it's more important that we continue to put on the same quality of psychedelic pleasures of the table that we always aim for here at The Green Goddess. But we'd love to tempt our diners right before we all celebrate the Saints winning their first Super Bowl this weekend: I am going to donate 10% of our sales from this Saturday night to the Emergency Relief Fund for Doctors without Borders. Should you be able to get down to the French Quarter to enjoy a meal with us tomorrow night, you will also be supporting that terific cause as the international team of doctors do all they can to help folks in Haiti.

We appreciate everybody's support, and all we ask if please don't assume we'll be slammin' busy during Carnival and think we're too crazy & hectic to take care of our people. We'd love to celebrate this remarkably happy time in New Orleans with our guests!

As the recent events in Haiti so vividly illustrate, nothing becomes more urgent in the aftermath of a natural disaster than emergency medical care, along with food and water for the healthy survivors. An earthquake especially makes demands on emergency health care, as people need surgery to repair crushed limbs, to heal from burns as building frequently caught fire once the shaking stopped, and the risks of infection from injuries skyrockets when so much of the normal infrastructure collapses, as happened in Port-Au-Prince. Luckily, the amazing and resilient health workers/volunteers in Doctors Without Borders had been on the ground in Haiti for many years, and while the situation continues to be a dire struggle to save lives, this organization has been getting it done despite all the horrible obstacles.

There are so many peripheral things we could argue about with regard to the aftermath of the Haiti Earthquake, and maybe there will be a place and a time to go into those thoughts later, particularly because we who live in New Orleans should understand about the dreadfully slow responses to disaster relief. At this moment, none of that really matters, however. It's not the time to score points in a politicized landscape, it's time to try to help. For those of us in New Orleans, it's truly important that we "pass it forward" to relief in Haiti; after all, there are so many cultural ties and historic events that link New Orleans to Haiti; and secondly, we know in New Orleans that the well-directed 'kindness of strangers" makes a huge difference to a place trying to recover from a cruel disaster. I know Poppy and I were overwhelmed by the kindness of our friends, readers, and the volunteers who wanted to help us as we fought to regain our lives after the levees failed in Hurricane Katrina. We wanted to find an impeccable charity doing irreplaceable work on the ground already in Haiti, and so we sent some money to the Emergency Relief Fund for Doctors Without Borders (www.doctorswithoutborders.org), and now we would like to create a little venue to raise additional funds for this fine, dedicated organization at The Green Goddess.

We're a small restaurant, but our odd dinner hours (usually Thur-Sun from 5 pm -11 pm) gave us an opening to try something a little different. In truthfulness, we have been kicking around the idea of opening on Wed. nights for little "seminars, soireés, and tastings" where we showcase some recent discoveries at our bar, but we do not actually open for full dinner service. We often have quite a bit of prep to handle on Wed. nights to re-open our little kitchen for the weekend, and I have tweaked the menu most every week according to what we are finding in the market. We also really enjoy sitting down with our wine reps and tasting stuff they present to us. It's always educational to pick the tastebuds and the brains of our people who sell us spirits, and thanks to them spending time with us we have developed our unorthodox menu of esoteric wines, beers, and cocktail ingredients. We have wanted to share this process with our guests, but we still need the night to prep, so I've been reluctant to challenge our comfortable dining format with such a wild card weekly event for Wednesday nights.

The need to reach out to help Doctors Without Borders succeed in their urgent mission to help the people of Haiti is the tipping point we to examine how we can handle Wed. nights. So we decided to conduct a series of Wed. night wine tastings as a benefit for this cause, beginning this Wed. night! Here's our notion:

We will charge $30 and feature a minimum of six wines, with a little food thrown in there, too. This week will be pretty casual. I'm thinking of making some crawfish pupusas, play around with some sake kazu marinated roasted winter squash and a lovely kohlrabi gratin for noshing during the event, while we have the last batch of our Mull of Bahîa (red wine with lemongrass and cachaça), some of our featured Winter Wonderland White Wines: the Alsation Auxerrois from Albert Mann, a new Pinot Blanc we got in from Domaines Schlumberger, who are also from Alsace, and our Grüner Veltliner from Austria in the Wachau region. I know we will have a couple of red wines to debate, too. I think the "playoff" for the red wines will be between the original French Malbec of Cahors, from Haut-Monplaisir, and the more familiar Argentine Malbec, represented on our list by Mil Piedras, where the dark wine is produced in the foothills of the Andes in Patagonia.

The next two weeks, we will probably feature other wines, perhaps even a night about our cocktails. We'll be open on Wed. nights to hold these wine tastings from 6-9 pm at The Green Goddess, 307 Exchange Place, New Orleans...

We're sending the proceeds (and by "proceeds" I mean a full $20 per person!) to Doctors Without Borders. My guys all want to donate their labor, so we will just analyze the actual costs of the foods and wines we use for the Wed. night, and maybe with our free labor we can send more from the night. If it costs more than $10 per person in stuff we serve, that's alright, we will be happy to make the in-kind contribution.
I hope it doesn't seem to be unseemly to gather folks for a wine tasting to generate cash for a cause in the aftermath of so much unbelievable suffering and sorrow in Haiti. We just want to pitch in, somehow & some way. If you are only able to read my blog and cannot attend, we urge you to dig deep and send a little something to the Emergency Relief Fund at www.doctorswithoutborders.org

If you can make it, we'll have a pair of wine goblets ready for you this Wed. night from 6-9 PM, as we tour the Northern latitudes of white wines, share our recipe for mulled wine we discovered this last holiday season, and most likely indulge in Who Dat Fever as we discuss a hotly contested red wine playoff among the two Malbecs on our list.

Finally, I should add this note about this week's schedule, with regard to Sunday and the NFC Championship Game here in the Louisiana Superdome between the Minnesota Vikings and our beloved New Orleans Saints. We will be open for our regular Sunday Brunch/lunch from 11-3ish, but we will not be open for dinner that night. The game begins around 5:45 PM, so there's no reason to try to be open in our little joint. Besides, when it's time for the Saints to march into the Super Bowl, I'd rather not be at work -- no matter how much fun we have cooking at The Green Goddess, this will be a wild & crazy moment for all of us who love our Saints, well worth savoring with appropriate libations and time with friends & family. So since we won't be open on Sunday night, perhaps some of you can drop by for a good cause and some great wines on this Wednesday. GEAUX SAINTS!!!!

Paul has changed up the menu some recently, so it might be worth another visit to the Goddess for lunch soon. We finally reached that point in the dead of winter where local crabmeat became too expensive, scarce, and mainly just isn't as sweet and delicious, especially at that stratospheric price. So we took all the crabmeat off the menu, including off our Green Goddess Romaine Wedge. We can compensate with more of our absinthe poached shrimp on the Wedge, but Paul has decided to do a few new salads with warm components. We have a new Warm Wintry Roasted Vegetable Salad, with pumpkins, fingerling potatoes, red onions, yellow squash and warm chevre, with smoky pumpkin seeds scattered over the salad. It's still a greens based salad with arugula, and this new salad features a warm sherry vinaigrette.

The lunch krewe is also using warm shrimp in a satsuma glaze over a salad, too. There's roasted asparagus involved as well with this one. I know Paul wants our lunch fans to be able to enjoy some lighter fare that a) doesn't sacrifice flavor, b) has nice heated up salad components to keep everybody's temperatures up in this frightfully blustery and downright chilly weather we've had lately, c) keep innovating and tweaking to make lunch as much a destination as dinner -- which is good since lunch is open 7 days a week.

Our Little Mummy's Absinthe Shrimp Remoulade is also making a comeback: this time with the crazy fennel & Napa cabbage with that flourish of Bengali seeds and spices and the Absinthe-poached shrimp nestled in an avocado half, with arugula and our Spanish almonds we make. That's a dish I made for Obsello Absinthe, which we proudly feature, when it hit town this past summer. I'm a little undecided if we'll run it at dinner yet, but for lunch that has always been a more popular menu item so it's good to see it back in the house in this new guise.

Finally, Paul is adding a new twist to his great lox he makes in house. He's added it as a BLT sandwich, with our killer Nueske's applewood bacon. We are using Atlantic salmon raised in Scotland by the Loch Duart company. They have a good reputation for environmental soundness, and the salmon does have exceptional flavor and silkiness that only improves after it's turned into gravlox. For now, the gravlox is only available during lunch, which definitely means it's worthy of a special visit to the French Quarter for that Green Goddess adventure.

I'm tweaking the dinner menu later this week. I'm feeling like it's time we put our Red, Red Wine & Radicchio Risotto on the menu, and we have a little bit of Burrata cheese, which I liken to the "love child" of mozzarella & ricotta cheeses. It's seriously creamy, and we enjoyed matching it to a warm roasted yellow tomato sauce with roasted garlic pureed and plenty of killer olio nuovo Italian olive oil, topped with the last of PZB's basil turned into pesto before evil Jack Frost killed the plants this weekend. It's a festive way to kickstart a dinner, and response to it as a special was very nice. I haven't checked with my sources to see at what price more burrata would be available, so this could be a one week engagement on our menu -- but I'll do some due diligence to check on feasibility for a longer run.

I'm looking into getting our Riesling poached crab apples back, too. They disappeared and I thought they were kaput, but I heard there were still some I could lay my hands upon soon. Keep your fingers crossed there as we really enjoyed those little tart flavor explosions, matched to our Turkish honey, a quenelle of Belgian honeyed chevre, and a little cashew pastry from India. It's always fun to take something that gets overlooked, like the crab apples in that dessert or the kohlrabi in our Pumpkins on Parade dish where the kohlrabi almost steals the show in the little salad on the side of the Gold Nugget pumpkin stuffed with red quinoa, and give that ingredient that people forgot how good they could be some love and attention. I feel like we are really doing that with regard to the vintage Madeira, too, which BTW is now practically down to our very last bottle of this exquisite 1912 Bual Madeira from Barbeito. If you have had your eye on getting a taste of that wonderful spirit, this could be the last week it's around. We've sold 9 servings some nights, so there just aren't that many more chances to get in on this spectacular Madeira experience for only $16 per ounce.

The weathermen say we'll go from bone-chilling cold to more crappy rain this week. They always say that an El Niño summer brings too much rain and some colder winters, but I'll take that to keep summers miraculously free of worry from hurricanes. A small price to pay, which I try to keep in mind as I shiver in my Saints parka walking from the restaurant to my parking garage. So hey it's playoff time for the city and our fantastic Saints, so let's keep our spirits high this week and be good hosts to any Arizona fans who come into town. Our plan for Saturday afternoon is to close lunch a little early, say around 2:30 or 3, then me and the dinner krewe will do a little prep but mainly try to catch as much of the game as possible. We will open 5 minutes after the game is over Saturday night, which should be around 6:30 or thereabouts, plenty of time for a night of rollicking celebrations in the FQ and endless cheers of "WHO DAT!" Yeah, you right!

So don't be a stranger at The Green Goddess this week. Lots of cool new stuff, and a few things available only in very limited quantities that just should not be missed.

We had a morning of dismay, finding our little black cat, Greta -- aka "Foothead," dead in the living room. She had by all appearances been in good health, with a robust appetite and her usual strange demands that I rub her head with my feet while either in my recliner or while still in bed. It was quite a terrible shock, and we asked our vet to do an autopsy. The result was she had a cancerous spleen, which does not give out any symptoms of sickness to the cat and so we had no clue she was ill. Apparently, she died when it burst, and the vet told us it happened pretty quickly and her passing was relatively painless and peaceful, and that with cancer in the spleen such a sudden, unexpected death is common.

I think I will miss her goofy sense of entitlement more than I knew. Sometimes after a long night working in the kitchen, my feet might be sore the next morning -- and it was a little ritual that she was my foot massage therapist. Greta, my little Foothead, would often be sleeping on my pillow when I came to bed, and I might promise her a little extra "foot" for surrendering my pillow. She never liked the cold, so it was very sad that we found her on a chilly morning, although at least it wasn't the coldest morning -- which we will experience tomorrow when it sinks to 19 degrees here in New Orleans after Friday night turns into the bone-chilling wee hours of Saturday morning.

Greta liked a conventional head-rubbing with your hands just fine, but she always perked up when I'd consent to use a foot to rub on her head. She'd always give my whole foot a workout, so if I needed to stretch my toes, or rub one sore side of my foot or the other, she had a knack for rubbing against that part of my foot. If I didn't give her a little time in the morning, she'd raise up and smack me in the side while I was in bed, so it was best & easiest to just let Greta have her little massage most mornings. Greta lived with us for several years, and her career as my foot therapist began maybe 5 years ago. Other than her foot fetish, she wasn't particularly demanding -- Greta could be a yowler if she felt another cat was messing with her, but she got along well most of the time with our big krewe of kitties.

Although we have an extraordinary menageire of cats, we do try to always see to their health. I guess it would've been lucky had we caught her illness in time, especially since she just kept truckin' along in normal Foothead mode, eating plenty and keeping to her routines. Cancer can be tough to eradicate under the best circumstances, and once it had advanced that far in Greta without her showing any symptoms, unfortunately, there's no other way to reconcile it than it was a blessing she didn't suffer. I have my regrets that I took her urgency for foot massages for granted probably too much; now I know I'll miss her funny little demands that I stick out a bare leg from under the covers and rub her head with my tired foot.
Isn't it always nice to feel loved? I hope somehow in feline heaven, Greta understands that I did appreciate her, for more than just her foot fetish. It'll be odd not to have to pull my pillow out from under Greta tonight, such a sudden departure from the family norm, and I will be wishing that in Cat Heaven Greta gets all the attention and massages she wants....

Hey dear reader, take from this little tale of a funny cat's life & times: Don't take the people in your life for granted! Indulge their odd whims as best you can manage; celebrate your own perfect weirdness; and don't be afraid to be a little demanding of the ones you love.

We had quite a blast on New Year's Eve. The day krewe had three of their best consecutive business days on the last moments of 2009, and we managed to entertain our New Year's Eve Gala partygoers in good style. We didn't overbook the room, which could've taken many more folks in theory. As it was, we had beautiful weather that night which allowed us to fling open the balcony doors and our guests could enjoy the fireworks without freezing. They did move the fireworks down river a bit, but we could still see them exploding over the French Quarter rooftops. It was nice to have kept it to the size we had because everybody more or less congregated in the kitchen, where it's always the sign of a good party when the kitchen is the nexus; and folks were never crowded even when bunched together to see the fireworks. Given our little kitchen's limitations in size that was quite enough for us to tackle, as well.

The menu was pretty enormous, even though we didn't quite get to every single thing listed, skipping the "Cry Uncle" phase because people were pretty dang full by then. People liked the white asparagus with white truffles so we kept them rolling along. We did some things I've been meaning to try, such as the miso-rubbed winter squash and the red wine radicchio risotto, to good effect. I think people were satisfied and by all accounts it was a jovial group. We had a terrific blend of locals and tourists, and everybody seemed to really enjoy meeting one another. Scotty & Ben kept the booze flowing all night, Jocelyn ran the elevator correctly and kept ferrying platter after platter of party food upstairs. Mike and Stan, and I kept the pedal to the metal all night long down in the kitchen, and a big thanks to Steve from the day krewe for staying longer to help transport our entire bar upstairs after he'd had quite a hectic day.

Of course, the biggest thanks goes out to all our guests, not just at the NYE Gala, but to those who found us thus far in the remarkable course of connecting our ideas with the dining public in New Orleans. Without our hungry customers coming in and plunking their hard-earned money down for our food & libations, The Green Goddess would've been just an ephemeral notion. Our success is your success, too, and we appreciate all the fun-loving support thus far in our dining adventures at The Green Goddess.

If we have any resolutions for 2010, the biggest one is to hurry up and finish our little dining room & wine room addition soon. The holidays were crazy, and Mardi Gras ain't too far behind, so we need to get that done this month. Having that room will also help us next summer so we can have a better a/c situation, especially at lunch when it's too brutal to dine alfresco, and here in the winter it gives us cozy options to expand our seating. Besides that, we'd like to maintain & improve our consistency, keep pushing to get better and discover new ingredients we can feature, and just take steps to carefully safeguard the restaurant's future. Restaurant margins are always pretty slender, especially when we work on a fine dining milieu without charging the heavy hitter prices. For us, we love finding other small businesses to support with our selections, to support our krewe as they work hard, and to keep the doors open where our guests can afford to splurge with us or just have a simple, good meal.

It's been an awesome ride. Thanks to all our NYE guests, here in particular. Y'all were a great posse to have as we rang in a big, shiny 2010, and best wishes to each one of you for a festive upcoming twelve months. Thanks for making that night our biggest celebration at The Green Goddess thus far, and we sure do hope everybody makes it back to our little restaurant again!

This will teach me next year to better focus on presenting our NYE menu in a more timely manner. Not only was I up way too late writing out the thing in the wee hours of the morning, but then my home computing system crashed and I couldn't get it online. Today Cox has got trucks all over my neighborhood, but it might not have anything to do with that; my TV was messed up during the Saints game vs the woeful but victorious stupidheads from Tampa Bay and Cox may have screwed up my Internet trying to re-start the cable. Now my Tv works and my Internet connection is shot...

Due to the size of The Green Goddess kitchen, I have to be thoughtful about what we can accomplish when catering a swanky affair, like our NYE Gala to be held upstairs on the 4th Floor above the restaurant. We want to present a banquet with many tastes; honestly, that way we can much better handle cooking for 40 than we could were we to do a more expensive (yet simpler) plated dinner. Besides, my ethos as a cook is let's have more fun, despite the work, so a banquet of many flavors fits my style better.

Even at the 11th hour, we may make some changes. Sometimes ingredients don't show, or we get inspired to do something else that's better than we list, etc. Nonetheless, this is pretty much what our guests can anticipate for our 1st Green Goddess New Year's Eve Gala:

New Year's Eve Gala @ The Green Goddess

Pass Arounds:

Niigata Bruschetta
Roasted Kabocha Squash Wedges Rubbed with Miso & Sake Kazu
Savory Ivory Lentil Pancake with Tamarind Sauce
Creole-Spanish Potato Tortilla

Absinthe Poached Shrimp on Bengali Fennel Slaw with Smoked Almonds
Proscuitto Pinwheels stuffed with Fig and Honey Chevre
Corn & Crab Blini topped w/ Paul's Gravlox & Tequila Crema

Next Early Courses

Burrata Cheese with Two Pestos and Killer Sicilian Olive Oil
Crawfish and Banana Blossom Pupusas
Little Thai Crabcakes with Mango, Basil and Wasabi Caviar
Array of Vegetables

Considering the Main Event

Moroccan Duck & Quince B'stilla
Meaty Stuffed Piquillo Peppers from Rioja

Wine-Poached White Asparagus & White Truffles
--with Spanish Cheese Fonduta and Oregon White Truffles

Red, Red Wine and Radicchio Risotto

Spooky Blue Corn Crepes, with Huitlacoche & Wild Mushrooms

Shrimp "Wearing a Grass Skirt"

But We Cried "Uncle!"

Cochon de Lait/Lei
Tiny Cubes of Bison & Bacon Meatloaf
Mission Figs in Pear Brandy
--stuffed with Valdeón Blue Cheese and wrapped in Proscuitto di San Daniele

Fireworks @ Midnight!!!

Dessert

Gettin' Your Greens and Black-Eyed Peas in a Hurry!
--Vietnamese Black-Eyed Pea and Coconut Milk Parfait
--Nicoise Sweet Swiss Chard Tart

Chef's Evil Foie Gras Bonbons

Spanish "Spaghetti Squash Marmalade" Turnovers

Hope this all sounds like way too much fun at the very reasonable price of $44, with a dazzling cash bar, and your first drink is included in the set price. We have around 10 spots left, so it's best to call me at the restaurant at 504-301-3347 or drop me an email to chef at our restaurant's website (www.greengoddessnola.com), if you want to get in our number!

Thus far, our attempts to set new holiday traditions seems to be going swimmingly at The Green Goddess. We had a little Christmas party for our employees and a few friends who really got this crazy enterprise lifted off the ground; to celebrate that event we adapted a Brazilian recipe for mulled wine we now call The Mull of Bahía. First of all I must confess, who knew tropical Brazil had a taste for hot, mulled red wine? Good thing somebody there had the idea because cachaça really lifts up both the flavor and the potency of this warming winter wonderland mug.

We lucked into some pretty good South African pinot noir at a very favorable price, steeped it until quite hot with a little lemongrass that the magical PZB garden has flourishing, a pair of satsumas, chopped pear and a good apple (you could add apple or pear cider instead/also), adding just a little sprinkle of cinnamon, letting the flavors slowly heat for 30 minutes or so. When this mulling wine is actually quite hot, add a hefty dose of honey. You'll be able to tell how much is needed because the lemongrass and wine by themselves will be tannic, and the honey will smooth out that bitterness towards a roundness that is not so much sweet as it will gain balance and depth of character. Strain and let cool just briefly, just long enough that the heat doesn't completely incapacitate the upcoming addition of booze. Per bottle of steeped wine, add 3 oz of cachaça and 1 1/2 oz of orange liqueur (we use the excellent Mathilde orange rather than triple sec or Grand Marnier, but the awesome Creole Shrubb from Martinique would also be very tasty here). We love the Fazenda "Mae de Ouro" cachaça, but lately it's been hard to track down. I like the Fazenda because it has a hint of smokiness to match its smooth flavor. Currently we use both Cabana (a bit pricier, but well made) and LeBlon (perhaps a bit lighter in style, but packing a nervous edge, a brightness that is more like Rhum Agricole or silver tequila that makes it a dynamite cocktail partner).

Keep warm in a thermos. It tends to disappear at a festively rapid pace...

This week we decided to feature the 1912 Madeira as the concluding course on the tasting menu. We match it to some great old Dutch gouda, the Beemster - aged two years which is long enough for the cheese to develop some salty crystals while retaining its creaminess, a bit of smoked almonds and either Asian pear or gingery poached carambola/star fruit. I wrote in the menu that it's easy to imagine St. Nick putting up his feet after a long night of making magic across the globe and taking a nip of vintage Madeira with some familiar Dutch cheese. This presentation of this remarkable Barbeito Bual Madeira has been very satisfying, for us at The Green Goddess and to our guests. Many of them are discovering the authentic pleasures of genuine vintage Madeira for the first time, but we also had the writer of a richly detailed book about Madeira, David Hancock with his aptly titled "Oceans of Wine," appear at the restaurant with a friend who had just been at the Lopez de Heredia Spanish Wine Feast a few nights earlier. Mr. Hancock really liked the match of Bual, a medium-sweet Madeira that is drinking with such amazing freshness for any wine (much less for a spirit from 1912!), to the caramel and toffee flavors of the old Gouda with our kitchen's smoky almonds. I might even be lucky enough to cater an upcoming January event where we would taste some really old Madeira from pre-phylloxera years, which in Madeira would mean wines from the 1850s or before. Wanna attend that party? I thought so! I am definitely keeping my fingers crossed to get that gig, to celebrate "Oceans of Wine" here in New Orleans with the Tastevin Society and David Hancock.

It's been a great holiday celebration for us to feature a truly amazing spirit in this 1912 Madeira, best of all, at a reasonable price. It's the kind of thing that leaves our guests happy and excited about traditions they are glad to have experienced, and that recognition of traditions worth sharing, in no small measure, is the most important goal of restaurant hospitality. Letting people taste a great tradition, with this vintage Madeira, is just such a good feeling for me and our krewe. It's one little way to make time pause for just a moment in this hectic holiday bustle, to savor a bit of holiday magic.

We've been having a blast with the menu lately: selling lots of Smoked Duck & Chestnut Pasta; little Thai Stuffed Eggplants with Crab, Mango and PZB's Basil; and a new salad featuring Fuyu persimmons with arugula, Port-braised shallots, a caramelized satsuma vinaigrette and my favorite new little taste: toasted pumpernickel bread crushed with toasted hazelnuts into a "dust," sprinkled all over the salad. I think Fuyu season is ending, which is too bad, but I like this dust so much we'll try to re-configure another reason to keep it around. Mike and Stan have been doing a good job dealing with a sudden influx of tasting menus during these holidays, and I feel that our service has been better. We are definitely having fun with our guests, showcasing all sorts of new cocktails, making pairing suggestions, and taking folks on our perfectly odd Green Goddess voyages.

Today I hope everybody takes an extra dose of time to pause and reflect on all the blessings we have, and all the blessings we want to give, here on Christmas. Thanks to all my readers for walking along these spasmodic pages with me, coming to dine with us at The Green Goddess, and enjoying life to the absolute fullest!

First, let me begin by thanking all of our guests for attending Wednesday night's Spanish Holiday Wine Feast, featuring the wines of R. Lopez de Heredia. We did actually obtain a sellout, with some good fortune as the last four seats were filled by visitors to New Orleans who stumbled upon The Green Goddess and were tempted to partake of the pleasures of Feast. We had a blast! Everything went smoothly, and we seemed to do a good job of showcasing these terrific wines from our favorite Rioja bodega in Lopez de Heredia by bring the flavors of Rioja to our tiny kitchen in New Orleans.

We are featuring a Pair of Rioja Beauties on our dinner menu this weekend, with the Meaty Stuffed Piquillo Peppers and the gorgeous 1998 Lopez Rosé BY THE GLASS, as well as the Fresh White ASPARAGUS & WHITE TRUFFLES with a Fonduta of Queso Tetilla with the deeply moving Lopez Tondonia 1989 Vino Blanco BY THE GLASS! (That's no typo -- a great 20 year old white wine...) These wines are very seldom offered by the glass, but we wanted to extend the moment of the Feast just a bit longer onto our regular menu. We hope you'll consider joining us for this special celebration on Sunday night.

Our guests also were much pleased by the Pedro Ximenez sherry-style wines that served as bookends to the Lopez wines. It was gratifying to hear people really enjoy their apertif of Fino so much because it's a really civilized way to begin a meal. We plan to feature that particular PX as much as we can, to breakdown the lack of appreciation surrounding these great, refreshing, tasty companions to the dining table.

Our schedule is gonna be a little outta whack. Today we are open, as one would imagine with all the tailgating going on for the Saints game vs the desperate Dallas Cowboys, but tonight The Green Goddess will be closed. We gotta holler for our Saints tonight, and I know our hearts would not have been with cooking tonight with such a huge game happening, plus we probably wouldn't have been too busy. It's no fun cooking when you're distracted and wishing to be someplace else and compounding that by being slow would've made work like willingly having dental surgery. Obviously while we apologize to those who planned to dine at The Goddess tonight on Saturday, all we can say is WHO DAT, BABY!!! We'll see y'all Sunday night instead...

Now with Christmas & New Year's Day falling on Fridays, it messes up things quite a bit. In the end, we hope it gives our people some extra opportunities to dine with us, but there are a few caveats along the way. Let me explain:

Lunch and daily brunch usually goes on 7 days a week at The Green Goddess. Due to the strain and travel needs of our daytime krewe, however, we will shutdown lunch for Dec. 24-26 so the daytime folks can have some family time. However, I particularly enjoy cooking on Xmas Eve, so the dinner krewe will be open both Wed. Dec. 23 and Thur. Dec 24 from 5 to 10:30 pm. If you are planning to attend Midnight Mass (so are we -- though not at St. Louis Cathedral) come visit for a lovely holiday dinner. Wednesday the 23rd is a bonus night to be open, too, so you last minute shoppers who are enjoying looking for treasures in the French Quarter can count on us that Wed. night for a relaxing meal.

Dinner will be closed for Christmas, too, but we will open on Sat. Dec 26th at 5pm til our usual midnight closing. In fact, we will be open every night for regular dinner service through Dec. 30th at the same time. Lunch will resume their regular schedule on Dec 27th. So if you're headed to New Orleans for the holidays or for New Year's and Sugar Bowl plans, then you have more chances to enjoy a festive meal at The Green Goddess during the week between Christmas and New Year's Eve (NYE).

However, we will be altogether closed on Jan 1st, despite it being a Friday; I imagine we'll be a little too worn down after hosting our New Year's Eve celebration.

About NYE, we have finally been able to confirm that we will indeed be hosting our New Year's Eve Gala on the 4th floor apartment above The Green Goddess. This will be something that we strongly urge folks to make reservations to attend, as there will be limited space available. The view of the fireworks from the apartment's balcony at midnight will be terrific and you won't have to be in the thronging masses to enjoy the sight! I'll drop more details about our plans for NYE, but in a nutshell it will be a fantastic bargain at $44 per person for a banquet of ever-changing sumptuous dishes and groovy snacks, with a "cash bar" (we can run tabs for folks on their cards, so no worries there) to drink whatever your heart desires ... and your liver permits! For our vegetarian diners, we will have quite a few appropriate options that should be tempting enough that you may have to battle with the omnivores over those dishes.

As I said, we will drop more details soon about the menu and the theme of Old & New Spirits very soon. But today is a GEAUX SAINTS day off, with an eggnog daquiri and maybe some crispy Theo's Pizza, or PZB's terrific sausage quiche that is now sitting in my fridge, or maybe all that and a whole lot more, as we countdown the moments to a fierce showdown in the Superdome tonight.

Oh and BTW, massive shout-out to CP3, the dazzling Chris Paul of our New Orleans Hornets, for dismantling any semblance of defense given by the hated Denver Nuggets in last night's smashing victory. C'mon y'all, 30 points, 19 assists, and 9 rebounds by CP3 qualifies as one of the best games of his excellent career, and it's good to see the Hornets starting to turn the corner under Jeff Bower and Tim Floyd. Looks like we might have some quality hoops to cheer about even after the Saints win the Super Bowl!

The intimate Spanish Holiday Wine Feast we have meticulously planned for tomorrow night is looking good. Beautiful oxtails in the house, going on the stove to braise; making all our canapes and appetizers; double-checking that all the wines have indeed arrived; making a list of "to do" things and checking it twice.

Unfortunately, we just had a four top cancel their reservation here at the 11th hour, but that could be your good fortune since it now re-opens the last four seats we have available. Plenty of reservations are kept with credit cards, especially for a significant event like this dinner, then some joints make folks pay for a cancellation. We all know when attending a wedding dinner that the family is charged per each reservation, and last minute cancellations cost just as much had they been able to attend. I just would rather not grub for money like that. If they cancelled on us, I'm sure they had an good reason and hopefully it wasn't a dire emergency.

We are super excited about presenting this tribute dinner to the spectacular wines of R. Lopez de Heredia, and I can barely stand to just gaze at the gorgeous 1981 Gran Reserva Tondonia Vino Blanco -- that's gonna be a wonderful experience for all involved.

If you've been sitting on the fence about our 6 course, 8 wine Spanish Holiday Wine Feast the door leading to this dinner just opened up again. We feel certain this will be a remarkable, festive dinner, and don't hesitate to join us if you can.

Probably it's best, since time is short, to call The Green Goddess at 504-919-7394 to get in that number, although if you decide late tonight (after we are done prepping), dropping me an email at chef@thegreengoddessnola -dot- com will work, too.

P.S. A very nice young couple visiting New Orleans just dropped by the restaurant while we were prepping, drawn by the aromas of the Spanish Feast as the oxtails and juniper berries braised slowly in the oven and our wild mushroom soup came together in the pot. She had been to Spain, at least twice, and they decided it was clearly meant to be that they should attend the Spanish Wine Feast. So now we are back to the last deuce, an opening for two. Serendipity awaits the last couple to decide to join the merriment...