Food brings me absolute joy! I often write odes to food I really love but for my #BirthdayWritingChallenge, I have decided to add some food review posts.

Where do I start? That is the biggest question when I think of writing about food.  After wasting 3 hours on deciding on a topic,I needed a cup of coffee and decided to drink some chickory coffee that I got during our recent trip to New Orleans. I was struggling to select a topic when the topic was in front of me, in a cup, quite literally. So, my first food post is aboutchickory coffee and beignets.

New Orleans food took me by surprise. I mean, yes, I have heard that Creole cuisine has the most flavorful dishes in North America but I am brown. Flavor is a brown person’s middle name. It’s hard for me to trust people who call Wendy’s burger “spicy”.  But New Orleans had me at my first spoon of Etouffee and my favorite Creole dishes deserve another post. Today is about coffeeand beignets.

Having coffee at the historic Café Du Monde in the French Quarter is a unique experience itself. It’s the perfect embodiment of New Orleans’s nick name “ The Big Easy”. The café is open 24*7, round the year and the coffee and beignets are always fresh. When you walk into the café remember that the servers are the real boss. They will spare 10 seconds to get the order and another 10 for the bill. You find a place to sit and wait for them to notice you. Keep your entitlement in your fanny pack when you enter the café.

The chickory mixed coffee is called café au lait which is “coffee with milk” in French. The chickory gives the coffee a slightly bitter taste but is well compensated by the milk. When served, the coffee may look like a cappuccino due to a little froth on top but it doesn’t taste like one at all. The coffee is velvety smooth, light and has a smoky flavor, perfect to be paired with the sugar coated hot beignets. Beignets are deep fried plain donuts with no icing but has a generous sprinkle of powdered sugar. My toddler called it “snowy donuts” which makes perfect sense! Beignets will remind you of a simpler time. The pastry is dense, mildly sweet with a lightly crisp outer texture. There is nothing over complicated here yet it fills the heart with warmth and joy.  Unlike Café Du Monde, Café Beignet offers a lot more variety. Decadent pastries, cakes, even crawfish omelet.  If you want to enjoy live jazz with your coffee then Café Beignets is a better bet. But who drinks only one cup of coffee a day? Have your first cup at Café Du Monde and evening snack at Café Beignets. Easy! And if you don’t try Café au lait and beignets when in New Orleans, there is little point of visiting New Orleans at all!

Day 05: March 11, 2019

#BirthdayWritingChallenge