Having lived with a writer for so long, I well understand the pitfalls and time consumption of editing. We just decided to enlarge our menu at The Green Goddess to a 6 page format, and I spent most of this weekend writing the little blurbs for the wines and beers, and editing the flow of the menu with Jedd, our art director. I think the final result will be worth the effort because now our guests can be presented with one folding 6 page document, with all our selections in food, cocktails, wines, beers, non-alcoholic cold drinks, desserts, our new cheese list and our expanding universe of After Dinner Spirits and Dessert Wines. It's a remarkable amount of things to enjoy in such a tiny restaurant, and now it's a little easier to navigate.

I really prefer not to dwell too much on typical wine talk, especially about flavors in the glass. To me, I'd rather folks discover the differences on their own as they experience our selection of wines, so my notes primarily focus more on the stories and producers of the wines, given the brief blurbs. We'll see how this edition of the menu goes, and as usual, we'll find a way to tailor it to our guests and what we can tell them about why we chose the wines we feature on our small, rather unorthodox list.

Paul wants to start his lunch Autumn changes soon, but for now his two delicious watermelon tastes are still available, both the Chilled Watermelon-Ginger Soup and the watermelon part of the Crab Duo. It's been pretty hot lately during the day, so our lingering summer menu for lunch & brunch has been doing well. Once we get this big cold front blowin' down here this weekend, we can try out a couple of Fall specials at lunch.

There are 4 new Fall dishes on the dinner menu this week, which makes for lots of excitement in the kitchen. We are also training a couple of new cooks these next couple of weeks, which is an essential part of growing our business to meet the increased business and level of service we need to provide. We survived opening The Green Goddess in a New Orleans summer that was a down time for the French Quarter overall, and now we really want to set the stage to continue to win over our dining guests as we approach the busy season.

Anyway, on to the new dishes: First, we have a new vegetarian dish that we like so much we are featuring it twice on the menu. It's a petite Gold Nugget Acorn Squash, split in half, and rubbed down with ginger, salt and pepper, roasted in the oven. We fill the squash with a rare organic Red Quinoa grown in the highlands of Bolivia, and it's gonna be a similar filling that we ran when we stuffed Creole tomatoes with the Red Quinoa, this time accented by smoky pumpkin seeds and shiitake mushrooms. Alongside the squash, we have a kohlrabi & arugula salad, with some Maras Farm sprouts, a little Napa cabage, & carrots tossed in a Minus 8 ice wine vinaigrette. Minus 8 is something pretty crazy, because it's made from exceptional ice wine that is "mothered" into an exquisite vinegar. Made in Ontario, Canada from late harvest grapes that freeze on the vines (hence the Minus 8 reference to frigid weather), it's not something that is easily made. Like authentic great balsamic in a way, you could enjoy sipping Minus 8 vinegar, and we are starting off our investigations of what we can do with this unique vinegar with a simple, somewhat wintry salad. There's also a finishing touch of beautiful Austrian pumpkin seed oil to complete the plate, which gives us a pumpkin trifecta: the roasted squash, the toasted, smoky seeds in the quinoa filling, and the dark, burnished pumpkin seed oil.

I doubt PZB will forgive me for the silly name, but we decided that Pumpkins on Parade would be a sufficiently excitable name for this dish.

I'm definitely with Bert Greene on the merits of kohlrabi as a completely underrated vegetable. Sustaining the sweetness of turnips with the raw crunch of celery root, kohlrabi deserves more love from chefs. Down the road, I'll be messing around with kohlrabi here and there, trying to coax diners to give it a try.

We are matching this roasted acorn squash dish on our new 5 course tasting menu AND on something we are calling Vegetarian Octoberfest. We are matching my favorite German beer, the Aventinus from Schneider & Sohn in Munich, a massive dark doppelbock wheat beer in a big 16.9 oz bottle (that's 500 ml for you metric folks, like the German brewery where it's made!) to both The Spooky Crepes with huitlacoche and mushrooms in a brandy mushroom sauce AND the Pumpkins on Parade for a little savings for trying it all together. I'll be curious to see how well this moves because it need not appeal to just vegetarians: both dishes are rich and in tune with Autumn hungers, and the Aventinus will be a boon companion to both plates.

The tasting menu begins with a new crab dish: little Thai eggplants stuffed with Louisiana crabmeat, a touch of mango and Thai basil PZB just picked from the garden, braised in an aromatic coconut milk broth of galangal, ginger, fresh turmeric, kaffir lime leaves and more of the Thai basil. It's not a Thai curry, but the intention to showcase a few of these herbs and rhizomes with Asian accents should make it a flavorful beginning. We match the Crab Stuffed Thai eggplants to our newest wine, the Auxerrois from Alsace and vintner Albert Mann. This is a unique wine, like a gewurtz to a degree but a little less floral and lychee. It's something that has been hidden from the spotlight, yet it has a great golden flavor, complex and inviting, and all these aromatics in the coconut broth need something that can hang in the conversation.

We also are introducing foie gras to The Green Goddess menu for the first time this week. The dish we'll showcase as our opening foie gras gambit is something I enjoyed presenting at The Delachaise toward the end of my time in that kitchen: "The Rising Sun" Foie Gras. Seared Hudson Valley "A" Foie Gras over sticky black rice with a blood orange-pepper jelly reduction pan sauce that captures every molecule of the foie gras pan "juices." The foie gras gets a crust of togarishi, the Japanese chili seasoning that also has black & white sesame seeds, dried yuzu peel, and seaweed. The blood red color of the pan sauce surrounding the coconut milk infused black rice, with the foie on top, and little bits of the togarishi scraped back into the sauce make for a pretty & dramatic dish. The rice absorbs the rich foie fat flavor and collects the bit of chili heat and tangy pepper jelly better than any bread or crouton could ever dream. It's a fusion dish to be sure, but to me there was a logic of flavor that urged me onward when I first thought about doing a togarishi crusted foie gras. That was my inspiration for this riff on Japanese tastes.

Finally, we also have a new pasta dish on our Autumn menu. It's a chestnut tagliatelle with smoked duck, a magret breast which incidentally comes from Hudson Valley ducks, so it's not like we are just using these ducks for their livers. We take the duck breast fat off and saute them to be cracklins in duck fat, then add wild mushrooms, Napa cabbage already braised in caraway and more duck fat, then finish the chestnut pasta with the sliced smoked duck and Very Old 5 Year Dutch Gouda shards and a splash of cream. I'm really thrilled to feature this pasta dish just in time for a big cold front that should mark the beginning of Fall. The pasta dish is not part of the tasting menu, but we have a couple of great new red wines by the glass, particularly the earthy, powerful Latour Pinot Noir from Provence, known as "Valmoissine," and a great bargain from Calabria, the Ciro' Rosso, made from an authentic grape indigenous from the region -- the Gaglioppo -- that never has travelled to any other wine regions. When we taste guests on Ciro, they invariably dig it, and it's so fun to introduce our diners to great traditions from faraway lands. We are adding our Flight of Italian Mysteries to both red and white wines. We've been doing this for the whites (Italian whites are very underrated) for a couple weeks, currently featuring an Arneis from the Piedmont, the Sicilian blend from Regaleali winemakers, and the mysterious Vermentino from the Argiolas family of Sardinia.

Our Red Italian Mysteries are the Ciro from Librandi, a Primitivo from Puglia, and a fascinating old-fashioned Merlot from Friuli. So that's plenty of entertainment from our little restaurant, and we hope you enjoy this celebration of Autumn soon.