New Orleans in 2018 party notes

[hazelchaz]

New Orleans in 2018 pre-bid party at Loscon, November 2011

Photos start here.

We served:
Jambalaya
Red Beans & Rice
Muffalatta dip with saltines. Next time make a half batch.

Soft drinks included a lot of fruit flavors. The only colas were in the diet section. If you wanted caffeine and sugar, you could have a Sunkist Orange, or try one of the other parties.

(Sunkist Orange, Cactus Cooler, Cherry Crush, Seven-Up, Welch's Strawberry, Squirt, Welch's Grape, Diet Pepsi, Diet Coke, Diet Coke Zero, Diet Mountain Dew.)

Snowballs. We had six flavors of syrup, we didn't go through much of any of them. (We could fill the “ketchup bottles” at home and not bring the gallon jugs to the hotel at all.) Next time only need one can of sweetened condensed milk.

We had a reasonably well-stocked bar as far as spirits go, anyway. We served slushy drinks. Margaritas were incredibly popular! Next year, split the snow in half for the bar and snowball station elsewhere. For transport, use the jumbo cooler to get the dry ice and keep the snow frozen and cooler closed on the drive back from Gardena.

Decorations included purple and gold lengths of fabric. Next year get green, too.

Things to add to New Orleans party at Loscon 2012:

Devilled eggs. Color them? Maybe black sprinkles for the Saints (Black & gold)?

King cake. Bake our own.

Small prepared muffalatta sandwiches.

Research sno-ball machines and recipes.

Things to consider:
Beignets
Some kind of po' boy sandiwch
shrimp & cocktail sauce in bowl over ice
New Orleans Barbecue, which is different from Kansas City
Bananas Foster
Red Velvet mini-cupcakes, bite-size, with white frosting

I would personally like to get some Abita Beer.

library_lynn and Maria enjoyed coloring the party signs. In addition to having full-color party signs, can we have ones that are even more suited for coloring?

Need menu signs for what's available. Make individual signs for everything we hope to serve.

Need high-resolution art images. Can we get a good, clear, square-on shot of a street sign that we can then manipulate ourselves?

missmea needs a spare bartender, and an assistant throughout the night. It was a long time to be on her feet. Stool for bartender!

Notes for pre-bid materials.

Lots of people asked "who's running the proto-bid." The flyer answered that question, a whole new group of people. Lots of enthusiasm for the project.

One fan copy-edited the flyers, catching a handful of typos. Another costumer still remembers the problem with the Masquerade's dressing rooms not being cleaned before the fans were to use them. And I was cautioned not to use the word "Nolacon" when talking about the proto-bid as it would be premature to use the Worldcon name.

In general there was a lot of good wishes for the New Orleans group.

Comments

[trinsf.livejournal.com]

So the thing is, these aren't foods people actually serve at parties in NO. :-) They're the idea of what people think is served. Would love to see you all play with that. I'd write more, but papers and stuff. Ask me after the 16th.

Foods

[hazelchaz]

Yeah, we had a limited amount of recipe support and didn't have a lot of time to research the issue. We are certainly looking at ways to make things more authentic in successive years, as we'll be doing it again next year.

We also, of course, have to adapt it to what we can reasonably whip up in the hotel room.

[trinsf.livejournal.com]

Suggestions: Cheese straws (easily made ahead of time). Sausage balls (same thing).

Response from New Orleans part 1

[hazelchaz]

I just received this e-mail from Rebecca Smith, from the proto-bid:

Our thanks to you and your cohorts for throwing the party on our behalf. I'm glad to hear that it was well-received. I should apologize though for having underestimated ya'll's culinary ambitions. I'm an ambitious and accomplished cook myself and, as a life-long New Orleanian, tend sometimes to take a skeptical view of the cooking abilities of people in other regions. We do frequently serve jambalaya and red beans at parties here. I don't use recipes for those dishes, or for gumbo either, but I could have put something together. I apologize for not having sufficient confidence in your dedication and I promise not to make the same mistake in the future, or at least to try.

Now, I don't know if you've ever had a real, New Orleans snoball (not a typo) before, but people don't ever make them at home here. In order to get the fluffy, soft sno we expect in a quality snoball you need a special machine produced here by Sno Wizard. You aren't going to buy one because it's a large, expensive piece of industrial kitchen equipment. Hansen's Sno Bliz, one of our oldest and best known snoball stands, doesn't use a Sno Wizard machine, but that's because they still use a custom one built by Ernest Hansen, the current owner's grandfather. I'd suggest sticking with the daiquiris, which we drink quite a lot of here. We are the birthplace of the drive-through daiquiri stand.

As for beignets, if you can't fry them up shortly before serving them, then don't serve them at all. They don't keep well. If they're made ahead of time and transported to the hotel they will be disappointing. Just don't do it. What can be made ahead of time are cocoons, a sort of pecan shortbread rolled in powdered sugar that people here frequently make for Christmas. If you can fry beignets at the party, however, then go for it.

Bananas Foster is a great idea, as long as you're not making actual Bananas Foster, which requires setting fire to things. A better idea is to make some other dessert, incorporating the flavors of Bananas Foster, which people often do here, partly because they don't want to set things on fire in some settings. I could come up with a recipe for Bananas Foster bread pudding, which is kind of like killing two birds with one stone in the realm of popular New Orleans desserts.

Po-boys are also a good idea, especially if you have a bakery there that produces New Orleans style french bread, which is an entirely different thing from authentic french bread as produced by the French. The texture isn't even similar. A baguette is too heavy and tough for a proper po-boy. It's not uncommon for folks here to serve whole loaf (generally about 3 feet) po-boys at a party cut into into individual servings. Unless you have people there who have experience with eating real po-boys, I would have to know something about ya'll's bread options over there to advise you on what variety you should use. Aside from that there are just a few simple rules about po-boys.

1. Dressed means lettuce, tomatoes and mayo. Pickles and ketchup are sometimes added, but only for fried seafood. Never use mustard. Don't even think about oil, vinegar, seasoning sprinkles etc...
   
2. They are never toasted.
   
3. Although we are crazy for po-boys here and these days will put almost anything on one, the most traditional fillings are roast beef, fried shrimp, fried oysters, fried catfish, ham and cheese, smoked sausage, hot sausage, and french fries with roast beef gravy. Among the current alternatives to fried shrimp po-boys are boiled shrimp in remoulade sauce. (To which fried green tomatoes are often added in place of fresh, but that's a whole other story. Fried green tomatoes aren't native to NOLA. They're a transplant from some other part of the South, possibly Alabama, that arrived about 20 years ago.)
   
4. Roast beef should be cooked in gravy and served warm (just the beef, not the whole sandwich).
   

Response from New Orleans part 2

[hazelchaz]

King cake is also a good idea, but Raymond and I have discussed the issue and we think it would be better if we shipped ya'll a king cake than if ya'll tried to make one over there. To head off comments from smart asses who may criticize you on the timing, you might want to post a small sign advising people that you know it's not carnival season until January 6th and, thus, not proper king cake season, but you're serving one anyway because they're characteristic of New Orleans. Besides, we come up with excuses for serving king cake at other times of the year here anyway, like decorating them with black and gold sugars for Saints games.

Finally, on the issue of barbeque, we don't have a local style of barbeque, unless you're talking about Pascal's Manale's much-copied barbeque shrimp. It's a really tasty dish and doesn't require the use of a grill or smoker. It's braised. To serve it for a party crowd, you need to commit the blasphemy of peeling the shrimp before cooking it. It can then be ladled over rice or grits or spooned onto po-boy sandwiches. A couple of restaurants here make it into po-boys by hollowing out one end of the sandwich to make a kind of cup to put the shrimp into so you don't have to worry about the sauce running everywhere. A barbeque shrimp po-boy needs nothing else added to it.

By the way, I appreciate that ya'll decorated the suite in honor of my alma mater, LSU, whose colors are purple and gold. I hope that Raymond didn't take it as a snub of Tulane that the green was left out. He's a fan of Tulane, you see. Did you know that there's a local legend concerning the seeming division of those colors between the two rival schools that has to do with their being the colors of Mardi Gras? Amusing coincidence, to me, anyway.

Rebecca

Another follow-up from New Orleans

[hazelchaz]

Rebecca sent me another note:

You know, it occurs to me that a very traditional New Orleans dish to serve after Thanksgiving is turkey andouille gumbo, also called turkey bone gumbo. I just made a big pot of it myself the other day. It's a bit fussy, requiring that you throw in an entire turkey carcass and pick the bones and cartilege etc... out after cooking it, but the flavor is very rewarding. You also need to use a high-quality, smoked andouille, but that can easily be shipped. I don't bother with the stuff we get in the grocery stores here myself. It's not really good enough. The best andouille, like the best boudin, is generally not found in New Orleans, but out in the country. The charcuterie at Cochon Butcher is one of the rare exceptions and that's what went into this week's gumbo. Sorry if I'm rambling on, but food is one of my other obsessions.

Rebecca