This is the first of a couple of posts I wanted to put up in reaction to the food I enjoyed (and didn't enjoy) in New Orleans this past weekend. On this first blog, I'd like to talk about the food that I genuinely enjoyed!


The best food item I tried in New Orleans this past weekend was this amazing sweet potato bread that a man in the French Market had made fresh. It was amazing. It tasted very much like Pumpkin Bread, which is to say that it was amazing. I bought an entire loaf, which disappeared, as if by magic, less than ten minutes after I offered my fellow Honors students a taste. That's probably a good thing because I most definitely would've eaten all of it had they not helped me out.

I never realized that New Orleans has a fascination with pralines that verges on the obsessive. Nor had I ever realized what pralines actually were; I ate them for years every day in my high-school cafeteria without actually knowing what they were. I just called them cookies then. Chocolate pralines are absolutely phenomenal, but peanut butter ones aren't too bad either. Every shop in New Orleans claimed to have the best pralines in town; I'm pretty sure most of them were wrong, but hopefully the shop I got pralines from was closer to satisfying that bravado than most.

My favorite meals, oddly enough, in the Big Easy came from the Sheraton's breakfast-time spread. Each morning at the Honors Conference the Sheraton hosted us for breakfast. The first day's meal consisted of copious amounts of fantastically buttery croissants, stuffed with breakfast meats, cheeses and eggs, of which I ate four. I also got a fantastic sausage, egg and cheese croissant from a little French bakery near the Quarter that I enjoyed thoroughly that day. On Saturday, the hotel had trays of danishes and blueberry scones placed out for us. If it's any indication what I thought of this new fair, I walked away from breakfast with a napkin stuffed with pastries hidden in my jacket pocket.

That's pretty much the extent of the good food...