New Orleans highlight: food

You all know me well enough to know that food is something I love, and thus I had to seek out good food in New Orleans (thankfully it was not hard to find). And, of course, I had to get pictures of the food to share here.

The first great food I had was at the Commander's Palace, which I've already posted about.



Turtle soup, gulf fish, souffle bread pudding, and the kitchen where it was all made.

The next good dinner I ate was at Cochon; I had andouille & sweet potatoes with a black-eyed pea vinaigrette, crab gumbo with a deviled egg, and louisiana cochon with turnips, cabbage and cracklins. Everything was delicious (especially the gumbo; it rivaled the Commander's Palace's turtle soup), but sadly only the crab gumbo picture is worth posting:


Crab gumbo with a deviled egg, and Cochon.
On my final day in town, thanks to a recommendation by doctorj, I headed off to Central Grocery and got myself a muffuletta; it was most excellent. It was big enough that I even brought some back for my SO (some people bring back flowers, t-shirts, or artwork; I bring back half-eaten sandwiches).


A muffuletta
And, since Cafe du Monde was just down the block from Central Grocery, I took ArtK's advice and headed over there to have some beignets for dessert after my muffuletta:


Just looking at these pictures again makes me hungry.

I now feel a great need to return to New Orleans to try out all the food I missed (and get more of everything I had).

Busy busy

While going to Innovations was fun, my pile of grading (and other tasks to do) did nothing but grow while I was away. So, this week has been spent playing catch up, and next week will likely be the same, meaning that I won't have much time for posting. Sorry.

That said, I will post some pictures of New Orleans soon. In fact, coming up next will be some pictures of food I had there. Enjoy!

New Orleans highlight: books

While wandering around New Orleans last week, I came across a sign that I could not resist:


Crescent City Books is a used bookstore in the French Quarter (204 Chartres St., New Orleans). Every nook and cranny (and much of the floor) is stuffed full of books:


The store has the perfect ambiance for browsing used books (including couches to read on!), and is extremely well organized. If I hadn't been attending a conference and short on time, I could have spent hours upon hours in there. As it was, I spent more than half an hour reading through some old cookbooks they had in a case up front:


Most of those cookbooks date to the late 1800's (the one by Warne is the newest of the bunch, and it dated to the 1930's if I recall correctly). Many of them had notes scribbled next to the recipes, and still had little splatters of grease on certain pages. If they hadn't cost more than $100 each (one was priced at $400!), I would have left with at least one.

Back in town

I'm back!

For those wondering if there was a repeat of this lovely experience, I'm pleased to say that there was not. In fact, I was so tired that I slept through the second landing of the day.

Sadly, today's going to be filled with catching up on all the work that I didn't do while I was in New Orleans (my pile of papers to grade is now very well traveled); I'll try to get some pictures and posts up later today or tomorrow.

In fact, if all goes well, I'll have a post up for Blog Against Sexism Day based around one of the worst talks I've heard in the past few years.

[Update: The post on the worst talk will have to wait for a bit, but I'm working on it.]

Commander's Palace

I've been having a blast at Innovations, and thanks to being in talks all day and heading out with colleagues every evening, I've had almost no time to myself (or to tour the city, or to write). Two days ago we headed out to the French Quarter, and even walked down the famed Bourbon Street. It seemed like it was the type of place one must be inebriated to enjoy; I wasn't inebriated, so, well, yeah. In fact, I was about to report that New Orleans was only rather so-so in my book (though admitting that I really should tour the city more before forming a final conclusion).

However, that was before I ate dinner at the Commander's Palace last night. The restaurant is in the Garden District, and has some of the best food I've tasted recently. We ate on the second floor, and I got to spend the whole dinner looking out on what was probably a 100-year old oak tree lit up from underneath. It was a gorgeous atmosphere.

I ordered the chef's three-course meal, which consisted of turtle soup, sauteed creole-spiced gulf fish, and bread-pudding souffle. Those meager titles do not do the dishes justice.

The turtle soup was like a magically enhanced bowl of liquid delight for your taste buds; it was filled with creole spices in a thick stock that contained dozens of chunks of meat. My oh my, turtles are tasty. The fish was excellent; it was sauteed perfectly (still wonderfully moist), and lightly covered in a blend of (you guessed it) creole spices. A few vegetables and a light sauce covered the plate, and complemented the fish perfectly. Neither the soup nor the fish were especially hot-spicy, they were just full of flavor. The bread pudding had a souffle on top and a whisky sauce spooned over that. While I love bread puddings, this was probably the weakest part of the dinner, but that's only because I like my bread puddings heavy and rich, and the souffle made it very light (and dulled the flavor a bit). It was still excellent though, and if you complain about bread puddings being too heavy, this one would have been perfect for you.

The dinner didn't come cheap; I dropped $50 including tax and tip, and I only had water to drink. However, the turtle soup alone might even be worth that price in my book; it was exceptional.

I must now return to New Orleans, bringing my SO with me so we can both enjoy the Commander's Palace.

Not the best of flights

I’m now in New Orleans for Innovations, but didn’t arrive at quite at the time I wanted to. Let me explain why.

My first flight of the day was to Dallas, and while I have a tendency to get motion sick, I’m usually fine on flights until the landing approach. This flight got me motion sick on the takeoff. In fact, the first hour of the flight was moderately miserable thanks to the near constant turbulence. The flight finally smoothed out for the middle half, and I was able to get a bit of work done (for maybe 30 minutes), but then it got turbulent again and was rocky for the entire descent into Dallas.

Normally I just slowly count in my head, clench my abdominal muscles, breathe deeply, and stare out the window during landing; I’m often unhappy, but usually fine. This time, however, that failed. And it failed when we were something like 50 miles up and a few decades away from the airport. So, I looked for an airsickness bag. There wasn’t one in my seat pocket.

A few minutes later we were still a few dozen miles above the ground in gale force winds (or something like that), so I asked my seat neighbor if she had an air sickness bag (note: that’s probably the question you least want to hear from the person sitting next to you on an airplane). She didn’t have one. Her neighbor didn’t have one. Finally they got a flight attendant to come up, and she found one a few rows up. It’s a great feeling knowing that you're about to throw up and that everyone around you knows that you’re about to throw up.

Before this gets too unpleasant, I should make it clear that I never needed the airsickness bag.

However, that didn’t mean all ended well. By the time we had landed I was probably hyperventilating (or something like it), my mouth was bone dry, my skin was clammy, my arms and legs were all extremely tingly, and I had lost virtually all muscular control over my hands, arms, and legs. In fact, as I sat there slowly figuring out that the muscles that control my fingers weren’t responding anymore, I realized that if I did actually throw up there was no way I could actually hold the bag open: my fingers were locked in a pinching position holding the bag by a corner. That was a problem I hadn’t considered before today.

After the plane landed I just sat there curled up with my eyes closed. I hardly even noticed the people getting off the plane. Even after everyone had left I was pretty sure I couldn’t walk, as I was just getting control of my hands back and I felt light headed anytime I even sat up. And my hands were shaking like mad anytime I tried to do anything with them. It was at that point that the flight attendants noticed me just sitting there; they ended up calling the paramedics.

I then got to meet some of the nicest folks in Dallas; the police officer, paramedics, and American Airlines staff were all exceptionally patient and caring. The paramedics helped me walk off the plane, then politely suggested that I not try walking up the sloped ramp to the terminal until they had checked me out. They didn’t find anything wrong (they initially suspected blood-sugar regulation problems, but they ruled that out with a blood sugar test result of 94 (units unknown)). They ended up saying that I should have eaten something for breakfast (and should have had something other than a carbohydrate-laden snack bar and can of soda for lunch), but didn’t posit a physiological mechanism for the symptoms.

The paramedics suggested that I have a “good meal of real food, not junk food” and see how I feel (recommending, of course, that I head to a hospital if I didn’t feel better; they also offered to take me to one right then and there). I agreed that a good meal was likely all I needed, and so I set about figuring out how I could make that happen since my connecting flight was scheduled to leave soon. The paramedics walked me up the ramp, and the American Airlines supervisor who had been hovering around for some time now went to a computer and started checking flights; it turned out that there was only one later flight to New Orleans, and it was already overbooked. My flight was scheduled to leave in less than half an hour, but I really didn’t feel like flying right then, and I think the supervisor got that idea. After a number of calls she finally was able to get me a guaranteed seat on the next flight out; I have no idea how she did it, but I’ll be eternally grateful, as the last thing I wanted to do at that moment was get on another plane.

A good meal and a Dramamine pill prepared me for the next flight, which thankfully was nausea free. I don’t know if it was the meal, the smooth(er) air, the Dramamine, or the Dramamine-induced drowsiness that made the flight fine; I’m just happy to be here on solid, non-moving ground.

So, the question I’m left with is this: what physiologically happened to me during the flight to remove my conscious muscular control? It has happened once before (on a SCUBA boat trip, actually), and it’s quite an odd phenomenon. I’m thinking that lack of blood flow to the extremities seems like a possible mechanism (maybe combined with breathing too rapidly), but once I get back I’ll have to try to dig up some references.

New Orleans here I come!

This weekend I take off for New Orleans to attend the League for Innovations in the Community College's annual Innovations meeting. I've had a blast at the two Innovations meetings I've been to before, and I'm looking forward to this one.

Innovations is a neat meeting for people involved with community colleges for a few reasons:

• The meeting focuses exclusively on community college education; there are no K-12 talks, no 4-year universities talking about upper division courses, etc. Since many education meetings focus on K-12 education, this is very refreshing.
  
• While the meeting has tons of talks on pedagogy, it also features talks by (and for) administrators hoping to run their colleges more effectively. Last year there was a great talk by a state senator on how colleges should interact with their legislators, and another by a researcher studying the role of department chairs at various community colleges.
  
• Each talk is 45 minutes long, which gives the speaker enough time to use the pedagogical technique they're talking about (e.g., using groupwork), or at least enough time to delve into the details of their work.

I'm hoping to blog some of the more interesting talks from the conference (as I did last year), but I may be a bit hindered in that as I'm rooming with a colleague who doesn't know that I blog.