The first post in a series about the New Orleans Jazz Festival covering food (restaurants and recipes), fun, music and travel tips.
The Grill-Meister and I have looked at the 2017 Glover Gardens calendar and realized that we need a little New Orleans this year. We’re all jazzed up about going back to Jazz Fest after a hiatus of a couple of years, and have already made hotel reservations for the second weekend (May 4-7).
Who’s on the playbill that weekend? We don’t know! Does it matter? Not really! The biggest problem with the New Orleans Jazz Fest is that there are too many good performances happening at the same time – and we can only hear one band at a time.
If you’re considering the NO Jazz Fest as one of your 2017 adventures, I recommend that you reserve a room now. It is MUCH easier to get a reservation before the lineup is announced mid-January. (Take my word for this if you’re considering the trek this year – getting a hotel room in the Big Easy during Jazz Fest after the lineup has been announced is harder than scoring a Super Bowl ticket in Houston right now.)
We started compiling a list this morning of the places we simply must go, and of course we will never have time to do it all. But I’ll be doing a series from now until after the Jazz Fest to share and discuss these ideas and memories with all of you. Oh, the anticipation!!!
This morning’s trip down food memory lane will probably spawn a recipe fairly soon: the Jambalaya Pizza at the Louisiana Pizza Kitchen (LPK). The restaurant is in the French Quarter in the Market section (not too far from Cafe du Monde) and its walls are covered with wonderful art by local artists. We visited it during our 2012 Jazz Fest adventure and fell in love with the pizzas. In love.
The Jambalaya pizza had a thin, crispy, wood-fired crust and was topped with shrimp, chicken and spicy Andouille sausage in a creole sauce that was reminiscent of a light étouffée. The promotion about it was dead-on:
So crammed with yummy, there’s no room in this jambalaya for boring white rice!
Luckily for me, the Grill-Meister’s talents include making homemade pizza dough. He has made great use of the Cuisinart outdoor pizza oven I gave him for Christmas in 2014 (the gift that definitely keeps on giving). He has mastered the crust using a great recipe from Martha Stewart, and sometimes on Friday nights he’ll make a batch of dough and then let me play with topping ingredients before doing the baking in the outdoor kitchen. Fun! Anyway, he wants us to recreate the Jambalaya Pizza, with a few important Glover Gardens variations: a little less sauce, a few more shrimp and perhaps a bit more kick (that’s the way we do it). If we can get it perfected, you’ll be the first to know.
Here are a couple of links related to today’s post.
There are so many more New Orleans memories to share in anticipation of our trip this year and I can hardly wait to tell you about them! And perhaps I’ll snag a guest blogger or two to add their own twist about having a good time in the Big Easy.
UPDATE: I found this absolutely gorgeous photo of the Louisiana Pizza Kitchen after I made this post, and just had to share. It is from a blog titled Storyteller in a post called Pizza. It’s worth a look! He tells a tale of weather from last year’s Jazz Fest in the post.
Copyright 2017, Glover Gardens Cookbook (with the exception of the marvelous photo by Ray)
Must go to New Orleans someday. During Jazz Fest would be the greatest!
I highly recommend it! There is soooo very much to do and see. Not just at the jazz fest, but also great art, street musicians, world class museums, bayous and wildlife very close, unbelievable seafood…oolala! I will have you and the missus in mind when I post the rest of the series and hopefully can convince you. 🙂
Looking forward to your posts and hopefully going down there sometime!
Jambalaya on pizza??? That sounds like the best food combination on the planet. Wow. Yum.
I know – right? It was AMAZING. I wish I had thought of it.
The roasted garlic pizza would go down a treat with me. The other one looks awesome, but I’m a veggie – my husband would love it though. My one visit to New Orleans, almost 25 years ago now, was just before the jazz festival but there was still lots going on. Not much veggie food 🙁 but I’m guessing that’s much improved as it is everywhere now. I’m sure you’ll have a great trip!
Anabel, you’re right, there is tons of good eatin’ for vegetarians in New Orleans these days – lots of locally sourced fruits and vegetables and grains, assembled in very creative ways. I’ll remember to do a nod to the vegetarians who may be traveling to NOLA in my next post.