Month: February 2007

Yesterday I posted about the newer dining room at The Club, so I figured I would go ahead and show some pictures from the original part of the building – especially because this part of it is supposed to undergo a renovation in the next few months. To me…well, I love it just as it is because it is **retro perfection**.

Really – retro perfection. Out-of-date in all the very best ways.

The View (that post is permalinked here), is contemporary and sleek – but this other side – the original side – just has……mmmm……..personality.

It’s older couples in evening wear (on crowded Friday and Saturday nights, the older women especially wear beautiful sequined and rhinestoned gowns). There’s ballroom dancing – I love it when couples who have obviously had lessons get out there and really show off. Honestly, I’m not wild about the food in the main dining room – The View is much, much better – but Av and I go anyway just to watch the dancing!

This room, below, is called the “gold room” – there’s a nice lady there that plays the piano, and people congregate there before supper to have cocktails.

See in the pic above, the cage in the back right part of the room? Inside is a white bird:

In the walkway between the gold room and the main bar are a couple of old-style phone booths. I am *in love* with the door hardware – a silver phone handset:

This is *such* a pretty lit wall – it’s behind the bar:
http://smg.photobucket.com/player.swf?file=http://vidmg.photobucket.com/albums/v242/avrahamsgirl/MOV00379.flv

…and this is the dance floor in the main dining room. It inspired John Badham (who is from B’ham) to include a lit dance floor in the movie ‘Saturday Night Fever’! How neat is that!?

In the foyer, there’s a John Badham-signed movie poster that shows John Travolta dancing on the lit floor in SNF.

Here’s another pic that I took a couple of months ago when we had supper there. In this picture the band is in a break and there’s noone on the dance floor so you can see it really well. I love it!

Av and I are just overwhelmed by all the super-nice emails about the little one! Thank you to everybody who has written and sent such good wishes. It’s one thing to know you have an amazing circle of family and friends, but it’s such a rush to be reminded of how much pure joy and love there is, just waiting to spill over. Wow!

Ohmygoodness I have wanted to let everyone in on our little secret for a *long* time now!

We’ll get to meet him or her this coming July!

This has been a real dream for us. An absolute dream.

I am just in bliss – grateful, and in complete love. Happy Valentine’s Day!

This weekend, I made Creole cream cheese cheesecake with the Creole cream cheese we brought home from Dorignac’s:

I’m going to try to make my own Creole cream cheese this week or next, so I’ll post that later.

I had already promised Av a cheesecake when I realized at the last minute that we had already run out of graham cracker crumbs – so I made do with a little pre-made crust in the pantry – and it still turned out just fine. It wasn’t as ‘authentic’ as I would have liked otherwise, but it really did turn out, and Av didn’t even ask why it wasn’t made in a springform pan!

Ingredients for filling:
1 carton (12 oz.) Creole cream cheese
1-1/2 packages Philadelphia cream cheese (at room temperature is best)
2 eggs
3/4 cup sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla

(if you’re making this in a big 10″ springform pan, double the recipe (there may be a teensy bit left and you could bake the overage in a muffin tin), otherwise this size above is perfect for a ready-made graham cracker crust)

Directions:
First, I preheated the oven to 350*. In my Kitchenaid, I mixed together the Philadelphia cream cheese (which wasn’t quite room temperature yet, so I just beat it on high speed until it was nice and soft) and sugar. Once that was together, I added the Creole cream cheese and vanilla on low speed until it was all incorporated and the lumps were out, then the eggs – one at a time.

Next, the filling was poured into the crust, put on top of a cookie sheet (just in case it was going to run over (it didn’t)), and put on the middle shelf of the oven at 350*:

It needs to start being checked for doneness at 1 hour, but it took about 1 hour and 25 minutes to be done. It’s ready when it has a pretty buttery color on top and a nice brown around the edges:

It needs to set up, covered, overnight in the refrigerator before it’s sliced.

Av likes cheesecake plain, but you could always drizzle some chocolate or praline sauce over the top (or a fruit topping, too). It turned out really, really nice!

Before we left for home, we stopped at Angelo Brocato’s – they just re-opened back in September or October, I think. There’s a little brass plate just above the door handle that shows how much water they got with the hurricane.

Isn’t their sign great?!

We had a bite each of these – a ‘Greek cap’ and a Florentine:

…and we shared this small cup of St. Joseph Almond – yum!!

I was going to watch from our balcony, but decided to come down to the street to watch the Krewe du Vieux. They’re the only parade that goes through the Quarter, and what’s really neat is that the floats (which are *very* crafty and not ultra-put-together like the big krewes have) are pulled by mules – the last krewe to not go mechanical – which is part of why they can go through the Quarter.

To some people, this is a more authentic experience because in the large krewes, the float is built professionally, and members may be given their costumes and in some cases their throws.

In this krewe, everything is done by the members – from float design and construction, creating unique throws, coming up with costumes, etc. It really is the ‘crafty’ krewe!

Another thing that makes it different is that so many of the floats have satirical political themes – like this year, the theme was “Habitat for Insanity”:

Av’s Krewe marched this weekend, so we stayed a couple of days at the Royal Sonesta Hotel (300 Bourbon Street). The really neat thing was that the parade route went right down Bienville, and when we made the reservations, we got a room with a balcony on the Bienville side of the hotel so that I could have a really good view of everything!

Here’s the room: