Monthly Archives: March 2016
Glimpse: Beauvoir, Gulf breezes and contemplation
Beauvoir, which means beautiful view in French, was the last home of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy.
One of the exhibits at Beauvoir, in Biloxi, Mississippi, the last home of Jefferson Davis, calls him “America’s son.” This is more than a little jarring to a Yankee because Davis was president of the Confederacy, leading the South’s effort to secede from the union and, after his defeat, was imprisoned as a traitor.
But here, where some refer to the Civil War as the War of Northern Aggression, and where there is a lot of defensive explanation that it was about states rights, not slavery, Davis is a hero.
New Orleans: Storms, survival and reunions
Tom and I with Robert Indiana's Love sculpture at The Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden at the New Orleans Museum of Art.
They probably should make you show your passport to get into New Orleans. It’s so wonderfully unique that it should have its own national borders: The French Quarter, the music, the food, the cocktails, the streetcars, the Gulf, the swamps, the Cajun culture, all overlaid with the bittersweet sense of the fleeting nature of life, losses, survival and renewal after Hurricane Katrina, now more than a decade ago.
Our guides here were Dave and Judy Walker, longtime friends and former colleagues at The Arizona Republic, NOLA citizens since 2000, and until recently, journalists at the Times-Picayune. Dave was the television writer, former president of the national Television Critics Association, and has written for TV Guide and other outlets. Judy covered homes and gardens, then food, and has written several cookbooks, including Cooking Up a Storm: Recipes Lost and Found from The Times-Picayune of New Orleans (with columnist Marcelle Bienvenu), a work of love envisioned after readers lost all their clipped recipes in the storm. Judy still writes her food column at NOLA.com and Dave has a new gig at the famed National World War II Museum. We hadn’t seen them for maybe 15 years, and were excited for the reunion.
Gluten-free ‘I live in a van down by the river’ Pizza
Ingredients: Pre-packaged gluten-free pizza crust, red peppers, sliced potatoes, goat cheese and pizza sauce.
So I love pizza. And we live in a van. And we have two pans, a pot and a frying pan. And we hardly ever “plug in” to an electrical source or run our generator, so we can’t often use our microwave/convection oven. And I have celiac disease. You might say, “Hell, just give up and eat Campbell’s Soup out of a can.” But not me. Like Matt Damon in The Martian, “I’m just going to have to science the shit out of this.” As my pal, Matt, says, you have to solve one problem, then the next, then the next.
So, first was the crust. The solution: Pre-packaged gluten-free pizza crusts the exact diameter of my frying pan. They must have made them just for me. I toast them on one side in some olive oil, then flip them over,
Next, the ingredients. The solution: Pre-cook them, so they only need to heat through.
Last, the final assembly and heating. The solution: Put a lid on the frying pan, lower the flame underneath and let sit until the crust is browned and the ingredients hot and bubbly.
I recently made two versions, one with thinly sliced potatoes, reminiscent of the one I had from a street vendor in Paris years ago (Yes, I am that sophisticated.), and another with red peppers and goat cheese, which I will put on ANYTHING. You could use pepperoni, grated mozzarella, eggplant, anything you like.
And trust me, if Matt had this on Mars, he might not have worked so hard to get home.
Gluten-free Van Pizza
Olive oil
Pre-packaged gluten-free pizza crusts to fit your pan
Pizza sauce (commercial or your own)
Your favorite pre-cooked ingredients
1 – Thinly sliced potatoes, sautéed in olive oil, salt and pepper until brown and crispy
2 – Diced red peppers, sautéed, and goat cheese
Heat a tablespoon of olive oil in the frying pan.
Cook crust until browned on one side.
Flip.
Top with ingredients.
Cover and cook until crust is toasted brown on the bottom and ingredients are hot and bubbly.
Sweet Potato ‘I’m not a total food failure’ Hash
Sweet Potato Hash requires a willingness to embrace a lack of rules and an abundance of goat cheese.
Everyone who knows us knows that Tom is the real cook in the family. But that doesn’t mean I’m a total food failure. I can put together something to eat once in awhile. And, if I do say so myself, sometimes it’s pretty good.
One of the things I’ve made in the one-pot cooking world of The Epic Van is a version of a recipe my mother always makes for the vegetarians in our family. (The garbanzo beans are my addition. You’re welcome.) I’m not sure where the original recipe came from, but I’ll call it Sweet Potato Hash. It can be scaled to feed any number. And it’s the kind of no-rules recipe I like: Put in as much of each ingredient as you like.
Glimpse: The Whitney Plantation – Wallace, Louisiana
Live oaks at the plantation's main entrance, which faced the Mississippi River.
Across the south, there are numerous restored plantations preserving and celebrating the opulent history of excess and privilege of the white owners. The Whitney Plantation is the only one that tells the story from the viewpoint of the enslaved people who worked there. The plantation, which cultivated and processed sugar, is less than an hour from New Orleans on historic River Road in Wallace, Louisiana. Its French Creole raised-style main house built in 1803 is described as one of the finest surviving examples in Louisiana. Many of the original slaves on the plantation came from the Senegambia region of West Africa and are honored on memorial walls. Our guide showed us the slave quarters and described the work of a sugar plantation, a dangerous operation that used sharp machetes to chop the cane and huge pots to boil it down to crystals. Slaves who were cut or burned, which happened frequently, usually would develop infections and die. She described the “punishments” they received for different infractions – whippings, beatings, brandings – which also often caused infection and death. The guide also discussed the shift when the African slave trade was outlawed and owners forced enslaved women to have as many children as possible to replace lost slaves. The plantation, on the National Register of Historic Places, was used for several scenes in the 2012 Quentin Tarantino film Django Unchained. The gift shop has books of slave history and interviews conducted by the Federal Writers Project, a division of the Works Progress Administration, in 1937-40. On a wall, visitors share their reaction to the plantation with sticky notes, including one that recalls a poem by Aeschylus that Robert Kennedy used in his speech announcing the assassination of Martin Luther King:
Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
until, in our own despair,
against our will,
comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God.
The visitor concludes: WHAT YOU DO HERE IS IMPORTANT, underlining it three times.
Glimpse: Bishop’s Palace, opulence, tragedy
The front door of the Bishop's Palace in Galveston, Texas.
Walking into the entryway of the Bishop’s Palace in Galveston, Texas, you can imagine the rustling silks and genteel voices of high society who gathered here in the late-1800s and early 1900s. The home, also known as Gresham’s Castle, for its first owner, is listed in the National Register of Historic Places, and considered one of the most significant Victorian houses in the country.
We took the excellent self-guided audio tour, which gives details of the construction, as well as bits of family detail.
The home was finished in 1892, built for Colonel Walter Gresham, an attorney, Civil War veteran and founder of the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railroad, his wife, Josephine, and their nine children. Gresham also served in the Texas Legislature. In 1923, the house was sold to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Galveston and was the residence of Bishop Christopher E. Byrne.
Designed by architect Nicholas Clayton, the exterior of the three-story home is sculpted granite, limestone, and sandstone with elements of French Gothic, Romanesque, Tudor, and Classical architecture and a Mansard roof, with turrets and gargoyles. Its cost at the time is estimated at $250,000. In today’s dollars, it’s about $5.5 million.
Two Sienna marble columns flank the entrance hall, which opens to a 40-foot octagonal mahogany staircase, with stained glass on five sides. Fourteen-foot ceilings grace the first floor, which houses the parlor, music room, library, dining room, conservatory, pantry and kitchen.
The second floor houses a living room, bedrooms, and a chapel, created out of one of the Gresham daughter’s bedrooms. It has stained glass windows depicting the four apostles, St. Peter and St. Paul, which were hand-painted in Germany with a single-bristle brush to create the finest detail.
Mrs. Gresham’s art studio and the boys’ bedrooms are on the third floor. Windows and doors throughout the house are designed to open and bring in the Gulf breezes during the warm summers.
Made of steel and stone, it survived the Great Storm of 1900, which killed 8,000 people and destroyed much of Galveston. Mrs. Gresham rode out the storm in the house, helped drag survivors out of the raging waters outside her door, and sheltered hundreds of her neighbors. Afterward, her servants said she was “totally wrecked,” and retreated to New York to recuperate.