My dinners all came accompanied with either baked potatoes or French fries. They also came with oodles of vegetables: carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, beans, artichokes, avocados, snow peas, and corn. Corn bread was a staple of the menus and full baskets were served at each meal. For dessert, every conceivable type and flavour of cake or pie was available. Ice cream, sorbet, and frozen yogurt abounded. The most common ingredient of cake, pie, and ice cream was praline which tasted like caramel.
For beverages there were fruit juices, tea, iced tea, and coffee. In the Deep South if you wanted hot tea you had to tell your server specifically otherwise you would get iced tea. Fruit juices consisted of orange, cherry, strawberry, passion fruit, mango, grape, and pineapple. Surprisingly there was no apple juice. Wine, beer, and liqueurs for coffee were also available, but I never ordered them because they were too expensive. Also available were specialty coffees like cappuccino, moccachino, expresso, and café au lait also known as lattes. All these drinks contain coffee and milk as their main ingredients. I didn’t order these drinks because I found the milk down there too thick and heavy.
New Orleans seafood restaurants took pride in offering exotic fish such as caviar and escargot. I think I had one caviar salad and found it too rich. Escargot I avoided completely because of my sensitive stomach.
Every imaginable type of seafood and garden salad was offered on every dinner menu either as appetizers or entrees. I was able to eat many different salads, even the ones with lobster and crab because in these salads both the lobster and the crab were separated from their shells.
New Orleans’ French Quarter is also famous for its two Creole dishes, gumbo and jambalaya. Gumbo contains the following ingredients: sausage, meat, vegetables, rice, corn, crayfish, onions, celery, green bell peppers, and chili. Jambalaya is composed of the same recipe, adding portions of bas file, a spicy herb and okra, a green vegetable. Gumbo is cooked with the rice together while jambalaya is cooked with the rice separately. Whenever I found chicken or beef on a menu, they were usually part of gumbo or jambalaya stew.
Oddly enough I don’t remember eating soup in any restaurant in New Orleans. Maybe I had no appetite for soup because I was there in October and it was extremely hot and humid. I do remember that the soups that were offered tended to be bouillabaisse, ratatouille, French onion soup with cheese, and clam chowder with milk. Bouillabaisse is a French seafood stew in a stock with garlic sauce and bread slices. Ratatouille is generally a vegetable stew. Both can be meals in themselves. The French onion soup with cheese and the clam chowder with milk tended to be too thick and rich.
If you are a fan of exotic French cuisine and a French atmosphere when eating then the French Quarter of New Orleans is a good place to visit.
