Lola's, Boxers, and Sweet Taters

After recovering from a weekend in which I thought I was an integral part of the Jersey Shore cast, the blog is back from its brief hiatus.

We started another weekend in New Orleans by vacating our Uptown comfort zone and heading over to Mid-City. We arrived at Lola’s just as Friday’s Sun was setting on the live oak-lined Esplanade Avenue.

Luckily, we narrowly beat the dinner rush- the somewhat small dining room was overflowing with guests as soon as we were seated. While we waited for a few small plates, we popped open our personal bottle of wine (BYOB and a $5.00 corking fee is almost as fun as stomping out a crotch fire) and fended off our mounting hunger with the antipasto plate of cheeses, prosciutto, and housemade chorizo.

Once we polished off the garlic shrimp and the avocado stuffed with crabmeat and a spicy aioli, we could barely muster a few bites of Lola’s specialty- paella with sausage, chicken, shrimp, crab, squid, and octopus. As usual, I couldn’t allow a plate to go back to the kitchen without being completely cleaned. As I took the last few bites, the Arborio rice began mingling with the red wine deep within my innards, causing me to balloon like the Imaginationland Flying Machine.

After our quick tour of Imaginationland, we again left our Uptown compound for Mid-City on Saturday. While we parked under the enormous oaks at City Park, we could already see the tents and packs of dogs ahead of us.

Across Big Lake, The Bulldog was hosting New Orleans on Tap, a beer festival/fundraiser for the Louisiana SPCA. Because what’s better than drinking and dogs? We sampled a few of the 200+ beers on tap, including some homebrews, and both agreed that Hebrew Rejewvenator (a big beer brewed with date juice), and Harpoon Leviathan Imperial Red were our favorites. The canine benefit resembled a typical New Orleans festival with food and entertainment on the Abita Stage, and something very atypical, a kissing booth.

I finally pulled Erin away from the adoption tent, and coaxed her into being my recipe test subject once again. Since fall was finally here, I had sweet potatoes on my mind, but not the marshmallow smothered kind that graces every true southern Thanksgiving spread. After seeing a similar recipe on the menu of one of Bourbon House’s Bourbon Dinners, we devised a recipe for a sweet potato crepe with roasted corn, pulled pork, and a spicier variation of our Abita Turbodog BBQ sauce that included Attala County fig preserves.

Our sweet potato fix wasn’t quite over. In an attempt to finish of the abundance of sweet potatoes left over from the night before, we surprised ourselves by somehow managing to create a Sunday brunch that would have even appeased the appetite of Admiral Ackbar. Sunny side up eggs over Marciante’s duck sausage and a sweet potato-bacon biscuit covered in a Tasso cream.