{"id":151554,"date":"2013-09-12T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-09-12T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gracious-khorana.45-76-20-142.plesk.page\/localmex12013x109x1buttermilk-beignets-chicory-creme-patissiere-htmlx1\/"},"modified":"2023-06-26T17:12:14","modified_gmt":"2023-06-26T17:12:14","slug":"buttermilk-beignets-chicory-creme-patissiere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/localmilkblog.com\/2013\/09\/buttermilk-beignets-chicory-creme-patissiere.html","title":{"rendered":"Buttermilk Beignets + Chicory Cr\u00e8me P\u00e2tissi\u00e8re"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"buttermilk<\/a><\/p>\n

\"buttermilk<\/a><\/p>\n

I remember New Orleans as if from a fever dream. I ran away from home at seventeen, all the way to Bourbon Street. I blamed it on an existential crisis. I still do. Well that and an unholy fear of a preordained life. I\u2019d never set foot in Louisiana before that night, middle of the week, in my pale yellow shift dress, my school uniform. My high school textbooks were in the trunk. I smoked cigarettes and drove, untethered, unhinged, and free. I remember thinking I could feel the textbooks getting lighter and lighter, losing their very physical substance, the farther south I drove. I used maps, the paper kind. It was about midnight when I arrived, accidentally went over a toll bridge, spent my last dollar getting back over it, and parked illegally in the French Quarter. I wandered the streets in fake leather pants, ate my first oyster on the half shell, and naively accepted all sorts of charity. I drank like a high school girl who thought she was a woman. I read bad poetry (I thought it was good) with a homeless man. I thought I was living. I thought I was an immigrant. But I was a run away. And so happy. Because I didn\u2019t understand a thing, and girls don\u2019t possess the capacity for horror and anxiety that women do. It was one of the happiest times of my life. I went home a few weeks later because I didn\u2019t want my mother to be sad. The day I left I ate an entire plate of beignets at Caf\u00e9 Du Monde by myself, got a muffuletta from Central Grocery to go, and drove back north. That was my first time in New Orleans.<\/p>\n

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\"buttermilk<\/a><\/p>\n

\"buttermilk<\/a><\/p>\n

\"buttermilk<\/a><\/p>\n

And after that all I wanted was to get back. Something I\u2019d never found anywhere else seemed to live there. I felt at home. I didn\u2019t fit in at the private girl\u2019s school I went to growing up (no surprise), and I\u2019d finally found a land where they spoke my own mad tongue. I ended up going to university there, at Loyola. The Jesuits, they\u2019re good for studying philosophy with. So that\u2019s what I did. I moved to New Orleans and studied philosophy, writing, and painting with the Jesuits. And learned to drink too much and how to wear perilously high heels and sit in a decrepit mansion with a a three-legged cat, how to live the novel I couldn\u2019t write. I was still a girl and proud of everything that would ultimately become my life\u2019s great failure. But that\u2019s neither here nor there. I was fearless, did my nails on the streetcar on my way to work at dicey clubs. But it wasn\u2019t all dark. I learned to eat there. Really eat. I fell in love with the food, and it\u2019s where I learned to cook. I\u2019d gotten a taste for it in Europe, and in New Orleans I found what I thought only existed across the Atlantic. It\u2019s as close as you can get to Europe in the states, that\u2019s what I\u2019d always say.<\/p>\n

\"buttermilk<\/a><\/p>\n

\"buttermilk<\/a><\/p>\n

I still think it\u2019s the most marvelous city on earth. Tennessee is my blood home. And that means a lot. But New Orleans is my soul home. You don\u2019t choose these things. They choose you. I don\u2019t visit anymore. There are too many ghosts milling about, peering out the window above the ice cream parlor on Prytania, grilling eggplant in the Bywater. Too many ghosts. They\u2019ll come a time when I\u2019m ready, and I have a feeling it will be soon. But not just yet; I don\u2019t know how to be who I am in that city. I only know how to be who I was: the girl shaking, blank faced and silently weeping & listening to Lou Reed croon Jesus, help me find my proper place; help me in my weakness because I\u2019ve fallen out of grace<\/i> as she drove, geeked out of her mind, from her secret-not-so-secret life in the Bywater back to her university existence in the Garden District. New Orleans\u2019 great strength & great evil is that it can make the dark light. Those nights and days, those years, were punctuated by great bowls of red beans and rice, fried oyster po-boys from the corner of Magazine by my house, and my all-time favorites: a muffuletta from Central Grocery and chicory coffee & beignets from Caf\u00e9 Du Monde. I\u2019ve recreated that latter experience, best had at midnight, for you here in one bite: airy buttermilk beignets with chicory cr\u00e8me p\u00e2tissi\u00e8re and mountains of powdered sugar.<\/p>\n

\"buttermilk<\/a><\/p>\n

So if you\u2019re like me and always a little broken hearted for New Orleans or if you\u2019ve never been & want a taste: make these, listen to this<\/a>, and watch this<\/a>. Tom Waits, Jim Jarmusch, and these beignets will give you a fix. A little. I do, in fact, wish I was in New Orleans. And I actually see it in my dreams. Just the other night I dreamt I was walking across the Audubon green, my heart so light, thinking, \u201cI\u2019m home, I\u2019m home. This is home.\u201d <\/i>It\u2019s a recurring dream, that I\u2019m back in New Orleans and finally at peace. I miss you, NOLA. So much it physically hurts. That\u2019s the sort of city New Orleans is, one you can\u2019t ever really leave.<\/p>\n

\"buttermilk<\/a><\/p>\n

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